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Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
RTX Corporation, the weapons giant formerly (and better) known as Raytheon, agreed on Wednesday to pay almost $1 billion to resolve allegations that it defrauded the U.S. government and paid bribes to secure business with Qatar. RTX, as part of this agreement that spanned multiple investigations into its business, admitted to engaging in two separate schemes to defraud the Defense Department, which included deals for a radar system and Patriot missile systems. "The Raytheon allegations are stunning, even by the lax standards of the arms industry," [said William Hartung with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft]. "Engaging in illegal conduct on this scale suggests that, far from being an aberration, this behavior may be business as usual for the company." Raytheon has been ... embroiled in scandals and malfeasance for decades. The company pleaded guilty to "illegally trafficking in secret military budget reports" (1990); paid $4 million to settle charges that it overbilled the Pentagon (1994); paid $10 million to settle a class-action lawsuit contending that its Amana unit sold defective furnaces and water heaters (1997); paid $2.7 million to settle allegations that it improperly charged the Pentagon for expenses incurred in marketing products to foreign governments (1998); [and] agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty to resolve State Department charges that the company violated export controls (2003).
Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.
The United States' secretive Special Operations Command is looking for companies to help create deepfake internet users so convincing that neither humans nor computers will be able to detect they are fake. Academic and private sector researchers have been engaged in a race ... to create undetectable deepfakes. The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense's Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country's most elite, clandestine military efforts. "Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content." JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that "appear to be a unique individual that ... does not exist in the real world," with each featuring "multiple expressions" and "Government Identification quality photos." The document notes that "the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers." JSOC hopes to be able to generate "selfie video" from these fabricated humans. Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, "to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms." A joint statement by the NSA, FBI, and CISA warned [that] the global proliferation of deepfake technology [is] a "top risk" for 2023. An April paper by the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute was similarly concerned: "Experts expect the malicious use of AI, including the creation of deepfake videos to sow disinformation to polarize societies and deepen grievances, to grow over the next decade."
Note: Why is the Pentagon investing in advanced deepfake technology? Read about the Pentagon's secret army of 60,000 operatives who use fake online personas to manipulate public discourse. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and media corruption from reliable major media sources.
Two lawsuits aim to stop US federal regulators and industry from "illegally" hiding basic information about toxic chemicals used in consumer products. Companies often claim that toxic chemicals' health and safety data, and even their names, are "confidential business information" (CBI) because making the data public could damage their bottom line. The US Environmental Protection Agency frequently allows industry to use the tactic, which makes it virtually impossible for public health researchers to quickly learn about dangerous chemicals. It also bars most EPA staff and state regulators from accessing the information and criminal charges could be brought against those who do. That leaves regulators attempting to protect the public without essential information for some chemicals and in effect creates a "shadow regulatory government" in the EPA, said Tim Whitehouse, a former EPA attorney who is now director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer), a plaintiff in one of the suits. The ... suit alleges the EPA has narrowed Congress's definitions of what should be made public. The EPA is also withholding chemical safety test results that show health risks to the public or environment. Separately, Peer is suing the EPA for hiding health and safety data for chemicals made by Inhance Technologies, which produces plastic containers found to leach dangerous levels of PFOA, a highly toxic compound, into the containers' contents.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and toxic chemicals.
Hundreds of people gathered outside the WK Kellogg headquarters in Michigan on Tuesday calling for the company to hold up its promise to remove artificial dyes from its breakfast cereals sold in the U.S. Nearly 10 years ago, Kellogg's, the maker of Froot Loops and Apple Jacks, committed to removing such additives from its products by 2018. While Kellogg's has done so in other countries including Canada, which now makes Froot Loops with natural fruit juice concentrates, the cereals sold in the U.S. still contain both food dyes and a chemical preservative. In the U.S., Froot Loops ingredients include Red Dye No. 40, Yellow Dye No. 5, Yellow Dye No. 6 and Blue Dye No. 1. Kellogg's insisted its products are safe for consumption, saying its ingredients meet the federal standards set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.The agency has said that most children experience no adverse effects from color additives, but critics argue the FDA standards were developed without any assessment for possible neurological effects. The protests come in the wake of a new California law known as the California School Food Safety Act that bans six potentially harmful dyes in foods served in California public schools. The ban includes all of the dyes in Froot Loops, plus Blue Dye No. 2 and Green Dye No. 3. Consumption of said dyes ... may be linked to hyperactivity and other neurobehavioral problems in some children.
Note: Big Food profits immensely as American youth face a growing health crisis. Read about the health concerns linked to these food dyes, including neurobehavioral problems, attention issues, DNA damage, allergies, chronic digestive issues, cancer, and more. Check out our latest Substack for a deep dive into who's behind the chronic disease epidemic that's threatening the future of humanity.
Filmmaker [Titus Kaphar] has many reasons to smile. The premiere for "Exhibiting Forgiveness" attracted attendees such as Serena Williams and Oprah Winfrey. The visually sumptuous movie examines what it takes to pardon wrongdoing. Famously, Mr. Kaphar was in his mid-20s when he decided to become an artist. The spark? An art history class in junior college. Mr. Kaphar taught himself how to paint by visiting art museums. In 2001, he completed an MFA degree at Yale. He was awarded the "genius grant" in 2018. Yet for all the artist's success, he was secretly having panic-attack nightmares about his father. "The thing that was the revelation is that my father is not the villain of my narrative," says Mr. Kaphar, who'd left home to live with relatives in California after witnessing his father commit a "heinous" act. While completing the script, Mr. Kaphar started writing and thinking from the perspective of La'Ron, the father. Mr. Kaphar realized that there are very few true villains in this world. "I began to realize that my father is as much a victim as I was. My father suffered at the hands of his father and, in fact, did better than his father," he says. "That was difficult for me to accept initially. But by the time I got finished, it was just clear. It was absolutely clear. It meant that I have developed a new compassion and sympathy for my father." Like his proxy character in the movie, Mr. Kaphar has let go of resentment toward his father. It had a healing effect. "Since the film, I haven't had any more of those nightmares," says Mr. Kaphar. "I haven't had one for almost two years now."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on the power of art.
Philip G. Zimbardo, a Stanford University social psychologist whose aborted 1971 experiment, employing college students to play prison guards and inmates, became one of the most controversial episodes in modern psychology and yielded disturbing insights into the effect of stress on human behavior, died Oct. 14. He was 91. For his prison experiment, conducted over a school break, Dr. Zimbardo recruited 24 male students, screening them to ensure that they had no history of crime or violence and that they were emotionally stable. He randomly assigned half to be guards and half to be prisoners. The guards were instructed not to physically harm the prisoners but to otherwise maintain control as they saw fit. Wearing uniforms and sunglasses, they forced the prisoners to follow strict rules, and punishments for violators included solitary confinement in a converted closet. The prisoners ... were referred to by numbers. After an attempted revolt on the second day, the guards began asserting their authority by turning fire extinguishers on the prisoners and demanding that they ... strip naked. Dr. Zimbardo [wrote] that the experiment was "a cautionary tale" about what can happen when "we underestimate the extent to which the power of social roles and external pressures can influence our actions." He saw parallels between the guards' behavior during his exercise and the conduct of U.S. soldiers who had abused prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Note: Read more about Zimbardo's revealing experiments. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on mind control from reliable major media sources.
Western Sikkim in India ... officially went 100 percent organic in 2016, and won what many regard as the Oscar for best public policies – the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's Future Policy Gold Award – in 2018. This change is necessary: An estimated 52 percent of agricultural land across the globe is moderately to severely degraded due to monoculture, chemical pesticide and fertilizer use, and groundwater extraction – and this will accelerate unless these practices change. Sikkim is India's most sparsely populated state. Its mainly subsistence farms were, and continue to be, spread thinly across mountainous terrain, which makes supplying inorganic fertilizers expensive. Consequently, using homegrown organic manure and vermicompost (compost created from worm waste) was very much the norm. It also helped that the local populace already understood the value of organic food. "As children, we were taught that basti (local) vegetables grown without any chemical inputs by small farmers, were the best vegetables to eat," says Renzino Lepcha, CEO of Mevedir, an organic agri-business and certification agency in Sikkim. [Former] chief minister Pawan Chamling wrote, "[W]e have not inherited this earth from our forefather but have borrowed it from our future generations, it is our duty to protect it by living in complete harmony with nature and environment." Rain-fed agriculture has helped reduce the need for irrigation and conserve water. Some reports suggest that since 2014, bee populations have been rebounding, with yields of pollinator-dependent cardamom increasing by more than 23 percent.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing our bodies and healing the Earth.
In the city of Nanchang, in an alleyway near a cancer hospital, two senior citizens run a "community cancer kitchen" to support those caring for their loved ones. Wan Zuocheng and Hong Gengxiang have been doing this charity work for two decades. "No matter what life throws at you, you must eat good food," Mr. Wan told South China Morning Post. For just 3 RMB, the equivalent of around $0.32, anyone can use the kitchen spaces they've set up in the alleyway to cook meals. Sometimes it's for the patients so they can eat something familiar rather than hospital food, while sometimes it's for the people who care for the patients. "There was a couple who came to us with their child," Wan said, talking about the day in 2003 they decided to start their charity kitchen. "They said he didn't want treatment, he just wanted a meal cooked by his mom. So we let them use our kitchen." As time passed they added more utensils, appliances, stoves, and ovens to their stall. This came with gradually increasing use of water, electricity, and coal, but as the costs rose, so too did the community, supporting the couple and their efforts to provide the invaluable service they relied on. Donations began to outpace expenditures, and now nearly 10,000 people come to cook in the cancer kitchen. It's been thoroughly observed in medicine that the odds of beating cancer can be improved with positivity, and what could be more positive than a loved one bringing you a home-cooked meal?
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing our bodies and healing social division.
Under the guise of combating misinformation, the US government funds universities, ostensibly to analyze social-media trends – but in truth, to help censor the Internet. Agencies like the National Science Foundation provide taxpayer dollars to universities like Stanford and the University of Washington as part of a broader government effort to pressure social-media companies into censoring speech related to elections, public health and other matters. A lawsuit against the Biden administration in the case that became Murthy v. Missouri uncovered emails in which federal officials threatened to penalize social-media companies unless they complied with orders to banish users who posted speech contrary to the administration's priorities. Last year, a federal judge reviewing this evidence dubbed the administration's effort a de facto "Ministry of Truth." Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote that in 2021, the Biden-Harris administration "repeatedly pressured" his social-media empire to censor speech – even humor and satire. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and revealed similar evidence in the "Twitter Files," the public first learned that university misinformation research teams, funded by the government, actively participated in those censorship efforts. These academics served as a front for the government's censorship policy, essentially laundering it in the name of science. But if this is research, it is unethical research that harms the human subjects under study.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and government corruption.
Stanford University hosted the first major university-sponsored conference where different viewpoints on the appropriate management of pandemics were aired and debated. For much of 2020-2022, critical debate about the wisdom and effectiveness of mandatory Covid policies ... was treated with deep hesitation at best and outright hostility at worst. Professors and students who publicly questioned the mainstream consensus were censored on social media, vilified by their colleagues, and, in the case of Covid vaccine mandates, fired by administrators. Universities failed in their mission to promote academic debate and freedom during the most significant domestic policy issue of this century. During these years, colleagues and students with critical, sceptical viewpoints and countless members of the public [asked] why institutions of higher education were not hosting reasoned debate. The pandemic taught us a valuable lesson for those interested to hear. We need more freedom of expression and academic debate during crises and emergencies, not less. Many are tired of the vapid arguments of ideologues and hungry for a return to the ... academic tradition of debate. By that standard, the Stanford Covid conference was a huge success. The panels addressed key issues regarding the evidence for Covid lockdowns, the management of information and censorship, the impact of lockdowns on the world's poor, and the contentious question of the origin of the virus. Experts who supported early school closures reasoned together with those who did not. Those who support the lab leak hypothesis argued their case with those who disagree. And they disagreed about the wisdom of social media censorship in a pandemic. In the end, the conference achieved its stated purpose: to bring serious thinkers and scientists into constructive dialogue with one another.
Note: Learn more about the Stanford conference that inspired this article. An article by The Nation about this Stanford conference is a significant example of how dissenting views get spun into divisive partisan rhetoric, contributing to the larger culture wars poisoning public discourse.
Two decades ago, Shahawar Matin Siraj started to feel uneasy about a plan to bomb a subway station in Manhattan. Osama Eldawoody, a New York City Police Department informant recruited after 9/11, had established himself as a father figure to Siraj, who was 21 when they met. But as it started to feel real, Siraj tried to back out – insisting about 18 times that he was not willing to place bombs in the station. "I have to, you know, ask my mom's permission," he had said. Siraj [was] arrested a week later ... and was sentenced in 2007 to 30 years in prison after three years of pretrial detention. Siraj is one of almost 1,000 terrorism defendants prosecuted by the U.S. since 9/11. More than 350 defendants' cases involved FBI stings with an informant or undercover agent. The fear of this kind of surveillance transformed the social fabric of Muslim communities and made them more insular. "You didn't know if the person you're talking to was an informant or undercover," says Fahd Ahmed, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving, or DRUM. (Siraj's family are members.) A 2014 Human Rights Watch report closely reviewed 27 federal prosecutions involving 77 defendants and found that in some instances, "the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act." The report also described a pattern of targeting people with mental or intellectual disabilities in these stings.
Note: Read more about the FBI's manufacture of terrorist plots. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on law enforcement corruption and terrorism from reliable major media sources.
A recent study published in Collabra: Psychology has found a notable decline in people's motivation to stand out or be unique over the past two decades. Researchers analyzed data from over one million people between 2000 and 2020, measuring various aspects of uniqueness, including willingness to defend beliefs, adherence to rules, and concern over others' reactions. Results revealed declines across all three areas. The new study was motivated by evidence suggesting that people are increasingly concerned about the social consequences of expressing opinions, particularly in online spaces where scrutiny is often harsh and widespread. Polling data and past research suggested that fear of isolation or criticism might make people more cautious about sharing beliefs or acting in ways that draw attention. At the same time, rising social anxiety and sensitivity to judgment could make people more hesitant to express uniqueness. Given these shifts, the researchers wanted to track whether and how people's desire for uniqueness had changed over a 20-year period. The largest decline, at 6.52%, was in people's willingness to publicly defend their beliefs. The study also found a decline, albeit less steep, in people's willingness to break rules, indicating that people are less inclined to challenge norms or social expectations than two decades ago. Over time, people have become more reserved in behavior, choosing to conform to social norms rather than push boundaries.
Note: Over half of Americans are self-censoring out of fear of being cancelled or alienated from their community. From gender medicine research, the psychology field, social justice movements, to Middle East politics, a Cato Institute poll found that 71% of Americans believe that political correctness has silenced important societal discussions, and 58% of Americans reported that the current political climate prevents them from sharing their political beliefs. Is this the world we want to create?
Preschools and funeral homes, car washes and copper mines, dermatologists and datacentres – private equity is anywhere and everywhere that money changes hands. If it can in any way be marketed or monetised, private equity firms have bought it. By some estimates, these firms now control more than $13tn invested in more than 50,000 companies worldwide. "We cannot overestimate the reach of private equity across the global economy," Sachin Khajuria, a former partner at Apollo Global Management, which manages half a trillion dollars in assets, wrote in 2022. More and more people, especially the relatively poor, may live almost their entire lives in systems owned by one or another private equity firm: financiers are their landlords, their electricity providers, their ride to work, their employers, their doctors, their debt collectors. Private equity firms and related asset managers "increasingly own the physical as well as financial world around us," the scholar Brett Christophers writes. "All of our lives are now part of their investment portfolios." In order to drive up profits, private equity-controlled dental chains have induced children to undergo multiple unnecessary root canals. One child even died as a result. Some of the most heinous accounts have come from private equity-owned treatment centres for young people with behavioural problems, where children have been physically abused, raped and killed. These cases are extreme, but they are not isolated.
Note: BlackRock and Vanguard manage over $11 trillion and $8 trillion respectively–an unprecedented concentration of financial power. We hear outrage about billionaires and oligarchs, but rarely about private equity firms, who are backed by both political parties and are drastically reshaping our economy, contributing to environmental destruction, and extracting wealth from communities in the US and all over the world. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of financial inequality and financial industry corruption.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the highest-ranking transgender official in the Biden administration ... has supported a misinformation campaign that has turned the U.S. into an international outlier in the use of the "gender-affirming" model of care, which recommends hormones and surgeries rather than psychotherapy as the first-line treatment for adolescent distress around puberty. In 2022, Levine pressured the World Association for Transgender Health to remove age minimums for gender surgeries. Since 2017, a Manhattan Institute analysis of health insurance claims has shown, that more than 5,000 teenage girls had their breasts amputated as part of a "gender-affirming" procedure designed to help them achieve a male look. These figures ... do not include procedures performed at large health care systems like Kaiser Permanente (which is currently being sued by two young women who underwent "top surgery"). These surgeries do not seem to pose a problem for those like Levine who believe the theory that "trans kids know who they are." Children who do not fit sex stereotypes and same-sex attracted adolescents are now given the idea they are "trans" and encouraged to perceive hormones and surgeries as a solution to the substantial difficulties that society imposes on gender non-conforming young people. Contrary to the slogans, these treatments are not lifesaving.
Note: For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of revealing news articles on transgender medicine.
TD Bank will pay $3 billion to settle charges that it failed to properly monitor money laundering by drug cartels. The fine includes a $1.3 billion penalty that will be paid to the US Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a record fine for a bank. TD also intends to pay $1.8 billion to the US Justice Department and plead guilty to resolve the US government's investigation that the bank violated of the Bank Secrecy Act and allowed money laundering. More than 90% of transactions went unmonitored between January 2018 to April 2024, which "enabled three money laundering networks to collectively transfer more than $670 million through TD Bank accounts," according to a legal filing. In one instance, TD Bank employees collected more than $57,000 worth of gift cards to process more than $470 million in cash deposits from a money laundering network to "ensure employees would continue to process their transactions" and not declare them in required reports, the DoJ said. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a US agency that regulates banks, said TD processed hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions the clearly indicated highly suspicious activity. The Canadian bank will be subject to four years of monitoring [to] ensure it is following the agreement. The US Federal Reserve also fined TD Bank and will force the company to relocate to the United States its anti-money laundering compliance office.
Note: Several years ago, Europe's biggest bank was caught laundering millions for cartels and terrorists. For more, read our latest Substack on the dark truth behind the war on drugs.
"Hospitals are the ugliest places in the world," says Jacques Herzog. "They are a product of blind functionalist thinking, while neglecting basic human needs." Welcome to Zurich's remarkable new children's hospital, the Kinderspital – or "Kispi" for short – a 14-year endeavour to revolutionise how we think about the architecture of healing. It is not trying to be a fancy hotel, like some private hospitals. It is just a place where simple things like the quality of light and views, the scale and proportion of spaces and the texture of materials have been thought about with immense care, and honed to make the experience as pleasant as possible for everyone. The firm [Herzog & de Meuron] completed an impressive, yet oddly undersung, rehabilitation clinic in Basel in 2002, and is now building a huge amoeba-shaped hospital in Denmark as well as a terracotta-clad ziggurat teaching hospital in San Fransisco. "I am totally convinced that architecture can contribute to the healing process," [Herzog says]. The 600-strong practice has been quietly tackling the topic of healthcare for the last two decades. Kispi ... is unlike any other hospital. The rooms have a more domestic feel than typical hospital rooms, like being in the attic of an alpine chalet. They have big picture windows and clever window seats that can be pulled out to become beds, giving weary parents a place to sleep. Having a sloped wooden roof and natural light makes a huge psychological difference when you're lying in bed staring at the ceiling all day. Fun porthole windows at child height can be opened for natural ventilation, while every room has an en suite bathroom. Wooden floors add a sense of warmth in contrast to the usual stark vinyl – and they're just as hygienic, coated with ultra-hardwearing polyurethane. "We've tried to make the architecture address the curiosity of children," says Christine Binswanger, partner in charge of the project.
Note: Don't miss the incredible photos of this children's hospital at the link above. Explore more positive stories like this on healing our bodies.
A secretive Pentagon UFO data retrieval program has been hidden from Congressional oversight since 2017, a new report claims. Whistleblowers assert the program – codenamed 'Immaculate Constellation' – was established to 'detect' and 'quarantine' the military's best UFO imagery, as well as its best videos, eyewitness testimonies and electronic sensor evidence. This trove of high quality, multi-sensor UFO data is so tightly held that 'talking about it will put you in the danger zone,' according to a US official who confirmed the leak. The quite literally 'above top secret' program allegedly sprang into action in the wake of the 2017 leak of three, still-as-yet unexplained US Navy infrared UFO videos. The source of the leaked report, who supplied the document to the independent news site Public, described the program as an 'Unacknowledged Special Access Program' or USAP with unique secrecy privileges. 'The multitude of wavelengths collected by these sensors ... have captured UAP characteristics that are difficult or impossible to observe with the human eye alone,' according to the leaked report, allegedly intended for cleared members of Congress. 'Subtle atmospheric effects associated with UAPs are also visible through the sensors,' the leaked report added. 'Some of the phenomena we may be seeing,' ex-CIA head John Brennan [said], 'results from something that we don't yet understand and ... some might say constitutes a different form of life.'
Note: Watch a fascinating NewsNation interview about this secret Pentagon UAP program. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources. Then explore the resources provided in our UFO Information Center.
Following Iran's missile barrage into Israel last week, carried out in retaliation for Israel's assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris called Iran a "destabilizing, dangerous force" in the Middle East, opening a new chapter in a long history of US hawkishness against Iran. This past Monday, she went even further, calling Iran the United States' "greatest adversary." It's hard to hear such statements without hearkening back to New Year's Eve, 1977, a year before the Iranian Revolution broke out. In the heat of growing civil unrest in Iran, US president Jimmy Carter attended a lavish state dinner with the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Twenty-four years earlier, during "Operation Ajax," the CIA, in collaboration with the British MI6, had orchestrated a coup that ousted the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who had won on a platform of nationalizing Iranian oil and taking it back from Western control. The coup set into motion the destruction of the country's budding democracy and would haunt Iranians for decades. The United States has worked to destabilize Iran for nearly a century. With the Democratic presidential nominee once again trotting out hawkish tirades against Iran while backing Israel's new assault on Lebanon, American officials seem to have learned nothing from history.
Note: Read more about the CIA-backed 1953 coup in Iran. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.
REMspace, a California-based neurotech startup, claims to have achieved the first two-way communication between individuals during lucid dreaming. Using specially designed equipment, participants reportedly exchanged a message while asleep–an extraordinary claim that has yet to be peer-reviewed. This milestone, if validated, could mark a turning point in dream research, with REMspace suggesting applications from mental health therapies to skill training. Lucid dreaming ... is the state of being aware that you are dreaming while asleep. While around 50 percent of people report experiencing at least one lucid dream, the idea of communication within such a state is still in its early stages of research. The REMspace team claims they achieved communication between two participants during a lucid dream on September 24, 2024. Participants received random words generated by a server through earbuds while they were dreaming. One participant reportedly repeated the word in their dream, and the second confirmed it after waking. Looking ahead, they claim to be working on enabling more complex forms of dream communication, including full conversations and interactions with external servers. [REMspace founder Michael] Raduga predicts that within a few years, "dream communication will become common." Until then, the scientific community awaits peer-reviewed evidence to substantiate these intriguing, but currently unverified claims.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on the mysterious nature of reality and technology for good.
Venture into New Mexico's beautifully stark high desert and you may well stumble across some fantastical and unconventional homes – some palatial and sculpturally rounded; others with an ancient temple-like form – that look like they're from a Star Wars movie. Set in and around the town of Taos where they were invented almost 40 years ago, these are Earthships: net-zero, sustainably designed homes built mostly from both natural and waste materials, such as old tyres, empty wine bottles and wood and mud. Earthship construction requires less in the way of toxic or carbon-emitting construction materials like concrete and plastics, and doesn't require precious woodland and other natural resources. An earth berm (a purposefully built bank of soil) surrounds the Earthship on three sides, providing insulating mass that controls temperature. Each has a greenhouse ... either on the north or south side depending on location. Most Earthships are purely solar powered; some also have wind turbines to supplement or a wood-burning stove as back up. Taos has cold snowy winters and often dry, hot summers, but in an Earthship, the internal temperature remains close to 72F (21C) year-round, regardless of outside weather conditions. What does it feel like to stay inside an Earthship? "It feels like you're inside the womb," says Earthship construction manager Deborah Binder. "You feel constantly hugged and snuggled. The temperature is always comfortable."
Note: Don't miss the great Earthship pictures at the link above. Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.