Follow the Jellyfish: Irish Sea Likened To A ‘Jellyfish Soup’

Sea Lace seaweed and Bladder Wrack on beach at Spanish Point, County Clare, Ireland

The Irish Sea has been likened to a ‘jellyfish soup’ by the Marine Conservation Society (MSC), which has warned beach goers and sea users that jellyfish population numbers are on the increase.
The MSC made the statement just weeks after Scotland’s Torness nuclear power station was closed when swarms of moon jellyfish blocked the facility’s water intake cooling systems
The UK-based organisation said there is strong evidence that jellyfish numbers are increasing around the world, including in Irish and UK seas.
According to the MCS’s Peter Richardson: “These increases have been linked to factors such as pollution, over-fishing and possibly climate change…We should consider jellyfish populations as important indicators of the state of our seas. Already, some areas of the UK’s seas resemble a ‘jellyfish soup’, such as the Irish Sea where large numbers of moon, lion’s mane, blue and compass jellyfish have already been reported.”
“Most jellyfish bloom in summer, but some species can survive the cool winter months too,” says MCS Biodiversity Programme Manager Peter Richardson, “This year, we received our first reports of the huge but harmless barrel jellyfish off North Wales back in early January, and this species has occurred in huge numbers in the Irish Sea and beyond ever since, with reports received from North Somerset to the Firth of Clyde. Since May we have also received reports of large numbers of several other species of jellyfish from various coastal all sites round the UK – it is another good year for the jellyfish!”, he added.

Jellyfish are the staple diet of critically endangered leatherback turtles, seasonal visitors to UK and Irish seas, which migrate from their tropical nesting beaches to feed on the islands’ abundant seasonal jellyfish blooms. Examinations of dead leatherbacks stranded on UK shores have revealed that they feed on several species of jellyfish.

By comparing the distribution of jellyfish with environmental factors such as sea temperature, plankton production and current flow, the MSC say they hope to understand what influences the seasonal distribution of jellyfish and leatherbacks in our waters. This year there have been three confirmed leatherback sightings since June, all spotted in waters off the Western Isles in Scotland where jellyfish blooms have been reported.
The MSC are currently appealing to members of the public to participate in a jellyfish survey. Over 6000 jellyfish encounters have been reported since the MCS Survey was launched in 2003. The survey data is being analysed in collaboration with the University of Exeter and early results of the public sightings show interesting differences in the distribution of the larger jellyfish species around Britain.
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From: Irishweatheronline.com

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Sigmund Freud's cocaine problem

Editor's note: Nearly 130 years ago, cocaine was the world’s newest wonder drug –touted as a cure for everything from morphine addiction to tuberculosis. And its biggest supporter was Sigmund Freud. Dr. Sanjay Gupta has the fascinating history and what it means for us today on "Sanjay Gupta M.D." at 7:30 a.m. ET Saturday and Sunday.

Whenever Big Pharma unfurls its latest “blockbuster” drug, I am carried back to the era when the biggest wonder drug on the market was cocaine. Yes, cocaine!
In the early 1880s, pharmaceutical houses touted it as a cure for everything from morphine addiction and depression to dyspepsia and fatigue. It was widely available in tonics, powders, wines and soft drinks before its mass consumption created a cadre of raging addicts demanding medical attention.
One of cocaine’s leading medical advocates was a struggling Viennese neurologist named Sigmund Freud. He began studying cocaine’s effects in 1884, and his clinical notebooks amply demonstrate that his favorite experimental subject was himself.
Initially, Sigmund was eager to employ cocaine as an antidote for his best friend’s morphine addiction. Ernst Fleischl-Marxow was a brilliant physiologist who injured his thumb while dissecting a cadaver, resulting in chronic pain tamed only by large doses of morphine.
Substituting one addictive drug for another was a common means of treating substance abuse in the late 19th century. What all these well-intentioned games of medical musical chairs did most reliably was to create “new and improved” addicts.
Freud, in essence, transformed his highly functioning, albeit opiate-dependent, friend into an addled cocaine and morphine addict who was dead seven years later at age 45.
One would think that this episode would have soured Freud on the drug. Yet like most humans ensnared by cocaine’s addictive grip, for the next 12 years, he continued to sing its praises and consumed a great deal of cocaine to quell his physical aches and mental anxieties. In a perverse way, Freud loved how cocaine made him talk endlessly about memories and experiences he previously thought were locked in his brain for no one to hear, let alone judge.
Freud’s most haunting encounter with the drug occurred in 1895 after he and a colleague named Wilhelm Fleiss nearly killed a patient named Emma Eckstein with a botched operation and too much cocaine. Several nights later, he had a disturbing dream about a party where Eckstein blamed Freud for his gross negligence.
Today, Eckstein is better known as “Irma," the pseudonym Freud gave her in his masterpiece, "The Interpretation of Dreams." When writing about his dream, Freud glossed over his obvious malpractice, an act that today would have resulted in disgrace, loss of medical license, lawsuits and even jail time.
Instead, Freud explained the dream meant he was a caring doctor who was, if anything, overly concerned about his patient, “Irma."
Like so many others, Freud suffered from the most maddening symptom of addiction: the stealthy process by which the addict’s mind conspires to convince that nothing, nothing at all, is askew or dangerous about something that most decidedly is.
Indeed, if one set out to design addiction as an implacable disease, he would be hard pressed to come up with a more diabolical symptom than denial, the need to lead a double life – feeding the addiction in private while struggling to starve, or at least conceal, it in public for long periods of time.
Until, that is, the addiction completely takes over with disastrous results and public masquerade is no longer possible.
One assumes that his clinical experiences with Eckstein, if not Fleischl-Marxow, taught him that cocaine was far too dangerous for any therapeutic application. In the fall of 1896, the day after his father’s funeral, Freud claimed to have put his “cocaine brush” aside. No documentary evidence exists to refute his testimony.
But for the remaining days of his life, Freud had far greater difficulty in fully comprehending the dangerous consequences of his substance abuse. He decidedly, and repeatedly, misinterpreted his famous dream of cocaine. Instead, he chose to elaborate a far more flattering and positive analysis that epitomizes an addiction’s power of subterfuge.
The man who invented psychoanalysis, a revolutionary pursuit for self-truth, succumbed to the same “big lie” most every practicing addict tells himself every day.

Dr. Howard Markel, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan, is the author of "An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine" (Pantheon).
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From: thechart.blogs.cnn.com/

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Hacker says Anonymous still downloading NATO data

July 22, 2011 The hacking group Anonymous said Thursday that it accessed about 1 gigabyte of restricted material from NATO servers, and released a few of the documents as proof of its cyber-incursion.

According to a hacker who maintains that he is part of Anonymous and goes by the name "Commander X," Anonymous plans to eventually release all the NATO documents in its possession and still has the capability to download NATO data. 

Anonymous--a loose confederation of hackers that has taken credit for hacking MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Amazon, and Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper--showed off a piece of its NATO cache via a link on its Twitter page to a document with the text "NATO Restricted" about "Outsourcing CIS in Kosovo," dated January 2008. Restricted is NATO's lowest level of document classification.

On Twitter, Anonymous trumpeted its hacking of NATO and implied it could access even more data from NATO servers: 

"Yes, we haz more of your delicious data. You wonder where from. No hints, your turn. You call it war; we laugh at your battleships."

The man who calls himself Commander X described in an email to CBS News the substance of what he said were the NATO documents obtained by the hacker group. "The documents, a tiny sample of which has already been released this morning - are classified NATO procurement and procedure files mostly (though not exclusively) describing NATO secure communications networks. What equipment is used by NATO to securely communicate, and how that equipment is deployed. That is what you can expect from the dumps. Although there may be other incredible stuff we have not found yet in the cache, as it is a HUGE dump and we are only now getting into a lengthy analysis. It will take weeks just to analyze what we have already, and we also STILL have access to the NATO servers and we are STILL downloading databases." On Twitter, Anonymous said that it would be "irresponsible" to post most of the data. However, Commander X told CBS News that Anonymous plans to release every NATO document it has in its possession. "Anonymous ALWAYS releases EVERYTHING we take...eventually. But with these big classified dumps we like to take our time analyzing exactly what it is we have. That way we can do the disclosures in such a way as to maximize the political impact of the release."He explained Anonymous' motivation for hacking NATO as follows:"It's all part of an ongoing Operation NATO that began the very day NATO released their much vaunted report denouncing Anonymous and calling on member states to "persecute" us. [Editor's note: See the NATO report here.] The following day (look up the date yourself on Google), we responded with a press release and accompanying Black Fax & E-Mail Bomb of every inbox at NATO." [Editor's note: see the Anonymous response here.]"Now, at that point if nothing else had happened - things may have cooled down in Op NATO. It would have become just another monitoring or "wait and see" Op. But almost immediately European countries saw this report from NATO as a green light and dozens of Anons were arrested across Europe in sweeps from Spain and Italy to Turkey. Retribution against those countries and now also Holland, the UK and USA - are handled by a separate Operation Vendetta. But because we see NATO as the prime instigator of this recent wave of persecutions, Op NATO never slowed down or missed a beat.""It is important to understand that Op NATO and many of our other Operations are manned by a global force and ongoing 24/7. If the Op is active, it never ceases because there is always someone in the world awake and at least monitoring the chan and news feeds. All the media and the world see is when we release something, but the effort to do these Ops is relentless and continuous."In a videotaped interview with CBS News on Tuesday, Commander X, who asked that his identity be hidden, said, "The power of Anonymous is that we have the ability to effect change on the Internet. You have a site online -- all of a sudden, we snap our fingers and that site is gone."A NATO spokesman said the organization is aware of Anonymous' hacking claims, and that NATO security experts are conducting an investigation. "We strongly condemn any leak of classified documents, which can potentially endanger the security of NATO Allies, armed forces and citizens," he said. On Tuesday, the FBI conducted multiple raids and arrested 14 suspects in connection with December attacks claimed by Anonymous on PayPal, the Internet payment service that had stopped processing donations for Wikileaks. "We want to send a message that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable," Steven Chabinsky, deputy assistant FBI director told NPR. "[Even if] hackers can be believed to have social causes, it's entirely unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts."

Anonymous tweeted in response to the arrests: "We will not be stopped. Arrest one of us and they shall be replaced. #Anonymous is not a person or entity. It is you and I."

A statement on Thursday from a group identifying itself as Anonymous & Lulz Security to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies regarding the hacker arrests proclaimed: "Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea. Any attempt to do so will make your citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir. It is our mission to help these people and there is nothing - absolutely nothing - you can possibly to do make us stop."

From: cbsnews.com

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LulzSec and Anonymous hacker suspects arrested by US, UK and Dutch authorities

July 20, 2011
Computer crime authorities will be hoping that they have struck a significant blow against the Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups, following a series of raids and arrests on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the United States, 16 people have been arrested in connection with an internet attacklast year against PayPal - an assault which was claimed by the loosely-knit hacktivist group known as "Anonymous", in retaliation for the website withdrawing support for WikiLeaks.
According to a Department of Justice press release, arrests were made in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and the District of New Jersey.
In all, FBI agents executed more than 35 search warrants as part of the co-ordinated investigation.
In addition, the UK's PCeU arrested a 16-year-old youth known as "T-Flow" in South London, on suspicion of breaching the Computer Misuse Act. The teenager is allegedly connected to hacks perpetrated by the LulzSec and Anonymous groups.
Finally, the Dutch National Police Agency arrested four individuals for alleged cybercrimes related to the case.
Defendants named by the US authorities include:
* Christopher Wayne Cooper, 23, aka "Anthrophobic"
* Joshua John Covelli, 26, aka "Absolem" and "Toxic"
* Keith Wilson Downey, 26
* Mercedes Renee Haefer, 20, aka "No" and "MMMM"
* Donald Husband, 29, aka "Ananon"
* Vincent Charles Kershaw, 27, aka "Trivette", "Triv" and "Reaper"
* Ethan Miles, 33
* James C. Murphy, 36
* Drew Alan Phillips, 26, aka "Drew010"
* Jeffrey Puglisi, 28, aka "Jeffer", "Jefferp" and "Ji"
* Daniel Sullivan, 22
* Tracy Ann Valenzuela, 42
* Christopher Quang Vo, 22
In addition, 21-year-old Scott Matthew Arciszewski, 21 who was arrested by the FBI in Florida, was charged with hacks targeted at the Tampa Bay InfraGard website.
InfraGard is a public-private partnership for critical infrastructure protection sponsored by the FBI.
Meanwhile, 21-year-old Lance Moore, of Las Cruses, New Mexico, was charged with allegedly stealing confidential business information from AT&T's web servers. Moore is said to have worked as a customer support contractor at the firm and is alleged to have downloaded thousands of documents and other files that he was not authorised to access.
The AT&T files were later published by the LulzSec hacking group.
Computer crime authorities will no doubt be hoping that they have struck a significant blow against the Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups - but anyone who believes we have heard the last of the hacktivists is probably going to be sourly disappointed. By Graham Cluley  

From: nakedsecurity.sophos.com

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