Natural News
August 21, 2012 by: Craig Stellpflug

(NaturalNews) It's in your cookware, your clothing, furniture, carpets, popcorn bags and even in your food! It's perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and it remains indefinitely in the environment and even gets stuck in your body. PFOA is a toxicant and known carcinogen that has been detected in the blood of more than 98% of the US population. Exposure to this chemical has been associated with increased cholesterol, uric acid levels, preeclampsia, heart disease, liver damage, thyroid trouble, neurological disorders, chronic kidney disease and kidney cancer.

High levels of exposure to the Teflon (a DuPont registered trademark) chemical PFOA causes the risk of testicular cancer to skyrocket by 170 percent.

To read the rest of this story, visit NaturalNews.com.

Reuters
By Alister Doyle
OSLO | Thu Aug 23, 2012 12:15pm EDT

Huff Post
JIM SUHR | August 23, 2012 05:47 PM EST | Associated Press

ST. LOUIS — While other corn growers already have knocked down their drought-ravaged crops to feed them to livestock, Nebraska farmer Doug Nelson still waits for his maize to mature, well aware it won't be a banner year.

On the day a new report suggested the nation's worst dry spell in at least a generation is deepening in America's breadbasket, Nelson said Thursday he expects to harvest anywhere from nothing to 43 bushels per acre on his unirrigated acreage, a far cry from the 120 to 140 bushels he'd typically get. On the irrigated land, he could see 150 to 200 bushels an acre; in previous years, Nelson would see a minimum of 180 bushels.

To read the rest of this story, visit HuffingtonPost.com.

Mail Online
By Eddie Wrenn
August 22, 2012

The Martian landscape: But what is that hovering over the background? Dots appear to float in the sky, leading some observers to suggest an alien presence

When Curiosity first touched down on Mars, Internet pranksters were quick to mock up photographs of alien life on the alien landscape.

But it seems Nasa has itself captured something very strange on camera, including a strange white light dancing across the horizon of the red planet, and four blobs hovering in the sky. While the images are certainly a curiosity, Nasa and photography experts insist that these are nothing more than blemishes on the images, picked up by the camera lens sitting on the rover at a distance of 350 million miles away.

Extreme Tech
By Sebastian Anthony on August 17, 2012

• 

• With a chilling hint of the not-so-distant future, researchers at the Usenix Security conference have demonstrated a zero-day vulnerability in your brain. Using a commercial off-the-shelf brain-computer interface, the researchers have shown that it’s possible to hack your brain, forcing you to reveal information that you’d rather keep secret.

  As we’ve covered in the past, a brain-computer interface is a two-part device: There’s the hardware — which is usually a headset (an EEG; an electroencephalograph) with sensors that rest on your scalp — and software, which processes your brain activity and tries to work out what you’re trying to do (turn left, double click, open box, etc.) BCIs are generally used in a medical setting with very expensive equipment, but in the last few years cheaper, commercial offerings have emerged. For $200-300, you can buy an Emotiv (pictured above) or Neurosky BCI, go through a short training process, and begin mind controlling your computer.