Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies. The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of ‘neo-colonialism’, with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people. Rising food prices have already set off a second ‘scramble for Africa’. This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports. ‘These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government,’ said Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange […]
NEW YORK — Water, Water, everywhere; nor any drop to drink. The plight of the Ancient Mariner is about to be alleviated thanks to a firm of eco-inventors from Canada who claim to have found the solution to the world’s worsening water shortages by drawing the liquid of life from an unlimited and untapped source – the air. The company, Element Four, has developed a machine that it hopes will become the first mainstream household appliance to have been invented since the microwave. Their creation, the WaterMill, uses the electricity of about three light bulbs to condense moisture from the air and purify it into clean drinking water. The machine went on display this weekend in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, hosted by Wired magazine at its annual showcase of the latest gizmos its editors believe could change the world. From the outside, the mill looks like a giant golf ball that has been chopped in half: it is about 3ft in diameter, made of white plastic, and is attached to the wall. It works by drawing air through filters to remove dust and particles, then cooling it to just below the temperature at which dew forms. […]
A researcher at Pennsylvania State University, Stephan Schuster, said in the journal Nature last week that he might be able to regenerate a mammoth from ancient DNA for just $10 million. Given that Chicago’s Field Museum, with the help of McDonald’s and Walt Disney, recently paid $8.36 million for an especially fine Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, Dr. Schuster should be able to sell a pack of live mammoths to zoo managers around the world. For making the past come alive, a mammoth is a good start, but it’s just a hairy elephant. What other extinct species would be good to have around again? Herein, a wish list. Because we are so interested in ourselves, the first two resurrected species might be the two close cousins whom our ancestors drove to extinction: THE NEANDERTHAL. This species and modern humans split apart some 500,000 years ago, and the Neanderthal adapted to the ice age climate that gripped its European homeland. Scientists in Germany are expected to report soon that they have decoded the full genome. No one knows if Neanderthals could speak. A living one would answer that question and many others. THE ‘HOBBIT.’ Remains of these downsized humans, […]
Diets high in red and processed meats have long been associated with cancer of the large intestine. Now, however, for the first time scientists have looked at whether eating meat and other animal fats is also linked to cancers of the small intestine. Their findings show yet again what natural health advocates have said for years: red meat and diets high in animal fats are a good way to promote cancer, not wellness. The new study, just published in the Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, strongly suggests eating diets high in meat and other saturated fats is associated cancer of the small intestine — a kind of cancer that has been steadily increasing since the l970s. If a person gets this type of cancer, they are at increased risk of also developing a second malignancy, an often deadly colorectal cancer. ‘Identifying modifiable risk factors for cancer of the small intestine is important not only because the incidence of this cancer is on the rise, but it may enable us to further understand other gastrointestinal malignancies,’ Amanda Cross, Ph.D., a National Cancer Institute researcher and the study’s lead author, said in a statement […]
NEW DELHI, India — After an intense debate on whether to begin a formal independence movement, the majority of delegates attending a conference of Tibetan exiles in northern India recommended Saturday that the Tibetan government in exile continue to adopt the Dalai Lama’s conciliatory approach to China, a Tibetan spokesman said. But in a sign of mounting frustration with fruitless negotiations with China, most delegates also advised the Tibetan government to end the dialogue until China shows real willingness to negotiate, the spokesman, Thubten Samphel, said in a telephone interview from Dharamsala, India. The delegates made their recommendations at the end of a six-day conference called by the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetans worldwide, who has pursued a ‘middle way approach in which he has called for China to grant autonomy to its six million Tibetans. The Dalai Lama has not called for Tibetan independence and prefers to deal with China without confrontation. ‘The majority view is that the middle way approach is the best approach for now, Mr. Samphel said of the results of the conference. But the intractability of the Tibetan problem, highlighted by an uprising of Tibetans last spring and a […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
