Some pack a bit of revolution in their bags when they come home. Others are making a getaway from the economic crisis abroad. Many want to contribute to Rio de Janeiro with something they learned elsewhere.

‘Our journey began three years ago, when [we] began to imagine a different Rio de Janeiro, where the voices of all citizens would be respected and heard during the decision-making processses that define the city’s future,

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Einstein’s theories of relativity suggest that gravity can cause time to slow down. Now scientists have demonstrated a way to stop time altogether-or at least, to give the appearance of time stopping by bending light to create a hole in time.

The new research builds on recent demonstrations of ‘invisibility cloaks’ that can make objects seem to disappear by bending waves of visible light.

The idea is that, if light moves around an object instead of striking it, that light doesn’t get scattered and reflected back to an observer, making the object essentially invisible.

Now Cornell University scientists have used a similar concept to create a hole in time, albeit a very short one: The effect lasts around 40 trillionths of a second.

‘Imagine that you could divert light in time-slow it down, speed it up-so that you create a gap in the light beam in time,’ said study co-author and Cornell physicist Alex Gaeta.

‘In this case, any event that occurs at that instant of time won’t lead to scattering of light. It appears as if the event never occurred.’

For example, Gaeta said, think of laser beams crisscrossing a museum display to protect priceless works of art.

‘You have a laser beam and a detector […]

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As climate change progresses, the planet may lose more plant and animal species than predicted, a new modeling study suggests.

This is because current predictions overlook two important factors: the differences in how quickly species relocate and competition among species, according to the researchers, led by Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut.

Already evidence suggests that species have begun to migrate out of ranges made inhospitable by climate change and into newly hospitable territory.

‘We have really sophisticated meteorological models for predicting climate change,’ Urban said in a statement. ‘But in real life, animals move around, they compete, they parasitize each other and they eat each other. The majority of our predictions don’t include these important interactions.’

These are important because some species may not be able to move fast enough to survive, or they may have to compete with new species or species better able to adapt to the shifts during and after the move.

To test how competition and variation in dispersal ability would affect species’ success at shifting to new habitats when faced with climate change, Urban and his colleagues created a mathematical model.

The researchers found that diversity decreased when they took these factors into account, and that new […]

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Not so long ago, a high-ranking Chinese official, who obviously had concluded that America’s decline and China’s rise were both inevitable, noted in a burst of candor to a senior U.S. official: ‘But, please, let America not decline too quickly.’ Although the inevitability of the Chinese leader’s expectation is still far from certain, he was right to be cautious when looking forward to America’s demise.

For if America falters, the world is unlikely to be dominated by a single preeminent successor — not even China. International uncertainty, increased tension among global competitors, and even outright chaos would be far more likely outcomes.

While a sudden, massive crisis of the American system — for instance, another financial crisis — would produce a fast-moving chain reaction leading to global political and economic disorder, a steady drift by America into increasingly pervasive decay or endlessly widening warfare with Islam would be unlikely to produce, even by 2025, an effective global successor. No single power will be ready by then to exercise the role that the world, upon the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, expected the United States to play: the leader of a new, globally cooperative world order. More probable would be a […]

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The peer-reviewed Journal of the Canadian Medical Association – a 144 year-old national association – slammed the Japanese government for lying about Fukushima:

A ‘culture of coverup

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