Alan Mulally, Ford’s chief executive, said the company will produce a range of vehicles which can read motorist’s twitter messages to them as they drive down the street. Drivers may even be able to Tweet replies as the cars will feature voice recognition technology. But composing Tweets will not be possible on the first models, due out in the US later this year, because of safety fears. US Road safety group the AAA warned that the new technology could put lives at risk. ‘The more things that are going on in a vehicle, the more things can distract a driver,’ a spokeswoman said. ‘You only have so much attention to give, and we really want everyone to keep their attention on the roadway for safety reasons.’ However, Doug VanDagens, Ford’s global director of connected services, said people currently read Twitter feeds while they are driving anyway, and the new system would increase road safety by enabling motorists to keep both hands on the wheel. ‘We take what people do – they talk on the phone, they fumble with mp3 players, they look at maps. We take these activities and make them safer,’ he said. The […]
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 […]
CHICAGO — More than 40 scientists with expertise in climate, agriculture, soil, and entomological science today sent a letter to American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman requesting a meeting to discuss his group’s ‘inaccurate and marginalized’ position on global warming. The Farm Bureau maintains that ‘there is no generally agreed upon scientific assessment on…carbon emissions from human activities, their impact on past decades of warming, or how they will affect future climate changes.’ According to the scientists’ letter, that assertion ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change, a problem that puts Farm Bureau members at risk. ‘As scientists concerned about the grave risks that climate change poses to the world and U.S. agriculture,’ the letter states, ‘we are disappointed that the American Farm Bureau has chosen to officially deny the existence of human-caused climate change when the evidence of it has never been clearer.’ The letter then points out the fact that scientific institutions worldwide have concluded that human activity is causing global warming. For example, 18 U.S. science organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society and the Crop Sciences Society of America, recently issued a statement declaring […]
Scientists have found the oldest fossilized footprints made by a four-legged creature forcing a rethink on when fish first crawled out of water and onto land. The discovery of the footprints in a former quarry in the Holy Cross Mountains in south-eastern Poland are thought to be 395-million years old — 18 million years older than the earliest tetrapod (a vertebrate with limbs rather than fins) body fossils. The report published Thursday in the science journal Nature says the footprints of the tetrapod measure up to 26 (10 inches) centimeters wide, which scientists say is indicative of an animal around 2.5 (7.5 feet) meters in length. The footprints are also 10 million years earlier than the oldest known elpistostegids — creatures which displayed some animal characteristics but retained fins. Philippe Janvier from the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and reviewer of the paper told CNN: ‘It is a really stunning discovery because it’s the earliest evidence we have of tetrapods. These footprints are clear enough to attest that tetrapods were there 395 millions years ago.’ Video: First fish steps out of water The report’s authors say their findings ‘force a radical reassessment of the […]
Churches in Malaysia were bracing themselves for further attacks by Muslim protesters today, hours after two arson attacks, apparently provoked by a controversy over the use by Christians of the word Allah. Police were increasing their patrols of areas around churches and Christian communities were hiring security guards, after a Protestant church in the capital Kuala Lumpur was set on fire by a petrol bomb in the early hours of the morning. Muslim organisations have promised street protests today over a court decision which would allow use of the Allah as the Malaysian language term for the Christian God. The word has been used for centuries in Malaysia, as well as by Christians in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Indonesia as the equivalent of the English word God. But many Malaysian Muslims in Malaysia, who make up 60 per cent of the population, say that the word Allah should be reserved to refer exclusively to the Muslim deity and that use of it in a Biblical context encourages conversion to Christianity, a crime under the country’s sharia laws. The Herald, a Catholic newspaper which published in Malaysian, won an appeal last week against a ruling which banned use […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
