The 21st century has seen rapid urbanisation and the global population is now expected to grow to more than 8.3 billion by 2050. Currently, 800m hectares – 38% of the earth’s land surface – is farmed and we’ll soon need to give over another 100m hectares if we continue to use current agricultural methods. That’s not additional fertile land that actually exists though, so some are investigating the potential of vertical farming.

While there is a man in Bolivia said to be the oldest living person in the world, at 123 years of age, a village in China is boasting ages far older than the global average, and few suffer from any health problems. Scientists believe the secret is in their diet, which actually includes lots of hempseed.

Most natural ways to soothe the common cold aim to increase your immunity to the invasive viruses, and include vitamins C & D, zinc, turmeric and essential oils

There is quite a barrage of information about what not to do in order to stay healthy – don’t eat processed food, don’t drink too much alcohol, and don’t watch too much television top the list. But instead of focusing on what you shouldn’t do to improve your health, here are 10 extremely simple ways to become more healthy today, with very little effort:

Water is a bountiful gift of nature. We see it all around us in the falling rain, lakes, rivers, the ocean, early morning dew, waterfalls, taps, swimming pools, showers and even plastic bottles. Until the recent industrial era we drank water freely from streams and rivers, not giving a second thought to whether it was safe – it just was. So where did things go so wrong? With our bodies composed of somewhere upwards of 60% water, it is an important element for human life; a basic human right. When did water become a controlled commodity?

Living in this day and age where there are so many obvious changes and shifts on the planet through the weather upheavals, occupy movements, continual wars throughout the globe, coupled with the emotional instability of many in the nation, it is also true that many of us are waking up to something greater within ourselves. Perhaps you, too, have had unexplained experiences with the paranormal, time travel, out of body experiences, and the like and wish there was a place to get some answers. Following is a brief story and explanation of what is called a “parallel” reality.

Within the next five years, using mobile devices simply for communication will seem outdated. The Internet of Things (IoT) will allow consumers to interact with nearly every appliance and device they own. Your refrigerator will let you know when you’re running low on milk, your dishwasher will inform you when it’s ready to be emptied. It’s possible that you will be getting more text messages from your devices than from human beings.

In the study, researchers found that people slept for 20 to 25 minutes less on average on nights with a full moon, compared with how long they slept on nights with a quarter moon.

People taking dopamine for Parkinson’s disease sometimes begin to generate a lot of artwork. New research differentiates this creative expressiveness from obsessive or impulsive tendencies.

There has been an experiment that proves certain animals they do know what language you’re saying it in. Scientists at the University of Barcelona have figured out that animals can distinguish between different human languages.

What is the Federal Reserve? How did it come into existence? Is it part of the federal government? How does it create money? Why is the public kept in the dark about these important matters? In this feature-length documentary film, The Corbett Report explores these important questions and pulls back the curtain on America’s central bank.

Jonathan Cole provides a comparison of scientific evidence for 9/11 with the Copernican model of a Sun-centered solar system. Most people believe the official explanation and refuse to alter their viewpoint, even when contradictory evidence is presented.

There is little doubt that the United States will soon run out of steam in its march across the world and a crackdown at home while reckless economic policy continues to be dictated from the halls of Wall Street. Yet the decline of the United States is not simply the result of a few years of stupid mistakes made by the ruling class. The truth is that the end of America is nothing more than a waypoint in a script that was written long ago

Lee Camp shows the shocking 1994 video in which Dick Cheney specifically states why the U.S. did not invade Iraq after Desert Storm: “If we would have gone into Bagdad we would have been all alone, it would have been a US occupation of Iraq… Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Suddam Hussein’s government, then what are you gonna put in it’s place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrian’s would like to have to the west, part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim (we fought them for eight years), in the north you’ve got the Kurds… it’s a quagmire.”

President Woodrow Wilson saw a horrible danger to his country, looked it in the eye, and decided that instead of trying to decentralize and dismantle that overarching power, he would hope against hope that greater cooperation among leaders of nations would bring sanity and peace and freedom of the individual. Of course, he was wrong. Wilson knew he was entangled with those very powers that were destroying the best of what American stood for. Nevertheless, no modern President has made more revealing comments on the existence and nature of the shadow government, the real rulers of America.

Just days after the tragic crash of a Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, Western politicians and media joined together to gain the maximum propaganda value from the disaster. It had to be Russia; it had to be Putin, they said. President Obama held a press conference to claim — even before an investigation — that it was pro-Russian rebels in the region who were responsible. His ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, did the same at the UN Security Council — just one day after the crash! While western media outlets rush to repeat government propaganda on the event, there are a few things they will not report. Read on…

The U.S. media’s Ukraine bias regarding the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 has been obvious, siding with the Kiev regime and bashing ethnic Russian rebels and Russia’s President Putin. But now – with the scramble to blame Putin for the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down – the shoddy journalism has grown truly dangerous.

Egyptian-American reporter Ayman Mohyeldin witnessed and reported the brutal Israeli killing of four young boys as they played soccer on a beach in Gaza City. He has now been removed completely from reporting on Gaza by a top NBC executive, who ordered Mohyeldin to leave Gaza immediately.

ABC News’ Diane Sawyer misidentified scenes of the aftermath of Israeli missile strikes in Gaza as destruction caused by Palestinian rocket fire. As Sawyer segued into the segment, she says, “We take you overseas now to the rockets raining down on Israel today as Israel tried to shoot them out of the sky.” Next to her is video footage not of Israelis or even Israel, but of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. Sawyer then incorrectly describes an image of a Palestinian family gathering belongings in the smoking debris of a missile-hit home in Gaza as “an Israeli family trying to salvage what they can.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sits down with Democracy Now! inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been living in political asylum for over two years. Assange explains his critique of “big power” First Look Media and The Intercept for agreeing not to name a country targeted by bulk National Security Agency spying, following U.S. government concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. Assange and WikiLeaks went on to reveal the targeted country, Afghanistan, which along with the Bahamas had all of its cell phone calls recorded. “That is as great an assault to sovereignty as you can imagine, other than completely militarily occupying a country, to record the intimate phone calls of every single Afghan citizen,” Assange says. “My perspective is, [this is] up to the Afghan people.” Assange also gives an overview of the close to eight million documents WikiLeaks has released since 2007 about nearly every country in the world; details how WikiLeaks helped Edward Snowden evade U.S. arrest and find political asylum in Russia; and addresses his prospects for ever being able to leave the Ecuadorean embassy without fear of arrest.

Senior US intelligence officials told reporters Tuesday they have no evidence of a direct Russian role in the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. Although standing by the claim that rebels used a SA-11 surface-to-air missile to shoot down the aircraft, they also stated it was most likely not intentional.

The UN Security Council has condemned the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine and called for an international probe into the incident in a unanimously adopted resolution. All 15-member states voted to pass the Australia-proposed resolution, condemning “in the strongest terms” the crash of Malaysian plane on July 17 in Donetsk region of Ukraine, which resulted in 298 people dead.

The question now looming large over the United Nations is why China and Russia aren’t initiating a new draft resolution condemning the aerial bombardments of civilians in Gaza, demanding a no-fly zone and accusing Israelis of war crimes. Such a resolution is certain to be vetoed by one, or all three, of the Western powers in the UNSC, as China and Russia did on the resolutions against Syria. But this time around, it will be the Western powers on the defensive, trying to protect the interests of a country accused of civilian killings and war crimes.

Evidence presented by Ukraine to implicate Russia in the shoot down of the Malaysian Airlines plane appears to have been fabricated.

Abby Martin speaks with RT Arabic correspondent Reema Abuhamdieh about the escalation of violence in Gaza, and the conditions for Israel’s ground invasion. Abby then reports on the militant group ISIS seizing 52 US-made heavy artillery cannons, going over several other examples of US weapons playing a role in almost every major global conflict. Abby then goes over a the case a botched sting operation in Miami-Dade Florida, where officers shot and killed 4 suspects including an informant who voluntarily offered to help police. Abby also highlights the nature of disastrous US law enforcement policies that perpetuate these failed raids. BTS wraps up the show with an interview with journalist and host of Media Roots Radio, Robbie Martin, going over why Facebook is hiring police officers to aid in surveillance, as well as why more people aren’t outraged about private sector surveillance.