Exclusive: Read the Internal Documents Exposing the Former Secret Service Agents Who Went Through Greenpeace's Trash

A Mother Jones exclusive investigation has revealed that a security firm run by cops and former Secret Service agents spied on Greenpeace, Fenton Communications, the Center for Food Safety, and other progressive groups. The most interesting company communiques you weren't supposed to see? Check out the glow-in-the-dark Taco Bell emails and the handwritten notes about which green groups to dumpster-dive in D.C. We've made them public for the first time; they're available on the site here. You'll have to read James Ridgeway's story itself to find out about the Mary Kay cosmetics, Obama, and Scientology angles, though.

Yes, it's weird. Wait'll you get to the Greenpeace undercover operatives part.

BBI also conducted background checks for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; provided "protective services" for the National Rifle Association; handled "crisis management" for the Gallo wine company; engaged in "information collection" for Wal-Mart. It conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in an acrimonious child custody battle with billionaire Ronald Perelman. And for Mary Kay, BBI mounted "surveillance" and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records? Halliburton and Blackwater.

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Scientists Now Expect to Find Gravitational Waves

A diagram of the LIGO detector, which will detect the ripples in space-time by using a device called a laser interferometer. The time it takes light to travel between suspended mirrors is measured with high precision using controlled laser light. Credit: LIGO Laboratory

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A $205 million upgrade will allow a laser-wielding observatory to monitor tens of thousands of galaxies for mysterious gravitational waves.

Leading investigators are confident that the Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories) Project will be able for the first time to detect gravitational waves from neutron stars and black holes, as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.

"With the limited LIGO range at time, it wasn't guaranteed detection," said Albert Lazzarini, deputy director of LIGO at the California Institute of Technology. "With Advanced LIGO, it'd be very surprising from a relativity perspective if we didn't observe anything."

Gravitational waves are ripples thought to occur in the fabric of space-time that result from interstellar collisions, explosions, or the dramatic movement of large and extremely dense objects such as neutron stars. Those ripples can then pass through the space-time that Earth occupies, causing a slight distortion which Advanced LIGO is meant to pick up on.

How it works

LIGO tries to detect gravitational waves using highly precise lasers to measure the time it takes light to travel between mirrors. Two sets of facing mirrors sit at a 90 degree angle, forming something like an "L" shape that meets at a corner. A laser beam is shot through an "L" shaped splitter at the corner, which splits the beam into two beams that strike each set of mirrors.

The laser interferometer measures how long the laser light bounces back and forth between the mirrors on the "L" legs before returning to a light detector at the "L" corner. They should theoretically return to the light detector at the same time because the mirror legs are identical distances – unless a passing gravitational wave distorts the local space-time fabric and changes the distance.

But the observatory, operational since 2002, has yet to detect the elusive, still-theoretical waves.

Scientists foresaw that advances in laser technology and mirrors would allow for even greater sensitivity when LIGO was first proposed, and so the Advanced LIGO Project became a natural upgrade for the observatory. The National Science Foundation recently approved the proposal to upgrade LIGO over the next seven years, starting with $32.75 million in 2008.

"The first several hours of observation with new instruments will equal almost the first year of observation with LIGO's current instruments," Lazzarini said. "We can probe something like several hundred galaxies out to the Virgo cluster [59 million light-years away] with LIGO, but increase that by a factor of one thousand and you go to the cosmological regime of measuring many tens of thousands of galaxies."

That thousand-fold increase in coverage comes from boosting LIGO's sensitivity 10 times over.

Larger mirrors made of better materials will reduce the background "noise" from the random motion of atoms at room temperature, and the laser power is being pumped from 10 watts to 180 watts. Advanced LIGO will also be better cushioned from any terrestrial vibrations coming through the ground, thanks to an active servo-controlled system that replaces an older, passive spring system.

"We achieved several milestones with the initial LIGO sensitivity," Lazzarini noted, pointing out that the two main LIGO facilities at Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana had just finished a two-year run to test the design's sensitivity. LIGO requires at least two widely separated detectors working simultaneously to rule out false signals and confirm when gravitational waves might pass through the Earth.

More planned

Advanced LIGO may eventually become part of a greater global network of gravitational wave detectors, thanks to strong international collaboration.

German and British contributors are providing the laser and mirror suspension systems respectively for the upgraded observatory, and Advanced LIGO has grown its cooperation with Europe's Virgo detector located near Pisa, Italy. Japan has also begun working towards building a gravitational wave detector.

"The gravitational wave community supports very strongly indeed the upgrade to LIGO – this upgrade was in fact planned from the very start of the LIGO project and has always been an integral part of the planned evolution of the detector performance," said Jim Hough, University of Glasgow physicist.

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Frog without lungs found in Indonesia

AP Photo: In this photo released by David Bickford, an aquatic frog Barbourula kalimantanensis , is...

BANGKOK, Thailand - A frog has been found in a remote part of Indonesia that has no lungs and breathes through its skin, a discovery that researchers said Thursday could provide insight into what drives evolution in certain species.

The aquatic frog Barbourula kalimantanensis was found in a remote part of Indonesia's Kalimantan province on Borneo island during an expedition in August 2007, said David Bickford, an evolutionary biologist at the National University of Singapore. Bickford was part of the trip and co-authored a paper on the find that appeared in this week's edition of the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology.

Bickford said the species is the first frog known to science without lungs and joins a short list of amphibians with this unusual trait, including a few species of salamanders and a wormlike creature known as a caecilian.

"These are about the most ancient and bizarre frogs you can get on the planet," Bickford said of the brown amphibian with bulging eyes and a tendency to flatten itself as it glides across the water.

"They are like a squished version of Jabba the Hutt," he said, referring to the character from Star Wars. "They are flat and have eyes that float above the water. They have skin flaps coming off their arms and legs."

Bickford's Indonesian colleague, Djoko Iskandar, first came across the frog 30 years ago and has been searching for it ever since. He didn't know the frog was lungless until they cut eight of the specimens open in the lab.

Graeme Gillespie, director of conservation and science at Zoos Victoria in Australia, called the frog "evolutionarily unique." He said the eight specimens examined in the lab showed the lunglessness was consistent with the species and not "a freak of nature." Gillespie was not a member of the expedition or the research team.

Bickford surmised that the frog had evolved to adapt to its difficult surroundings, in which it has to navigate cold, rapidly moving streams that are rich in oxygen.

"It's an extreme adaptation that was probably brought about by these fast-moving streams," Bickford said, adding that it probably needed to reduce its buoyancy in order to keep from being swept down the mountainous rivers.

He said the frog could help scientists understand the environmental factors that contribute to "extreme evolutionary change" since its closest relative in the Philippines and other frogs have lungs.

Bickford and Gillespie said the frog's discovery adds urgency to the need to protect its river habitat, which in recent years has become polluted due to widespread illegal logging and gold mining. Once-pristine waters are now brown and clogged with silt, they said.

"The gold mining is completely illegal and small scale. But when there are thousands of them on the river, it really has a huge impact," Bickford said. "Pretty soon the frogs will run out of the river."

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