Last June, David Gershon saw Al Gore’s global warming documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ The time was ripe, he realized, to finish an old project. In 2000, Mr. Gershon created a step-by-step program, Ã la Weight Watchers, designed to reduce a person’s carbon footprint. The idea received positive reviews after a pilot program was run in Portland, Ore., but it eventually fell by the wayside for lack of interest. ‘The world wasn’t ready,’ says Gershon, who heads the Empowerment Institute in Woodstock, N.Y., a consulting organization that specializes in changing group behavior. But since then, Americans witnessed the catastrophic fury of hurricane Katrina, which, if nothing else, showed them what a major city looks like underwater. A substantial body of evidence supporting the idea of human-induced global warming accumulated. And, of course, Mr. Gore made his movie. Attitudes toward global warming had shifted considerably. (Indeed, a recent poll by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that nearly half of Americans cited global warming as the No. 1 environmental concern; in 2003, only one-fifth considered it that critical.) Gershon put his nose to the grindstone, and a slim workbook titled ‘Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to […]
It was an early May morning in 2005, and Patricia McDermott had no reason to expect anything but a typical commute to her job as an X-ray technician. Riding the No. 33 bus through the predawn streets of Philadelphia, McDermott got off at her regular stop — the post office on the corner of Ninth and Market streets. She began walking south, toward Pennsylvania Hospital, but she never made it to work. Minutes after she got off the bus, McDermott was discovered lifeless on the street by a passing driver. Police on the scene were stumped at first. Was it a robbery, an accident or a suicide? ‘There was blood on the sidewalk,’ said Howard Peterman, one of the first detectives to respond. ‘We looked around for evidence for weapons. No ballistic evidence. We looked up to see if she had jumped from the building. ¦ [There was] no evidence to show us what had happened.’ But Peterman noticed something else when he looked up — surveillance cameras mounted all around the post office. Americans have grown accustomed to being filmed as part of their daily routines — cameras are commonplace at ATMs, convenience […]
Try connecting to a high-speed wireless network from a car, and you are pretty much limited to one method: rigging your laptop computer with a special modem and subscribing to a costly, and sometimes temperamental, wireless service. But Autonet Mobile, a start-up wireless technology company based in San Francisco, is expected to announce this week that it has reached an agreement with Avis Rent A Car System to provide a rolling Wi-Fi hotspot to Avis customers by March. For $10.95 a day, Avis will issue motorists a notebook-size portable device that plugs into a car’s power supply and delivers a high-speed Internet connection. For the moment, the service is intended for business travelers. But Autonet sees its service appealing to families traveling with their children, although its unit is expected to cost $399, about twice as much as current cellular card technology, plus $49 a month for service. A mobile Wi-Fi hotspot that lets laptops and personal digital assistants link to the Internet without the benefit of wires represents an important step toward what technology experts call the ‘connected car.’ ‘This shows us a glimpse of where we will be in the future,’ said Roger Entner, […]
WASHINGTON — There’s a big change coming for pregnant women: Down syndrome testing no longer hinges on whether they’re older or younger than 35. This week, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists begins recommending that every pregnant woman, regardless of age, be offered a choice of tests for this common birth defect. The main reason: Tests far less invasive than the long-used amniocentesis are now widely available, some that can tell in the first trimester the risk of a fetus having Down syndrome or other chromosomal defects. It’s a change that promises to decrease unnecessary amnios giving mothers-to-be peace of mind without the ordeal while also detecting Down syndrome in moms who otherwise would have gone unchecked. The new guideline is published in the January issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. About one in 800 babies has Down syndrome, a condition where having an extra chromosome causes mental retardation, a characteristic broad, flat face and small head and, often, serious heart defects. Age 35 was always a somewhat arbitrary threshhold for urging mothers-to-be to seek testing. Yes, the older women are, the higher their risk of having a baby with Down syndrome. […]
CALGARY, Alberta — A chunk of ice bigger than the area of Manhattan broke from an ice shelf in Canada’s far north and could wreak havoc if it starts to float westward toward oil-drilling regions and shipping lanes next summer, a researcher said on Friday. Global warming could be one cause of the break of the Ayles Ice Shelf at Ellesmere Island, which occurred in the summer of 2005 but was only detected recently by satellite photos, said Luke Copland, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s geography department. It was the largest such break in nearly three decades, casting an ice floe with an area of 66 square km (25 square miles) adrift in the Arctic Ocean, said Copland, who specializes in the study of glaciers and ice masses. Manhattan has an area of 61 square km (24 square miles). The mass is now 50 square km (19 square miles) in size. ‘The Arctic is all frozen up for the winter and it’s stuck in the sea ice about 50 km (30 miles) off the coast,’ he said. ‘The risk is that next summer, as that sea ice melts, this large ice island […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
