If you have ever wondered about the government’s ability to control the civilian airwaves, you will have your answer on November 9th.

On that day, federal authorities are going to shut off all television and radio communications simultaneously at 2:00PM EST to complete the first ever test of the national Emergency Alert System (EAS).

This isn’t a wild conspiracy theory. The upcoming test is posted on the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau website.

Only the President has the authority to activate EAS at the national level, and he has delegated that authority to the Director of FEMA. The test will be conducted jointly by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through FEMA, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS).

In essence, the authority to seize control of all television and civilian communication has been asserted by the executive branch and handed to a government agency.

The EAS has been around since 1994. Its precursor, the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS), started back in 1963. Television and radio broadcasters, satellite radio and satellite television providers, cable television and wireline video providers are all involved in the system.

So this begs the question: is the first ever national EAS test really a big deal?

Probably not. At least, not yet.

But there are some troubling factors all coming together right now that could conceivably trigger a real usage of the EAS system in the not too distant future. A European financial collapse could bring down U.S. markets. What is now the “Occupy” movement could lead to widespread civil unrest. And there are ominous signs that radical groups such as Anonymous will attempt something major on November 5th- Guy Fawke’s day.

Now we know in the event of a major crisis, the American people will be told with one voice, at the same time, about an emergency.

All thats left to determine is who will have control of the EAS when that day comes, and what their message will be.

Researchers genetically engineered goats to produce milk which is packed with the same protein as silk spiders.

Once this is milked out it can be spun out and weaved into a material that is ten times stronger than steel.

The fabric can then be blended with human skin to make what the scientists hope will be tough enough to stop even a bullet.

Dutch researcher Jalila Essaidi said the 'spidersilk' project was called '2.6g 329m/s' after the weight and the velocity of a .22 calibre long rifle bullet.

Working with the Forensic Genomics Consortium in the Netherlands, she said the goal was to replace the keratin in our skin with the spider’s silk.

The first stage involves growing a layer of real skin around a sample of the bulletproof skin, which takes about five weeks.

Essaidi said that the project was making science fiction a reality, even if the tests results were not yet perfect.

She said that silk has a long history of using battle in combat and that Genghis Khan once issued all his horsemen with silk vests as an arrow hitting silk does not break, meaning you can tease it out.

‘Imagine a spidersilk vest, capable of catching bullets, the modern day equivalent of Genghis Khan’s arrows,’ she said.

‘Now, let’s take this one step further, why bother with a vest: imagine replacing keratin, the protein responsible for the toughness of the human skin, with this spidersilk protein.

‘This is possible by adding the silk producing genes of a spider to the gnome of a human: creating a bulletproof human.

‘Science-fiction? Maybe, but we can get a feeling of what this transhumanistic idea would be like by letting a bulletproof matrix of spidersilk merge with an in vitro human skin.’

Bullet proof vests have been around for decades but skin that can stop them has only been the preserve of science fiction.

The most famous example is Superman, or the Man of Steel - bullets simply ricochet off of him.

A mobile application for Google's Android smartphones can secretly record users' phone calls and transmit them to malicious hackers, security researchers have found.

Once downloaded by a user, the app – which the researcher has not named, but seems to have a name relating to "System Messages" – surreptitiously stores a recording of the user's incoming and outgoing calls to the phone's memory card, according to the New York-based security experts CA Technologies.

In a blog post unveiling the finding, researcher Dinesh Venkatesan said the so-called "Trojan app" is one of the most invasive they have ever uncovered. He also warned that there is an increasing trend targeting smartphones using Google's Android software, which allows developers to submit apps with little vetting.

Google had not returned requests for comment at the time of publication.

Venkateskan wrote on the researcher's official blog: "In one of our earlier blogs, we have demonstrated how a Trojan logs all the details of incoming/outgoing calls and call duration in a text file.

"This Trojan is more advanced as it records the conversation itself in 'amr' format [which is optimised for recording speech]. Also it has many other malicious activities that we have seen in many of the earlier malware incidents targeted for Android platform."

The app, which was not named by the researchers for security reasons, asks users' permission to intercept outgoing calls and record audio before it is installed. Once downloaded, all calls the user makes will be logged on the phone's memory – which can potentially be accessed by the app's makers. The sound is filed in a folder called shangzhou/callrecord, suggesting that its author is Chinese.

Venkatesan added: "As it is already widely acknowledged that this year is the year of mobile malware, we advise smartphone users to be more logical and exercise the basic security principles while surfing and installing any applications."

Only last month security experts warned over a new strain of the Zeus virus – known to be one of the most pernicious on the internet and which targets login details for banks – that specifically targeted Android smartphones.

Almost 52m Android smartphones were shipped worldwide in the second quarter of this year – almost a fivefold increase year-on-year – according to market researchers Canalys. The huge increase is attributed to the large number of manufacturers, including HTC, Samsung and Motorola, now making handsets using Google's software.