http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Spenc...F_officer)

EXCERPT: [...] Between 23 June and 28 August 1944, he [Terence Spencer] claimed seven V-1 flying bombs destroyed, but an eighth is also recorded in his logbook that did not make it to the official records. One of these he succeeded in destroying by tipping it up with the wing of his aircraft, an event sketched into his logbook by fellow pilot and amateur artist, Flt Lt Tom Slack, who titled the drawing “Tip ‘em Up Terry”.

[...] In early September 1944, Spencer led a section of four pilots on an armed reconnaissance over Belgium where they encountered two of the Luftwaffe’s highest-scoring Aces, Hptm Emil ‘Bully’ Lang, the Commanding Officer of II/JG26 (173 victories) and Lt Alfred Gross (52 victories), in FW190s over Tirlemont. Although one of his section was killed, the two Aces were shot down, Lang killed and Gross so seriously wounded that he did not return to service before the end of the War.

[...] On 26 February 1945, he [Spencer] was hit by flak in the Rheine-Lingen area of Germany and captured. Just over a month later, when the camp's main gate was left open, he escaped by bicycle, and subsequently motorcycle, with another ex-41 Squadron pilot, Sqn Ldr K. F. ‘Jimmy’ Thiele, in a Steve-McQueen-style getaway, in which the pair made it back to Allied lines.

[...Spencer...] was shot down once again, this time by rocket fire while strafing a trawler in Wismar Bay. He succeeded in baling out and deploying his parachute at a height of just 30 feet (9.1 m), which he miraculously survived, only to be captured again. The successful jump has since been credited by the Guinness Book of Records as having been the lowest authenticated survived bail-out on record....

http://en.ww2awards.com/person/42431

EXCERPT: [...] After the war, he [Spencer] flew a single-engine aeroplane 8,000 miles to South Africa, where he reportedly became involved in diamond smuggling before turning to a career in photography. He married London actress Lesley Brook, and they and set up an aerial photography business outside Johannesburg. In 1952, Spencer joined Life magazine as a photojournalist. He worked for the magazine for the next 20 years, reporting on stories and conflict in Africa and the Middle East, the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He also became involved in CIA covert activities. Spencer he returned to England to cover the Beatles and the 60s cults and fashions, and in 1972 started to freelance for The New York Times, People and other US publications....

But will it work? Will the body reject a new head, attacking it like an invading tumor? One neurologist predicts dire consequences for the recipient..

"Yesterday, 30-year-old Russian man Valery Spiridonov volunteered to become the first person in the world to undergo a complete head transplant. Literally his entire head. On a different body.

The operation will be carried out by Italian surgeon Dr Sergio Canavero, in what he expects to be a 36-hour procedure involving 150 doctors and nurses.

A Werdnig-Hoffmann disease sufferer with rapidly declining health, Spiridonov is willing to take a punt on this very experimental surgery and you can't really blame him, but while he is prepared for the possibility that the body will reject his head and he will die, his fate could be considerably worse than death.

"I would not wish this on anyone," said Dr Hunt Batjer, president elect of the American Association for Neurological Surgeons.

"I would not allow anyone to do it to me as there are a lot of things worse than death."


The problem is, fusing a head with a separate body (including spinal cord, jugular vein etc) could result in a hitherto never experienced level and quality of insanity.

Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Centre, who described Dr Canavero as "nuts", believes that the bodies of head transplant patients "would end up being overwhelmed with different pathways and chemistry than they are not used to and they’d go crazy."====https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=c...5.5008j0j8

http://metro.co.uk/2015/03/29/these-newl...s-5126423/

EXCERPT: You would be mistaken for thinking you are looking at a group of tiny dolls. But these weird, human-shaped things are actually a newly discovered species of mushroom. With fleshy heads, arms and legs, they look like pretty fun guys (sorry, we had to). Discovered by Jonathan Revett in Cockley Cley, Norfolk, they have been given the name geastrum britannicum – which reflects the fact they are unique to the UK....

http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...-galaxies/

EXCERPT: [...] more evidence mounts that the warm, wet conditions for life as we know it prevail throughout the cosmos. Surely simple, single-celled life should be common out there [...but...] The possible existence of intelligent aliens and extraterrestrial civilizations [...] remains much more controversial and is scarcely funded at all. [...] SETI chiefly looks for chatty cosmic cultures that might be beaming messages around [...] But its interstellar eavesdropping has yet to detect any signals that withstand close scrutiny.

[...] Now, new results suggest this loneliness may extend out into the universe far beyond our galaxy or, instead, that some of our preconceptions about the behaviors of alien civilizations are deeply flawed. After examining some 100,000 nearby large galaxies a team of researchers lead by The Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright has concluded that none of them contain any obvious signs of highly advanced technological civilizations. [...] it is by far the largest of study of its kind to date.

[...James Annis:] “In some sense it doesn’t matter how a galactic civilization gets or uses its power because the second law of thermodynamics makes energy use hard to hide. They could construct Dyson spheres, they could get power from rotating black holes, they could build giant computer networks in the cold outskirts of galaxies, and all of that would produce waste heat. Wright’s team went right to the peak of the curve for where you’d expect to see any sort of waste heat, and they’re just not seeing anything obvious....”

[...] Annis suspects galaxy-sterilizing astrophysical explosions called gamma-ray bursts, which were more frequent in the cosmic past, until recently suppressed the rise of advanced civilizations and that we inhabit “the beginning of history.”

But as rich as the scientific literature is with ideas, some of the most fascinating ones come instead from science fiction. [...In author Karl Schroeder's] view the future of technology would not consist of star-hopping civilizations spreading like wildfire through galaxies, disassembling planets and smothering suns, but rather of slow-growing cultures becoming more and more integrated with their natural environments, striving for ever-greater efficiencies and coming ever-closer to thermodynamic equilibrium. Simply put, profligate galaxy-spanning empires are unsustainable and therefore we do not see them. “SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products,” Schroeder has written. “Waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals—we merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained....”

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...avior.html

EXCERPT: [...] The researchers added that their finding potentially rules out the standard theory of Cold Dark Matter, where dark matter interacts only with gravity.

"We used to think that dark matter sits around, minding its own business," said Richard Massey, Royal Society Research Fellow, in Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology. "But if it slowed down during this collision, this could be the first dynamical evidence that dark matter notices the world around it. "Dark matter may not be completely 'dark' after all."

[...] "Our observation suggests that dark matter might be able to interact with more forces than just gravity," said Team member Professor Liliya Williams, of the University of Minnesota. "The parallel Universe going on around us has just got interesting. The dark sector could contain rich physics and potentially complex behaviour."...

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-quantum-dot...china.html

EXCERPT: At this month's China Information Technology Expo (CITE) event, a headline-maker was the launch of quantum dot televisions, by QD Vision and Konka, the consumer electronics company. [...] Konka picked CITE as the launch venue for its quantum dot TVs, which are based on QD Vision's Color IQ optics. [...] The new TV models are high-end with features that include larger size, higher resolution, smart functionality, a wide color gamut, and very slim design. The new models will be available at Chinese retailers later this year. QD Vision, which is headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, describes itself as a nanomaterials product company with advanced display and lighting solutions. [...] Its Color IQ product line harnesses the light-emitting properties of the class of nanomaterials called quantum dots. [...] As for quantum dot technology, Dr. Jennifer Colegrove, CEO and principal analyst at Touch Display Research, said the technology was "one of the biggest breakthroughs for LCD developments in recent years. We are forecasting that, by 2025, 60 percent of TVs will feature quantum dots."...

http://www.livescience.com/50526-amazon-...rsity.html

EXCERPT: A medical checkup of people living in remote villages deep in the Amazon rainforest in Venezuela has uncovered striking details about these villagers' microbiomes, the bacteria living on and in their bodies, a new study finds. The villagers appear to have the highest levels of bacterial diversity ever reported [...] Moreover, their microbiomes include bacteria that have genes that could make them resistant to treatment with antibiotics. Some of these genes could even make these bacteria resistant to synthetic drugs — an alarming discovery, given that these villagers had never had contact with either people of industrialized societies or commercial antibiotics prior to the study, the researchers said....

Truth be told, I bet there are hundreds of people that look alot like you. We just lack the time and resources to find them all. Then there are some phenotypes that simulate better than others. I have one niece I see dopplegangers of all the time. My other niece? Never...

http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/04/17/...=obnetwork