Imaging tool lets scientists look inside brain at nanoscale resolution

The universe-like depth and complexity of the human brain can now be studied in excruciating detail thanks to a new imaging technology.

The human brain contains more synapses than there are galaxies in the observable universe (to put a number on it, there are perhaps 100 trillion synapses versus 100 billion galaxies), and now scientists can see them all – individually. A new imaging tool promises to open the door to all sorts of new insights about the brain and how it works. The tool can generate images at a nanoscale resolution, which is small enough to see all cellular objects and many of their sub-cellular components (so for the biology-literate, that's stuff like neurons and the synapses that permit them to fire, plus axons, dendrites, glia, mitochondria, blood vessel cells, and so on).

Developed by researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard University, the imaging method employs an automated tape-collecting device equipped with a diamond knife to obtain ultra-thin brain sections, which are then scanned under an electron microscope. Different colors are used to identify different cellular objects using software developed by study co-author Daniel Berger.

To demonstrate their new tool the researchers peered inside the brain of an adult mouse. They imaged a very small piece of a mouse's neocortex at a resolution that made individual synaptic vesicles visible (these are tiny spheres of less than 40 nm diameter that store neurotransmitters, or chemical signals, for release from a synapse into a "target" neuron). The specific area they imaged is involved in receiving sensory information from mouse whiskers, which are much more sensitive than human fingertips.

Noting significant redundancies in the synaptic connections, the researchers analyzed how axons and dendrites connect. An axon is a nerve fiber; it transmits electrical impulses like a fiber optic cable. You can think of dendrites as being like the input sockets on your electronics; they're the branches that jut out from a neuron, receive the impulses from axons, and convert that information into a signal the neuron understands.

It had previously been thought that the connectivity between axons and dendrites could be inferred from their locations – a concept called Peters' Rule, despite the fact that the man responsible for the idea disputes it. The researchers proved this is not the case. There is a more complex relationship between axons and dendrites, which causes multiple synapses to form on some dendrites but not on others. The best predictor of synapse formation turns out to be the presence of another synapse between that same axon and dendrite pair.

The researchers take this as evidence that imaging at super-fine detail will be necessary for neuroscientists to fully understand the brain. On the downside, it seems that more data is going to mean more questions and not necessarily more insights, but the researchers draw an optimistic conclusion from this – "there is no reason to stop doing it until the results are boring," they write.

Further, study first author Narayanan "Bobby" Kasthuri says that the complexity of the brain is far greater than anyone had imagined. "We had this clean idea of how there's a really nice order to how neurons connect with each other," he explains, "but if you actually look at the material it's not like that. The connections are so messy that it's hard to imagine a plan to it. But we checked, and there's clearly a pattern that cannot be explained by randomness."

Nanoscale imaging of the brain means that in every square micrometer of tissue we can see things we've never seen before. It promises huge opportunities for discovery and exploration, and it promises that someday, in the far flung future, we may have our answers – we may learn everything there is to learn about how the brain works.

Many scientists see the work as a waste of time and money, senior author Jeff Lichtman notes – it is simply too enormous an undertaking to yield much value. But surely we as a species must continue to dream big, to chase the impossible, because history has taught us that the journey, the striving for more answers, proves as rewarding and fruitful as the goal that we may never reach.

A paper describing the research was published in the journal Cell.

Life, the livingverse and everything

Science has remade the world, but poetry is still its ambassador to the cosmos

“I SEEM to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Those words, ascribed to Sir Isaac Newton, might still be spoken, with the appropriate correction for sex, by any scientist today.

The discipline of natural science that Newton helped found in the second half of the 17th century has extended humanity’s horizons to a degree he could scarcely have envisaged. Newton lived in a world that thought itself 6,000 years old, knew nothing of chemical elements or disease-causing microbes, believed living creatures could spring spontaneously from mud, hay or dirty bed-linen, and had only just stopped assuming that the sun (and everything else in the universe) revolved around the Earth.

Yet even today, deep problems and deeper mysteries remain. Science cannot yet say how life began or whether the universe is but one of many. Some things people take for granted—that time goes forwards but never backwards, say—are profoundly weird. Other mysteries, no less strange, are not even perceived. One is that 96% of the universe’s contents pass ghostlike and unnoticed through the minuscule remaining fraction, which solipsistic humans are pleased to call “ordinary matter”. Another is how, after billions of years when the Earth was inhabited only by single-celled creatures, animals suddenly popped into existence. Perhaps the deepest mystery of all is how atoms in human brains can consciously perceive the desire to ask all of these questions in the first place, and then move other atoms around to answer them.

Known unknowns

Over the next six weeks we will be running a series of briefs that explore these unsolved scientific questions. Some are more tractable than others. Our first brief, on life’s origin, looks at a chemical puzzle that may well be elucidated over the next decade or so (see article). The nature of the unseen 96% of the universe may start to manifest itself later this year, as the newly cranked-up Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest particle accelerator, begins creating things massive enough to be particles of the “dark matter” that theory predicts.

Other mysteries, such as the unidirectionality of time, probably await lightning-strikes of insight of the sort that produced the theories of relativity a century ago. By contrast, discerning the early history of animals will require a lot of hard graft—the painstaking reconstruction of a jigsaw in which the pieces include palaeontology, genetics and embryology.

Some mysteries may remain so for ever. The idea of a multiverse containing an indefinite, possibly infinite, number of universes, each with its own laws of physics, is mathematically plausible and would deal with the puzzling fact that if the physical laws of the actual, observable universe were only slightly different, life could never have come into existence. With multiverses, every possible set of laws would exist somewhere. Unfortunately, unless the separate universes intrude onto one another, the idea is untestable. As for the nature of consciousness, this is one question which science has not yet fully worked out how to ask. Studying the bits of the brain that seem to generate consciousness does not answer the question of what such perception really is.

Does it all matter, a cynic might ask? Will humans really be better off for knowing such things? The answer, written on the tomb, in St Paul’s Cathedral, of Newton’s contemporary, Sir Christopher Wren, is: “If you seek his monument, look around you.” For the monument to Newton’s pebble-collecting child is no less than the modern world.

Bacteria and Brontosaurus. Oxygen and octane. Quarks and quasars. All are the offspring of Newton’s child. Moreover, it is the manipulation of nature which science permits that has brought today’s unprecedented plenty and prosperity. Most of all, though, science has brought self-knowledge, for it has put humans in their place in two contradictory ways. It has dethroned them as the centre of the universe, by showing that mankind is a Johnny-come-lately, living on a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary star in an unremarkable galaxy that is, itself, one of more than 150 billion such galaxies. But it has also enthroned humanity, revealing the extraordinary nature of the universe’s inner workings in ways that Newton’s contemporaries were only beginning to glimpse. Simultaneously demoted and exalted by science in this unprecedented era of discovery, Homo sapiens still has oceans to survey.

Finnish ZOG Thought-Police: Pro-White Finns Party MP Immonen won't be persecuted for exercising free speech

The National Bureau of Occupation said on Thursday that it will not launch a criminal investigation into a pro-White Facebook post by Finns Party MP Olli Immonen that sparked demonstrations around Finland.

Detective Chief Superintendent Tero Haapala of the NBO said Immonen’s “rant” against multiculturalism [i.e., White genocide] and its supporters did not cross the line to meet the definition of any particular crime such as incitement against an ethnic group. [Somebody should tell Haapala that “multiculturalism” is an “incitement” against Whites.]

In Immonen’s English-language statement on July 24, he called on his “fellow fighters” to “defeat this nightmare of multiculturalism” and to “fight until the end for our homeland” while bursting “this ugly bubble that our enemies live in”.

Hubble finds evidence of galaxy star birth regulated by black-hole fountain

Computer simulations of knots of star formation in the two galaxies show how gas falling into a galaxy's center is controlled by jets from the central black hole.

Astronomers have uncovered a unique process for how the universe's largest elliptical galaxies continue making stars long after their peak years of star birth. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's exquisite high resolution and ultraviolet-light sensitivity allowed the astronomers to see brilliant knots of hot, blue stars forming along the jets of active black holes found in the centers of giant elliptical galaxies.

Combining Hubble data with observations from a suite of ground-based and space telescopes, two independent teams found that that the black hole, jets, and newborn stars are all parts of a self-regulating cycle. High-energy jets shooting from the black hole heat a halo of surrounding gas, controlling the rate at which the gas cools and falls into the galaxy.

The entire cycle is a self-regulating feedback mechanism, like the thermostat on a house's heating and cooling system, because the "puddle" of gas around the black hole provides the fuel that powers the jets. If too much cooling happens, the jets become more powerful and add more heat. And if the jets add too much heat, they reduce their fuel supply and eventually weaken.

The researchers were aided by an exciting, new set of computer simulations of the hydrodynamics of the gas flows developed by Yuan Li of the University of Michigan. "This is the first time we now have models in hand that predict how these things ought to look," explains Donahue. "And when we compare the models to the data, there's a stunning similarity between the star-forming showers we observe and ones that occur in simulations. We're getting a physical insight that we can then apply to models.

Along with Hubble, which shows where the old and the new stars are, the researchers used the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), the Herschel Space Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM-Newton), the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)'s Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA), the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO)'s Kitt Peak WIYN 3.5 meter telescope, and the Magellan Baade 6.5 meter telescope. Together these observatories paint the complete picture of where all of the gas is, from the hottest to the coldest. The suite of telescopes shows how galaxy ecosystems work, including the black hole and its influence on its host galaxy and the gas surrounding that galaxy.

Quarter of Romanians want a Jew-free country – poll

In Romania, nearly a quarter of people told pollsters that the country should have no Jewish residents. Of the 1,000 Romanian adults polled by the Center for Opinion and Market Studies in June, 11 percent said Jews were “a problem for Romania” while 22 percent said they would only like them as tourists, not neighbors. Romanian military dictator, Ion Antonescu, who was executed for war crimes in 1946, is seen as a patriot by over a half of Romanians, the poll showed.

Astronomers unveil a distant protogalaxy connected to the cosmic web

Using the Cosmic Web Imager (CWI) at Palomar Observatory to study a system 10 billion light years away, a team of astronomers led by Caltech has unveiled a galaxy in the making being fed cool gas by a filament of the cosmic web. 

A team of astronomers led by Caltech has discovered a giant swirling disk of gas 10 billion light-years away—a galaxy-in-the-making that is actively being fed cool primordial gas tracing back to the Big Seed. Using the Caltech designed and built Cosmic Web Imager (CWI) at Palomar Observatory, the researchers were able to image the protogalaxy and found that it is connected to a filament of the intergalactic medium, the cosmic web made of diffuse gas that crisscrosses between galaxies and extends throughout the universe.

"This is the first smoking-gun evidence for how galaxies form," says Christopher Martin, professor of physics at Caltech, principal investigator on CWI, and lead author of the new paper. The new observations and measurements provide the first direct confirmation of the so-called cold-flow model of galaxy formation.

"As a proof that a protogalaxy connected to the cosmic web exists and that we can detect it, this is really exciting," he says. "Of course, now you want to know a million things about what the gas falling into galaxies is actually doing, so I'm sure there is going to be more follow up." Martin notes that the team has already identified two additional disks that appear to be receiving gas directly from filaments of the cosmic web in the same way.

Calais migrants: British anarchists infiltrate camps to provoke trouble, police warn

British far-left activists are “manipulating migrants” to stage mass intrusions into the Channel Tunnel and provoke violent clashes with security forces they depict as “savages”, French police have claimed.

The accusations came two days after a French officer was treated for face wounds after being struck by a rock apparently thrown by a Sudanese migrant in the first such incident inside the Eurotunnel site to date.

Migrants made around 1,700 attempts on Sunday night to penetrate the Eurotunnel premises in a bid to get to England.

The previous night, an “organised” group of around 200 migrants tried to “walk” to the UK via the Channel Tunnel, tearing down outer fences and charging past police with tear gas, chanting: “Open the borders!’”.

When they were rebuffed, they staged a sit-in that lasted into the early hours of before finally being dispersed.

Gilles Debove, of police union Unité SGP-Police FO, said police were convinced such action was being encouraged and coordinated by anarchists or far-Left activists, some belonging to the No Borders group.

He told the Telegraph: “I’ve never seen an organised sit-in before. This is being encouraged not by human traffickers, who wish to remain discreet, but by extreme Left elements here to manipulate the migrants in the name of their ideal of imposing a country without borders or police.”

“Among these activists are quite a few Britons,” he added. “For now they have been allowed to act with total impunity. It’s time for a return to the rule of law: they need to be identified and arrested.

“They are seeking opportunities to provoke clashes with the police and violence in the hope that the police will drop their guard (in protecting the site).

“They want to depict us as savages. But if there was any police brutality, it would be all over the news.”

He blamed their influence on a CRS riot policeman being hit in the face by track ballast apparently thrown by a Sudanese migrant, who was arrested. The policeman was taken to hospital for stitches. “They are seeking to stoke migrant hatred of police,” he warned.

This was the first time an officer was injured inside the Eurotunnel site. Last year, an officer suffered shoulder injuries when a migrant knocked him to the ground at the ferry port and another suffered stomach wounds when migrants slammed a lorry door into him during a motorway check.

With their numbers now having reached around 4,000 in Calais, migrants from countries including Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Afghanistan are making increasingly desperate attempts to reach Britain.

At least 10 have died since June seeking to illegally reach what many view as an “Eldorado". However, reports of violence have to date been extremely low.

Calais Migrant Solidarity, a help network relaying unofficial reports of police brutality, denied there was any radical activist plot to manipulate the migrants and that these were "simply desperate people coming together to protest in a more organised way because that's the only recourse they have to get their voices heard".

Jason, a "European" spokesman, said: "Sometimes people accompany migrants when they actually go on demonstrations but I haven't seen anyone organising or manipulating any groups here. That's a fabrication.

"The meetings were held exclusively among the migrants. They decided to go to the tunnel as together a group as they had had no success individually."

He accused the police of brutality and said he suspected it used "military grade" gas on migrants that knocked some unconscious on Saturday although they were, he insisted, nowhere near breaking into the inner Eurotunnel area and were simply making a "peaceful protest".

"The police have been getting bad press of late and are exaggerating claims of violence and intrusions,” he said.

He said he expected more "organised protests" blocking the road to the Eurotunnel entrance "in the coming days".

At the main migrant camp outside Calais known as the Jungle, there is evidence of more radical activities at work.

On a caravan that acts as an information bureau, a map denounces “Fortress Europe”, showing Italy as racist, France as colonialist, Germany as repressive and Britain as exploitative.

Printed sheets of advice on how to improve their chances of claiming asylum, which carry the contact details of several British-based migrants' rights groups.

The documents warn migrants British Home Office officials are “not your friends” and “will try to refuse your claim and remove you” unless convinced otherwise. They also include lists of the various questions that Home Office officials use to rumble bogus applicants.

One trick question is to ask the denominations of the currency in the country they claim to have come from. Another is to inquire the name of the president, or the months in the calendar year. “Prepare for the interview and know your story well,” the documents advise.

Migrants are told to choose a "category", which proves that are under grave danger in their homeland. Reasons given include ‘"race and religion" and "being gay in some countries".

Scientists Identify the Cosmos' Largest Feature

Astronomers have found a structure in the universe so huge, that current cosmological theory says it shouldn't exist.

A US-Hungarian team recently discovered a ring of nine gamma ray bursts, in nine distant galaxies, 5 billion light years across. For comparison, our galaxy is just a hundred thousand light-years across. This suggests that the ring is more than 5 billion light years across. According to Professor Lajos Balazs of Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, there is only a 1 in 20,000 probability the GRBs being are in this distribution by chance.

Modern astrophysical models suggest that the upper size limit for cosmic structures should be no more than 1.2 billion light-years. The newly discovered ring is almost five times as large. The structure also defies a widely accepted cosmological principle, which says that the universe would look uniform when observed at the largest scales. Astronomers may need to radically revise their theories of the evolution of the cosmos.

Jobbik Party Confirms Hungarian Lawmakers to Visit Crimea in Fall

A member of Hungary’s Jobbik party confirmed to Sputnik on Friday that his party had received an official invitation to visit Crimea and was planning to make the trip sometime in the fall.

Marton Gyongyosi, Vice-Chairman, Foreign Affairs Committee, Hungarian National Assembly

“At the moment we cannot say anything concrete. We do have a valid invitation to Crimea for October, but haven’t yet concretized the dates and fixed the schedule and the agenda for the trip. But we do have a plan to visit Crimea this autumn,” Marton Gyongyosi, who is vice-chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Hungarian National Assembly, said.

He added that the invitation was extended to members of the Jobbik party, who are “considering to represent the party at the highest level.”

The delegation will include the chairman and other party members.

Earlier in July, a 10-member delegation of French lawmakers traveled to Crimea to assess the situation on the ground and meet local officials.

Italy’s influential opposition Five Star Movement (M5S) party and northern Italy’s regional Lega Nord party are also planning to visit Crimea in the fall.

Video: The Release of Golden Dawn MP Panagiotis Iliopoulos on July 11th

“Today, after 18 months of unlawful and unjust imprisonment, we’re more experienced and creative than ever. Some believed that with the imprisonment of Golden Dawn’s MPs that they could break us and that we would at least take a step back from our ideas and our positions. They made a serious mistake. Golden Dawn is everywhere, she has a fighting presence at all the critical political developments and this will continue for many more years to come. Let it be known to everyone that we are the only patriotic force in the country, which resists, not just to the Memorandums of the loan sharks, but also to the new left Memorandums of Tsipras. As for our parajudiciary case, those who set up and carried out the largest conspiracy of the century in our Fatherland, in other words the now notorious Golden Dawn trial, they can rest assured and the can be absolutely confident that very soon they will be brought to justice to answer for their crimes. We continue our struggle, we’re here, we’ll change Greece for us, but above all for our children.”

Supercuck!

Yes, it's Supercuck, strange visitor from planet Plutocrat, who came to Earth with Jew-backing and deep pockets far beyond those of mortal White men. Supercuck, who can destroy the mightiest of empires with his calculated stupidity, bend truth through his lying teeth, and who, disguised as Cuck Kent, mild-mannered milk sop milquetoast mop-boy for the LGBTQIA's local nightclub, the Crisco Disco, fights a never-ending battle for gunpoint balkanization, White genocide, and the Americuck way.

How the Nordic pro-White has stolen the left’s ground on welfare

Far-right political parties are making huge gains across Nordic countries as new champions of a working class alienated by the cosmopolitan left

Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Akesson celebrates his party’s gains at the general election last September. 

“The basis of the home is commonality and mutuality. A good home is not aware of any privileged or slighted, no darlings and no stepchildren. You see no one despise the other, no one who tries to gain advantage of others… In the good home you find compassion, cooperation, helpfulness.”

Per Albin Hansson, Swedish prime minister, 1932-1946

Every July, thousands of politicians, lobbyists and journalists desert Stockholm in a seasonal exodus of the well-connected. Their destination is Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, for a festival of politics that showcases the consensual virtues associated with Scandinavia. During Almedalen week, named after the park in the main town of Visby, Social Democrats rub along with Liberals, Conservatives, Socialists and Greens in the narrow medieval streets, competing for bar space, television interview slots and seats at myriad fringe meetings held throughout the day.

The mood is normally convivial, as befits a political elite at play before the summer break begins. But this year there was a palpable edge. On the Wednesday evening, bodyguards in dark suits and sunglasses were prowling around a main stage, on which a sniffer dog was searching. Police vans lined a nearby road.

The crowd that began to gather was notably different from the habitual Almedalen set – poorer, older and less fashionably dressed. Middle-aged couples from the south mingled with pensioners and the occasional skinhead. This was another Sweden, overwhelmingly provincial and, in these monied surroundings, somewhat self-conscious. It had assembled to listen to Jimmie Åkesson, the latest Scandinavian leader to take his party from the far-right fringes of politics to the mainstream.

Ostracised within the Swedish parliament, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats are the country’s fastest-growing political force. Before last September’s general election, one of their candidates had to withdraw when photographs appeared of her wearing a swastika armband. Such reminders of the party’s neo-fascist roots are a regular occurrence, but a substantial swathe of the Swedish electorate does not seem to care. The SD gained 12.9% of the vote at the election, more than doubling its share and making it Sweden’s third-largest political movement. Latest opinion polls put the party above 18%, snapping at the heels of the Social Democrats, who run an enfeebled minority government.

The pitch to voters was summed up by Åkesson in the runup to last autumn’s poll, when he tweeted: “The election is a choice between mass immigration and welfare. You choose.”

Ragna, a policewoman from Västerås, had travelled to Visby for the day to hear Åkesson. She believes that tweet got to the heart of the matter: “Instead of taking more and more people in, we have to take better care of the people who are already here,” she says. “We have housing shortages that mean our young people are trapped living with their parents. If times are tough and the state doesn’t have money, we have to think about our own people.”

Ignoring one lone protester waving an “SD = Racist” placard, Henrik Poulstrom, a 29-year-old accountant, shrugged off the idea that he might be following an extremist party. “They’re at the centre of the spectrum. They take their policies on immigration from the right and their policies on defending the welfare state from the left.” His father chipped in: “Åkesson wants to defend the way our society is. He thinks about things from a Swedish perspective.”

Åkesson joined the party in the bad old days of the mid-1990s, when its neo-Nazi associations were in plain view. The logo back then was a National Front-style flaming torch, in the colours of the Swedish flag. But when he appeared at Almedalen, wearing sharp glasses, an open-necked shirt, blue jacket and chinos, the 36-year-old Lund graduate resembled an ambitious mid-ranking company manager. Behind him was the new party emblem, introduced in 2006 – a soothing blue and yellow anemone hepatica flower, and the slogan: “Sweden’s Opposition.”

Three themes dominated the speech: the danger of Islamism, which Åkesson has described as “the Nazism of our times”; the need to stop the flow of refugees and asylum seekers – Sweden takes more asylum seekers per capita than any other EU country; and the desire to create a better society for Sweden’s children. Åkesson claimed that if the Sweden Democrats eventually claim a place in government, Swedish children would experience “the best childhood in the world”. As a taster, a more generous policy on pay for primary school teachers was unveiled. Schools and healthcare will, Åkesson stated, be a priority for any Sweden Democrats administration.

The entire article is accessible here.

Hungary’s Orban: Europe’s Existence Threatened by Influx of Invaders

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Saturday that Europe’s existence is under threat from the huge influx of migrants to the region, but that granting Brussels more power isn’t the way to solve the bloc’s problems.

Escalating political unrest in the Middle East and North Africa has led to a surge of migrants to the European Union this year. In the first half of 2015, 137,000 migrants reached Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain—an 83% increase compared with the same period last year, according to the United Nations.

“For us, Europe is at stake today; Europeans’ way of life; European values; the survival or demise of European nations, or rather, their transformation beyond recognition,” Mr. Orban said in a speech in Baile Tusnad, which is part of neighboring Romania and has a large number of ethnic Hungarians.

Hungary has become a major transit country for migrants this year with some 71,200 entering the country in the first six months, almost double the amount for the whole of 2014, Hungarian police data showed. After crossing the Balkans, migrants, mostly from Syria and Afghanistan, enter Hungary to seek registration for EU asylum before heading to the bloc’s more developed western and northern countries.

“The question is not what sort of a Europe we Hungarians would like to live in but whether what we call Europe today will continue to exist. We would like Europe to continue to belong to Europeans,” Mr. Orban added.

Hungary’s government supports a solution that lets each EU member state deal with its border protection the way it sees fit, an asylum system that provides shelter for “real” asylum seekers but is tough on illegal immigrants, and provides aid to the countries which their people are fleeing, a government spokesman has said.

Mr. Orban criticized certain unnamed factions in the EU and Brussels, accusing them of wanting to destroy the current form of the union and replace it with a “united states of Europe,” while weakening national sovereignty and eliminating national identity—something that Hungary strongly rejects, he added.

“The left has always looked upon nations, national identities with suspicion. They reckon that an escalation of immigration could terminally weaken, even eliminate the [EU’s] structure of nation states, and thus bring about the left’s unfulfilled historic goal,” Mr. Orban said.

Unlike other EU member countries, Hungary rejects giving a home to “masses of people coming from a different civilization,” Mr. Orban said. There is a clear connection between the rise of terrorism, higher unemployment, increasing crime rates with the rise in illegal immigration, he added.

In an effort to deter migrants, Hungary has started the construction of a 4-meter (13-foot) high fence on its 175-kilometer (110-mile) border with non-EU member Serbia, where most of the migrants en route to Austria and Germany enter Hungary.

Hungary will complete the fence by the end of August, Mr. Orban said.

NASA estimates 1 billion ‘Earths’ in our galaxy alone

There are a billion Earths in this galaxy, roughly speaking. Not a million. A billion. We’re talking 1 billion rocky planets that are approximately the size of the Earth and are orbiting familiar-looking yellow-sunshine stars in the orbital “habitable zone” where water could be liquid at the surface.

That’s a billion planets where human beings, or their genetically modified descendants, as well as their dogs and cats and tomato plants and crepe myrtle trees and ladybugs and earthworms and whatnot, could plausibly live.

The estimate comes from NASA scientist Natalie Batalha. Let’s go through some background information to see how she got to that number. Thank you, Dr. Batalha! Keep in mind, she is using conservative estimates. So 1 billion may be a little low.

Before we make plans for colonizing these other Earths, we should pause for a second to note that there are two "Earth-like" planets orbiting our own sun and much, much closer to home than any of these extrasolar planets. Getting Venus in shape for habitability would be a terraforming challenge of the first order. Mars is potentially more congenial, but still an unpleasant place by our standards. Before we colonize Mars, we'll probably colonize the bottom of our shallow seas. Your scribbler will avoid going into a full rant about people who think there's a do-over in space for when we ruin our own planet.