The controversial practice of exorcism is experiencing a popular revival. This disturbing report investigates the priests on the frontline, who claim they are fighting battles in a war against the devil. "I command you Satan: leave this woman immediately!" Father Massimiliano Pusceddu is a member of the growing band of young exorcists in the ranks of the Roman Catholic church. He's part of the fight against growing reports of demonic possession, attributed to "dark forces preying on the young". But the practice is not without critics. According to activist Marco Dimitri, "the problem is that most exorcisms are performed on people who are not of sound mind, who need psychological help. And that's why it's a criminal act". Whether superstition or gospel truth, this rare glimpse inside the practice makes one thing clear: the ritual is hugely traumatic for all of the individuals involved.

Zeitgeist founder calls for a resource based system

Worldwide there are many issues that have arisen in the last few years. Many countries like Egypt and Libya have sought revolution due to the desire for change. Many think that society as a whole needs to be overhauled. One of those individuals is Peter Joseph, filmmaker and founder of the Zeitgeist Movement, and he is here to share his thoughts.

Picture of an Atom's Shadow—Smallest Ever Photographed

Scientists have taken the first ever snapshot of an atom's shadow—the smallest ever photographed using visible light. The imaging technique could have big implications for genetic research and cryptography, researchers say.

The pioneering shutterbugs used an electrical field to suspend a charged atom, or ion, of the element ytterbium in a vacuum chamber. They then shot a laser beam—about a thousand times wider than the atom—at the ytterbium.

The ytterbium atom absorbed a tiny portion of the light, and the resulting shadow was magnified by a lens attached to a microscope, then recorded via a digital camera sensor.

The team used ytterbium because they knew they could create lasers of the right color to be strongly absorbed by the element.

"Each element responds to different specific wavelengths ... so we would need different laser systems to use this technique on a different atom," said study leader Dave Kielpinski. Atoms, he added, are the smallest things that can be seen in visible light, and though the team's shadow shots are unprecedented, atoms themselves have been photographed before.

Since capturing the unique picture, the team has been refining their technique, creating (as yet unreleased) photos of ytterbium shadows twice as dark as in the above image, said Kielpinski, a physicist at Australia's Griffith University.

The group is also working on increasing the resolution of their images, so that it might one day be possible to see how the electrons orbiting an atom affect the shape of its shadow.

(Related: "Proton Smaller Than Thought—May Rewrite Laws of Physics.")

Atomic Encryption

The shadow-imaging technique could one day enable scientists to study DNA inside living cells by shining a laser at them and observing patterns of light absorption, the researchers say. Current techniques—involving attaching special molecules to DNA—are potentially harmful to cells.

(Also see "Higgs Boson Found? Without 'God Particle,' No Galaxies—And No Life.")

The technology might also one day be harnessed to send information across "quantum cryptography networks," which would use single atoms as data-storage devices and quantum physics to guarantee privacy, Kielpinski said.

"Our work gives a new way to get light to talk to single atoms," he added, "so we can cook up new protocols for these storage nodes."

The atom-shadow research is detailed in the July 3 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120710-first-picture-atom-shadow-photograph-science-nature-smallest/

So Real it's Scary

LG IPS Monitors. So Real, it's scary!

The Crisis of Civilization

Like the book on which it is based, the film consists of seven parts which explore the interconnected dynamic of global crises of Climate Catastrophe; Peak Energy; Peak Food; Economic Instability; International Terrorism; and the Militarization Tendency -- with a final section on The Post-Peak World.

Society without Money. Prof. Franz Hörmann

Prof. Franz Hörmann is Assistant Professor and Lecturer at the department for Business Taxation and Tax Planning, of the Department for Accounting at the University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna. Works on further development of the semantical accounting theory, an approach studying accounting information systems from a linguistic perspective (the main proponents being Yuji Ijiri, Ahmed Riahi-Belkaoui). The results of those researches should lead towards more usable accounting information systems in the future, resulting in knowledge management in the fields of accounting and semantic business modelling using predicate logic. Development of network-based cooperative software tools for "Economy 2.0". TEDxPannonia is hosted by DREAM ACADEMIA. TEDxPannonia 2011 was crossing borders for "infinite dreams"! On Sep 11, 2010, it was the first TEDx-Event in Austria. The second TEDx-Event in 2010 was TEDxPannonia WOMEN on Dec 7, 2010. TEDxPannonia 2011 took place at the Monastery of Sopronbánfalva (Kloster Wandorf) in Sopron, Hungary.

Great Latvia Success Story!

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of The World by Niall Ferguson...

Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance. http://www.niallferguson.com Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What's more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history. Through Ferguson's expert lens familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. Suddenly, the civilization of the Renaissance looks very different: a boom in the market for art and architecture made possible when Italian bankers adopted Arabic mathematics. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world's first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer. With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What's the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do? This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can't provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis. Perhaps most important, The Ascent of Money documents how a new financial revolution is propelling the world's biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generation—an economic transformation unprecedented in human history. Yet the central lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble bursts—sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers, sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that's why, whether you're scraping by or rolling in it, there's never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.

10 Most Indebted Countries

The End of Money - Chuck Missler

Bashar : Take Action - End of Money