I collect news. I put it in different folders with appropriate titles for ideas for future articles. A lot of the news is news most people are unfamiliar with, but it’s interesting and can be the basis for a good article, or part of an article. One of the many folders I have is marked miscellaneous. The miscellaneous folder is where I put the odd news that doesn’t fit into any other category. Today’s article consists of news I have collected in that folder. The range of news I collected in this folder goes from 2014 to the current period. I found something interesting which I’m going to lead off with.

Scientists have been working on ways to read our brains for a couple of years now. I don’t think this is a good thing in most cases, but science and the government think it is great. To practice their newfound talent scientists have been reading monkey brains and incredibly they have been able to pull pictures of humans the monkeys have seen out of their brains and onto a screen. Scientists claim different neurons fire when information is being transmitted to the brain and the same is true for both humans and monkeys. The scientists have been able to extract many different photos of humans and when compared to the actual face they are almost exact. As incredible as this may sound, scientists have said that the code which creates these images is quite simple. So what does this mean? Well it seems to me we are on the verge of having our thoughts read. While this may be a boom in local criminal cases and federal crimes, it will inevitably lead to our minds being read without our knowledge or consent.

There have been rumors for many years which state we actually have a cure for cancer, but it’s being withheld from us. Some believe the drug companies discovered this cure years ago, but want to keep their meds, which are very expensive, flowing. Others claim a cure was, found but is locked up in black government projects and the government will never let us have it, because it involves the use of certain devices which can also be used as weapons. There is also a third group of people and they believe there is alien technology available which can cure cancer and is being withheld. It has just been announced there is a new noninvasive cancer test which can detect cancer from DNA and 90% of blood samples and this test would detect the cancer years before there are any symptoms. The results of this test were published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology and they were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology also known as ASCO.

The website, The Guardian, released a report about CIA torture in 2014. The report was upsetting to most people. Here is what the report published in The Guardian stated. It said detainees were forced to stand on broken limbs for many hours, sometimes in complete darkness and deprived of sleep for up to a hundred and eighty hours and sometimes made to stand the whole time. The report was released by the Senate. Sometimes when the suspects were forced to stand their arms were shackled above their head. It went on to say rectal exams were conducted with excessive force and prisoners were subjected to rectal feeding without medical necessity. Sometimes Russian Roulette was played with the detainees. Russian Roulette is a game where one bullet is inserted into a revolver, the cylinder spun randomly and then the trigger is pulled as the gun is aimed at a person. The person, in this case the detainee, would have one chance in six of being shot, because that is how many bullets a revolver usually holds. Threats were also made to kill the prisoner’s mothers and children and sexually abusive threats were made against some of their relatives.

The world’s first true computer was considered by many to be the ENIAC. It was a 27 ton machine which took up 1,800 square feet and used vacuum tubes and diodes. Unfortunately this historical device had been sent out to the trash heap. When Ross Perot said he wanted to donate his Plano, Texas headquarters with relics from computing history his staff knew he wanted it to contain something special from computing history, so they decided to go out and try and discover where the ENIAC computer might have got to. Somehow part of the computer had landed up at Fort Sill. The fort didn’t have the entire computer, but it did have about 25% of it. They didn’t want to just release it, but when Perot’s staff promised to restore what they were given the Army turned over eight of the panels and thus some of ENIAC’s parts will be at the home for posterity.

In 2015 a news site asked a question, and the question was why are there so many military vehicles in the parking lots of closed Walmarts? Photos were published of these vehicles in several different locations and some people thought this was very ominous and all sorts of theories came out. I remember one theory which stated people which didn’t agree with the government were going to be rounded up and put into camps. This never happened of course and the question of why military vehicles were in these closed Walmart parking lots has never been answered.

A story came out in National Geographic a couple of years ago. It stated that chimpanzees had all the qualifications to learn how to cook except for one and that was how to control fire. This makes one wonder, are chimps evolving and will they someday learn how to cook? A while back I mentioned the fact archaeologists and other scientists were shocked to find some monkeys were creating stone tools which mimicked those found which were created by prehistoric man, so I guess anything is possible.

Since we are talking about monkeys I would like to mention the fact monkeys have formed a relationship with Ethiopian wolves. Actually monkey is the wrong term, because I’m really talking about baboons. The baboons are geladas and the wolves come right through the middle of their herd and don’t go after any of the baboons, even the baby ones. Scientists couldn’t help but notice the relationship seems to be almost the same as humans have with dogs and they claim it looks an awful lot like domestication. When feral dogs are spotted the baboons run for cover. For some reason it was noted wolves found it much easier to capture small rodents when they were with the baboons.