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Bill Nye on Terraforming Mars: “Are You Guys High?”

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

Noted science educator Bill Nye thinks people would need to be on drugs to believe we could turn Mars into a place where humans could live.

Ain’t Happening

Bill Nye thinks you’d have to be on drugs to believe Mars could ever be habitable for humans.

“This whole idea of terraforming Mars, as respectful as I can be, are you guys high?” the science educator asked in an interview with USA TODAY. “We can’t even take care of this planet where we live, and we’re perfectly suited for it, let alone another planet.”

That’s Just Like, Your Opinion, Man

Nye is a respected science communicator, so his opinion on the viability of Mars terraforming plans carries some weight. He also has some pretty solid arguments.

“It’s not reasonable because it’s so cold,” he told USA TODAY. “And there is hardly any water. There’s absolutely no food, and the big thing, I just remind these guys, there’s nothing to breathe.”

Nye isn’t alone in his thinking, either — noted astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, another well-known science advocate, also believes any plans to make Mars livable for humans are absurd.

Terra Forma

However, the pro-terraforming camp isn’t all slouches — it counts among its membership SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and late physicist Stephen Hawking.

In Musk and Hawking’s opinions, we can and should exhaust all options for transforming Mars into something of an Earth 2.0. And they have some pretty compelling reasons, ranging from climate change to the notion that becoming an interplanetary species is the next step in human exploration.

Switching Space Camps

While Nye really couldn’t have been more clear about his opinion on terraforming Mars in the USA TODAY interview, he did also say he believes we should send astronauts to explore the Red Planet.

And who knows? Maybe they’ll find something there that moves the Science Guy from the camp of the terraforming skeptics to that of the believers.

More on Mars skeptics: Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

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Watch the Boring Company’s Digging Machine Finish Its First Tunnel

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

It's two miles long, 30 feet in diameter, and connects the Boring Company's HQ to a local suburb in LA. The tunnel is set to open in December.

Breakthrough

Elon Musk’s oddball underground tunneling venture, the Boring Company, just completed a major milestone.

Musk posted a video on Twitter showing the gigantic tunneling machine breaking through the final wall connecting it to O’Leary Station, the Boring Company’s first outpost that connects the underground tunnel to the surface near its headquarters in Hawthorne, Los Angeles.

pic.twitter.com/TQhb9hQRxQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2018

The tunnel is a respectable 3.2 km (2 miles) in length, 30 feet (9 m) in diameter, and 15 feet under the surface. It has been in the works for almost two years under the Boring Company’s headquarters.

Skating Home

The tunnel is a proof-of-concept that’s meant to connect the company’s offices to a local suburb to show off a brand new form of transport: once completed, the company is hoping to shoot cars or just passengers along at 250 km/h (155 mph) on “skates.”

Musk announced last month that his company is planning to open the tunnel to the public in December – a tight timeline considering the tunnel was only just completed.

Racing a Snail

The Boring Company is hoping to speed things up next time round, according to its official website. By digging tunnels with smaller diameters of 14 feet or less, company could conceivably dig much faster.

Unsurprisingly, the Musk-owned company is also planning to go electric, according to the site — future version of the Boring Machine will run on motors, not diesel engines and locomotives.

More on Elon’s tunnels: Elon Musk: First Boring Company tunnel will open December 10

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New Research Adds Another Branch to the Evolutionary Tree of Life

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

Researchers studying a tiny microbe discover that it warrants the creation of an entirely new branch on the Charles Darwin-created Tree of Life.

Tree House

The Tree of Life is a metaphor established by Charles Darwin to give some perspective to evolution. Every living organism on Earth has a home somewhere on the Tree, and by looking at it, we can see how species relate to one another.

While we’ve known about a type of microbe called hemimastigotes since the 1800s, it turns out we were totally wrong about where they fit on the Tree of Life — because they didn’t fit on any of the existing branches.

Home of Its Own

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers from Dalhousie University detail their discovery that hemimastigotes are so unlike anything else in the Tree of Life, they require the creation of a brand-new branch.

“It was clear from our analyses that hemimastigotes didn’t belong to any known kingdom-level group, or even to a known ‘super-group’ of several kingdoms together, like the one that includes both animals and fungi,” researcher Alastair Simpson said in a news release.

“This one little collection of organisms is a whole new group at that level, all on its own,” she continued. “It’s a branch of the Tree of Life that has been separate for a very long time, perhaps more than a billion years, and we had no information on it whatsoever.”

Evolution of Tech

The Dalhousie team was only able to reach this conclusion thanks to an advanced genetic analysis technique that wasn’t available when scientists first discovered hemimastigotes.

“That such a distinct form of life could be hiding literally under our feet,” Simpson said in the press release, “is a sharp reminder about how little we still know about the diversity of life on Earth.”

And as our technologies advance even further, there’s no telling what else we might discover — or how many other branches we might add to the Tree of Life.

More on the Tree of Life: There’s a Revised “Tree of Life,” and It Has 1000+ New Species

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Jeff Bezos: “One Day, Amazon Will Fail”

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

During an all-hands meeting last week in Seattle, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicted that the company would one day go bankrupt.

King of Kings

During an all-hands meeting last week in Seattle, AmazonCEO Jeff Bezos reportedly predicted that the company would one day go bankrupt.

“Amazon is not too big to fail,” he said, according to CNBC, which reviewed audio from the meeting. “In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.”

Boundless and Bare

Bezos’s admission is striking because Amazon was on top of the world this week, riding the high after announcing that its much-hyped HQ2 will be split between New York and D.C.

In the light of that success, Bezos turned his attention to the company’s longterm future — and advised the retail giant’s workers not to become complacent, lest it follow in the footsteps of Sears, which filed for bankruptcy last month.

“If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end,” he said. “We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”

More on Amazon: Experts Warn of Amazon’s Accent-Detecting Technology

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Cybersecurity Is a Top Concern for Healthcare Executives

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

According to a new report, cybersecurity is the area of technology healthcare executives believe will have the biggest industry impact in 2019.

Priority Numero Uno

Cybersecurity isn’t just a top technology concern of today’s healthcare executives — it’s the top concern.

That’s according to “Top of Mind for Top Health Systems 2019,” a new report co-authored by the Center for Connected Medicine (CCM), a think tank focused on the use of technology in healthcare, and the Health Management Academy, a network of healthcare executives.

Weak Link

To produce this report, the CCM and the Academy surveyed and interviewed 44 executives from 38 health systems representing 459 hospitals across the U.S.

According to those executives, the most common types of cyberattacks their institutions had faced in the previous 12 months were phishing and spear-phishing. Both of those involve gaining access to a network by essentially tricking a person into handing over valuable information, such as passwords and usernames, and they can enable a hacker to access sensitive information about patients.

It’s not entirely surprising, then, that 62 percent of those who contributed their insights to the report believe staff members are the primary point of weakness in their institutions’ cybersecurity. “Employee education” was also cited as the most common cybersecurity challenge, implying it’s a weak spot that hasn’t been easy to address.

Shoring Up

Thankfully, hospitals appear prepared to meet the challenge of cybersecurity head on. Not one of the respondents claimed their health system planned to decrease spending on cybersecurity efforts in 2019. In fact, 87 percent said they planned to spend more than they did in 2018.

“The people that are up to no good have far better tools than we do on our platforms,” one CEO told the report’s creators. “If they really target you, they will likely find a way in…We are not trying to make it impenetrable, but we are trying to make it more difficult to break into our system than others in our market.”

READ MORE: Top of Mind for Top Health Systems 2019 [Center for Connected Medicine]

More on health data: The Government Wants to Share Your Health Data. That’s Not a Terrible Idea.

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Russian Hackers Have New Techniques to Steal Data

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

Russian hacker groups are using old tricks with a new twist to retrieve sensitive government data. But security firms are on to them.

Hacker Bears

“Fancy Bear” and “Cozy Bear” might sound like characters in a fairy tale, but both are monikers for elite Russian hacker groups responsible for stealing data from the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Now, security firm Palo Alto Networks says it’s uncovered the groups’ latest tricks. According to Wired, they’re sending “weaponized documents” as email attachments that retrieve system information about the target’s computer — and even screenshots of the computer’s desktop — which are then sent back to a remote server set up by the hackers.

Phishing Emails

What makes this kind of phishing attack particularly hard to spot is the fact that if the rogue server is not active, the attachments look “largely benign,” according to the security firm’s blog post on the topic.

Palo Alto Networks identified a particularly suspicious email attachment titled “crash list(Lion Air Boeing 737).docx” that attempts to load Microsoft Word templates containing malicious code when opened on a target’s computer. That means Russian hackers are using recent events to lure in targets — Lion Air Boeing 737 refers to a deadly plane crash in October that resulted in the death of all 189 people on board.

Lion Air Boeing 737

The target of the Lion Air phishing attempt: members of “government organizations in the EU, US, and former Soviet states,” according to Palo Alto Networks.

This latest instance yet again underlines how important it is for governments to support and fund national cybersecurity resources. Without them, political instability and uncertainty will rule the day.

READ MORE: Russia’s Elite Hackers May Have New Phishing Tricks [Wired]

More on Russian hacking: We Knew Russian Hackers Infiltrated Americans’ Inboxes

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The Invisible Nature of Hacking and How it Affects Small Businesses

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

Small business owners have giant to-do lists. But too many of those owners are letting their cybersecurity planning fall to the bottom of those never-ending lists. It’s a risky move that jeopardizes everything they have fought to build, since as many as 60 percent of hacked small-to-midsize businesses go out of business after six months.

The move is particularly baffling in our era of unprecedented cyber attacks. Almost 50% of small businesses have experienced a cyber attack. The global cost of cybercrime has rocketed by 23% over the past year to reach $11.7m per business. Hackers understand the destruction they can bring to small businesses, thanks to often weak cybersecurity protection and a lack of cash to cover the damage. That’s why they keep penetrating – more than 70 percent of cyber attacks target small businesses.

The data breaches often happen to companies with excellent physical defenses in place. They lock their doors at night, and often have installed an alarm system or an armed guard. They don’t blab about trade secrets when they meet with competitors, and they ask employees to sign non-competes. So why don’t they take the same protective measures when it comes to making sure their data remains for their eyes only?

The reasons are as plentiful as they are perplexing.

The invisible nature of a hack makes it seem less threatening to some small business owners – the idea of armed thieves stealing computers or other materials in the middle of the night seems more frightening than a hacker tapping away on a computer across the world. Really, though, cyber attackers have threatening advantages that armed robbers don’t. A band of thieves has to have enough time to beat physical defenses, a getaway plan to transport bulky material, and faces a huge risk of getting caught thanks to security cameras or witnesses. A hacker can infiltrate a system in seconds from anywhere, not leave a trace, and go undetected until they make the decision to reveal they’ve snagged all of a business’s information.

Additionally, if physical material does get stolen, most small business owners are at least somewhat protected financially via their insurance plans. But no insurance plan can stop eyeballs around the world from viewing the information flow that a cyber attack lets loose.

Some small business owners recognize that they need a plan in place, but don’t understand the complex, fast-paced world of cybersecurity enough to pick the full protection that they need. Online attackers are constantly honing their craft, creating new, innovative ways to swipe data from beneath our eyes. In the first quarter of 2017, new malware emerged every 4.2 seconds. Only professionals whose sole job it is to stay one step ahead of them can keep up.

The cybersecurity team at HP are those professionals. HP understands that every PC decision is a security decision, and has earned a reputation as the leader in secure and manageable PCs. That’s partly because the company knows that breaches come from every angle, and that attackers trying they can’t get in through entry point. That’s why HP equips devices with comprehensive and multi-layered protection.

One of HP’s security strengths is recognizing the need for endpoint security built directly into each piece of hardware that they sell. It’s a self-healing first layer of defense that not only protects the hardware in an instance of physical theft, it also identifies and shuts down any malware before it has a chance to strike. If that stubborn malware continues to try, the company’s Sure Start, Sure Run and Sure Recover systems make sure that an employee won’t lose any time or work in the midst of a thwarted breach. The PC simply detects what is going wrong within various layers of the system, and puts it back to its’ original working state.

And that same employee doesn’t have to concern themselves with trying to learn all the attacker’s tricks – HP’s Sure Click, Sure View Gen 2, and Multi-Factor Authenticate Gen2 do all the work for them by protecting them against malicious websites, attachments, or visual attacks, as well as making sure that they’re the only ones who can access that device. In short, instead of slapping a single blanket layer of protection across a business’s system, HP is making sure that every single one of that business’s devices is armed with a line of defense built to be resilient against an attack from any angle.

Too often, small business owners are forced to build their defense only after a catastrophic offensive cyber strike. In the midst of the loss, they need to hobble together fortification with plays including attempting to rebuild customer trust, dealing with the fallout of competitors having access to their information, and finally installing the protection plan they should have had all along. It’s a move that often breaks the bank.

Now more than ever, it is time to join the ranks of the smart small business owners who understand that they can’t wait to protect their information. Buying HP devices ensures that they have a solid defense in place, one that even the stealthiest offensive attackers can’t penetrate. HP carries their burden of cyber security, freeing up time and money that the company can use to check off all those other items on their to-do lists.

Learn more at hp.com

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To Bolster Cybersecurity, France Gives Google the Guillotine

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

Do You Hear the People Sing?

In recent months, the French government has taken serious steps to boost its and Europe’s cybersecurity, in part by ousting foreign corporations that could spy on French leaders and citizens.

Most notably, according to a new story in WIRED, the French Ministry of the Armed Forces announced last month that the French military will no longer default to Google’s search engine, instead using a French one called Qwant, which says it doesn’t exploit user data.

Singing the Songs of Angry Men

The underlying logic is that the fewer non-European powers that dominate the French and European markets, the fewer backdoors the NSA and other foreign agencies can use to spy on the government and people of France, reports WIRED. And with that independence, according to WIRED‘s analysis, France is less likely to become a “digital colony” of America or China.

That push was inspired by Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks that revealed the NSA’s ongoing monitoring of foreign governments, as well as the more recent Cambridge Analytica scandal and other leaks and data hacks within the giant technology and social media corporations based in the U.S.

Water the Meadows of France

The French government’s concerns over digital sovereignty are well-founded.

Kai-Fu Lee, a venture capitalist and former executive at Apple and Google, recently wrote in his book “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order” that “AI will further cleave open the divide between the haves and the have-nots.”

Lee also predicts that AI have-nots could become subservient to the countries that AI leaders — very same tech giants France just ousted — call home. If it wants to nip any risk of America or China’s digital colonialism in the bud, France’s pushes for virtual self-dependence could not be timelier.

READ MORE: France is ditching Google to reclaim its online independence [WIRED]

More on cybersecurity: REPORT: IT’S EASY TO HACK AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF MILITARY WEAPONS

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The US Finally Has a Defense Agency Devoted to Cybersecurity

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is tasked with defending U.S. infrastructure from both cyber and physical attacks.

Lights Out

In July, officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed a very scary rumor: hackers working for the Russian government had hacked the U.S. power grid, gaining a level of access at which they could have cut off power to U.S. citizens.

Clearly, U.S. infrastructure simply isn’t effectively protected against cyberattacks — but that could change thanks to newly-signed legislation.

Security Signing

On Friday, President Donald Trump signed into law the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Act of 2018, thereby establishing the first agency devoted to defending U.S. infrastructure from both cyber and physical attacks.

According to the DHS website, CISA will include a National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) that will serve as the U.S. government’s go-to resource for anything related to cybersecurity. NCCIC will respond to any cybersecurity threats, ensure all .gov websites remain secure, and provide the government with cybersecurity defense capabilities.

CISA will also coordinate all cybersecurity efforts between the government and its private partners, ensuring both are properly trained and prepared to handle cyberattacks. In the event there is an attack on U.S. critical infrastructure, CISA is tasked with coordinating response efforts and facilitating effective communication.

Power to the People

We still don’t know for sure that the Russian attack on U.S. power companies is over. Some companies might not even know Russia hacked their systems, meaning they might not have taken any action to address the situation. In other words, Russia could still have access to those power companies’ control rooms.

That isn’t the only known example of a cyberattack on U.S. infrastructure, either, and it certainly won’t be the last. Nations will likely wage the wars of the future from behind keyboards, and by establishing CISA, the U.S. government is showing that it’s doing what it can to prepare for the era of cyber combat.

READ MORE: Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [Department of Homeland Security]

More on cybersecurity: Yes, Russians Hacked U.S. Electric Companies, Homeland Security Confirms

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360-Degree Video Shows What It’s Like to Fall Into a Black Hole

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

A team of physicists created a 360 video that takes people on a tour of a realistic simulation of the black hole in the middle of the Milky Way.

We’re Going in

Finally, modern technology has made it possible for us to live out our childhood dreams and dive head-first into a black hole. Or, at the very least, a new 360-degree video lets us see what it would look like before the incredible gravitational pull tore us to shreds.

A team of physicists out of Radboud University in The Netherlands and the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Germany created an immersive video that accurately simulates Sagittarius A*, the black hole that’s slowly eating the Milky Way from the inside out.

Family Fun

The researchers hope the simulation, published Monday in the journal Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology, will help educate people of all ages about how black holes really work. As the video shows, black holes like Sagittarius A* are dynamic hubs of cosmic activity, not silent spheres of nothingness that sit around and occasionally gulp down a wayward star or planet.

Video credit: J.Davelaar 2018

Eye of the Storm

In the video, which can be watched with or without a virtual reality headset, the audience is dragged along by Sagittarius A*’s gravitational pull. It brings people closer and closer to the black hole, which rests in the middle of what looks like a gigantic, fiery tornado.

But there’s no “if you die in the Matrix, you die in real life” moment here — before the audience is plunged into the black hole, the audience is catapulted backward, rocketing away until Sagittarius A* fades from their view altogether.

More on black holes: When Galaxies Merge, the Black Holes in Their Hearts Fuse Together

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A New Gadget Turns Plastic Waste Into Tools Astronauts Need

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station can now use the Refabricator to transform plastic waste into needed tools.

Precious Cargo

A gadget now aboard the International Space Station (ISS) could help define the future of space exploration.

On Monday, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo ship docked with the ISS, delivering roughly 7,400 pounds of supplies and research equipment. Included in that cargo was the Refabricator — a tool that could help humanity extend its reach into space.

3D Printing: The Remix

According to a NASA news release, the Refabricator is the first all-in-one plastic recycler and 3D printer. It was created by tech company Tethers Unlimited as part of NASA’s In-Space Manufacturing Program.

Astronauts aboard the ISS simply feed unwanted plastic into the machine, and it’ll melt the waste down into a 3D printing filament. The astronauts can then instruct the Refabricator to 3D print new tools or plastic parts using the filament.

This could reduce the amount of filament we currently send to the ISS, thereby cutting the cost of cargo resupply missions.

Make It Work

If the Refabricator proves useful to those aboard the ISS, it could one day help astronauts tackle longer missions that take them farther from Earth. Instead of needing to store all the tools a mission might require on their spacecraft, astronauts would have the option to simply create the tool on-demand using plastic waste.

Eventually, we could even start using Refabricators on Earth to decrease the amount of plastic pollution we generate, meaning this one gadget has the potential to impact life both on our planet and beyond it.

More on space printing: NASA: Objects 3D Printed in Space Perform Well Enough to Support Missions

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Elon Musk Just Changed the BFR’s Name for a Fourth Time

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

Elon Musk tweeted that the BFR will now be called

Beam Me up, Elon

Until yesterday, SpaceX’s futuristic and extremely ambitious rocket — which it says could carry 100 passengers to Mars — was called the Big Falcon Rocket.

But on Monday, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that its name was changing to “Starship.” That marks the fourth name change since SpaceX announced the craft more than five years ago.

Before mid-2016, it was referred to as the “Mars Colonial Transporter.” In mid-2016, it turned into the “Interplanetary Transport System.” In September 2017 it was dubbed the “BFR,” for Big Falcon Rocket — though its codename reportedly contained a certain expletive in place of “falcon.”

Renaming BFR to Starship
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2018

Super Heavy

In a follow-up tweet, Musk points out that the “Starship” itself is the “spaceship/upper stage” while the gigantic rocket booster required to leave Earth’s gravitational pull will be called “Super Heavy.”

The latter is likely a reference to the SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy booster, currently the rocket with the highest payload capacity of any rocket in operation.

“Delightfully Counter-Intuitive”

The news comes after Elon tweeted that the BFR’s new design will be “delightfully counter-intuitive.” We have yet to see what that meant.

Elon also announced that SpaceX scrapped plans for a “mini-BFR” that would upgrade an existing Falcon 9 rocket to test the BFR’s lightweight heatshield and control surfaces capable of hypersonic flight.

For now, we’ll have to wait to see if all of this amounts to a rocket capable of taking passengers around the Moon any time soon.

More on the BFR: The New Render of Elon Musk’s BFR Means It Might Have Some Dope Features

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New Brain Implant Could Translate Paralyzed People’s Thoughts Into Speech

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

Plugging In

A new brain implant out of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in New York might someday be able to read people’s thoughts and — for those who can’t speak on their own — say them out loud.

The brain-computer interface (BCI) system sits on the surface of the brain — an array of electrodes detects the neural signals sent out by brain regions responsible for perceiving and generating speech, which are then decoded by a computer in the lab, reports STAT News.

Baby Steps

Current-generation BCI can’t create a perfect brain signal-to-speech pathway; people using this new system wouldn’t be able to generate eloquent speeches. But according to STAT, doctors believe they may be able to let people who are paralyzed or otherwise can’t speak inform their caregivers that they are hungry, thirsty, in pain, or other things that are relatively simple but crucial to get across.

It could also — potentially — help doctors determine whether comatose people are awake and responsive or asleep at any given time.

We Can’t Rebuild Him

But STAT is quick to point out that medical brain-computer interfaces such as this one, which is being tested on volunteers who are already undergoing brain surgery for severe epilepsy, are far from being available outside of a research lab.

Brain implants have a bitter history of damaging the brain or being rejected by the nervous system, and because the devices don’t last forever, multiple brain surgeries over the years would become necessary. But someday, if the questions of brain compatibility are resolved, it looks like the assistive powers of BCI implants will be ready and waiting.

More on brain-computer interface technology: A Neural Network, Connected to a Human Brain, Could Mean More Advanced Prosthetics

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Physicists Have a New Idea for Faster-Than-Light Travel

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

Physicists are increasingly optimistic — at least on a theoretical level — about a hypothetical faster-than-light travel tech they call a

Ludicrous Speed

We might have robots and virtual reality, but another sci-fi standby has eluded technological progress: faster-than-light travel.

That impasse might not last forever, though, according to a new story in the New York Times. Though a practical version is still far off, physicists are increasingly optimistic — at least on a theoretical level — about a hypothetical faster-than-light technology they call a “warp bubble.”

Hyperdrive

According to Miguel Alcubierre, the director of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Nuclear Sciences Institute, a warp bubble would compress space in front of a craft while expanding space behind it. In effect, he told the Times, the bubble would sidestep the law of general relativity, which stipulates that nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

This isn’t a new idea — we’ve covered it before — but physicists have repeatedly revised the estimated amount of energy required. At first, they thought it would require more energy than the entire universe contains. Then they decreased that to the mass of Jupiter, converted to energy. Now, some suspect it would take the energy contained in just a ton or two of mass.

Warp Dorks

Physicists still urge caution about the idea of a warp bubble. Alcubierre, one of the greatest advocates of the idea, told the Times that even if the bubble were possible, scientists are unlikely to realize it within our lifetimes.

“I would have to say that it is probably impossible,” Alcubierre said, “and even if it turns out to be possible, we are probably centuries away from being able to do it.”

READ MORE: Where’s Our Warp Drive to the Stars? [The New York Times]

More on faster-than-light travel: Traveling Faster Than Light? Four Phenomena That Put the Cosmic Speed Limit to the Test

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liberty | Definition of liberty in English by Oxford Dictionaries

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

nounmass noun

1The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behaviour, or political views.

compulsory retirement would interfere with individual liberty

More example sentences

Synonyms

independence, freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, self government, self rule, self determination, home rule

people who attacked phone boxes would lose their liberty

More example sentences

Synonyms

free, on the loose, loose, set loose, at large, unconfined, roaming

the Bill of Rights was intended to secure basic civil liberties

More example sentences

Synonyms

right, birthright, opportunity, facility, prerogative, entitlement, privilege, permission, sanction, leave, consent, authorization, authority, licence, clearance, blessing, dispensation, exemption, faculty

the Statue of Liberty

More example sentences

2The power or scope to act as one pleases.

individuals should enjoy the liberty to pursue their own preferences

More example sentences

Synonyms

freedom, independence, free rein, freeness, licence, self-determination

Example sentences

3informal count noun A presumptuous remark or action.

how did he know what she was thinking?it was a liberty!

Synonyms

act with overfamiliarity, act with familiarity, show disrespect, act with impropriety, act indecorously, be impudent, commit a breach of etiquette, act with boldness, act with impertinence, show insolence, show impudence, show presumptuousness, show presumption, show forwardness, show audacity, be unrestrained

he was at liberty for three months before he was recaptured

More example sentences

Synonyms

free, on the loose, loose, set loose, at large, unconfined, roaming

2Allowed or entitled to do something.

he's not at liberty to discuss his real work

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Synonyms

free, permitted, allowed, authorized, able, entitled, eligible, fit

1Behave in an unduly familiar manner towards a person.

you've taken too many liberties with me

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Synonyms

2Treat something freely, without strict faithfulness to the facts or to an original.

the scriptwriter has taken few liberties with the original narrative

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Venture to do something without first asking permission.

I took the liberty of checking out a few convalescent homes for him

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Late Middle English: from Old French liberte, from Latin libertas, from liber free.

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liberty | Definition of liberty in English by Oxford Dictionaries

Nine Things to Know About Stem Cell Treatments

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

It can be hard to tell the difference between doctors conducting responsible clinical trials and clinics selling unproven treatments. One common differentiator is the way a treatment is marketed. Most specialized doctors receive patient referrals, while clinics selling stem cell treatments tend to market directly to patients, often through persuasive language on the Internet, Facebook and in newspaper advertisements.

Clinics peddling unproven stem cell treatments frequently overstate the benefits of their offerings and use patient testimonials to support their claims. These testimonials can be intentionally or unintentionally misleading. For example, a person may feel better immediately after receiving a treatment, but the perceived or actual improvement may be due to other factors, such as an intense belief that the treatment will work, auxiliary treatments accompanying the main treatment, healthy lifestyle changes adapted in conjunction with the treatment and natural fluctuations in the disease or condition. These factors are complex and difficult to measure objectively outside the boundaries of carefully designed clinical trials. Learn more about why we need to perform clinical trials here.

Beware of clinics that use persuasive language, including patient testimonials, on the Internet, Facebook and newspapers, to market their treatments, instead of science-based evidence.

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Nine Things to Know About Stem Cell Treatments

What is a Voluntaryist? – Zero Aggression Project

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Danzig

A voluntaryist libertarian believes that all adult relationships should be voluntary.

A voluntary society is what results when you apply the Zero Aggression Principle (the ZAP) consistently. This means that institutions of governance must be

The result is something we call consumer-controlled governance. In other words, citizens should have the power to withhold funding from government functions they disapprove of, or to choose another service provider.

Some libertarians disagree. They make exceptions to the Zero Aggression Principle. They argue that some legitimate government functions, such as police, courts, national defense, and pollution control, require taxation, though they still hope to limit those functions and taxes.

Voluntaryists believe this approach is both immoral and impractical. Its immoral because it initiates force. Its impractical because it

This is why tax-funded government tends to be wasteful and inefficient. Its also why tax-funded government constantly grows. There is no way to prevent this once you permit the power to initiate force. Thus

Voluntaryists make NO exceptions to the ZAP. Force must never be initiated. Force must only be used defensively.

The voluntaryist thinks empathetically when evaluating all political proposals. We put ourselves in the shoes of those affected not only those who would benefit from some coercive political proposal, but also those who would be harmed by it. We ask if we would want to be treated that way, and then act accordingly.

Help us promote these ideas. Join us by subscribing. Its free.

By Jim Babka & Perry Willis

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What is a Voluntaryist? - Zero Aggression Project

Fifth Amendment | Wex Legal Dictionary / Encyclopedia | LII …

Posted on November 20, 2018 by Danzig

Fifth Amendment: An Overview

TheFifth Amendmentof theU.S. Constitutionprovides, "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

The clauses incorporated within the Fifth Amendment outline basic constitutional limits on police procedure. The Framers derived the Grand Juries Clause and the Due Process Clause from the MagnaCarta, dating back to 1215. Scholars consider the Fifth Amendment as capable of breaking down into the following five distinct constitutional rights: 1) right to indictment by the grand jury before any criminal charges for felonious crimes, 2) a prohibition on double jeopardy, 3) a right against forced self-incrimination, 4) a guarantee that all criminal defendants have a fair trial, and 5) a guarantee that government cannot seize private property without making a due compensation at the market value of the property.

While the Fifth Amendment originally only applied to federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court has partially incorporated the 5th amendment to the states through the Due Process Clause of theFourteenth Amendment. The right to indictment by the Grand Jury has not been incorporated, while the right against double jeopardy, the right against self-incrimination, and the protection against arbitrary taking of a private property without due compensation have all been incorporated to the states.

Grand Juries

Grand juriesare a holdover from the early British common law dating back hundreds of years. Deeply-rooted in the Anglo-American tradition, the grand jury was originally intended to protect the accused from overly-zealous prosecutions by the English monarchy. In the early phases of the development of the U.S. Constituion, the Founding Fathers have decided to retain the Grand Jury system as a protection against over-zealous prosecution by the central government. Although the Supreme Court in Hurtado v. California in 1884 has refused to incorporate the Grand Jury system to all of the states, most states have independently decided to retain a similar form of Grand Jury, and currently, all but two states (Connecticut and Pennsylvania) have the grand jury.

Congressional statutes outline the means by which a federal grand jury shall be impaneled. Ordinarily, the grand jurors are selected from the pool of prospective jurors who potentially could serve on a given day in any juror capacity. At common-law, a grand jury consists of between 12 and 23 members. Because the Grandjurywas derived from the common-law, courts use the common-law as a means of interpreting the Grand Jury Clause. While state legislatures may set the statutory number of grand jurors anywhere within the common-law requirement of 12 to 23, statutes setting the number outside of this range violate the Fifth Amendment. Federal law has set the federal grand jury number as falling between 16 and 23.

A person being charged with a crime that warrants a grand jury has the right to challenge members of the grand juror for partiality or bias, but these challenges differ from peremptory challenges, which a defendant has when choosing a trial jury. When a defendant makes a peremptory challenge, the judge must remove the juror without making any proof, but in the case of a grand juror challenge, the challenger must establish the cause of the challenge by meeting the same burden of proof as the establishment of any other fact would require. Grand juries possess broad authority to investigate suspected crimes. They may not, however, conduct "fishing expeditions" or hire individuals not already employed by the government to locate testimony or documents. Ultimately, grand juries may make a presentment, informing the court of their decision to indict or not indict the suspect. If they indict the suspect, it means they have decided that there is a probable cause to believe that the charged crime has indeed been committed and by the suspect

Double Jeopardy

The Double Jeopardy Clause aims to protect against the harassment of an individual through successive prosecutions of the same alleged act, to ensure the significance of an acquittal, and to prevent the state from putting the defendant through the emotional, psychological, physical, and financial troubles that would accompany multiple trials for the same alleged offense. Courts have interpreted the Double Jeopardy Clause as accomplishing these goals by providing the following three distinct rights: a guarantee that a defendant will not face a second prosecution after an acquittal, a guarantee that a defendant will not face a second prosecution after a conviction, and a guarantee that a defendant will not receive multiple punishments for the same offense. Courts, however, have not interpreted the Double Jeopardy Clause as either prohibiting the state from seeking review of a sentence or restricting a sentence's length on rehearing after a defendant's successful appeal.

Jeopardy refers to the danger of conviction. Thus, jeopardy does not attach unless a risk of the determination of guilt exists. If some event or circumstance prompts the trial court to declare a mistrial, jeopardy has not attached if the mistrial only results in minimal delay and the government does not receive addedopportunityto strengthen its case.

Self-Incrimination

The Fifth Amendment also protects criminal defendants from having to testify if they may incriminate themselves through the testimony. A witness may "plead the Fifth" and not answer if the witness believes answering the question may be self-incriminatory.

In the landmarkMiranda v. Arizonaruling, the United States Supreme Court extended the Fifth Amendment protections to encompass any situation outside of the courtroom that involves the curtailment of personal freedom. 384 U.S. 436 (1966). Therefore, any time that law enforcement takes a suspect into custody, law enforcement must make the suspect aware of all rights.Known asMirandarights, these rights include the right to remain silent, the right to have an attorney present during questioning, and the right to have a government-appointed attorney if the suspect cannot afford one.

However, courts have since then slightly narrowed the Miranda rights, holding that police interrogations or questioning that occur prior to taking the suspect into custody does not fall within the Miranda requirements, and the police are not required to give the Miranda warnings to the suspects prior to taking them into custody, and their silence in some instances can be deemed to be implicit admission of guilt.

If law enforcement fails to honor these safeguards, courts will often suppress any statements by the suspect as violating the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, provided that the suspect has not actually waived the rights. An actual waiver occurs when a suspect has made the waiver knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily. To determine if a knowing, intelligent and voluntary waiver has occurred, a court will examine the totality of the circumstances, which considers all pertinent circumstances and events. If a suspect makes a spontaneous statement while in custody prior to being made aware of theMirandarights, law enforcement can use the statement against the suspect, provided that police interrogation did not prompt the statement. The Fifth Amendment right does not extend to an individual's voluntarily prepared business papers because the element of compulsion is lacking. Similarly, the right does not extend to potentially incriminating evidence derived from obligatory reports or tax returns.

To be self-incriminating, the compelled answers must pose a substantial and real, and not merely a trifling or imaginary hazard of criminal prosecution

After Congress passed the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, some felt that the statute by implication overruled the requirements ofMiranda. Some scholars also felt that Congress constitutionally exercised its power in passing this law because they felt thatMirandarepresented a matter of judicial policy rather than an actual manifestation of Fifth Amendment protections. InDickerson v.UnitedStatesthe U.S. Supreme Court rejectedthis argumentand held that the Warren Court had directly derivedMirandafrom the Fifth Amendment.

Due Process Clause

The guarantee ofdue processfor all persons requires the government to respect all rights, guarantees, and protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution and all applicable statutes before the government can deprive any person of life, liberty, or property.Dueprocess essentially guarantees that a party will receive a fundamentally fair, orderly, and just judicial proceeding. While the Fifth Amendment only applies to the federal government, the identical text in the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly applies this due process requirement to the states as well.

Courts have come to recognize that two aspects of due process exist: procedural due process andsubstantive due process.The proceduraldue processaims to ensure fundamental fairness by guaranteeing a party the right to be heard, ensuring that the parties receive proper notification throughout the litigation, and ensures that the adjudicating court has the appropriate jurisdiction to render a judgment. Meanwhile, substantive due process has developed during the20thcentury as protecting those substantive rights so fundamental as to be "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty."

Just Compensation Clause

While the federal government has a constitutional right to "take" private property for public use, the Fifth Amendment's Just Compensation Clause requires the government to pay just compensation, interpreted as market value, to the owner of the property, valued at the time of the takings. The U.S. Supreme Court has defined fair market value as the most probable price that a willing butunpressuredbuyer, fully knowledgeable of both the property's good and bad attributes, would pay. The government does not have to pay a property owner's attorney's fees, however, unless a statute so provides.

In2005, in Kelov.Cityof New London, the U.S. Supreme Court had rendered a controversial opinion in which they held that a city could constitutionally seize private property for private commercial development, where the redevelopment would economically benefit an area that was sufficiently distressed to justify a program of economic rejuvenation. 545 U.S. 469 (2005). However, after the Kelo decision, some state legislatures passed statutory amendments to counteract Kelo and expand protection for the condemnees. See e.g., Condemnation by Redevelopment Auth. of Fayette Certain Land in Brownsville Borough v. Redevelopment Auth., 152 A.3d 375, 376 (Pa. Commw. Ct. 2016). Nevertheless, Kelo remains a valid law under the federal context, and its broad interpretation of "public use" still holds true under the federal protection for the Fifth Amendment right to just compensation.

Last Edited by Jonathan Kim, June 2017

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Fifth Amendment | Wex Legal Dictionary / Encyclopedia | LII ...

Amendment V – The United States Constitution

Posted on November 20, 2018 by Danzig

Three of the five clauses of the Fifth Amendment pertain to procedures that must, or must not, be used in criminal prosecutions.

Grand Jury Indictment

The first of the criminal procedure clauses requires that felony offenses in federal court be charged by grand jury indictment. (A grand jury is a panel of citizens that hears evidence that the prosecutor has against the accused, and decides if an indictment, or formal criminal charges, should be filed against them.) This is one of only a few provisions of the Bill of Rights that the Supreme Court has not held to apply to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (the others being the Third Amendments protection against quartering of soldiers, the Sixth Amendments requirement of trial in the district where the crime was committed, the Seventh Amendments requirement of jury trial in certain civil cases, and possibly the Eighth Amendments prohibition of excessive fines).

That the Court has been reluctant to apply the grand jury requirement to the states is unsurprising. While the origins of the grand jury are ancientan ancestor of the modern grand jury was included in the Magna Cartatoday, the United States is the only country in the world that uses grand juries. In addition to the federal government, about half the states provide for grand juriesthough in many of these there exist other ways of filing formal charges, such as a prosecutorial information followed by an adversarial but a relatively informal preliminary hearing before a judge (to make sure there is at least probable cause for the charge, the same standard of proof that a grand jury is told to apply). As early as 1884, the Supreme Court held that the grand jury is not a fundamental requirement of due process, and Justice Holmes lone dissent from that judgment has been joined by only one Justice (Douglas) in the intervening years.

Recent scholarship has upset the previous understanding that the grand jury was from its inception venerated because it was not only a sword (accusing individuals of crimes) but also a shield (against oppressive or arbitrary authority). In its early incarnation in England, the grand jury was fundamentally an instrument of the crown, obliging unpaid citizens to help enforce the Kings law. Over the centuries, the idea of a citizen check on royal prerogative became more valued. By the time of the framing of our Constitution, both the grand jury (from the French for large, in sizetoday grand juries are often composed of 24 citizens), and the petit jury (from the French for smalltoday criminal trial juries may be composed of as few as six citizens) were understood, in both Britain and the colonies, to be important bulwarks of freedom from tyranny.

Few in the modern era would espouse such a view. The former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals (that states highest court) famously remarked in recent years that because prosecutors agents of the executive branchcontrol what information a grand jury hears, any grand jury today would, if requested, indict a ham sandwich. While this is a useful exaggerationthe Supreme Court has held that federal grand juries need not adhere to trial rules of evidence, or be told of evidence exculpating the defendantfew prosecutors, fortunately, are interested in indicting ham sandwiches! Rather, the greatest advantage grand juries now provide (at least in federal courts, which are not as overburdened as state courts) is allowing the prosecutor to use the grand jury as a pre-trial focus group, learning which evidence or witnesses are especially convincing, or unconvincing.

At least in federal court, grand juries are here to stay. The institution is written into the Fifth Amendment too clearly to be interpreted away. Moreover, neither pro-law enforcement forces (for obvious reasons) nor allies of those accused (because occasionally grand juries do refuse to indictin the legal parlance, returning a no true bill) have reason to urge their abolition through amendment of the Constitution.

Double Jeopardy Protections

The Fifth Amendments second procedural protection is the Double Jeopardy Clause, which provides: [N]or shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb. The Clauses core purpose is straightforward: to prohibit the government from forcing a person to undergo repeated trials for the same crime. As Justice Black explained in an oft-quoted passage in Green v. United States (1957), [t]he underlying idea . . . is that the State with all its resources and power should not be allowed to make repeated attempts to convict an individual for an alleged offense . . . .

While the Double Jeopardy Clauses underlying principle is straightforward, the Clause has spawned complex jurisprudence. The current rule, set forth in cases such as Crist v. Bretz (1978), is that jeopardy begins, or attaches, in a jury trial when the jury is empaneled and sworn. Much of the double jeopardy jurisprudence addresses circumstances in which re-prosecution is either permitted or barred after jeopardy has attached. One common situation where this question arises is when the government seeks a retrial after a mistriala trial terminated before a final judgment is reached. If the defendant consented to the mistrial, retrial is permitted. But an early Supreme Court case, United States v. Perez (1824), established that even without consent, the defendant may be retried as long as declaring a mistrial was a manifest necessity. In Perez, the manifest necessity was a hung jurya jury that could not agree upon a verdict. While the term necessity might imply a nearly impossible burden for a retrial, the Supreme Court has been fairly generous in recognizing such circumstances. On the other hand, retrial is not permitted after an acquittal, a finding that the defendant is not guilty. Although it has not addressed the rare situation where a jury has been bribed, the Supreme Court has made clear that the Double Jeopardy Clause flatly bars re-prosecution for the same offense. Controversially, this absolute bar applies even where the acquittal was the result of erroneous trial court rulings. (As a result, in federal and most state courts, the prosecution is able to take an immediate appeal of a pre-trial ruling suppressing evidence, before the jury is empaneled and jeopardy attaches.) To justify this approach, the Court has drawn analogies to the common law plea of autrefois acquit (formerly acquitted) and expressed concern that the Government, with its superior resources, not be permitted to wear down a defendant.

The rules for re-prosecution following a conviction are different. An 1896 decision, Ball v. United States, recognized an exception to the general prohibition against re-prosecuting someone who has already been convicted: when the convicted person has managed through an appeal to overturn the conviction (on grounds other than insufficiency of evidence, which is equivalent to an acquittal by the appellate court). In later decisions, the Court has explained that this exception rests on considerations related to the sound administration of justice. Society should not have to bear the burden of having a guilty defendant set free because a conviction is overturned for procedural error, such as erroneously admitted evidence or faulty jury instructions. And defendants, too, may benefit, as appellate courts might not zealously protect against errors if the price of reversal is irrevocably setting a defendant free.

To the general public, perhaps the most mysterious line of double jeopardy jurisprudence is the dual sovereignty doctrine. Under this doctrine, a defendant can be prosecuted twice for what appears to be the same crimeonce by federal authorities and once by state authorities, or even by two different states if they both have jurisdiction over the criminal conduct. In the Rodney King case, for instance, Los Angeles police officers were re-prosecuted for the beating of Rodney King and convicted of federal civil rights violations after having been acquitted in state court of the same beating. In such situations, the Courts theory has been that a defendant is not being prosecuted twice for the same offence, but rather for separate offenses against the peace and dignity of both sovereigns and thus may be punished by both. Strong policy arguments can be made in favor of the Courts interpretation, as it prevents, for instance, a state from barring federal civil rights charges through bungling (or, worse, sabotaging) the initial state prosecution. Likewise, a person who has committed a serious crime will not be able to effectively immunize herself against prosecution by another sovereign for that offense by convincing local or state officials to let her quickly plead guilty to a minor, lesser offense.

As a matter of original meaning, however, the Courts dual sovereignty jurisprudence is highly questionable. When the Bill of Rights was adopted, the double jeopardy principle was understood as providing inter-sovereign protection. The dual sovereignty doctrine may illustrate a situation where an original meaning interpretation of the Constitution provides greater protection for criminal defendants than does a more policy based approach. In addition, one might argue that the Fourteenth Amendment, understood to have applied double jeopardy protections against the states, also is a source of authority for the federal government to vindicate civil rights by means of re-prosecution in situations like the Rodney King casebut this would not justify the Courts allowance of dual state prosecutions.

Privilege Against Compelled Self-Incrimination

The third procedural protection in the Fifth Amendment is the right not to be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against oneself. This right is often referred to as the Fifth Amendment Privilege or, more colloquially, as the right to take the Fifth. The Supreme Court has many times affirmed the most natural understanding of these words: the defendant in a criminal case cannot be compelled to testifythat is, she cant be called to the stand and thereafter be held in contempt of court (usually leading to immediate imprisonment) if she refuses to answer questions relevant to the charges against her.

But over the years, the Court has read into these words many additional rights, both inside the criminal courtroom and in settings far removed from criminal court. In Griffin v. California (1965) the Court struck down a California rule of evidence that allowed the jury in a criminal case to consider as evidence of guilt the defendants failure to testifyhis silence in the face of the evidence the prosecution had introduced against him. The reasoning was that if the jury could draw a negative inference from the defendants silence, this could induce a defendant who preferred not to testify to decide nonetheless to take the stand, at least where the defendant thought that his testimony would be less damaging than his complete silence. While knowing that the jury could draw a negative inference is not being legally compelled in the way that being held in contempt is, the Court implied that the true purpose of the Fifth Amendment Privilege is not only to protect a criminal defendant from compelled self-incrimination, but also to ensure that no one is made worse off by asserting the Fifth than by not asserting it.

The idea that taking the Fifth should not lead to any penalty took hold in settings outside the criminal courtroom as well. In a series of cases in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court held that the government as employer may not condition continued employment on cooperation in the investigation of possible violations of its policies (though private employers routinely do this without any constitutional limitation). For instance, in Gardner v. Broderick (1968), the New York City Police Department was held to have violated the Fifth Amendment rights of a police officer when it fired him after he refused to waive the Privilege and testify before a grand jury that was investigating police corruption. Many observers think the better approach in these cases would have been to hold that continued public employment (or an occupational license) may be conditioned on providing pertinent information (after all, there is no constitutional right to be a police officer or a licensed attorney), but that the individual has a right to assert the Privilege in any governmental investigation related to her public employment or occupational license.

Indeed, it has long been understood that the Fifth Amendment Privilege can be asserted by any witness (not just the defendant) in a criminal trial, and by any witness in a civil trial, grand jury, legislative hearing, or other government proceeding. In effect, the words in any criminal case in the Fifth Amendment have been understood not to refer to the type of proceeding where the Privilege may be asserted, but as short-hand for the idea that a witness should not be required to give responses that could be used against him in a present or future criminal case. Given its broad applicability, the Privilege is commonly referred to as the right against compelled self-incrimination. Importantly, however, whereas the jury in a criminal case cant hold the defendants failure to testify against her in any way (according to Griffin), the fact-finders in these other settings are permitted to draw a negative inference from the witnesss assertion of the Privilege. While the Privilege may thus be invoked by any witness, the government can defeat the Privilege and require that the witness testify (under pain of contempt) by granting the witness immunity. Except for a perjury prosecution, neither the witnesss immunized statements nor any evidence deriving from those statements may be admitted against her in a criminal prosecution. Kastigar v. United States (1972).

The most important, and controversial, decision applying the Fifth Amendment Privilege outside the criminal trial is Miranda v. Arizona (1966). In order to protect criminal suspects from not only physical brutality but also informal compulsion that is inherent in custodial interrogation, the Supreme Court in Miranda devised a set of warnings that the police must give before custodial questioning takes place. The individual must be told that she has a right to remain silent, that any statements she makes may be used against her, and that she has the right to have an attorney present during questioning, including the right to a court-appointed attorney if she cannot afford one. The Court recognized that an individual could knowingly and intelligently waive these rights. Critically, the Court fashioned an exclusionary rule to enforce the right to Miranda warnings: unless and until such warnings and waiver are demonstrated by the prosecution at trial, no evidence obtained as a result of interrogation can be used against the defendant at trial.

Some heralded Miranda as a better way to regulate police interrogations than the due process approach the Supreme Court had forged during the previous three decades. In Brown v. Mississippi (1936), a deputy sheriff leading a mob of white men had obtained confessions from two black defendants by sustained and brutal lashings using a leather strap with buckles on it. This clearly constituted compulsion, but the Fifth Amendment Privilege had not yet been applied against the states though the Fourteenth Amendments Due Process Clause. (That would not come until Malloy v. Hogan (1964).) So the Court invoked the Due Process Clause directly, holding that confessions were involuntary and their admission at the mens trial violated their due process rights. In the view of some justices, however, the subjective totality of the circumstances test the Court developed to determine whether a defendants confession was involuntary was unwieldy. And it provided murky guidance for both lower courts and law enforcement, especially in cases with no physical coercion. Miranda, in the view of its supporters, seemed to provide a clear line-in-the-sand for everyone. Although the Court made clear that even if Miranda was followed, a confession might be inadmissible on due process/voluntariness grounds, in fact both the Supreme Court and lower courts have tended to consider a statement presumptively voluntary if made after waiver of Miranda rights.

Miranda was controversial for many reasons. The most serious charge was that whether or not the warnings were good policy, the decision was illegitimate: the Court had just made up a new rule, nowhere found in the Constitution. To be sure, there is much circumstantial evidence that the Fifth Amendment Privilege was adopted in part to constitutionalize a common-law maxim that both British citizens and their American counterparts thought fundamental: nemo tenetur prodere seipsum (no one is bound to accuse himself). In the late eighteenth century, this was understood to forbid extracting confessions by means of physical or spiritual coercion; the latter consisted of forcing a person to take an oath to God and state the truthundoubtedly coercive in a highly religious society. But nearly two centuries later the Supreme Court was saying that the Fifth Amendment also prohibited the assertedly inherent coercion that exists in routine station-house questioning, unless Mirandas warnings are given and waived. Most pointedly, the warnings themselves looked more like legislative rule-making than constitutional interpretation. The Court, in Miranda and two other cases decided shortly before Miranda, seemed bent on reducing, if not eliminating, an important tool of evidence-gathering in criminal casesquestioning the defendant upon arrest. After all, who wouldnt leap at the chance to have a lawyer before dealing with the police? And no lawyer would allow a client to submit to immediate questioning, as all of the justices knew.

In fact, Miranda has not prevented people from making incriminating station-house statements, as initially some of its detractors had feared and some of its supporters had anticipated. It appears to be an aspect of human nature that many recently accused persons are eager to talk their way out of trouble. Mirandas critics, however, believe that Miranda has noticeably reduced the number of confessions by allowing suspects to lawyer up rather than face questioning; while Mirandas supporters contend that any reduction in confessions is quite modest, and note that police officers have learned to live with the decision.

In a series of subsequent decisions, the Supreme Court gave further ammunition to those who considered Miranda to be nothing more than judicial legislation, by creating exceptions to the broad exclusionary rule the decision had announced. In Harris v. New York (1971), the Court held that even if Miranda was violated, any voluntary statements could be admitted to attack the defendants credibility if the defendant took the stand. In New York v. Quarles (1974), the Court held admissible the defendants statement, obtained without Miranda warnings, as to where he had hidden his gun in a supermarket, because of the public safety need to secure the weapon immediately. Quarles created a potentially large loophole and undercut the constitutional basis for Miranda, as the Court said that there was no actual coercion in that case even though Miranda warnings werent given. That same year, the Court held in Michigan v. Tucker (1974) that Mirandas exclusionary rule applied only to the defendants statements, not to testimony by other witnesses whom the police discovered on the basis of the defendants statements. Ten years later the Court held that that statements elicited in violation of Miranda could be used in deportation proceedings. The Court also cast doubt on the scope of the right to remain silent, holding in Fletcher v. Weir (1982) that states could adopt rules allowing the defendants silence after arrest but before receiving Miranda warnings, to be used to attack his credibility.

It appeared to many that Miranda would in due course be overturned. Quarles had referred to Miranda warnings as merely prophylactic, and Tucker had conceded that the warnings were not themselves rights protected by the Constitution. In 1999, the Fourth Circuit agreed with the latter statement, and applied a little-noticed statute that Congress had enacted in 1968 in response to Miranda, under which a confession . . . shall be admissible in evidence [in federal court] if it is voluntarily given. 18 U.S.C. 3501(a). The Supreme Court reversed, 7-2, holding that Congress was without authority to enact 3501(a); despite language in Quarles and Tucker, Miranda had indeed announced a constitutional rule. Dickerson v. United States (2000).

Even in the wake of Dickerson, however, the scope and status of Miranda remain unclear. In Chavez v. Martinez (2003), four justices squarely held that violation of Miranda is not a violation of the Fifth Amendment Privilege, which only prohibits the government from admitting compelled statements in a subsequent prosecution of the suspect. Two other justices, concurring, distinguished between this core prohibition and extensions such as Miranda. The Court has also further cut back on Mirandas exclusionary rule, holding in United States v. Patane (2004) that as long as the defendants statements were voluntary, any physical fruits of them are admissible. And in Salinas v. Texas (2013), the Court further equivocated on the right to silence: it was proper to admit the defendants silence during police questioning that took place when the defendant was not in police custody, despite the absence of Miranda warnings, and the defendant had waived the Privilege by failing to affirmatively assert it.

Mirandas future remains uncertain. While the waiver and warning requirement has seemingly become entrenched in American police practices, the decisions approach to regulating police questioning still draws fire from all quarters. Critics of police questioning believe that the Miranda line of cases does not go far enough, because it has permitted psychological tricks and other aggressive tactics so long as an officer obtains a Miranda waiver at the start. Supporters of broader questioning counter that Miranda is perverse public policy, since career criminals are most likely to lawyer up while the vulnerable and the innocent are most likely to waive their Miranda rights. As a result, considerable interest remains in alternatives (or supplements) to Miranda, such as a requirement that police officers record interrogation sessions.

Paul Cassell Ronald N. Boyce Presidential Professor of Criminal Law, College Of Law, University of Utah Kate Stith Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law at Yale Law School

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Amendment V - The United States Constitution

5th Amendment – constitution | Laws.com

Posted on November 20, 2018 by Danzig

Fifth Amendment: Protection against abuse of government authority

What is the Fifth Amendment?

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation

The Fifth Amendment Defined:

The Fifth Amendment stems from English Common Law and traces back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

The Fifth Amendment is a part of the Bill of Rights, which are the first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution and the framework to elucidate upon the freedoms of the individual. The Bill of Rights were proposed and sent to the states by the first session of the First Congress. They were later ratified on December 15, 1791.

The first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution were introduced by James Madison as a series of legislative articles and came into effect as Constitutional Amendments following the process of ratification by three-fourths of the States on December 15, 1791.

Stipulations of the 5th Amendment:

The Fifth Amendment is asserted in any proceeding, whether civil, criminal, administrative, judicial, investigatory, or adjudicatory. The Fifth Amendment protects against all disclosures where the witness reasonably believes the evidence can be used in a criminal prosecution and can lead to the spawning of other evidence that might be used against the individual.

The Fifth Amendment guarantees an American individual the right to trial by Grand Jury for specific crimes, the right not to be tried and subsequently punished more than once for the same crime, the right to be tried with only due process of the law and the right to be awarded fair compensation for any property seized by the government for public use.

The Fifth Amendment also guarantees the individual the right to refrain from self-incrimination by pleading the fifth to any questions or inquiries that may give way to an additional punishment or the notion of a guilty plea.

State Timeline for Ratification of the Bill of Rights

New Jersey:November 20, 1789; rejected article II

Maryland:December 19, 1789; approved all

North Carolina:December 22, 1789; approved all

South Carolina: January 19, 1790; approved all

New Hampshire: January 25, 1790; rejected article II

Delaware: January 28, 1790; rejected article I

New York: February 27, 1790; rejected article II

Pennsylvania: March 10, 1790; rejected article II

Rhode Island: June 7, 1790; rejected article II

Vermont: November 3, 1791; approved all

Virginia: December 15, 1791; approved all

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5th Amendment - constitution | Laws.com

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