The world’s largest building project is a revolutionary eco-city of electric cars and zero emissions near Shanghai. Wang Enming pauses as he emerges from the subway in Dongtan to listen to the sound of flocks of birds settling on the wetlands near the metro station, undisturbed by man as they prepare for a winter migration. Cycling the remaining three minutes home to his apartment, he marvels again at the fresh breeze coming off the mighty Yangtze river, which is never cleaner than at this point at the world’s first eco-city near Shanghai. The power that opens the door to his apartment comes from a solar cell on the roof, while the water he uses for his evening shower is recycled, as is all waste in this city of half a million residents. His dinner of boiled rice, spinach and spicy chicken has all been locally produced using organic methods. Later, he’ll stroll down to the car club and rent a battery-powered sports car and whizz through the tunnel back to Shanghai to cruise the Bund. This is one possible vision of China in 25 years’ time, low carbon-footprint living in the eco-city of the future. Grim apocalyptic […]
A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act. The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists’ ability to probe people’s minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future. The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way. ‘Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,’ said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University. The research builds on a series of recent studies in which brain imaging has been used to identify tell-tale activity linked to lying, […]
SAN FRANCISCO — A hacker attack on the Internet failed this week - but experts warn there could be more to come. Three of the 13 computers that help direct all Internet traffic were hit with a flood of data requests Tuesday. Although it’s not yet clear where the torrent came from, it was most likely designed to overwhelm the computers, says Peter Reiher, a professor at UCLA’s engineering school. Hackers commonly use this approach, called a denial of service attack, to cause computers to slow down or crash. If the attack had been successful, Internet traffic might have slowed to a crawl. But the technical groups that quietly run the Internet behind the scenes have built a system designed to reroute traffic during an attack. It appeared to have worked, since few users noticed any slowdown, says Edward Naughton, a Boston-based lawyer at Holland & Knight who specializes in Internet issues. ‘It’s an indication that the system is well designed,’ he says. But that does not mean it is foolproof, says Avi Silberschatz, head of Yale’s computer science department. In a worst-case scenario, the attack may have been a small-scale assault designed to test […]
About one in 150 American children has autism, U.S. health officials said Thursday, calling the troubling disorder an urgent public health concern that is more common than they had thought. The new numbers are based on the largest, most convincing study done so far in the United States, and trump previous estimates that placed the prevalence at 1 in 166. The difference means roughly 50,000 more children and young adults may have autism and related disorders than was previously thought – a total nationwide of more than half a million people. Advocates said the study provides a sad new understanding of autism’s burden on society, and should fuel efforts to get the government to spend hundreds of millions of additional dollars for autism research and services. ‘This data today show we’re going to need more early intervention services and more therapists, and we’re going to need federal and state legislators to stand up for these families,’ said Alison Singer, spokeswoman for Autism Speaks, the nation’s largest organization advocating services for autistic children. The study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was based on 2002 data from 14 states. It calculated an average […]
President Bush is reopening the fight over government support of public television, unveiling a 2007 government fiscal year budget that would cut federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by nearly 25 percent. There was some confusion on how to tally the exact cut, but public TV and congressional sources said at least $114 million of the $460 million CPB budget for the fiscal year that starts in October would be cut. The Association of Public Television Stations said the total impact could be $145 million when cuts in related programs are added, including a program to upgrade radio station satellite facilities. ‘It’s more of the same,’ said John Lawson, president and CEO of the Association of Public Television Stations, noting previous requests to cut funding for public TV, most of which were overturned by Congress. U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s telecom panel, ripped the cuts. ‘In a 24-7 television world with content often inappropriate for young children, the public broadcasting system represents an oasis of quality, child-oriented educational programming,’ he said. ‘We owe America’s children and their parents this free, over-the-air resource.’ A CPB analysis […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
