Lately, I’ve been studying the climate-change induced melting of glaciers in the Greater Himalaya. Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited. Spending time considering the deleterious downstream effects on the two billion people (from the North China Plain to Afghanistan) who depend on the river systems — the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya and Tarim — that arise in these mountains isn’t much of an antidote to malaise either. If you focus on those Himalayan highlands, a deep sense of loss creeps over you — the kind that comes from contemplating the possible end of something once imagined as immovable, immutable, eternal, something that has unexpectedly become vulnerable and perishable as it has slipped into irreversible decline. Those magnificent glaciers, known as the Third Pole because they contain the most ice in the world short of the two polar regions, are now wasting away on an overheated planet and no one knows what to do about it. To stand next to one of those leviathans of ice, those Moby Dicks of the mountains, is to […]
ROME — A novel – and natural – way of creating new bones for humans could be just a few years away. Scientists in Italy have developed a way of turning rattan wood into bone that is almost identical to the human tissue. At the Istec laboratory of bioceramics in Faenza near Bologna, a herd of sheep have already been implanted with the bones. The process starts by cutting the long tubular rattan wood up into manageable pieces. It is then snipped into even smaller chunks, ready for the complex chemical process to begin. The pieces are put in a furnace and heated. In simple terms, carbon and calcium are added. The wood is then further heated under intense pressure in another oven-like machine and a phosphate solution is introduced. ‘Very promising’ After around 10 days, the rattan wood has been transformed into the bone-like material. The team is lead by Dr Anna Tampieri. An X-ray of the new bone fusing with the old Within months, the real and artificial bone will have fused ‘It’s proving very promising’ she says. ‘This new bone material is strong, so it […]
The Internet has become an ever more mobile beast. Through iPhones, netbooks, Kindles, BlackBerries, Skiffs and other freshly evolved hosts, its appetite for bandwidth grows by the minute. Google’s release into the wild of its homegrown Nexus One smartphone this week adds yet another data-hungry species to the mix and highlights how your pocket is the new desktop. With such growth, however, comes a new scarcity. ‘Smartphones have been so successful, they’ve created their own problem,’ said Michael Nelson, analyst for Soleil Securities Group Inc. The radio frequency spectrum used for moving data to the fast-breeding digital fauna – soon to include Twitter feeds to the dashboard of your Ford – quickly is becoming overcrowded by an explosion of wireless broadband. That endangers newfound luxuries like on-the-go driving directions and the ability of your boss to thud you with an e-mail just about anywhere. Without more spectrums, wireless carriers warn of cellular gridlock just around the corner. AT&T, which holds exclusive rights to iPhone service, has said smartphone use in New York and San Francisco has pushed its network’s performance ‘below our standards.’ When people from New York ZIP codes were temporarily […]
HONG KONG — C. H. Tung, the first Chinese-appointed chief executive of Hong Kong after the handover in 1997, offered me a three-sentence summary the other day of China’s modern economic history: ‘China was asleep during the Industrial Revolution. She was just waking during the Information Technology Revolution. She intends to participate fully in the Green Revolution.’ I’ll say. Being in China right now I am more convinced than ever that when historians look back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they will say that the most important thing to happen was not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward. The Beijing leadership clearly understands that the E.T. – Energy Technology – revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it. We, by contrast, intend to fix Afghanistan. Have a nice day. O.K., that was a cheap shot. But here’s one that isn’t: Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, liked to say that companies come to ‘strategic inflection points,’ where the fundamentals of a business change and they either make the hard decision to invest in a down cycle and take a more promising trajectory […]
Trees have been known for a long time to be one of the most important carbon dioxide ‘sponges in the world, next to oceans and exposed volcanic rock. Climate scientists have been basing their studies and climate models on the faith that the world’s forests can absorb a certain amount of CO2 each year, but it would seem that they were wrong to do so. According to new investigations, the trees appear to be getting more and more inefficient at soaking up the devastating greenhouse gas, which is nothing but trouble to nations under the threat of floods and desertification. ‘Our findings contradict studies of other ecosystems that conclude longer growing seasons actually increase plant carbon uptake, University of Colorado in Boulder (UCB) former graduate student Jia Hu explains. The expert worked in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, and also enlisted the help of experts in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, at UCB. The direct consequence that these conclusions imply is that CO2 concentrations may actually be growing faster in the atmosphere. In addition to more carbon dioxide being emitted by power plants, industries and vehicles, it would appear that atmospheric concentrations […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
