ACMA confirmed that it had investigated pages on the WikiLeaks site – which publishes documents otherwise kept secret by governments and organisations – and said it had blacklisted them.

A spokesperson for ACMA told SBS that the organisation does not blacklist entire sites, only specific pages. He could not discuss what content the blacklisted pages contained.

“Talking about material on the blacklist gives clues to people to go and look for it on the Internet,” spokesman Donald Robertson said.

Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feedforward. They have no identities. They are probes.

Our price-points are all over the shop, and a sealed environment like the iPad permits all kinds of unnatural pricing inversions. We’ll pay more for a ringtone than a full MP3. We pay $10 for a README file on our Amazon Kindle, and a dollar for a pocket application that plays farts.

This is how Assange put it to me this morning in explaining why he believes his organization’s activities are so vital and why he’s willing to make himself a target in order to do it:

‘There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform civilization, and selectively targeting information will do that – understanding that quality information is what every decision is based on, and all the decisions taken together is what “civilization” is, so if you want to improve civilization, you have to remove some of the basic constraints, which is the quality of information that civilization has at its disposal to make decisions.’

If I had to choose between the trophy and the $2.6 billion, I would go for the $2.6 billion.

With only DNA evidence to go by, the researchers have said it is impossible to tell what the species would have looked like. And although they could not determine the sex of the individual to whom the finger belonged, the researchers have nicknamed the prehistoric person “X-woman”…

Professor Paabo said the x-woman type of human would have developed much later than Homo erectus but long before Neanderthals. Modern humans shared a common ancestor with the unknown hominin about a million years ago, he said.

The X-woman humans seem to have lived alongside Neanderthals and modern humans.

Iron fertilization, like other forms is geo-engineering is “purposely changing the system and may have unintended consequences,” said Scott Doney, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts

In his 1969 book Homo Movens, Kurokawa had envisioned a mobile society, with people time-sharing among five or six different environments. Like astronauts protected from solar rays, Kurokawa suggested, “individuals should be protected by capsules in which they can reject information they do not need and in which they are sheltered from information they do not want, thereby allowing an individual to recover his subjectivity and independence.”

…

Call them myPods—residents installed in their docks, downloading information, recharging before striking out again into the city. Kurokawa had forecast this: The capsules were “cyborg architecture,” he wrote, inside of which humans could “equip themselves with various devices with which to perform complicated roles which are beyond their capabilities as living creatures.”

The Swedish chicken study was one of several recent breakthroughs in the youthful field of epigenetics, which primarily studies the epigenome, the protective package of proteins around which genetic material – strands of DNA – is wrapped. The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature’s traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn’t news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what’s news is that those changes can be inherited.

…

It might not be immediately obvious why this has such profound implications for evolution. In the way it’s generally understood, the whole point of natural selection – the so-called “modern synthesis” of Darwin’s theories with subsequent discoveries about genes – is its beautiful, breathtaking, devastating simplicity. In each generation, genes undergo random mutations, making offspring subtly different from their parents; those mutations that enhance an organism’s abilities to thrive and reproduce in its own particular environment will tend to spread through populations, while those that make successful breeding less likely will eventually peter out.

…

Yet epigenetics suggests this isn’t the whole story. If what happens to you during your lifetime – living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden – can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable. Rather than genes simply “offering up” a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way. You begin to feel slightly sorry for the much-mocked pre-Darwinian zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own version of evolution held, most famously, that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors were “obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them”. As a matter of natural history, he probably wasn’t right about how giraffes’ necks came to be so long. But Lamarck was scorned for a much more general apparent mistake: the idea that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity. “Today,” notes David Shenk, “any high school student knows that genes are passed on unchanged from parent to child, and to the next generation and the next. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity. Except now it turns out that it can …”

Epigenetics is the most vivid reason why the popular understanding of evolution might need revising, but it’s not the only one. We’ve learned that huge proportions of the human genome consist of viruses, or virus-like materials, raising the notion that they got there through infection – meaning that natural selection acts not just on random mutations, but on new stuff that’s introduced from elsewhere. Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms. The researchers Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfield conclude that, on average, a bacterium may have obtained 10% of its genes from other organisms in its environment.

To an outsider, this is mind-blowing: since most of the history of life on earth has been the history of micro-organisms, the evidence for horizontal transfer suggests that a mainly Darwinian account of evolution may be only the latest version, applicable to the most recent, much more complex forms of life. Perhaps, before that, most evolution was based on horizontal exchange. Which gives rise to a compelling philosophical puzzle: if a genome is what defines an organism, yet those organisms can swap genes freely, what does it even mean to draw a clear line between one organism and another? “It’s natural to wonder,” Goldenfield told New Scientist recently, “if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level.” In natural selection, we all know, the fittest win out over their rivals. But what if you can’t establish clear boundaries between rivals in the first place?

As of mid-January, according to Rhodes, Oath Keepers had at least one chapter in every state and was adding dozens of members daily. Some 14,000 people had signed up as members on the Oath Keepers website while more than 15,000, including dozens of military recruiters, had done so on Facebook. And that doesn’t include those who, fearing reprisal, do their networking offline. Volunteers are in the process of sending out some 1,000 “constitutional care packages” complete with Oath Keepers patches to soldiers serving overseas.

…

In the months I’ve spent getting to know the Oath Keepers, I’ve toggled between viewing them either as potentially dangerous conspiracy theorists or as crafty intellectuals with the savvy to rally politicians to their side. The answer, I came to realize, is that they cover the whole spectrum.

…

Rand Cardwell, who organized multiple chapters in Tennessee, only woke up, he told me, when the government began bailing out big companies and left ordinary people in the cold

…

Over bottled water and microbrews, they swapped tips on how to involve members in state militias, spread viral YouTube videos of soldiers reaffirming their oaths, and reach out to other patriots. They boasted of recruiting at gun shows, approaching politicians and cops, and stuffing leaflets into magazines in veterans hospital waiting rooms.

…

During the talks, I sat between a libertarian who had biked across America, stopping at police stations to hand out recruiting materials, and a first-generation Chinese American stay-at-home dad from San Francisco who invited me to my local chapter’s winter survivalist training and rifle practice—extracurriculars, he assured me.