We Are Awake

Volunteer A team of biochemical researchers in the US has figured out how to give a human volunteer night vision, allowing him to see across a distance of over 50 metres in total darkness for several hours. The key is a natural, light-sensitive substance called Chlorin e6 (Ce6), which is derived from sea creatures and has been used for many years in   cancer treatment research . It’s also been shown to be effective in the treatment of night blindness and improving dim light vision in people with eye disorders, so an independent team of self-described 'bio-hackers' in California called   Science for the Masses   decided to see how else it could be used to improve vision. The idea came from a patent filed in 2012, claiming that when you apply a mixture of Ce6, insulin, and saline to a person’s eye, the retina will absorb it and increase vision in low light. The patent also mentions that the chemical dimethlysulfoxide (DMSO) can be used in place of the insulin, but

Within the next 200 years, humans will have become so merged with technology that we’ll have evolved into “God-like cyborgs”, according to Yuval Noah Harari, an historian and author from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Harari researches the history of the human species, and after writing a new book on our past, he now believes that we’re just a few short centuries away from being able to use technology to avoid death altogether - if we can afford it, that is. “I think it is likely in the next 200 years or so   Homo sapiens   will upgrade themselves into some idea of a divine being, either through biological manipulation or genetic engineering of by the creation of cyborgs: part organic, part non-organic,” Harari said during his presentation the Hay Festival in the UK, as Sarah Knapton   reports for the   Telegraph .   “It will be the greatest evolution in biology since the appearance of life … we will be as different from today’s humans as chimps are now from u

The EU has asked its member states to take in 40,000 migrants who land over the next two years in Italy and Greece, in a bid to ease the burden on struggling southern nations. Britain has already said it will opt out of the "relocation plan", which is designed to share the cost of soaring migrant arrivals. But it is unable to opt out of the "resettlement plan", which will see 20,000 asylum seekers who are not currently in the EU be housed within member states. The plan will see Britain forced to accept 2,309 asylum seekers - 11.54pc of the total, and the third-highest amount. Germany will take the lion's share, and house 3,086 people - despite the fact that Berlin already accepts more asylum seekers than any other nation. France will take the second-highest number, 2,375 people. Sanctuary "Everyone who needs sanctuary should find it in Europe," said Frans Timmermans, the first vice-president. "But those who have no justified claim

TPP Leak Confirms the Worst: US Negotiators Still Trying to Trade Away Internet Freedoms       After years of secret trade negotiations over the future of intellectual property rights (and limits on those rights), the public gets a chance to looks at the results. For those of us who care about free speech and a balanced intellectual property system that encourages innovation, creativity, and access to knowledge, it’s not a pretty picture. Today Wikileaks published a complete draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement’s chapter on “intellectual property rights.” The leaked text, from August 2013, confirms long-standing suspicions about the harm the agreement could do to users’ rights and a free and open Internet. From locking in excessive copyright term limits to further entrenching failed policies that give legal teeth to Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools, the TPP text we’ve seen today reflects a terrible but unsurprising truth: an agreement negotia

                               Sharon Wood delivering a statement with Paul Wood (right, husband) and Neil                                                       Shepherd  (left, ex-husband) (Picture: Dave Higgens/PA Wire) The parents of two children killed by a faulty boiler on holiday have accused Thomas Cook of ‘making money from their deaths’. Neil Shepherd and Sharon Wood spoke out after reports that the tour operator was paid £3.5million by a hotel over the deaths of Christi, seven, and Bobby, six. The divorced couple, given just £350,000 compensation each, also criticised the company for a ‘letter of apology’ that journalists received before they did. ‘It is disgraceful that, after all we’ve been through, Thomas Cook are still putting us last in the equation,’ the parents said in a statement yesterday. ‘We haven’t had this so-called letter of apology. We have been shown it by the press and feel it is an appalling continuation of Thomas Cook’s PR exercise.

Did a comet wipe out a highly advanced human civilisation in Antarctica, ?thousands of years before the invention of the wheel? Author Graham Hancock claims to have found a ‘smoking gun’ which proves a highly advanced civilisation existed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago. Hancock claims that our knowledge of astronomy and mathematics comes from this ‘lost’ civilisation. Hancock’s book Fingerprints of the Gods sold three million copies in 1995. He told The Sunday Times, ‘But what I lacked was a smoking gun. Now we have it. ‘A series of papers in geophysics and geological journals have been bringing forward evidence that the Earth was indeed hit by a comet 12,800 years ago, which is exactly what I proposed in my book.’ His new book, Magicians of the Gods, will be published in September.