After the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in 1620 on the Mayflower,they almost starved to death. Members of a local tribe, the Wampanoag, helped the newcomers, showing them how to plant corn and other local foods. In the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims celebrated their first successful harvest with a three-day feast with the Wampanoag.

The friendliness of the Wampanoag was extraordinary, because they had recently been ravaged by diseases caught from previous European explorers. Europeans had also killed, kidnapped and enslaved Native Americans in the region. The Plymouth settlers, during their desperate first year, had even stolen grain and other goods from the Wampanoag, according to Wikipedia’s entry on Plymouth Colony.

The good vibes of that 1621 feast soon dissipated. As more English settlers arrived in New England, they seized more and more land from the Wampanoag and other tribes, who eventually resisted with violence—in vain. We all know how this story ended. “The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million,”.

Let us all be thankful that the Native Americans did not kill our forfathers the minute they stepped off their boats and that the Wampanoag Indians where here to help us through our very first winter in the new world.

 It does not take you too long to figure out the many uses for this cool new remote control military vehicle. Riot control, border patrol, parking lot monitoring, school sentry, the potential uses for these smart cars on steroids is endless.

The Guardian shown here was used in the recent middle east conflict along the border of Israel and Gaza Strip

The Guardium is an unmanned armored car that carries more than 660-pounds of cameras, electronic sensors and weapons, according to the Israel Defense Forces’ blog. The killer go-kart can be operated in real time by a driver sitting in distant command center — similar to the way armed drones are flown by far-off pilots — or they can be programmed to “run patrol on predetermined routes without human intervention,”.

The Guardium is fully operational, according to the IDF.

Unlike the Army’s robot jeeps, which are pretty much serving as pack mules that accompany infantry units, the Guardiums are being used in a similar manner as UAVs, running patrols by themselves and using their sensors, equipped with “auto-target acquisition, to look for the enemy and their weapons and…well, we’ll see. The IDF says the little robo-cars can use various forceful methods to eliminate threats.

I say we use these futuristic robot cars to patrol the beaches.  Who knows, maybe they can offer paid subscriptions to view  live video feeds to help offset the cost?

Along with Bigfoot, the abomnibal snowman, UFO’s and poltergeist, “strange sounds” is also an interesting topic to search out on the internet.

If you are not familiar with this very strange phenomenom, check this video out and then do some of your own “armchair” research on the subject. It’s some very freaky shit.

Have fun!

It’s no illusion: Science has found a way to make not just objects but entire events disappear, experts say.

According to new research by British physicists, it’s theoretically possible to create a material that can hide an entire bank heist from human eyes and surveillance cameras.

“The concepts are basically quite simple,” said Paul Kinsler, a physicist at Imperial College London, who created the idea with colleagues Martin McCall and Alberto Favaro.

Unlike invisibility cloaks—some of which have been made to work at very small scales—the event cloak would do more than bend light around an object.

Instead this cloak would use special materials filled with metallic arrays designed to adjust the speed of light passing through.

In theory, the cloak would slow down light coming into the robbery scene while the safecracker is at work. When the robbery is complete, the process would be reversed, with the slowed light now racing to catch back up.

If the “before” and “after” visions are seamlessly stitched together, there should be no visible trace that anything untoward has happened. One second there’s a closed safe, and the next second the safe has been emptied.

Event Cloak “Fun” but Challenging

The concept of an event cloak “is definitely an interesting idea and great fun,” said invisibility researcher Ulf Leonhardt, a physicist at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K. who wasn’t part of the study team.

Steve Cummer, a cloaking specialist at Duke University, calls the concept “interesting and exciting,” but he thinks that actually making such a cloak would be “really, really challenging.”

“All of the material parameters need to be time-varying in a very specific way,” Cummer said by email.

Currently, nobody knows how to do that except in fiber optics, in which the speed of a signal can be varied by a few percent by changing the intensity of the light.

“You can use an intense control beam to slow a signal down,” Kinsler said. In that way, an event occurring inside a fiber optic cable—such as an electrical signal moving from “on” to “off”—could be hidden from view.

“You would see the fiber, but some event occurring in the fiber could be cloaked,” he said. Such a proof of concept, he added, could be possible within a few years.

Powerful Laser Key to Cloaking?

There are still a few hitches to address, though, before attempting such an experiment, according to the University of St. Andrews’s Leonhardt.

For instance, being able to cloak an event lasting more than a few femtoseconds—one-millionth of a nanosecond—would require light from an immensely powerful laser, he said.

“The experiment is not entirely impossible, but it is at the limit of what one can do with present technology in an ordinary university laboratory,” Leonhardt said.

Study co-author Kinsler agrees that the fiber optics experiment is a technological stretch, but he counters that the problem can be eliminated by using a miles-long cable, as is routinely done in telecommunications.

“You can reduce the required power by using a longer fiber,” he said. That’s because the duration of the event you can hide depends on how long you can delay the light. A longer cable would allow you to get a longer delay from the same percentage slowdown, which would take less power.

Still, it may be a long while before police have anything to worry about—the materials needed for speeding and slowing light precisely enough for a bank heist have yet to be invented.

The event-cloak story and an accompanying article by Leonhardt appear in a special issue of Physics World magazine published June 30

This story was lifted from the cool National Geographic Website

by Richard A. Lovett

for National Geographic News