WantToKnow.info: All News

MIT professor's killing remains a mystery as police launch homicide investigation

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Authorities were working Wednesday to uncover clues after a prominent professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was fatally shot at his home near Boston. Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a 47-year-old physicist and fusion scientist, was shot Monday night at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. He died at a local hospital. Loureiro, who joined MIT in 2016, was named last year to lead MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where he aimed to advance clean energy technology and other research. The center, one of the school's largest labs, had more than 250 people working across seven buildings when he took the helm. "It's not hyperbole to say MIT is where you go to find solutions to humanity's biggest problems," Loureiro said when he was named to lead the plasma science lab. "Fusion energy will change the course of human history." A neighbor of Loureiro's who did not want to be identified told CBS News Boston he heard "three loud bangs" Monday evening. "I thought at first it was somebody in our apartment kicking in a door or something so I called the neighbors and they said no they thought it was gunshots," he said. A 22-year-old student at Boston University who lives near Loureiro's apartment in Brookline told The Boston Globe she also heard three loud noises Monday evening and feared it was gunfire. "I had never heard anything so loud, so I assumed they were gunshots," Liv Schachner was quoted as saying.

Note: Read more about the latest wave of missing and dead scientists.

- CBS News

Murder of MIT Fusion Scientist Getting More and More Bizarre

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, lauded theoretical physicist and director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center Nuno Loureiro was murdered in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. Since then, investigators have made several breakthroughs in the unusual case, linking the prime suspect to a separate deadly mass shooting at Brown University earlier in December. The suspected shooter, Claudio Neves Valente, was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire on Thursday following a six-day manhunt. Neves Valente attended the same school — Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico — as his future victim, Loureiro, where they were both students between 1995 and 2000. Neves Valente eventually pursued his graduate studies at Brown, linking him to the second institution where he’s suspected of committing a deadly shooting. Former Brown physics professor Scott Watson, who spent a lot of time with Neves Valente at Brown, said he became “sometimes angry” about life at Brown in esoteric ways — complaining about the quality of the fish he was served, for instance. Neves Valente left Brown in early 2001 and returned to Portugal. Classmates have suggested he may have become jealous of Loureiro’s illustrious career. Roughly an hour before Neves Valente opened fire on students in a Brown lecture hall, a witness noticed he was wearing a mask and flimsy clothing, leading to an altercation. All told, Neves Valenete killed three individuals and injured nine.

Note: Read more about the latest wave of missing and dead scientists.

- Futurism

There Are Thousands of Inventions the Government Doesn’t Want You to See. A Shady Law Is Hiding Them.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Whatever the source, at some point you’ll hear about a guy who invented an engine that runs on water (or sometimes a different clean, renewable resource). This engine was going to change the world, bring about a new age, and also make its inventor very, very rich. The details about the person who invented it vary, but the story always has one constant: the U.S. government swept in, stole the invention, and shut the whole operation down—all to protect the interests of the oil industry. There’s a real law on the books that makes urban legends like that one entirely plausible. It’s called the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 (Pub. L. 82-256, 66 Stat. 3), and if you’re an American inventor whose work involves anything like cryptography, weaponry, or energy, it’s a law that hangs over your head. A remnant of the Cold War, the law allows agencies within the U.S. Government to interject during a patent review process and suppress any inventions that the agency deems a “threat to national security.” The law doesn’t simply give the government carte blanche to permanently lock away the fruits of an inventor’s labor. Under the parameters of the law, agencies ranging from the Department of Defense to NASA can issue a “secrecy order” on patents under review that they feel contain sensitive information. Of the more than 788,000 patents filed in Fiscal Year 2025, 6,543 of them were restrained by ISA. And there’s no real way to find out what they are, or why they were withheld.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on energy.

- Popular Mechanics

Former Fauci adviser pleads guilty to conspiracy to conceal Covid-19 records

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A former adviser to infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring to evade public records laws and conceal government documents related to grant research funding and the Covid-19 pandemic. David Morens, who had worked under Fauci as a senior official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid) during the pandemic, entered his plea, to a conspiracy charge during a hearing in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland. The 78-year-old had been indicted in April on charges related to what prosecutors said was a scheme to thwart public records requests received by the agency beginning in April 2020 related to Covid-19 research grants. He faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on 12 November. The plea came after Fauci, who led the Niaid for 38 years and became the face of the US pandemic response, appeared before a Senate panel last month and repeatedly invoked his right against self-incrimination. The FBI said in 2023 that a leak from a Wuhan laboratory likely caused the pandemic, a claim China said had “no credibility whatsoever”. The CIA said in January 2025 a lab leak was likely, but with “low confidence”, while four other US intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe the virus most likely emerged via natural transmission from some animal. Prosecutors said that Morens pledged to ... counter the narrative Covid-19 leaked from a lab.

Note: In our latest Substack, COVID Revisited: A Complete Guide to Pandemic Propaganda and the Search for Truth in a Divided World, we explore how many COVID-era policies and mandates didn’t actually have a scientific basis, and failed to hold up in the face of real world evidence. We also emphasize the devastating public health costs of fear, division, and social isolation. Read more on how Fauci was "untruthful" to Congress about Wuhan lab virus research.

- The Guardian

2026 ‘Dirty Dozen’ produce: Nearly 100% tested positive for pesticides, including ‘forever chemicals’

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Leafy greens such as spinach and kale and perennial kid favorites such as strawberries and grapes held the highest levels of potentially harmful pesticide residues based on government tests, according to the 2026 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce. Nectarines, peaches, cherries, apples, blackberries, pears, potatoes and blueberries filled out this year’s “Dirty Dozen” most pesticide-laden fruits and vegetables, according to the report released Tuesday by the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, a health advocacy organization. Spinach, which holds the top spot, had more pesticide residue by weight than any other type of produce and contained, on average, four or more different types of pesticides. Samples of every produce type averaged four or more pesticides, except for potatoes, which averaged two. Consuming produce with multiple pesticides is concerning, experts say, because exposure to mixtures of pesticides may accumulate and raise risk. Children are especially susceptible to contaminants such as pesticides, even while in the womb. Pesticide exposure during pregnancy may lead to an increased risk of birth defects, low birth weight and fetal death,” according to the AAP. “Exposure in childhood has been linked to attention and learning problems, as well as cancer.” For the first time, the report found over 60% of all Dirty Dozen samples contain pesticides that are also “forever chemicals” called PFAS.

Note: Our Substack, "The Pesticide Crisis Reveals The Dark Side of Science. We Have The Solutions to Regenerate," uncovers the scope of the widespread conspiracy to poison our food, air, and along with the powerful remedies and solutions to this crisis. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on toxic chemicals and food system corruption.

- CNN News

Jeffrey Epstein Had a Bizarre Obsession With “Improving” Human DNA, and He Was Emailing With Top Scientists About It

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jeffrey Epstein had a bizarre obsession with genetics and “improving” human DNA. The convicted child sex criminal exhibited a fascination with transhumanism, a controversial movement in science and philosophy with a eugenicist mission: using cutting edge technology, including genetic engineering. He tossed [these ideas] around among his shockingly wide network of intellectuals, many of whom communicated with him long after he had pled guilty to child prostitution charges in 2008. The deceased billionaire offered to fund their research and held expensive research conferences and parties. In 2006, he organized a conference on St Thomas in the British Virgin Islands ... attended by luminaries including physicists Stephen Hawking. One attendee recalled that all Epstein wanted to talk about was improving the human genome, and how the passing of certain traits might result in superior humans. Another scientist that Epstein confided with was Martin Nowak, a math and biology professor at Harvard University. In 2003, the billionaire donated $30 million to Harvard to support Nowak’s research. “i am so very sorry i caused you so much worry and that i spoilt this day. i am so happy that i did not kill anybody,” he wrote in a 2002 email [to Ghislaine Maxwell]. “my perspective of life has changed somehow.” In 2014, Epstein sent a cryptic email to Nowak stating, “our spy was captured after completing her mission.” Nowak responded: “did you torture her.”

Note: Read more in our Substack, "Epstein Files Pt. 2: Beyond Sex Trafficking—Zorro Ranch and a Darker Scientific Agenda," where we explore Epstein's deep ties to the scientific elite and their active exploration into eugenics, designer babies, human cloning, social engineering, and other ethically questionable human experimentation practices.

- Futurism

“All my fundees have blue eyes.” Epstein and the tech world’s dark ideology

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jeffrey Epstein’s international trafficking agents send him pictures and descriptions of blue-eyed young girls: potential victims. One of Epstein’s victims wrote of being chosen for her eye color in a journal entry later shared with federal prosecutors. “Superior gene pool?!? Why me?” she wrote, describing Epstein’s worldview as “Nazi like.” “Why my hair color and eye color?” Epstein — himself blue-eyed — seemed to prefer both his victims, and the people he bankrolled, to have blue eyes. “All of my fundees have blue eyes,” he boasted in one email. In the entryway of his Manhattan townhouse, he displayed dozens of prosthetic eyeballs in a frame. Going deeper into the files, Epstein and his network of contacts discussed beliefs about how physical characteristics and race might denote intelligence. They exchanged emails about population control. They spoke of engineering women’s sex drives, building designer babies, and living in a world full of superintelligent humans that could merge with robots. The files offer a glimpse into a world where ideas about eugenics and race science have never gone away. On the contrary, they run through our elite universities, through the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley, and through the tech industry itself. Epstein’s was an exclusive club that [dreamed] of re-engineering human minds and bodies, seizing control of our collective future, and building technology that, they hope, will one day merge with ... all of us.

- Coda

Ultra-processed food companies hindering health drives by suing countries, says WHO

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The world’s biggest ultra-processed food corporations are hindering global efforts to tackle the obesity crisis by suing governments that try to promote healthier diets, the head of the World Health Organization has said. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, accused global food companies of obstructing the adoption of vital public health measures and costing countries billions of dollars in healthcare and legal costs in the process. Almost 1 billion people worldwide are living with obesity, and unhealthy diets are one of the main drivers of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. Ultra-processed food (UPF) consumption is soaring and now makes up half the average diet in many countries, including the UK, the US and Australia. Governments around the world, waking up to the health and economic impacts of the obesity crisis, have begun introducing measures designed to curb junk-food intake and promote healthier diets. These include front-of-pack warning labels, marketing and advertising restrictions on unhealthy products, and taxes on junk food. Publicly, the world’s biggest UPF companies insist they back the policies. But an investigation ... found many of these same companies were taking governments to court to overturn, weaken or delay the policies. In total, 235 lawsuits were lodged over health policies targeting UPFs in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US and the UK from 2010 to 2025, the investigation found.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the food system and in the corporate world.

- The Guardian

Big Food vs. The People

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Bad diets kill millions of people globally every year. Legislators and government officials have worked to rein in this public health crisis by enacting laws that require food companies to be transparent about their ingredients and limit the advertising of unhealthy foods. In public, the world’s biggest and richest food companies ... say they want to be part of the solution. But behind closed doors, they have taken governments to court to delay, dilute, and derail public health laws, which the companies say violate their rights. 239 lawsuits were filed between 2010 and 2025 across Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US, the UK, and India against public health policies targeting food and beverages such as front of pack labelling, regulating advertising junk food to children, soda taxes, and taxes on ultra processed foods. The cases add up to 595 years of litigation, representing a significant burden on the governments defending their health policies. Of the cases brought by private companies where the plaintiff was identifiable, more than 1 in 3 came from just nine parent groups, led by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Mondelez. Their actions are not only prolonging the public health crisis but also cost countries billions of dollars in both legal and healthcare costs. In addition, they have a chilling effect on policymakers that wish to better their citizens’ health but do not have the resources to engage in drawn-out legal fights with food companies.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and food system corruption.

- Lighthouse Reports

The Deck Is Stacked Against Healthy Eating

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Big Food and Big Tech know that the products they are marketing to children are not healthy in a variety of ways. The tobacco giant Philip Morris — which owned Kraft Foods from 1988 to 2007 — used the research, development and marketing strategies it honed to sell cigarettes to hook schoolchildren on sodium-and-sugar-laden products. We know as much as we do about the way the food industry targets kids with unhealthy food because of the trove of documents released by lawsuits against tobacco companies. Through her years of work analyzing these documents, Laura A. Schmidt, a professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at U.C.S.F., discovered that Philip Morris used what the company called “technical synergies” between its tobacco and food products. Her paper in The American Journal of Public Health focuses on the development and marketing of Lunchables. Lunchables combine processed meats, cheeses and breads in stackable piles in a plastic tray. These “synergies” included chemical additives and “avor encapsulation technology,” also used in cigarettes and other packaged foods. “Philip Morris applied its ‘better for you’ reformulation strategy, rst used to create ltered Marlboro cigarettes, to develop Low-Fat Lunchables in efforts to keep consumers worried about childhood obesity loyal to the brand” in the mid-90s, Schmidt’s paper notes — but these “healthier” Lunchables weren’t much more nutritious than the originals, even if they were lower in fat.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and food system corruption.

- New York Times

For-Profit Corporations Are Buying Up More Psychiatric Hospitals. Some Flout Federal Law With Scarce Repercussions.

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As the share of U.S. adults receiving mental health care treatment steadily grows, for-profit companies are playing an increasingly important role. More than 40% of inpatient mental health beds were operated by for-profit entities as of 2021. That’s up from about 13% in 2010. (The number of mental health beds held relatively constant during that time.) Experts tie this growth to provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which made mental health care an essential health benefit that all insurance plans are required to cover. Wider access to and increased reimbursement of mental health services piqued the interest of for-profit corporations, said Eileen O’Grady, who until recently served as program director at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. “Investors in for-profit entities see that as an opportunity to make money,” she said, “in a space that had not historically been seen as super profitable.” Shields and other researchers have repeatedly flagged concerns about lower quality of care at mental health facilities owned by for-profit corporations, in part due to efforts to cut staff and reduce costs. ProPublica reported Monday that over 90 psychiatric hospitals across the country have violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act in the past 15 years. The vast majority of them — around 80% — are owned by for-profit corporations. Yet only a handful have faced any consequences. About half of all the hospitals cited were owned by ... Universal Health Services and Acadia Healthcare.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and mental health.

- ProPublica

Powerful US utilities secretly fund ‘grassroots’ groups to sway cities away from switch to public power

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The utility industry is quietly dispatching a network of front groups to thwart the growing push for public power across the US – a push that comes amid mounting frustration over sky-high utility bills, electric outages, a slow transition to clean energy and private utilities’ soaring profits. Communities from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to San Diego, California, and St Petersburg, Florida, are exploring municipalizing their grids to join the country’s approximately 2,000 public power companies. Municipal utilities – or “munis” – are owned and operated by local authorities and broadly have lower rates, better reliability scores and are structurally more accountable to customers. The industry front group operations aim to counter that narrative in a high-stakes fight – private utilities stand to lose billions of dollars in revenue should communities municipalize. Advocates say the front groups at times have resorted to especially unusual measures – in St Petersburg, for example, the industry allegedly recruited some of their canvassers from the parking lots of plasma centers where people donate plasma for money. Federal data shows public power companies’ bills, on average, are about 14% lower than private. That is in part because private utility profits that go to Wall Street investors are baked into customers’ bills. Public power companies do not need to earn those profits, and excess revenue is typically invested in the grid or used to lower customers’ bills.

Note: Read more about communities all over the country who are working to take over their local electric utility systems For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption.

- The Guardian

Three sports groups using movement to tackle isolation

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Sport in Mind began with one simple intention: to help a friend who was unwell,” [said founder] Neil Harris. “Today, having supported more than 60,000 people, I’m reminded every day of the power of sport.” Founded in 2010, the charity runs free sport and physical activity sessions for people experiencing mental health problems, from walking and football to gardening, dance and movement. It creates welcoming spaces where sport is treated less as competition and more as a route back into routine, confidence and recovery. The Bluetits Chill Swimmers is a free, volunteer-led community built around cold water swimming. What began in Wales has grown into a global network of informal local groups, where people meet outdoors to swim, dip, chat and build confidence in the water. Its appeal is not endurance or elite sport, but the chance to spend time in nature. GoodGym turns exercise into practical community action. Its members run, walk or cycle to help local projects and isolated older people, whether that means clearing a garden, sorting donations at a food bank or helping someone with a task they can no longer manage alone. “GoodGym was founded on a simple idea that we could use being active to help people and strengthen communities, Ed Field, head of operations, said. “What we’ve seen is that the benefits go both ways and that the people participating feel healthier, more connected and more purposeful through helping others.”

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.

- Positive.News

How Lithuania More Than Halved Its Suicide Rate

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 2016, [Marius iuželis] and his wife Kristina started Sidabrin Linija, or Silver Line, a nonprofit that offers free support to isolated seniors in Lithuania through regular phone calls with a “befriender” matched to their interests. “On the first day we spoke for 10 minutes. The next time we spoke for nearly an hour, and she shared a lot about her life with me,” recalls iuželis from his office in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. “Her husband of 50 years died about six years ago, and she has no children. She is completely alone and in poor health. A social worker visits twice a week, but otherwise she’s basically locked in her house because she can’t move.” Sidabrin Linija, which has befriended 6,000 seniors since its inception, has been just one of the many pieces of the puzzle to reduce Lithuania’s suicide rate, which is particularly high among senior citizens. Senior suicides, according to iuželis, account for more than 39 percent of all deaths of this type. “We may say it’s a natural problem that your support network shrinks when you get older. But let’s imagine the couple who lived happily for 50 years, and now one has gone. We get many calls saying, ‘I tried to do my best to live on my own, but I can’t anymore and I need help.’ We have many callers who say they call us as a last chance,” says iuželis. Mental health support more generally is also expanding nationwide. Since 2020, free psychological well-being services have been available ... in every one of Lithuania’s 60 municipalities.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.

- Reasons to be Cheerful

The Spanish Town Doing Capitalism Better

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are all kinds of enormous, impressive and, frankly, noisy machines at work across the 20,000 square meters of industrial warehouses at the headquarters of Fagor Arrasate, a manufacturing company in Spain’s northern Basque Country. Fagor Arrasate belongs to the larger Mondragón Corporation, which in 2025 had a revenue of €11.3 billion ($12.8 billion U.S.) and aggregate profits of more than €600 million. Founded by five coworkers in 1956 as a small stove factory, Mondragón Corporation is today the largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives in the world. It employs more than 70,000 workers across 92 cooperatives ... making it the largest employer in the Basque Country and the fifth-largest private employer in Spain. Its grocery-store chain, Eroski, has hundreds of outlets across the nation; the Mondragón University offers college degrees; it includes Spain’s ... largest producer of bicycles; and according to Mondragón’s estimates, more than a third of Europe’s solar panels use its tech and 60 percent of the world’s trains contain its parts. The group, despite being owned by its workers ... is capitalist. Yet Mondragón’s model has social good and humanism — rather than profit-maximizing — at its heart. The base salary for a Mondragón worker is on average 40 percent higher than Spain’s minimum wage. On top of that, company profits are shared. From annual earnings, 60 percent is reinvested in the business, 30 percent goes to employees (as capital that can only be claimed once they retire or leave the group), and 10 percent is invested in the local community. In 2025, Mondragón allocated more than €49 million for projects spanning social inclusion, poverty reduction, education, culture, sports, preservation of the Basque language and environmental sustainability. While cooperative governance may slow business decision-making, studies have found that cooperatives can make as much profit as companies under conventional systems.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on reimagining the economy.

- Reasons to be Cheerful

This 21-Year-Old Metro Atlanta Black Man Went Viral For Turning Plastic Into Fuel, Here’s How it Works

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Atlanta native Julian Brown has launched an innovation as powerful as it is sustainable. Declaring a war on waste, this self-starter is working to turn pollution into power with his company, Naturejab. Intrigued by hands-on discovery early on, it’s no wonder he’s grasped the mechanics of Pyrolysis, recycling plastic waste into a fuel he calls “Plastidiesel.” “The very issue we have is the production of plastic,” Brown, 21, told The Root. “The reason why recycling hasn’t been done is because it hasn’t been profitable. But now, we are able to make a product of super high value out of something that otherwise is just seen as waste.” Brown isn’t just tooting his own horn either. The entrepreneur recently returned from a trip to Vancouver, Washington for the purpose of testing his recycled diesel with some heavyweights in fuel testing, ASAP Labs. His samples passed with flying colors on May 22, showing more favorable results than its industry competitors. “It looks like it definitely burned cleaner,” an employee at ASAP Labs confirmed in a documentation of the fuel’s results Friday. “It appears that this diesel probably burns cleaner than typical diesel.” According to Julian Brown, as long as he’s around, “there will be no such thing as plastic waste — only untapped energy.” With sky-high ambition rooted in his childhood and a deep sense of gratitude for how his journey has unfolded, Brown is stepping into his purpose on the world stage. And we’re here for it.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.

- The Root

Food scraps and mushrooms: the closed-loop garden behind the world’s first community-powered sauna

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This ivy-topped wall shelters an urban oasis, within which sits an unprecedented sustainable project. The world’s first “community-powered” sauna – heated by food waste from residents of the neighbouring housing estate – is set to open here. Scraps from the kitchens of residents on the Teviot estate in Poplar, will be processed in a local-scale anaerobic digester ... to produce methane gas to power the sauna. The completely circular design is just one part of R-Urban Poplar, a civic space and “living lab” where members of the community are invited to experiment with ways of taking charge of their own food supply, while adapting to the climate crisis. Andy Belfield, an architect from the R-Urban Poplar team, says those behind the project believe it is the UK’s – and the world’s – first food waste powered community sauna. Nine years ago, the site was an unused car park and empty garages. Now, butterflies flutter around leaves and flowers in raised, no-dig beds. Micro-allotments and communal growing spaces offer opportunities for local people to grown herbs, courgettes, potatoes and passion flowers. But R-Urban Poplar is more ambitious than just a community garden. It is an “ecology hub”, where workers and local residents are prototyping circular urban farming, mushroom-growing and restore-and-repair services. Wild spaces encourage pollinators. There is a community kitchen and classroom, a workshop and a tool library, even a mushroom farm.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division and reimagining the economy.

- The Guardian

Blockchain Is The Next Big Thing For Renewable Energy

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Blockchain has been touted as the next big technological advance. But what does it mean for renewable energy? Essentially an online register that securely stores information, blockchain serves as a repertoire of knowledge accessible to everyone. Rather than being controlled by one entity, blockchain is spread across multiple computers and uses a form of data logging to ensure that the information cannot be changed or corrupted. By decentralizing data and protecting the way it is manipulated, blockchain promotes transparency and the sharing of information. As such, the record has immense potential in helping shape a wave of new technology and our ability to interact with it. Blockchain is far more than just a platform for cryptocurrency. Many startups are already using blockchain as a tool to make energy grids more accessible and sustainable. The idea behind creating energy grids linked to blockchain is fairly simple: by giving consumers total control over where they source their energy as well as the information behind the production itself it drives competition and promotes sustainable energy. Consumers using a smart-grid that relies on blockchain will be able to compare their energy providers and buy directly from them. In Estonia, a blockchain-powered smart grid called WePower has been testing just how well a choice-driven energy market could work by teaming up with an independent energy provider who shares their energy data in real time.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good and reimagining the economy.

- Forbes

Real-Life Mind-Control Technologies Governments Are Actually Working On

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In 2019, a team of researchers under the leadership of the U.S. science and technology development firm Battelle was awarded a contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to advance its next-gen non-surgical neurotechnology (N3) project — which aims at designing and producing bi-directional brain control technology interfaces for soldiers to use in fields of battle. Initially, brain-computer interface (BCI) research focused on helping those with disabilities achieve partial restoration of a brain-world interface via invasive implant procedures. The overarching DARPA-funded constellation of research projects is called Brain System to Transmit Or Receive Magnetoelectric Signals (BrainSTORMS), and involved the design and production of a nano-transducer capable of being directly injected into specific brain regions to transmit commands from neural activity to an external helmet-based transceiver. The University of Miami revealed that ... magnetoelectric nanoparticles (MENPs) can move through human bloodstreams, permeate the human brain, and identify subtle signals from your neurons, subsequently transmitting information to an external computer device in a helmet. We’re not living in a neo-feudalistic dystopia where our every thought and impulse is pre-determined by the algorithmic encoding of human brains. But the governments of the world are building the technology to enhance bi-directional brain control.

Note: Read about the Pentagon's plans to use our brains as warfare, describing how the human body is war's next domain. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mind control.

- Interesting Engineering

Trump UFO advisors accuse private corporations of operating alien craft-retrieval programs

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Avi Loeb, the leader of Trump’s UAP Science Advisory Council, shockingly revealed on Congressman Eric Burlison’s podcast “Fresh Freedom” that an executive of the $137 billion military contractor Lockheed Martin claimed the company operated a crashed-UFO retrieval program. “I had a [former] high level executive from Lockheed Martin visit my home and I asked him, ‘Is there any truth to these claims?’ And he said ‘It’s not wrong,'” Loeb revealed. Loeb claims retrieved tech would be enough to prove humans are not the only intelligent beings on Earth — and believes private corporations are ready to participate in the Trump administration’s disclosure effort. “If such materials exist, we would love to analyze them. With just a gram of material, we will be able to determine if it originated outside the solar system,” Loeb [said]. Former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program member Hal Puthoff suggested on the same podcast that Lockheed was ready to transfer materials to AATIP between 2008 and 2012 — but that plan was killed by the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. Luis Elizondo, who had a leadership role in AATIP, similarly claimed in congressional testimony that a craft of unknown origin was being held in Lockheed labs and was set to be transferred to the Navy’s Pax River Facility in Maryland. Burlison, on his tour of government facilities rumored to be housing UFOs, visited Pax River earlier this year.

Note: Former Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a longtime UFO disclosure advocate, revealed in 2021 that he’s been informed for decades that Lockheed Martin is in possession of fragments recovered from the US crash site of a UFO. Don't miss our new video UFO Disclosure Explained: New Solutions for Humanity w/ Daniel Sheehan and Amber Yang. For more along these lines, explore the comprehensive resources provided in our UFO Information Center.

- New York Post

Docs Show Navy Got ‘UFO’ Patent Granted By Warning Of Similar Chinese Tech Advances

Fri, 28 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The bizarre saga of the U.S. Navy and its sudden willingness to admit that its personnel regularly encounter unidentified objects in the skies keeps getting stranger. Clearly, the narrative is being carefully controlled by the Department of Defense and the Navy. Maybe the most curious additions to the still-developing saga is a set strange aerospace patents filed by one Salvatore Cezar Pais, an aerospace engineer ... at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) headquarters in Patuxent River, Maryland. One of these patents describes a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft” claimed to be capable of truly extraordinary feats of speed and maneuverability in air, water, and outer space alike [without leaving a heat signature] thanks to a revolutionary electromagnetic propulsion system. This is possible, Pais claims in the patent, because the craft is able to “engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level” by exploiting the laws of physics. All matter contains energy on the quantum level. By theoretically creating its own incredibly dense and polarized energy field, the hybrid craft is claimed to be able to create a quantum ‘vacuum’ around itself which allows it to repel any air or water molecules with which it interacts. Thus, the craft can essentially ignore aerodynamic or hydrodynamic forces, or so it is claimed in the patent. Not only are we now being told that Navy pilots have witnessed aircraft behaving exactly like the craft these patents describe, but some of the pilots’ visual descriptions of those anomalous aircraft even seem to be uncannily similar to the drawings of the aircraft as depicted in Pais’ patents. One of those patents depicts a curiously and distinctly shaped gravitational wave generator that resembles the Tic Tac-shaped object reported by retired U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor and other Nimitz Carrier Strike Group pilots in encounters that took place in 2004 off the Baja Coast.

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- TWZ (previously The War Zone)

Emails Show Navy’s ‘UFO’ Patents Went Through Significant Internal Review, Resulted In A Demo

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The War Zone continues to dig into the bizarre U.S. Navy patents authored by enigmatic inventor Dr. Salvatore Pais and the seemingly unusual circumstances of their approval by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). These patents included bizarre technologies such as a “high temperature superconductor,” a “high frequency gravitational wave generator,” a force field-like “electromagnetic field generator,” a “plasma compression fusion device,” and a hybrid aerospace/underwater craft featuring an “inertial mass reduction device.” They seem to describe the theoretical building blocks of a craft with UFO-like performance. Each of the Navy inventions are credited to one Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, who, at the time the patent applications were submitted, was an aerospace engineer at NAVAIR’s Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) in Patuxent (Pax) River, Maryland. Every one of Pais’ recent inventions depends on what the inventor calls “the Pais Effect,” described in numerous publications by the inventor as the “controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma) via accelerated spin and/or accelerated vibration under rapid (yet smooth) acceleration-deceleration-acceleration transients.” Emails reveal that numerous employees of NAWCAD and the Pax River Invention Evaluation Board took them seriously enough to clear Pais’s patents for the USPTO application process. We also now know these inventions resulted in the Section 219 Basic Applied Research/Technology Transfer program that was successfully funded and resulted in a physical demonstration and further experimental testing.

- TWZ (previously The War Zone)

‘Diamond-shaped’ UFO spotted over US nuclear weapons plant: report

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the latest UFO files release from the Pentagon, it was revealed that security radar and armed patrols detected an unidentified object in the sky near a Texas nuclear weapons facility. According to a document titled “Pantex Unidentified Object Incident Report,” a “diamond-shaped” object was spotted over the Pantex nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility located in Amarillo, Texas, on Sept. 1, 2015. The object was described as hovering in a “non-threatening” manner in a “northerly trajectory at approximately 10-15 mph” for several minutes at close range. Plant personnel were made aware of the flying object and began to follow it in a vehicle for several miles until the object was no longer visible. Some personnel described the “diamond-shaped” flying object as “approximately 4-feet tall and 2-feet wide at the bottom,” and “thinner at the top.” Per the report, there was conflicting color of the UFO, with some eyewitnesses citing it as black while others described it as blue, red and silver. A video of the incident was obtained by the Ground Surveillance Radar Tower (GSR) and reviewed by Sandia National Labs, a U.S. Department of Energy research and engineering facility. It was noted the object did not come near any “sensitive assets” at the nuclear power plant nor was it maneuvering in a threatening manner and stayed over “unpopulated areas of the plant.” The video and report was given to the FBI.

- NewsNation

Former Canadian Defence Chief Claims Multiple Alien Species Visited Earth and Dealt With Governments

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Hellyer was no fringe figure. Born in 1923, he served decades in Canadian politics and became minister of defence in the 1960s during the Cold War. He was also the longest serving member of Canada's Privy Council, placing him deep inside the country's political establishment. Hellyer repeatedly said UFOs were not only real but represented advanced technologies far beyond human capability. He claimed multiple non-human species had visited Earth and that governments were aware of their presence. In interviews and public talks, Hellyer argued that global secrecy around UFOs existed to hide revolutionary technologies. He suggested that extraterrestrial craft possessed energy systems that could transform human life but were suppressed because they threatened existing power structures. He spoke of interactions between aliens and governments, although he avoided operational details. According to Hellyer, officials feared panic and disruption if the truth became public. He framed disclosure not as science fiction, but as a moral responsibility. Hellyer's reputation took hits, particularly when he referenced ideas such as a 'Galactic Federation'. Even some supporters dismissed parts of his claims as speculative or shaped by human concepts applied to unknown phenomena. Yet his long career complicates easy dismissal. He was not a single issue activist but a veteran politician with decades of service.

- International Business Times

Landmark Deal Would Officially Add Laser Weapons to US Army Arsenal

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The US Army is about to make a working laser weapon an official part of its arsenal. The Pentagon is poised to sign a contract to acquire and rapidly deploy what’s called an Enduring High Energy Laser in and around bases across the world to defend them from drone attacks. It will mark the first time that the US military will have committed to equipping its forces with laser weapons in significant numbers. The US military, at this moment, has either deployed or is actively testing a half-dozen laser weapons systems. The deployments haven’t all gone great. Four vehicles equipped with Raytheon air-defense lasers were yanked from the Middle East after poor reviews from soldiers. One laser, built by the defense contractor AeroVironment and positioned along the southern US border, accidentally zapped a party balloon in February, causing the Federal Aviation Administration to briefly close the airspace around El Paso, Texas. Once it was reopened, the laser shot down a Border Patrol drone by mistake. Despite such mishaps, the Army appears ready to go beyond the one-offs and the experiments. The Pentagon and its suppliers had been scrambling to field something, anything to defend against mass-produced, low-cost attack drones. They’ve rolled out radio frequency jammers, microwave weapons, an array of missiles, drones designed to kill other drones, even copies of the Iranian robots. None of them ... have been enough.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and warfare technology.

- Wired

The ‘less lethal’ weapons Australian police don’t want you to know about

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Projectiles that release powder designed to burn the eyes and throat. Flashbang grenades. Teargas. Launchers that resemble semi-automatic rifles. Often dubbed “less lethal”, these weapons can cause serious injuries or even death if misused – but they are deployed by police against crowds in Australia with little scrutiny. “All of these weapons can kill people,” says Rohini Haar, a medical adviser at Physicians for Human Rights. Haar says there is “almost zero” regulation. In Australia, there are no nationally enforced standards for their use. In some states, police go to great lengths not to share what weapons they have or how they’re used. Contracts worth millions for these weapons are often with third-party distributors rather than the manufacturers, obscuring what police have access to. During coronial inquests, after baton rounds and other weapons may have contributed to deaths, Victoria police have sought suppression orders that bar media from describing any details of weaponry. Less lethal projectiles have been connected to deaths and a range of injuries around the world. After the protests that followed the death of George Floyd in 2020 at the hands of US police, doctors undertook a review of the injuries caused by less lethal weapons in Minneapolis. They reviewed up to 89 cases of people injured by police weapons in mid-2020 and found that much of the damage was to the head, neck or face – 16 patients had traumatic brain injuries.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption and non-lethal weapons.

- The Guardian

A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military’s Tech to Blame?

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This past May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn’t have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69 degrees; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most. But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots—and anyone else within hundreds of miles—unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors. The accident marked the first time that GPS jamming had contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States. But it was just one of a string of recent disruptions across the world. In the past year, the US military appeared to have sent out notices for at least 10 such exercises. “As drone warfare and electronic warfare expand, airlines are increasingly encountering navigation disruptions hundreds of miles beyond the actual conflict zone,” says Eliran Almog, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Cyviation. Since 2023, planes flying over large swaths of the Middle East, the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea regions have endured waves of GPS jamming.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and warfare technology.

- Wired

DHS Is Hiring Bounty Hunters to Find and Photograph Deported People’s Homes Abroad

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

US Customs and Border Protection is seeking to hire private investigators to track down deported immigrants and others who have left the United States, and press them into paying the government money, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The work would cover Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala, and potentially other countries. The documents, which cap the so-called Tracing and Payment Recovery Services program at $9 million over the next two years, call for “commercial data verification and physical observation services” to confirm where each person lives. As of July, the Department of Homeland Security, CBP’s parent agency, says it has issued more than $84 billion in fines to immigrants it has accused of failing to depart the United States. Those fines run against people who are still in the country, at $998 a day for up to five years. Some have reached up to $1.8 million. Hasan Shafiqullah, the Legal Aid Society’s immigration supervising attorney, says he’s seen some third-party collection agencies add $500,000 in additional administrative fees on top of the US government’s fees. Immigrants accused of failing to depart have had their tax returns seized, their wages garnished, and their credit scores ruined. DHS promises that it will forgive failure-to-depart fines if people self-deport using the CBP Home app. The waiver does not include a separate $5,130 fee Congress created last year for people ordered removed in absentia and later arrested by ICE.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

- Wired

ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Officers drove Moreno-Mendez to a nearby ICE field office. There, one deportation officer after another approached him with the same demand. Open your mouth. One officer tried to take his fingerprints and swab the inside of his cheek for DNA. He refused. Then another tried. Then a third. Each time, Moreno-Mendez refused. Four days later, Moreno-Mendez was charged with failing to register as a noncitizen and refusing to provide DNA while in federal custody—the latter a misdemeanor. On August 18, 2025, a magistrate judge in Waco found him guilty of each. Moreno-Mendez’s case is part of a sweeping expansion of DNA collection from people held for civil immigration violations—a federal campaign that, backed by the threat of prosecution, funnels the genetic profiles of nearly everyone in ICE custody into an FBI database built for criminal investigations. New research from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology estimates that the Department of Homeland Security has become the largest single source of new genetic profiles in the nation's criminal DNA system, with ICE alone potentially adding as many as roughly 920,000 profiles in 2025. The vast majority of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction. Yet once the DNA profiles of detained people enter the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, law enforcement agencies across the country can compare them against evidence from unsolved crimes.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

- Wired

Exclusive: Emails reveal Palmer Luckey’s political fundraising as his company wins sole-source contracts

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Defense industry tycoon Palmer Luckey [is] the 33-year-old co-founder of sprawling weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries. A longtime GOP donor and activist who spoke on condition he not be identified in order to preserve his political relationships said Luckey was now the “godfather of Republican fundraising on the west coast”. “If you’re raising campaign money in California, you have to go to Palmer Luckey,” he said. “Luckey is the top tier.” Anduril, launched just nine years ago, has emerged as a major military contractor for the Trump administration, working on contracts for everything from drones to autonomous jet fighters to space-based interceptors. In March, the US army awarded a $20bn sole-source contract to Anduril for a variety of drones it sells, though it is not clear which of its weapons systems are operational or have been deployed for combat in US operations. Anduril, though it is not widely known as a space contractor, announced in May it would work, with a team of other companies, on what may be the mother of all contracting opportunities offered by the Trump administration, the so-called “Golden Dome” anti-missile space-based interceptor effort. Estimates for the Golden Dome range between $185bn and $1.2tn. Anduril says in Trump’s first year in office it doubled its revenue – a growth rate of 100%, but still only reached $2.2bn for 2025, which is barely a blip in the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar budget.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and warfare technology.

- The Guardian