To bee, or not to bee: do bees ask this question? Perhaps our apian friends don’t approach existentialism quite to that extent, but a new study suggests that insects might have a form of basic consciousness, allowing them to have their own, individual subjective experiences.
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Steve Bassett, executive director of the Paradigm Research Group, says that he thinks that President Barack Obama will disclose what the United States government knows about the UFO phenomenon by the end of 2016.
Bassett, speaking in an interview with the Express newspaper in the U.K., appears to be basing this on the media coverage surrounding Hillary Clinton’s interest in investigating what the government knows about the phenomenon, and that Obama may want to get the jump on Clinton to become the "disclosure president". The Paradigm Research Group is the only registered lobby group with the U.S. government that is pushing for disclosure on UFOs, and Bassett feels that their efforts are about to bear fruit.
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A new device developed by a research team at UC Berkeley is able to produce mechanical speech using only the thought of the word being produced from the subject. The researchers hope that this device will enable patients suffering from conditions that limit or prohibit spoken communication, such as the effects from a stroke or Lou Gehrig’s disease, to be able to communicate normally.
The researchers placed electrodes on the surface of the subjects’ brains in the region associated with language, then recorded the electrical patterns their brains produced when perceiving spoken speech. This information was then applied to a computer model that sorted out which patterns belonged to which sounds, creating maps of the subjects’ perceived speech patterns.
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The United States of America over its history has been involved in 80 wars and military operations in which soldiers lost their lives. They range from obscure battles in faraway places to titanic conflicts like the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and World Wars One and Two. In these conflicts, there have been 2,800,000 casualties, including 664,000 combat deaths. By far the greatest American conflict was the Civil War, with 215,000 combat deaths on both sides, and in excess of 400,000 wounded.
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