FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT…

• Vitamin D has been found to influence over 200 genes, highlighting links to disease.
• The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and this summer its sea ice is melting at a near-record pace.
• Defying their reputation as a scourge of households, bedbugs are creeping into a growing number of office cubicles, break rooms and filing cabinets..
• Physician-guided robots routinely operate on patients now at most major hospitals, but the next generation robot could eliminate a surprising element: the doctor.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Crowd Sourcing Looses Steam - (Newsweek - August 9, 2010)
In the history of the web, last spring may figure as a tipping point. That’s when Wikipedia-a site that grew from 100,000 articles in 2003 to more than 15 million today-began to falter as a social movement. Thousands of volunteer editors who write, fact-check, and update all those articles, logged off-many for good. For the first time, more contributors appeared to be dropping out than joining up. A deep and enduring truth about human nature may account for it: most people simply don’t want to work for free. They like the idea of the Web as a place where no one goes unheard and the contributions of millions of amateurs can change the world. But when they come home from a hard day at work and turn on their computer, it turns out many of them would rather watch funny videos of kittens or shop for cheap airfares than contribute to the greater good. Even the Internet is no match for sloth.

NEW REALITIES

Supermassive Black Holes Discovered Devouring Whole Galaxies - (Daily Galaxy - August 25, 2010)
Black holes -Stephen Hawking’s enigmatic “bad boys of the Universe”- have been discovered to have the ability to strip massive galaxies of the cool gases required to form new stars, leaving ageing red giants to fade out of existence with no stars to replace them.

GENETICS/ HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime - (New York Times - August 24, 2010)
Cell phones now make the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas. At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience. The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

Are Boom-and-Bust Cycles Hardwired in Human DNA? - (Daily Galaxy - August 25, 2010)
Over three billion years ago, bacteria had a cycle of boom and bust built into their DNA. A single bacterial colony the size of your palm contains seven trillion individuals - more than all the human beings this planet has ever seen. All working in concert, pooling their talents and their data and communicating with a chemical vocabulary. Bacterial metropolises are discovery machines. That’s why they are breakthrough generators and the first life form to experience boom and bust, a cycle of exploration and digestion, of expand and then consolidate. Similarly, the cycle of boom and bust is built into our DNA.

Vitamin D Found to Influence Over 200 Genes, Highlighting Links to Disease - (Science Daily - August 24, 2010)
It is estimated that one billion people worldwide do not have sufficient vitamin D. This deficiency is thought to be largely due to insufficient exposure to the sun and in some cases to poor diet. As well as being a well-known risk factor for rickets, there is a growing body of evidence that vitamin D deficiency also increases an individual’s susceptibility to autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes, as well as certain cancers and even dementia.

Teen Hearing Loss Rate Worsens - (Discovery News - August 18, 2010)
The prevalence of hearing loss in teenagers rose by nearly one-third in recent years compared with the rate in the 1980s and 1990s, a new study shows. The findings come as a surprise to the study’s authors, who had expected overall hearing to improve thanks to publicity about the risks of exposure to loud music and the advent of childhood vaccines against meningitis and pneumonia that can prevent many ear infections. Scientists report that the portion of U.S. adolescents aged 12 to 19 with any hearing loss rose from 14.9 percent during the 1988 to 1995 period to 19.5 percent in 2005 and 2006. While noise exposure is a known culprit, diet, medical care, lack of exercise and obesity may also play a role.

DISCOVERIES ENABLED BY NEW TECHNOLOGY

The Sun Also Surprises - (New York Times - August 15, 2010)
It’s been 90 years since the last super solar storm, but scientists say we are on the verge of another period of high solar activity. Though less frequent than large hurricanes, significant storms have hit earth several times over the last 150 years, most notably in 1859 and 1921. High-voltage transformers are the most sensitive part of a grid; a strong electromagnetic pulse can easily fuse their copper wiring, damaging them beyond repair. Even worse, transformers are hard to replace. They weigh up to 100 tons, so they can’t be easily moved from the factories in Europe and Asia where most of them are made; right now, there’s already a three-year waiting list for new ones.

“Zombie” Ants Controlled by Parasitic Fungus for 48 Million Years - (Guardian - August 18, 2010)
The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists. The gruesome hallmark of the fungus’s handiwork was found on the leaves of plants that grew 48m years ago near Darmstadt, Germany. The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas. The fungus, which is alive and well in forests today, latches on to carpenter ants as they cross the forest floor before returning to their nests high in the canopy.

Did Life on Earth Evolve Twice? - (BBC News - August 18, 2010)
Life on Earth may have begun around 90 million years earlier than scientists had previously thought, a new fossil find suggests. Dr Adam Maloof of Princeton University explains the importance of his discovery in this audio clip - but he is doubtful that life evolved twice on earth.

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Disaster at the Top of the World - (New York Times - August 22, 2010)
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and this summer its sea ice is melting at a near-record pace. The sun is heating the newly open water, so it will take longer to refreeze this winter, and the resulting thinner ice will melt more easily next summer. At the same time, warm Pacific Ocean water is pulsing through the Bering Strait into the Arctic basin, helping melt a large area of sea ice between Alaska and eastern Siberia. Scientists are just beginning to learn how this exposed water has changed the movement of heat energy and major air currents across the Arctic basin, in turn producing winds that push remaining sea ice down the coasts of Greenland into the Atlantic.

Responding to Threats of Climate Change Mega-Catastrophes - (Kennedy School, Harvard University - October 19, 2009)
This paper first discusses the state of current knowledge and the defining characteristics of potential climate change mega-catastrophes. It goes on to present a qualitative analysis of three options for mitigating the risk of climate mega-catastrophes-drastic abatement of greenhouse gas emissions, development and implementation of geo-engineering, and large-scale ex-ante adaptation-against the criteria of efficacy, cost, robustness, and flexibility.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Computer Scientists Build ‘Pedestrian Remover’ - (Science Daily - August 5, 2010)
Google Street View currently blurs faces and license plates from its images. Nevertheless, clothes, body shape, and height combined with geographical location can be enough to make some pedestrians personally identifiable even if the face is blurred out. A new system developed at UC SanDiego removes pedestrians and replaces the holes in the images with an approximation of the actual background behind each pedestrian. These corresponding background pixels are pulled from the image taken right before or right after the image in question. However, the system does generate an occasional curious image: imagine encountering a dog on its leash without a dog walker or shoes filled just with ankles.

Cell Phone Sees in the Dark - (Discovery - August 20, 2010)
Now, materials engineers have come up with something that could replace current night vision technology. And it’s everything the current technology isn’t: small, light and cheap. Most standard night vision devices work by converting photons into electrons that hit a phosphorous screen and produce an image you can see. This requires lots of electric power and heavy glass components. The new idea uses a detector made up of layers of an organic semiconductor connected to an LED array. The best part is that the device is about the size of a nickel and can be made of plastic. The researchers say adding it to a cell phone should be inexpensive. It also could be added to eyeglasses or automobile windshields.

‘Spintronics’ Breakthrough Holds Promise for Next-Generation Computers - (Science Daily - August 25, 2010)
Using powerful lasers, researchers have discovered a new way to recognize currents of spinning electrons within a semiconductor. “We have been using the charge of the electron for several decades,” said Zhao, principal investigator. “But right now the size of each device is just 30 to 50 nanometers, and you don’t have many atoms remaining on that tiny scale. We can’t continue that way anymore because we’re hitting a fundamental limit.” Instead of using the presence or absence of electronic charges, “spintronics” relies on the direction of an electron’s rotation to convey data.

McEliece Cryptosystem Resists Quantum Fourier Sampling Attacks - (ArXiv - August 13, 2010)
Quantum computers can break the RSA and El Gamal public-key cryptosystems, since they can factor integers and extract discrete logarithms. If we believe that quantum computers will someday become a reality, we would like to have \emph{post-quantum} cryptosystems which can be implemented today with classical computers, but which will remain secure even in the presence of quantum attacks.

AUGMENTED/ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Next Generation Surgical Robots: Where’s the Doctor? - (Science Daily - July 20, 2010)
As physician-guided robots routinely operate on patients at most major hospitals, the next generation robot could eliminate a surprising element from that scenario - the doctor. Feasibility studies conducted by Duke University bioengineers have demonstrated that a robot — without any human assistance — can locate a man-made, or phantom, lesion in simulated human organs, guide a device to the lesion and take multiple samples during a single session. The researchers believe that as the technology is further developed, autonomous robots could some day perform many more simple surgical tasks.

ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

Huge Tidal Turbine Arrives in Orkney - (BBC News - August 21, 2010)
A device thought to be the largest tidal turbine of its type to be built in the world has arrived in Orkney for testing. Atlantis Resources unveiled its AK1000 at Invergordon last week ahead of it being shipped to Kirkwall. The device stands 73ft tall, has a rotor diameter of 59ft, weighs 1,300 tons and has two sets of blades on a single base. It has been designed to harness ebb and flood tides and could generate one megawatt of power - enough electricity for about 1,000 homes.

Self-Cleaning Technology from Mars Can Keep Terrestrial Solar Panels Dust Free - (Science Daily - August 23, 2010)
“A dust layer of one-seventh of an ounce per square yard decreases solar power conversion by 40 percent,” Mazumder explains. “In Arizona, dust is deposited each month at about 4 times that amount. Deposition rates are even higher in the Middle East, Australia, and India.” Working with NASA, Malay K. Mazumder and colleagues at Boston University initially developed the self-cleaning solar panel technology for use in lunar and Mars missions. The technology involves deposition of a transparent, electrically sensitive coating on glass or a transparent plastic sheet covering the panels. Sensors monitor dust levels on the surface of the panel and energize the material when dust concentration reaches a critical level. The electric charge sends a dust-repelling wave cascading over the surface of the material, transporting the dust off of the screen’s edges.

PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUES

More Offices See Bedbug Infestations - (USA Today - August 20, 2010)
Defying their reputation as a scourge of households, blood-sucking bedbugs are creeping into a growing number of cubicles, break rooms and filing cabinets. Concerned about the swelling number of infestations in New York City, publishing giant Time recently brought in bedbug-sniffing dogs. The canines found a few cases, which Time had treated two weeks ago. The District Attorney’s office in Brooklyn recently discovered that they had the critters, as well, and exterminated over a weekend. The IRS had bedbugs in its offices in Philadelphia and Covington, Ky. It had exterminators into those offices and is still monitoring the situation.

The Bedbug Registry - (Bedbug Registry website - no date)
The Bed Bug Registry exists to give travelers and renters a reliable and neutral platform for reporting their encounters with bed bugs. Though most Americans have still never come across one, these retro pests are spreading extremely quickly across American and Canadian cities. Check out the map of infestations before you travel or report an occurrence. (Not guaranteed 100% accurate and certainly not complete, but still potentially useful.)

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Wikileaks Encryption Use Offers Legal Challenge - (BBC News - August 19, 2010)
A novel use of encryption by whistle-blowing website Wikileaks could “challenge the legal system for years to come,” according to an influential observer of the hacking community. Some suspect the file - as yet unopened - contains further sensitive material. It has been reposted around the web and is available for anyone to download. So far, it has been downloaded 100,000 times. The website now says it will release 15,000 further sensitive documents related to US actions in Afghanistan, once it has completed a review aimed at minimizing the risk that the release could put people’s lives in danger.

Pentagon Disbands Network Warfare Shop - (Wired - August 10, 2010)
As the so-called “cyber” activities became more and more central to the military’s intelligence efforts and combat operations, IT became too important to leave to the techies. “Our networks are really weapons. We treat them as weapons systems,” said Defense Comptroller Robert Hale. “And if our networks aren’t organized in such a way - to be able to accommodate that, we’re disadvantaged.”

Anti-wi-fi Paint Offers Security - (BBC News - September 30, 2009)
Researchers at the University of Tokyo say they have created a special kind of paint which can block out wireless signals. The paint contains an aluminum-iron oxide which resonates at the same frequency as wi-fi - or other radio waves - meaning the airborne data is absorbed and blocked. By coating an entire room, signals can’t get in and, crucially, can’t get out. The makers say that for businesses it’s a quick and cheap way of preventing access to sensitive data from unauthorized users.

TRENDS OF GOVERNMENT

Top Secret Network of US Government and Its Contractors - (Washington Post - August 20, 2010)
Explore the relations between the various agencies and the types of work being done in what the Washington Post calls “Top Secret America”. Mouse over the chart for details: it goes down many layers.

Confirmed: Obama Authorizes Assassination of U.S. Citizen - (Salon - April 7, 2010)
The Obama administration has a “presidential assassination program,” whereby American citizens are targeted for killings far away from any battlefield, based exclusively on unchecked accusations by the Executive Branch that they’re involved in Terrorism. Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have confirmed that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield.

Ramadan Kareem from the Netanyahu and Obama Administrations - (Intifada - August 17, 2010)
On the day before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, at 2:30 in the morning, workers sent by the Israeli authorities, protected by dozens of police, destroyed the tombstones in the last portion of the Mamilla cemetery, an historic Muslim burial ground with graves going back to the 7th Century, hitherto left untouched. In 1948, when control of the cemetery reverted to Israel, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry recognized Mamilla “to be one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin's] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars. Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.” Now some 1,500 Muslim graves have been cleared in several nighttime operations to make way for a $100 million Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity, a project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. (”Ramadan Kareem” is one of the greetings one offers to Muslims during Ramadan.)

SOCIAL TRENDS

Too Long Ignored - (New York Times - August 20, 2010)
Parental neglect, racial discrimination and an orgy of self-destructive behavior have left an extraordinary portion of the black male population in an ever-deepening pit of social and economic degradation. This trend of the failure of the Black lower class is a long one, with many explanations. None but the Black community itself can solve the key one, but the three that don’t get mentioned are the rise of the corporate virtual state, and its uninterest in job creation, the abject failure of public education, and the rise of the private human warehousing industry. It is in no one’s interest to have any of these trends continue.

But Will It Make You Happy? - (New York Times - August 7, 2010)
Practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could - as a raft of new research suggests - make them happier. New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses. “We’re moving from a conspicuous consumption - which is ‘buy without regard’ - to a calculated consumption,” says Marshal Cohen, an analyst at the NPD Group, a retailing research and consulting firm.

CONTACT AND THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE

Alien Hunters Should Look for Artificial Intelligence - (BBC News - August 22, 2010)
Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth. Many involved in Seti have long argued that nature may have solved the problem of life using different designs or chemicals, suggesting extraterrestrials would not only not look like us, but that they would not at a biological level even work like us. However, Seti searchers have mostly still worked under the assumption - as a starting point for a search of the entire cosmos - that ETs would be “alive” in the sense that we know. But senior astronomer at the Seti Institute, Seth Shostak, has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien “sentient machines”.

Starchild Skull 2010 DNA Result - (You Tube - August 8, 2010)
The refinement of DNA analysis techniques seems to have caught up with the challenge of testing a 900 year-old bone sample. Preliminary new DNA results from the 900 year old “Starchild Skull” provide evidence that a percentage of the DNA in the bone may not be from Earth. The skull seems to be that of an offspring of a human mother and alien father, but formally and genetically it appears to be entirely alien.

DEMOGRAPHICS

The Geography of a Recession - (Cohort 11 - May, 2010)
According to the US Department of Labor, there are more than 31 million unemployed and under-employed people in the US. Here is an interactive map that shows the unemployment, by individual county, across the entire US on a month by month basis (rolling twelve month average) from January, 2007 to May, 2010 (most recent data available). The visual is quick, easy to comprehend - and chilling.

U.S. Census Bureau Releases Detailed Information on Nation’s Housing - RIS Media - August 20, 2010)
Issued jointly every two years by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the 2009 American Housing Survey is the definitive source of information on the quality of housing in the United States. Statistics are provided for apartments, single-family homes, manufactured housing, new construction and vacant housing units. A wide range of specific topics is covered, such as the presence of air conditioning, crowding, housing costs, special living services offered to older residents, safety equipment present, type of heating fuel used, satisfaction with the neighborhood, cost of utilities and size of the home. The survey also covers the demographic characteristics of the housing units’ occupants. The full survey can be accessed here.

The Ugly Demographic Reality that Dooms the US to Sub-Par Growth - (Business Insider - August 23, 2010)
The 45-to-54-year-old demographic rose every year during 1984-2010, but this key age group that often sparks the economy and the markets will decline every year to 2021. The last time sustained declines in this group occurred was 1975-83, an awful time for the economy and the stock market.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

Does German Intransigence Threaten Europe? - (William Pfaff - August 10, 2010)
The excellent second quarter export and growth results reported by Germany have set that country at an increasing, and increasingly dangerous, distance from the other members of the European Union, with jeopardy to the EU and the euro — which many in Britain and the United States would like to see fail. Thus Germany’s success is tending to encourage market pessimism rather than international optimism, everywhere but in Germany itself, where complacency seems to reign, together with a certain amount of what the Germans themselves term Schadenfreude.

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH - articles off the beaten track which may - or may not - have predictive value.

Preparing for the Next Black Swan - (Wall St. Journal - August 21, 2010)
A growing number of money managers and financial firms are rolling out investment products designed to exploit big declines known as “black swan” events. Most of the products are geared toward institutional investors such as pension funds, endowments and high-net-worth families-but black-swan strategies are trickling down to Main Street as well. The term black swan was popularized in a 2007 best-selling book by author and investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It derives from the ancient belief, once widespread in the West, that all swans are white-a notion that was proven false when European explorers discovered black swans in Australia. The gist: Anything is possible. In fact, big surprises are more common than people think.

JUST FOR FUN

Faces of Our Ancestors - (Discovery News - no date)
To put a human face on our ancestors, scientists from the Senckenberg Research Institute used sophisticated methods to form 27 model heads based on tiny bone fragments, teeth and skulls collected from across the globe. The models are on display at the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. The oldest (one of the oldest hominid specimens ever found) is Sahelanthropus tchadensis, also nicknamed “Toumai,” who lived 6.8 million years ago. Parts of its jaw bone and teeth were found nine years ago in the Djurab desert in Chad. The article includes photos of the reconstructed models.

A FINAL QUOTE…

“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. “ - Albert Einstein

CONTACT US

Edited by John L. Petersen
johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

PRIVACY POLICY: We don’t share your information with anyone.

FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT…

• Time and space may be able to be converted back and forth between each other with the speed of light being the conversion factor between the two.
• Bill Gates predicts that in five years the best education will come from the Web.
• Neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people’s heads, is doing a better and better job of discovering what people really want.
• A University of Arkansas team who surveyed the North Dakota countryside for canola discovered that transgenes were present in 80% of the wild canola plants they found.

PUNCTUATIONS
by John L. Petersen

If you are near our neighborhood here in Berkeley Springs, you might like knowing that I’m giving a free talk at the Fairfax Coffee House on Wednesday night. This will be the third time that I casually chat about what I think is coming our way and entertain questions about what we can all do about it. This time I’m going to muse about the big global shift that I think humanity is experiencing that will produce a new human and a new world. If you can make it, come by. It promises to be an interesting evening.

UFOs

Every once in a while an author friend asks me to write a blurb for their upcoming book. That happened again recently. What was unusual about it was that my comments were picked up by the Los Angeles Times and included on their website.

If you visit the link, you’ll immediately see why my opinion got a little ink - the book is Leslie Kean’s, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record. John Podesta wrote the introduction to the book and if I hadn’t mentioned his name, I’m sure I wouldn’t have shown up. In any case, Leslie’s book is really a great piece of journalism around a subject that is seldom treated seriously. I think that’s a mistake.

I can’t remember when I haven’t been interested in the bigger questions about how reality works and why some things - like UFOs - which are commonly experienced and reported by millions of people all over the world are ignored by science and the mainstream press. Having spent a good bit of time seriously looking into the subject, I can tell you that anytime I hear anyone summarily discount the validity, let alone possibility, of the existence of these anomalous aerial phenomena, I know that they’re speaking from ignorance. They haven’t seriously looked into the subject. They are not seriously thinking.

I have often been asked why I am specifically interested in the subject. My usual answer is: “The day the aliens unambiguously show them self to the world is the day everything changes.” There are few wild cards events that I’ve thought about that would have the extraordinarily profound (and potentially positive) implications of such an event. Most people would have to rethink who thought they were.

Leslie’s book is timely for a number of reasons. One is that quite a few governments (not the U.S., though) have come clean about their long-time interest in the subject. The Mexican military has released quite impressive film footage of unknown craft tailing their air force aircraft. The Belgium government declassified many of their documents. There are quite a number more.

But, I was impressed when a few days ago the Brazilian Air Force reportedly decided to treat the issue with a great deal of transparency. The report came from A. J. Gevaerd, Editor of Brazilian UFO Magazine. Gevaerd - somewhat breathlessly - reports about this new development below. (In his defense, I suppose I’d be a little breathless if I had given my life to a subject like this and my government decided that they were finally going to spill their secrets.)

The point here is that we are clearly in a time of great change, and a significant element of the change is a growing awareness about who we as humans are in the larger spectrum of intelligent life. You’ll find an article included in this FUTUREdition about how science is now deciding that clouds “talk” to each other. They seem to intelligently communicate among themselves. It’s been shown in the past that plants identify individually the humans that are near them - and somehow know which individuals are thinking about doing harm to the plant. There are lots of these kinds of examples. All suggesting that there is far more life around us than we even begin to imagine.

Here’s the Brazilian piece.

BRAZILIAN AIR FORCE CONFIRM UFO REPORTS AND REGULATES HOW TO HANDLE THEM

The Brazilian Air Force commander, Lieutenant-Brigadier Juniti Saito (equivalent to 4-star General), has just given a major step to openly recognize the UFO Phenomena as serious and worthy of immediate actions in Brazil. Saito, a very respected man by the current Federal Administration, issued a public statement regulating how UFO reports should be handled in Brazil, by whom and what destination should they have.

Brazil must be the first country in the world to have such measure published in its official journal, called Diário Oficial da União, which is openly public and records every and all acts taken by our Administration, its agencies and entities. The document was published Tuesday, August 10 and can be read below translated into English.

This is a great example of how a public campaign such as UFOs: Freedom of Information Now, conducted by the Brazilian Committee of UFO Researchers (CBU) through the Brazilian UFO Magazine, can make things happen. The actual measure by Lieutenant-Brigadier Saito is a direct result of the campaign, following several others, such as the release of thousands of pages of UFO secret documents and hundreds of photos, including material of the Operation Saucer.

See more information here:

1,300 New pages of formerly secret UFO documents surface in Brazil
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2009/aug/m08-001.shtml
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2009/sep/m26-005.shtml
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2009/sep/m26-004.shtml

There is a real commotion in the Brazilian UFO Community at this moment, as it has achieved much more than it could expect in its most optimistic dreams. Even the over 300 members of the Brazilian UFO Magazine are completely surprised by what happened. According to the official release, military should register and forward UFO occurrences to the National Archives, the final destination of UFO.

THOUSAND OF CASES TO BE RELEASED

It is yet to be determined if the reports of UFO occurrences made all over the last three or four decades of Brazilian official involvement with the phenomena are included, or just the most recent ones. Also, if the reported cases that have been officially investigated by the Brazilian Air Force and its agencies are also included, as well as the results of such investigations. It is widely known that the country had several departments at the Brazilian Air Force designed to document and research UFO activity, as reported by the Brazilian UFO Magazine.

Also, in a recent exclusive interview to the publication, Lieutenant-Brigadier José Carlos Pereira, former commander of the Brazilian Airspace Defense Command, has declared that there are tons of official documents produced by the Brazilian Air Force over the last decades, and that he determined that all data was digitalized and inserted in a huge databank. Pereira was also responsible for elaborating a complete new form to be filled by civilian and military pilots when they see UFOs in the country. “There are hundreds of such forms”.

By regulating the way that military should handle UFO reports, especially those coming from air traffic control and aviation personnel, as stated in the official journal, the Brazilian Air Force practically recognizes the materiality of the UFO Phenomena, as it was recently declared by a few other top military, such as Lieutenant-Brigadier Sócrates Monteiro, former minister of Air Force, and Pereira itself, among many others, in exclusive interviews given to the Brazilian UFO Magazine and reported world widely.
Some of the astounding declarations made by these men can be read here:

“All UFO secrets must be disclosed”, says Brazilian top military
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2008/mar/m12-004.shtml

Brazil’s former Air Force minister makes statements about UFOs
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2009/oct/m27-014.shtml

More sources of Brazilian military information achieved by the Brazilian UFO Magazine:

Another Brazilian military officer reveals UFO investigation, observation and physical evidence
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2010/jul/m13-001.shtml

Retired Lieutenant-Colonel discloses new revelations on Operation Saucer in the Amazon, 1977
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2007/oct/m28-027.shtml

A SOLID AND INTELLIGENT PHENOMENON

The materiality of the UFO Phenomena by Brazilian military has also been clearly recognized in an official document just recently released to the UFO community through the efforts of the Brazilian UFO Magazine named ‘Occurrence Report’ and related to what is called ‘Official UFO Night in Brazil’, when 21 spherical objects, estimated 100 meters in diameter - according to military sources - literally jammed air traffic over the major Brazilian airports, when several Mirage and F5 jets scrambled to pursue them for hours.

In its Final Considerations section, the ‘Occurrence Report’ reads: “As a conclusion of the observed facts in almost all presentations, it is the opinion of this Command that the phenomenon is solid and reflects intelligence by its capacity to follow and sustain distance from the observers, as well as to fly in formation, and are not necessarily manned craft”. Again, “the phenomenon is solid and reflects intelligence”;

See the report here:

Brazilian military document confirms UFOs “Solid and Under Intelligent Control”
http://www.ufoupdateslist.com/2009/oct/m23-011.shtml

The document ‘Occurrence Report’ in PDF file and in English:
Occurrence_Report_Original.pdf
Occurrence_Report_Translated.pdf

OPENING A PRECEDENT IN THE CONTINENT

This is a major breakthrough to all UFO researchers and especially to the Brazilian UFO Community, as it may open a precedent in the Continent and other areas of the planet to other countries do the same. We at the Brazilian Committee of UFO Researchers (CBU) are all very glad to say that the official recognition of the seriousness of the UFO Phenomena and the need of proper handling the reports is a result of the campaign UFOs: Freedom Of Information Now, started in 2004 and widely announced both domestically and internationally.

There aren’t many countries in the world today - if any - that had its military taken such a bold and unprecedented decision on a public basis, in a public record. It is always good to remember that Brazil was also the first country in the world to officially admit the UFO Phenomena, back in the 50s, when colonel João Adil de Oliveira made a clear statement at the Superior School of War, in Rio de Janeiro, assuming that the investigation of the nature and manifestation of UFOs should be of immediate concern of the Brazilian military.

Towards all these years, many Brazilian UFO researchers have done their best to make the UFO Phenomena worthy of public credibility and acknowledged by the authorities, and I am very pleased to say that it has just happened in a very solid way. This generation of UFO researchers, all belonging to the Brazilian Committee of UFO Researchers (CBU) and to the Brazilian UFO Magazine, inspired and following the example of our pioneers, are making things happen.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

On the Web’s Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only - (Wall St. Journal - August 4, 2010)
You may not know a company called [x+1] Inc., but it may well know a lot about you. Its ability to make snap assessments of individuals is accurate enough that Capital One Financial Corp. uses [x+1]’s calculations to instantly decide which credit cards to show first-time visitors to its website. firms like [x+1] tap into vast databases of people’s online behavior-mainly gathered surreptitiously by tracking technologies that have become ubiquitous. They don’t have people’s names, but cross-reference that data with records of home ownership, family income, marital status and favorite restaurants, among other things. Then, using statistical analysis, they start to make assumptions about the proclivities of individual Web surfers. The findings offer an early glimpse of a new, personalized Internet where sites have the ability to adjust many things-look, content, prices-based on the kind of person they think you are.

Bill Gates: In Five Years the Best Education Will Come from the Web - (Tech Crunch - August 6, 2010)
Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to universities in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. Well, provided they’re self-motivated learners. “Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued. He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.

NEW REALITIES

“The Big Bang Never Happened” The New Standard? - (Daily Galaxy - July 30, 2010)
While there is scientific consensus that the Big Bang is the best explanation for the origin of the Universe, there’s a growing chorus of doubters among the world astrophysics community, led by the fascinating new work of Wun-Yi Shu at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan who has developed an innovative new description of the Universe in which the roles of time space and mass are related in new kind of relativity. Shu’s idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other. In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two.

Behold, the Antilaser - (Science News - July 30, 2010)
Fifty years after physicists invented the laser, ushering in everything from supermarket scanners to music CDs, scientists have conceived its opposite - the “antilaser.” No one has yet reported building an antilaser, but a theoretical description of one has been published in Physical Review Letters. Instead of amplifying light into coherent pulses, as a laser does, an antilaser absorbs light beams zapped into it. It can be “tuned” to work at specific wavelengths of light, allowing researchers to turn a dial and cause the device to start and then stop absorbing light.

Rethinking Einstein: The End of Space-time - (New Scientist - August 9, 2010)
Space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is right, it may be no more than a mirage. Horava, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to rip this fabric apart and set time and space free from one another in order to come up with a unified theory that reconciles the disparate worlds of quantum mechanics and gravity - one the most pressing challenges to modern physics. Something has to give in this tussle between general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the smart money says that it’s relativity that will be the loser. So Horava began looking for ways to tweak Einstein’s equations and found inspiration in the physics of condensed matter, including the material of the moment - pencil lead.

GENETICS/ HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

The Bio-future of Joint Replacement - (TED - July, 2010)
Arthritis and injury grind down millions of joints, but few get the best remedy - real biological tissue. Kevin Stone shows a treatment that could sidestep the high costs and donor shortfall of human-to-human transplants with a novel use of animal tissue.

Adult Stem Cell Research Far Ahead of Embryonic - (Washington Post - August 2, 2010)
Adult stem cells are being studied in people who suffer from multiple sclerosis, heart attacks and diabetes. Some early results suggest that stem cells can help some patients avoid leg amputation. Recently researchers reported that they restored vision to some patients whose sight was destroyed by chemicals. Apart from these efforts, transplants of adult stem cells have become a life-saving therapy for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people with leukemia, lymphoma and other blood diseases.

Nerve Connections Regenerated after Spinal Cord Injury - (Kurzweil AI - August 9, 2010)
Researchers for the first time have induced robust regeneration of nerve connections that control voluntary movement after spinal cord injury, showing the potential for new therapeutic approaches to paralysis and other motor function impairments. In a study on rodents, the research team turned back the developmental clock in a molecular pathway critical for the growth of corticospinal tract nerve connections. They deleted an enzyme called PTEN (a phosphatase and tensin homolog), which controls a molecular pathway called mTOR that is a key regulator of cell growth. PTEN activity is low early during development, allowing cell proliferation. PTEN then turns on when growth is completed, inhibiting mTOR and precluding any ability to regenerate.

Two New Paths to the Dream: Regeneration - (New York Times - August 5, 2010)
In recent years, most research in the field of regenerative medicine has focused on the hope that stem cells, immature cells that give rise to any specific type of cell needed in the body, can somehow be trained to behave as normal adult cells do. Nature’s method of regeneration is quite different in that it starts with the adult cells at the site of a wound and converts the cells to a stemlike state in which they can grow and divide. A research group at Stanford has taken a possible first step toward unlocking the human ability to regenerate. By inactivating two genes that work to suppress tumors, they got mouse muscle cells to revert to a younger state, start dividing and help repair tissue.

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Corexit - Coast Guard and Administration Betray the Country - (Dr. Sircus’ Blog - August 5, 2010)
The spraying of Corexit is certified by the EPA as being a safe hell to breathe in though early on in the disaster it was reported that the EPA warned BP not to use it. Over 40% of adults living within ten miles of the coast said they have experienced direct exposure to the oil spill or clean-up effort. Within this group, nearly 40% reported physical symptoms of skin irritations and respiratory problems, which they attributed to the oil spill.

GM Plants Established in the Wild - (BBC News - August 5, 2010)
Researchers have found new evidence that genetically modified crop plants can survive and thrive in the wild, possibly for decades. A University of Arkansas team surveyed countryside in North Dakota for canola. Transgenes were present in 80% of the wild canola plants they found. Similar findings have been made in Canada, while in Japan, a study in 2008 found substantial amounts of transgenic rape - a close relative of canola - around port areas where GM varieties had been imported.

Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current Dying, Loop Current in Gulf of Mexico Already Dead - (Before It’s News - August 7, 2010)
Stepping past some of this blogger’s agenda, you may find some of the reportage worth consideration: An Italian theoretical physicist specializing in global climate research and analysis, Dr. Gianluigi Zangari, of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy, has found that the massive amount of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, from the BP Disaster, has caused a disruption of the Loop Current in the Gulf. And further, that this has resulted in a dramatic weakening in the vorticity of the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current, and a reduction in North Atlantic water temperatures of 10C. The entire ‘river of warm water’ that flows from the Caribbean to the edges of Western Europe is dying due to the use of approximately two million gallons of Corexit, plus several million gallons of other dispersants, which have caused the over two hundred million gallons of crude oil to mostly sink to the bottom of the ocean.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

7 Dangerous New Computer Hacks (and 1 Silly One) that Will Change the Future - (io9 - August 5, 2010)
Every year computer security experts, from garage hackers to intelligence agents, descend on Las Vegas to attend Black Hat and Defcon. At these events, you can learn highly technical details about the Android operating system and Microsoft’s internal network - or you can learn how to fool biometric locks and crank call BP. These are the premiere conferences for exchanging information about keeping data secure. But they’re also where concerned geeks stand up in front of thousands of people to whistleblow about bad privacy and security practices at major companies (or governments). For all those reasons and more, announcements from last week’s conferences are certain to change the future - at least if you own a computer (including a phone) that’s attached to the internet.

Mind-controlled App Calls Your Friends with the Power of Thought - (The Next Web - August 5, 2010)
Nokia claims the ThinkContacts app it’s developing for Nokia N900’s Maemo platform allows a “motor disabled person to make a phone call to a desired contact by himself/herself,” using brainwaves. According to Nokia, a headset reads the user’s brainwaves, which are digitized and sent via Bluetooth to the phone, where the data is translated into the user’s “level of meditation” and “attention” for navigating between contacts and selecting one to call. (Note: Nokia does not present any data to validate its claims - but we have no doubt that sooner or later this will be possible.)

Mind-reading Marketers Have Ways of Making You Buy - (New Scientist - August 9, 2010)
In what may be a world first, this week’s cover of New Scientist was created with the help of a technique called neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people’s heads and discover what they really want. You may find that sinister. Or perhaps you are skeptical and consider the idea laughable. But neuromarketing, once dismissed as a fad, is becoming part and parcel of modern consumer society. “I’ve been involved in market research for about 25 years,” says Thom Noble, managing director of NeuroFocus Europe. “Every few years a new methodology comes out. Frankly, they’re incrementally different. This is transformationally different.”

AUGMENTED/ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial Life Forms Evolve Basic Intelligence - (New Scientist - August 4, 2010)
For generations, the Avidians have been cloning themselves quietly in a box. They are the digital offspring of Charles Ofria and colleagues at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing. They “live” in a computer world called Avida, and replicate using strings of coded computer instructions instead of DNA. But in many ways they are similar to real life: they compete with each other for resources, replicate, mutate, and can evolve new traits to out-compete their rivals. Unlike microbes, their evolution can be stopped at any time, reversed, repeated, and the precise sequence of mutations that led to the new trait can be dissected. They - or things like them - might eventually evolve to become artificially intelligent life forms.

Innovator: Rob Wood - (Business Week - July 29, 2010)
As founder of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, Rob Wood is trying to identify the unique factors that make a variety of insects efficient. Then he’s figuring out ways to replicate those biological advantages in tiny robots. He and eight graduate students are working to build a menagerie of mechanical creatures, from bees to termites. They’re using the locomotion of cockroaches and centipedes as models for gizmos that can navigate any terrain, perhaps to seek out victims in earthquake rubble. They’re also studying the flap-and-glide of butterfly wings and the hovering of dragonflies to help them make tiny robots that can fly for miles.

ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

Solar Roadways - (Solar Roadways website - no date)
The Solar Roadways company has made a section of road from the material that airline black boxes are made of and, in it, housed solar cells to collect energy, thereby creating a road that would pay for itself over time. They then said, “What if we added LEDs to “paint” the road lines from beneath, lighting up the road for safer night time driving? What if we added a heating element in the surface like the defrosting wire in the rear window of cars to prevent snow/ice accumulation in northern climates?” In 2009, the company received a contract from the Federal Highway Administration to build the first ever Solar Road Panel prototype.

Gasoline From Thin Air? - (ABC News - August 8, 2010)
An enzyme found in the roots of soybeans could be the key to cars that run on air. Vanadium nitrogenase, an enzyme that normally produces ammonia from nitrogen gas, can also convert carbon monoxide (CO), a common industrial byproduct, into propane. “This organism is a very common soil bacteria that is very well understood and has been studied for a long time,” said Markus Ribbe, a scientist at UC, Irvine. While scientists caution the research is still at an early stage, they say that this study could eventually lead to new, environmentally friendly ways to produce fuel — and eventually gasoline — from thin air.

In Crackdown on Energy Use, China to Shut 2,000 Factories - (New York Times- August 9, 2010)
Earlier this summer, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China promised to use an “iron hand” to improve his country’s energy efficiency, and a growing number of businesses are now discovering that it feels like a fist. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology quietly published a list of 2,087 steel mills, cement works and other energy-intensive factories required to close by Sept. 30. To prevent local obstruction to the closings, the ministry said in a statement on its Web site that the factories on its list would be barred from obtaining bank loans, export credits, business licenses and land. The ministry even warned that their electricity would be shut off, if necessary.

PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUES

Humanity Needs to Start Farming Bugs for Food - (PopSci - August 2, 2010)
The raising of livestock consumes two-thirds of the planet’s farmland, and is a major source of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, tons of edible, sustainable protein swarms all around us, free for the taking. In a new policy paper being considered by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Belgian entomologist Arnold van Huis makes the sensible recommendation that the western world eat more insects. Farming edible insects like mealworms and crickets would produce far less greenhouse gas — 10 times less methane and 100 times less nitrous oxide — than the large mammals we currently farm. Insects are metabolically much more efficient, which makes them far cheaper to feed and raise; and, since they’re so biologically different from humans, they are less subject to contagious disease scares like mad cow.

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring - (Wired - July 28, 2010)
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time - and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents - both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.” Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

Cybercrime: Are Mobsters Planting Hackers in Big Companies? - (Christian Science Monitor - July 30, 2010)
That is just one finding of a cybercrime report recently released by Verizon. While cybercrime fell in 2009, the report noted that hackers are getting better at what they do. Unlike some cyberstudies which are based on surveys, Verizon’s annual cyberattack report analyzes more than 900 actual cases and 900 million stolen records over the past six years. That data set now includes US Secret Service cases added to the report this year. The richness of the data makes the Verizon report particularly closely watched within the industry. More than half of data breaches from 2004-2008 had “none” or “low” difficulty ratings. But the “scales tipped” last year with 60% now rated “moderate” or “high.”This raises concerns about the “advanced persistent threat,” or APT, in which deep-pocketed, highly sophisticated elite attackers steal proprietary data by gaining entry to corporate systems like those of Google or US oil companies.

TRENDS OF GOVERNMENT

Feds Admit Storing Checkpoint Body Scan Images - (CNet - August 4, 2010)
For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.” Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse. This follows an earlier disclosure by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for “testing, training, and evaluation purposes.” The TSA’s procurement specifications, classified as “sensitive security information,” require that in some modes the scanner must “allow exporting of image data in real time” and provide a mechanism for “high-speed transfer of image data” over the network.

Iran Targeted in Cyber Attack - (War in Context - August 5, 2010)
Last September, Reuters reported: “Israel has been developing “cyber-war” capabilities that could disrupt Iranian industrial and military control systems. Few doubt that covert action, by Mossad agents on the ground, also features in tactics against Iran.” Now it seems, such an attack may have occurred in recent months. “Looks like this malware was made for espionage,” was the assessment of industry analyst Frank Boldewin when describing the recently discovered computer worm, known has Stuxnet, a particular trojan that had its greatest impact in Iran. It targets management systems that control energy utilities, transportation, and other vital systems. Stuxnet is, according to Andy Greenberg, “the first publicly-known threat, aside from occasional unattributed reports, to target Iran’s long-vulnerable infrastructure systems.” As such, the most likely instigator of such an attack would be a hostile government. The question is: which government? Israel and/or the United States have to be the prime suspects.

SOCIAL TRENDS

GPS Trackers Secretly Placed in Unilever Laundry Detergent Boxes - (Natural News - August 2, 2010)
It’s part of Unilever’s new marketing campaign to entice consumers in Brazil to purchase more boxes of Omo laundry detergent. The GPS trackers, you see, are only embedded in prize winning boxes of Omo detergent. If you happen to buy one of these GPS tracked boxes, Unilever agents suddenly show up at your door with a video camera crew and a prize. This is not merely an RFID tracking tag, but something far more technically advanced: Unilever is inserting GPS tracking transmitters (basically a transponder) into the boxes of Omo detergent, and additional circuitry allows two-way communication so that Unilever agents can remotely set off a beeper in the detergent box.

CONTACT AND THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE

Antarctica Experiment Discovers Puzzling Space Ray Pattern - (Yahoo News - July 30, 2010)
Cosmic rays are highly energetic particles streaming in from space that are thought to originate in the distant remnants of dead stars. But it turns out these particles are not arriving uniformly from all directions. A new study detected an overabundance of cosmic rays coming from one part of the sky, and a lack of cosmic rays coming from another. This odd pattern was detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an experiment still under construction that is actually intended to detect other exotic particles called neutrinos.

Abandon Earth or Face Extinction, Stephen Hawking Warns - (Fox News - August 9, 2010)
It’s time to abandon Earth, warned the world’s most famous theoretical physicist. “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet,” he said. “But I’m an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space.”

Mysterious Glow from the Milky Way Decoded - (Daily Galaxy - August 4, 2010)
Scientists have been puzzled by a mysterious infrared glow from the Milky Way and other galaxies, radiating from dusty regions in deep space. By duplicating the harsh conditions of space in their laboratories and computers, scientists have identified the mystifying infrared emiters as PAHs (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons that are a ubiquitous component of organic matter in space) that are probably produced by carbon-rich, giant stars. “A similar process produces soots here on Earth,” said Louis Allamandola, an astrochemistry researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Churchill Ordered UFO Cover-up, National Archives Show - (BBC News - August 5, 2010)
The latest batch of UFO files released from the UK Ministry of Defence to the National Archives shows that, in 1957, the committee received reports detailing an average of one UFO sighting a week and the government took the threat of UFOs so seriously in the 1950s that UK intelligence chiefs met to discuss the issue, newly-released files show. The files also include an account of a wartime meeting attended by Winston Churchill in which, it is claimed, the prime minister was so concerned about a reported encounter between a UFO and RAF bombers, that he ordered it be kept secret for at least 50 years to prevent “mass panic”.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Dwindling Retirement Savings ‘Undiscussed Explosive Bomb’ of Recession - (Huffington Post - July 31, 2010)
Retirement statistics are grim. The percentage of American workers who said they have less than $10,000 in savings grew to 43% in 2010, according to a recent survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Nearly a quarter of the workforce said they have postponed their planned retirement in the past year and a CareerBuilder.com survey reports that 61% of workers say they are now living paycheck to paycheck, as compared to 43% in 2007. With rapidly dwindling savings and fewer opportunities for jobs than their younger counterparts, many older Americans are facing a very uncertain economic future.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

China Banks See Risks in 23% of Local Loans - (Bloomberg - July 26, 2010)
The China Banking Regulatory Commission has told banks to write off non-performing project loans by the end of this year. The estimate implies $261 billion of debt may go sour, almost five times the $53.5 billion the nation’s five largest banks are raising to replenish capital. China’s banks advanced a record $1.4 trillion of credit last year to support the economy, raising concern that bad loans will surge and force the government to add to the more than $650 billion spent to clean up the banking industry since 1999. Lending hasn’t slowed as much as official data suggests because Chinese banks are shifting loans off balance sheets by repackaging them into investment products that are sold to investors. “The growing popularity of this activity is increasingly distorting credit growth figures at an institutional and system level,” Fitch Ratings analyst Charlene Chu wrote. “Consequently, Chinese banks’ loan loss reserves and capital are more exposed to credit losses than current data suggests.”

Five Myths about the Bush Tax Cuts - (Washington Post - August 1, 2010)
The tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, known as the Bush tax cuts, are set to expire Dec. 31. The cuts lowered tax rates across the board on income, dividends and capital gains; eventually eliminated the estate tax; further lowered burdens on married couples, parents and the working poor; and increased tax credits for education and retirement savings. Stepping quietly beyond the noise coming from Capital Hill, here is an analysis of the tax cuts as computed by several nonpartisan economists, including the Congressional Budget Office.

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH - articles off the beaten track which may - or may not - have predictive value.

The Empathic Civilization - (Rachel Maddow Show - May 28, 2010)
A 10 minute video clip that offers the best argument we’ve seen for the “new human”. If you aren’t familiar with mirror neurons, this is particularly worth your time.

Churchgoers, Strippers Protest One Another in Coshocton County - (Columbus Dispatch - August 9, 2010)
Inside the New Beginnings Ministries church, Pastor Dunfee’s worshippers wore polyester and pearls. Outside, club owner Tommy George’s strippers wore bikinis and belly rings. Every weekend for the last four years, Dunfee and members of his congregation have stood watch over George’s joint, taking up residence in the right of way with signs, video cameras and bullhorns in hand. They videotape customers’ license plates and post them online, and they try to save the souls of anyone who comes and goes. Now, the dancers have turned the tables, so to speak. Fed up with the tactics of Dunfee and his flock, they say they have finally accepted his constant invitation to come to church. It’s just that they’ve come wearing see-through shorts and toting Super Soakers. Greg Flaig, the executive director of the Ohio Owners Coalition, a group of showbar and club owners, called the women’s protest extraordinary, saying he’s never heard of anything like it in the country.

Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders - (Atlantic - August 4, 2010)
Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation’s stock exchanges. The trading bots aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants. In fact, it’s hard to figure out exactly what they’re up to or gauge their impact. Are they doing something illicit? If so, what? Or do the patterns emerge spontaneously, a kind of mechanical accident? If so, why? No matter what the answers to these questions turn out to be, we’re witnessing a market phenomenon that is not easily explained. And it’s really bizarre.

A FINAL QUOTE…

“…If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.” - Arthur C. Clarke

CONTACT US

Edited by John L. Petersen
johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

PRIVACY POLICY: We don’t share your information with anyone.

FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT…

• A number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges”.
• An upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere recently collapsed in an unexpectedly large contraction, the sheer size of which has scientists scratching their heads, NASA announced.
• The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
• A roughly $35 computing-cum-access device with impressive capabilities has been unveiled by the Indian Human Resources Department.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Amazon Says E-Book Sales Outpace Hardcovers - (Wall St. Journal - July 20, 2010)
Amazon.com Inc. said it reached a milestone, selling more e-books than hardbacks over the past three months. But publishers said it is still too early to gauge for the entire industry whether the growth of e-books is cannibalizing sales of paperback books, a huge and crucial market. Over the past month, the Seattle retailer sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books it sold, it said. “That is dramatic evidence of how powerful the e-book is now,” said Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney.

NEW REALITIES

A Scientist Takes On Gravity - (New York Times - July 13, 2010)
Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, is among a number of physicists say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms. Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

Plants Can Think and Remember - (BBC News - July 14, 2010)
Plants, scientists say, transmit information about light intensity and quality from leaf to leaf in a very similar way to our own nervous systems. These electro-chemical signals are carried by cells that act as “nerves” of the plants. In this study, Stanislaw Karpinski from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences and colleagues discovered that when light stimulated a chemical reaction in one leaf cell, this was immediately signalled to the rest of the plant by via specific type of cell called a “bundle sheath cell”. He said that plants used information encrypted in the light to immunise themselves against seasonal pathogens. “Every day or week of the season has… a characteristic light quality,” Professor Karpinski explained.

Mystery Supernova May Point to Unknown Laws of Physics - (Daily Galaxy - July 16, 2010)
An international team of astronomers has uncovered a supernova whose origin cannot be explained by any previously known mechanism and which promises exciting new insights into stellar explosions. Supernova (SN) 2005E, discovered five years ago by the University of California, Berkeley’s Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), is one of eight known “calcium-rich supernovae” that seem to stand out. If these eight calcium-rich superonovae are the first examples of a common, new type of supernova, they could explain two puzzling observations: the abundance of calcium in galaxies and in life on Earth and the concentration of positrons - the anti-matter counterpart of the electron - in the center of galaxies.

GENETICS/ HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

Whisker Stimulation Prevents Strokes in Rats - (Science Daily - July 13, 2010)
UC Irvine researchers found that mechanically stroking a single whisker activated a rat’s cerebral cortex - seen lighting up in magenta and blue - and prompted obstructed blood to take other routes to the brain. The team discovered that mechanically stroking just one whisker for four minutes within the first two hours of the blockage caused the blood to quickly flow to other arteries - like cars exiting a gridlocked freeway to find detours.But unlike freeway off-ramps, which can quickly clog, the alternate arteries expanded beyond their normal size, opening wide to allow critical blood flow to the brain. In people, “stimulating the fingers, lips or face in general could all have a similar effect,” says Melissa Davis, co-author of the study.

Depression Linked to Later Dementia - (New York Times - July 19, 2010)
A new study suggests that people with depression are significantly more likely to develop dementia later in life. The analysis followed 949 participants in the famous Framingham Heart Study over an average of eight and a half years, some for as long as 17 years. Adjusting for differences between groups, researchers found that depression raised the risk of dementia by 72%. And the more severe the depression, the greater the risk of dementia later. Given the study’s long interval, the lead author, Dr. Jane Saczynski said, “it is very clear that depression is a risk factor for dementia rather than a consequence of the disease.”

DISCOVERIES ENABLED BY NEW TECHNOLOGY

Earth’s Upper Atmosphere Collapses. Nobody Knows Why. - (Christian Science Monitor - July 15, 2010)
An upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere recently collapsed in an unexpectedly large contraction, the sheer size of which has scientists scratching their heads, NASA announced. The layer of gas - called the thermosphere - is now rebounding again. This type of collapse is not rare, but its magnitude shocked scientists. “This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,” said John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab. The collapse occurred during a period of relative solar inactivity - called a solar minimum from 2008 to 2009. These minimums are known to cool and contract the thermosphere, however, the recent collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain. Something is going on that we do not understand,” Emmert said.

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Solar Cycle Prediction Lowered Again - (Hockey Schtick - June 6, 2010)
Solar physicist Dr. David Hathaway of NASA has again lowered his prediction of the peak in sunspot numbers for the current solar cycle 24 to only 65 sunspots/month as of June 2010. The predictions for Solar Cycle 24 have plummeted from “one of the most intense” to now one of the least intense cycles of the past 400 years. If the anemic activity continues, the sun may be entering a quiet phase similar to the Dalton Minimum, characterized by approximately 50 sunspots/month at the peak of the solar cycle.

Why China Has to Dominate Green Tech - (Forbes - July 20, 2010)
Beijing wants to encourage domestic production into wind and solar products for export around the world. With patents on the new technology used in manufacturing, China would control the intellectual property and licensing on the products that would be used all over the world. If Beijing is able to do this, it would control the next generation of energy products used by the world for the next century. That is how China obviously plans to keep most of the value-added profits within China’s borders. (Editor’s note: Some of those “value-added profits” will leave China just as soon as the companies involved issue IPOs and outside investors buy the stocks.)

BP Buys up Gulf Scientists for Legal Defense - (Alabama Blog - July 16, 2010)
For the last few weeks, BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast to aid its defense against spill litigation. BP PLC attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university, according to scientists involved in discussions with the company’s lawyers. The university declined because of confidentiality restrictions that the company sought on any research. With its payments, BP buys more than the scientists’ services, according to Robert Wiygul, an Ocean Springs lawyer who specializes in environmental law. It also buys silence, he said, thanks to confidentiality clauses in the contracts.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Google’s Latest Invention May Lead to a Severe Loss of App-etite - (Guardian - July 18, 2010)
Google has launched a new online tool called App Inventor, a DIY kit that will allegedly enable non-techies to build applications for Android smartphones. “To use App Inventor,” says Google, “you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires no programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.” To make this as effortless as the App Inventor appears to do requires a great deal of cleverness. In fact the software underpinning the tool is wonderfully elegant and ingenious. It’s based on research originally done at MIT and on a dialect of the Scheme programming language, which is itself a descendant of Lisp, the original artificial intelligence language.

Indian HR Ministry Brings $35 Computing Device to Reality - (Trak In - July 22, 2010)
Finally: a low-cost computing-cum-access device has been unveiled by Human Resources minister Shri. Kapil Sibal. HR ministry is aiming at bringing down the cost of this device to $20 and ultimately to $10. IIT’s and other Technical Institutions are setting up research teams to cover wide range of issues and capability enhancements to achieve the ultimate goal of bringing down the the cost of this device to $10. It looks like a notepad (see photo) and its minimum expected functionalities are fairly impressive.

Google Buys Metaweb, the One Company That Could Revolutionize Google Search - (Fast Company - July 16, 2010)
Metaweb views keywords, the way we search now, as an inferior search method to what it calls “entities.” Words can vary in meaning, refer to different things, have different levels of importance or relevance at different times, and often return inexact results. So Metaweb has created a constantly growing database, or directory, of 12 million “entities,” which are really just persons, places, or things, and all the different ways you might refer to them. Wording isn’t so important with Metaweb, it’s the end meaning that matters.

AUGMENTED/ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Robotic Exoskeleton Gets Wheelchair Users Back on Their Feet - (Gizmag - July 16, 2010)
A robotic exoskeleton called REX puts wheelchair users back on their feet, enabling a person to stand, walk and go up and down stairs and slopes, controlling it with a joystick. REX users can stand up, walk, move sideways, turn around, go up and down steps, as well as walk on flat, hard surfaces including ramps and slopes. Sales are expected to commence in New Zealand by the end of 2010 and elsewhere by the middle of 2011. It is expected to cost about US$150,000.

The Loneliest Humanoid in America - (Pop Sci - July 20, 2010)
Walking, self-contained, adult-size robots are commonplace in robotics labs in Japan and South Korea, but there’s only one made here. Why are we falling behind? Broken into a daisy chain of input, calculation and action, just kicking a ball is incredibly hard. It’s so difficult, in fact, that engineers from all over the world have embraced it as the modern era’s standardized test of humanoid-robot sophistication, and they converge each June at an event called RoboCup to try it. This year, only one adult-size, self-contained, humanoid robot in the USA can even attempt it.

ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

Terawatt Research LLC Defies Free Energy Stereotypes - (Pure Energy Systems News - July 14, 2010)
This overunity magnet motor company is opposite the typical free energy image. They are low on fluff, have never been in the mainstream press; and they are high on evidence, including test results from TÜV and UL. One of their strategic advisors (not suppressors) served as former director of the CIA and of the FBI. Terawatt has evidence supporting their claims by two of the most reputable testing organizations in the world: TÜV Rhineland of North America and Underwriter Laboratories (UL). Both data plots clearly show performance frequency ranges in which much more energy is produced from the system than what is required to drive the system - at least three-fold.

China Passes U.S. as World’s Biggest Energy Consumer - (Wall St. Journal - July 19, 2010)
The Paris-based agency, whose forecasts are generally regarded as bellwether indicators for the energy industry, said China devoured 2,252 million tons of oil equivalent last year, or about 4% more than the U.S., which burned through 2,170 million tons of oil equivalent. The figures reflect, in part, how the global recession hit the U.S. more severely than China and hurt American industrial activity and energy use. Still, China’s total energy consumption has clocked annual double-digit growth rates for many years, driven by the country’s big industrial base. Highlighting how quickly its energy demand has increased, China’s total energy consumption was just half the size of the U.S. 10 years ago. The U.S. is still by far the bigger energy consumer per capita, with the average American burning five times as much energy annually as the average Chinese citizen.

PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUES

Researchers Engineer Malaria-proof Mosquitoes - (L.A. Times - July 17, 2010)
Malaria kills nearly 1 million people a year, but it has a weakness - to infect humans, it needs mosquitoes. In a potential step toward eradicating the disease, researchers report that they have developed a genetically engineered breed of mosquito that cannot be infected by the malaria-causing parasite. Genetically-modified mosquitoes are far from ready for use in the field, but the researchers achieved an unprecedented 100% blockage of the Plasmodium parasite, highlighting the promise of this approach, according to their study.

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nanotech Coatings Produce 20 Times More Electricity from Sewage - (Science Daily - July 22, 2010)
Engineers at Oregon State University found that by coating graphite anodes with a nanoparticle layer of gold, the production of electricity increased 20 times. Coatings with palladium produced an increase, but not nearly as much. And the researchers believe nanoparticle coatings of iron - which would be a lot cheaper than gold - could produce electricity increases similar to that of gold, for at least some types of bacteria. This brings us one step closer to a technology that could clean biowaste at the same time it produces useful levels of electricity.

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Hidden US Afghan War Details Revealed by Wikileaks - (BBC News - July 26, 2010)
More than 90,000 leaked US military records have been published on the website Wikileaks, reportedly revealing hidden details of the Afghanistan war. Three major news publications which have been shown the documents say they include unreported killings of Afghan civilians. The huge cache of classified papers is described as one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The White House has condemned the leaks as “irresponsible”.

Toxic Legacy of US Assault on Fallujah Worse than Hiroshima - (Independent - July 24, 2010)
Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study. Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer. Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, says that while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form.

The Lonely, Dangerous Fight against Christian Supremacists inside the Armed Forces - (TruthOut - July 11, 2010)
Over the past year, Mikey Weinstein, 55-year-old founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), and his organization have recorded a tremendous string of victories in the fight against Christian supremacists inside the U.S. armed forces. In January, the MRFF broke the story on the Pentagon’s Jesus Rifles, where rifle scopes used in Afghanistan and Iraq were embossed with New Testament verses. In April, he got the military to rescind its invitation to the Reverend Franklin Graham to speak at May’s National Prayer Day because of Islamophobic remarks. Most shockingly, MRFF received its second nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in late October. These high-profile victories have earned him the enmity of the hardcore Christian Right and the mentally unstable.

A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control - (Washington Post - July 19, 2010)
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine. See also: projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america.

TRENDS OF GOVERNMENT

Jailed for Debt in the U.S. in the 21st Century - (All Gov - June 19, 2010)
With millions of Americans struggling to pay off credit cards and loans, some are finding themselves serving time in local jails because of failures to make payments or to appear at court hearings with debt collectors. Consumer attorneys said they’ve witnessed a rise in debt-related arrests in Arkansas, Arizona, Minnesota and Washington. In Minnesota, arrest warrants for debtors have increased 60% during the past four years. Those arrested often serve 48 hours in local jails. But in some states, judges have ordered individuals to serve jail time until coming up with minimum payments to creditors.

Rethinking the Measure of Growth - (New York Times - July 19, 2010)
Some Asian governments, China’s included, have been trying to recalibrate gross domestic product to include the cost of growth to the environment, creating a green gross domestic product. Such efforts, said Mr. Tan, the Nanyang professor, have been frustrated by the difficulty in determining the future cost of environmental destruction. However, economists warn that even with greener development, the result may still be the same (severe eco-destruction) if the goal remains an American-style standard of living. Asia may instead need to carve out a vastly different vision of prosperity that does not rely on ever-increasing levels of material consumption.

SOCIAL TRENDS

The Shadow over Israel - (Haaretz - February 6, 2010)
An essay by Margaret Atwood recounts her experience during a trip to Israel, “The Israelis I met could not have been more welcoming. The sun was shining, the waves waving, the flowers were in bloom. Tourists jogged along the beach at Tel Aviv as if everything was normal. But… there was the Shadow. Two minutes into any conversation, the Shadow would appear. It’s not called the Shadow, it’s called “the situation.” It haunts everything. The Shadow is not the Palestinians. The Shadow is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, linked with Israeli’s own fears. The worse the Palestinians are treated in the name of those fears, the bigger the Shadow grows, and then the fears grow with them; and the justifications for the treatment multiply.”

CONTACT AND THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE

China’s UFO Conspiracy Frenzy - (Daily Galaxy - July 20, 2010)
Signs are accumulating that China is experiencing a growing fascination with UFO’s. After an unidentified object was detected last week blazing through China’s Hangzhou airspace, dozens of inbound flights to nearby Xiaoshan Airport were diverted. Explanations have ranged from an alien spacecraft to “sunlight reflected from planes” to military trials to, but there’s no official statement yet from the Chinese government. A number of people had apparently seen a white glowing object proceeding rapidly across the evening skies over Xiaoshan, near Hangzhou in Eastern China. Panic broke out - and the authorities decided to close the airport just in case.

UFO Testimony from Don Phillips of Lockheed Skunkworks - (ListRocket - July 21, 2010)
In this interview with Don Phillips, a design engineer from Lockheed, he says in part, “These UFOs were huge and they would just come to a stop and do a 60 degree, 45 degree, 10 degree turn, and then immediately reverse this action. During the Apollo landing, Neil Armstrong said, ‘They’re here. They are right over there and look at the size of those ships. And, it is obvious they don’t like us being here’.” Phillips also noted, “Anti-gravitational research was going….We know that there were some captured craft from 1947 in Roswell, they were real. And, yes, we really did get some technology from them. Moreover, yes, we really did put it to work….”

DEMOGRAPHICS

More Americans’ Credit Scores Sink to New Lows - (Yahoo - July 12, 2010)
Figures provided by FICO Inc. show that 25.5% of consumers - nearly 43.4 million people — now have a credit score of 599 or below, marking them as poor risks for lenders. Historically, just 15% of the 170 million consumers with active credit accounts, or 25.5 million people, fell below 599, according to data posted on Myfico.com. More are likely to join their ranks. On the positive side, the number of consumers who have a top score of 800 has increased in recent years. In part, this is because more individuals have cut spending and paid down debt in response to the recession. Their ranks now stand at 17.9%, which is notably above the historical average of 13%, though down from 18.7% in April 2008 before the market meltdown.

Of Medical Specialties, Demand for Psychiatrists Growing Fastest - (USA Today - July 1, 2010)
A national physician recruiting firm, which tracked more than 2,800 physician requests, found that psychiatrists were the third-most-requested physician. Family practice doctors were the most requested, followed by internists, but the number of requests for both those specialties decreased from the previous year. Though demand is growing, fewer medical students are entering psychiatry. Health officials say the field garners little interest because psychiatrists earn less than other specialties, even though they spend the same amount of time in medical training.

China’s Money and Migrants Pour into Tibet - (New York Times - July 24, 2010)
Han Chinese workers, investors, merchants, teachers and soldiers are pouring into remote Tibet. After the violence that ravaged this region in 2008, China’s aim is to make Tibet wealthier - and more Chinese. But if the influx of money and people has brought new prosperity, it has also deepened the resentment among many Tibetans. Migrant Han entrepreneurs elbow out Tibetan rivals, then return home for the winter after reaping profits. Robert Barnett, a scholar of Tibet at Columbia University, said the goal of maintaining double-digit growth in the region had worsened ethnic tensions. “Of course, they achieved that, but it was disastrous,” he said. “They had no priority on local human resources, so of course they relied on outside labor, and sucked in large migration into the towns.” Now, a heavy security presence is needed to keep control of Lhasa.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

Why Are Banks Withholding Highend Repossessions over $300,000 from the Market? - (Real Estate Channel - July 20, 2010)
There are now two main props keeping the housing market afloat. One is the refusal of banks to put on the market foreclosed homes over $300,000. For example, this year, banks in the Chicago area have foreclosed on a huge number of expensive homes: 2,650 repossessed homes for more than $300,000 and 169 for more than $1 million. But out of 28,829 repossessed properties, there were only 1,292 listed by lenders as “for sale.” And a mere 29 homes over $300,000 were for sale. In other words, the banks have withheld from the market 2,621 properties listed at $300,000 or higher. There are probably two important reasons why banks have pursued this strategy.

Fiscal Localism on Rise In Germany - (NPR - July 15, 2010)
The Havelbluete, the Augusta and the Chiemgauer are micro-currencies which are in abundance in Germany. There are more than two dozen local currencies in circulation, and 40 or so initiatives are about to start printing their own banknotes. These notes are not gimmicks. They’re recognized legal tender — at least within each local region. For example, one Chiemgauer equals one euro and aims to promote regional investment while also helping the community. It’s not backed by any government body. But what used to be illegal gray area is now legal tender here. The Chiemgauer, named after a region in Bavaria, is a depreciative currency. It loses two% of its value at the end of each quarter (the notes are date stamped) which encourages people to spend, something the frugal Germans are notoriously unwilling to do.

Three Years On, Fault Lines Threaten the World Economy - (Financial Times - July 14, 2010)
As Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund notes in a thought-provoking new book, the earthquake of the past few years has damaged western economies, while leaving those of emerging countries, particularly Asia, standing. It has also destroyed western prestige. The west has dominated the world economically and intellectually for at least two centuries. That epoch is over. In the US, the post-WW II “deal” centered on full employment and high individual consumption. In Europe, it centered on state-provided welfare. The deal is over.

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH - articles off the beaten track which may - or may not - have predictive value.

How Facts Backfire - (Boston Globe - July 11, 2010)
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. “The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon - known as “backfire” - is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

JUST FOR FUN

Paul the Psychic Octopus: There’s an App for That - (AOL News - July 19, 2010)
Paul the octopus is leaving Oberhausen, Germany for new home in Madrid. More importantly, he could be headed for your i-phone. Brazilian developer UTouchLabs has released “Ask the Octopus”, an app that allows a cartoon version of Paul to help users make decisions - be they mundane or mind-boggling. Simply enter two possible options and the eight-legged oracle will make a choice, hopefully guiding your life in the right direction.

A FINAL QUOTE…

“We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future. “ –Max Planck

CONTACT US

Edited by John L. Petersen
johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

PRIVACY POLICY: We don’t share your information with anyone.

FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT…

• Finland has become the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right for every citizen.
• Scientists have found the “genetic signatures of exceptional longevity” by studying more than 1,000 people who have reached 100 and comparing them with the general population.
• An ACLU report documents that law enforcement agencies across America continue to monitor and harass groups and individuals for doing little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.
• Blood drawn with a simple needle stick can be coaxed into producing stem cells that may have the ability to form any type of tissue in the body.

PUNCTUATIONS
by John L. Petersen

KRYON in Berkeley Springs

We’re very excited about Lee Carroll and KRYON coming to Berkeley Springs this weekend. Looks like almost 100 will be attending, but there’s still room for you. It will be a very timely and fascinating event that is sure to provide unusual enlightenment about what might be on our horizon. I’m personally going to be looking for what KRYON has to say about the gulf oil spill and what the potential implications might be from that. Click on the banner to the right and you’ll go straight to all of the information you need to make sure that we reserve a seat for you. Hope you can make it.

The Government and the Gulf

When I last wrote in this space I made mention in passing to the terrorist no-fly list that is maintained by our federal government. It is reported that more than a million names are on this list that restricts who will be allowed to board an airplane within or coming to this country.

While waiting to get a haircut last week I was reminded of this when I came across a piece by Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. Pitts was writing about a class-action lawsuit that has been brought against the government relative to this list by ten very diverse individuals who can’t fly anywhere because their names are erroneously on the list.

These are people “the government deems too dangerous to fly, but too harmless to arrest,” he explains. This is “more than a clever turn of phrase. It is also an apt description of the legal limbo to which the government has consigned an untold number of innocent people in the name of fighting terror.

“Here’s how it is when your name is on the no-fly list:
“They won’t let you fly.
“They won’t tell you why.
“They won’t show you the list.
“They won’t take your name off the list.
“They won’t give you any way to appeal.

“The list, then, is a purgatory to which one can be consigned in perpetuity with neither due process nor judicial review, because one’s name happened to that of some bad person. And there is no form you fill out or person you can talk to to have the error corrected. You’ve simply got to live with it.”

Read the whole piece here . . . and then tell me: Is this fair? Is this right? Is the government really helping us by doing this? It makes me wonder who these rule makers think they are representing or working for. If they really thought that they were responsible to the citizens of this country, would they do things like this?

The question I’m raising is one of motivation and perspective - that lens through which the world is seen which defines and circumscribes the options one believes are available to him or herself. The bigger issue is whether this orientation will allow us to effectively deal with the other, much larger issues that are on our horizon. It does not look encouraging to me. Let me tell you why.

I read the above piece after coming from a community meeting where our mayor (remember the town has 600 residents) was lamenting the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency (the federal government, I presume) had a team in town telling her that a goodly percentage of the town was out of bounds for badly needed economic development because the theoretical 100-year floodplain of the stream going through town would not allow any buildings on the empty downtown land that we’d like converted into economic and community building facilities.

I wondered out loud in the meeting, why, in the face of the gulf oil catastrophe - and many other major environmental problems in our country - our government had nothing better to do than work its way through tiny little towns like ours telling officials how they couldn’t be creative in shaping their future.

Their perspective was not congruent with the scale of the problem.

I had not read Pitts before, so I looked into some of the other things he was writing for the Miami Herald relative to the Gulf oil spill. It was interesting. He said:

An oil rig operated by British Petroleum explodes in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven people die. As much as 2.5 million gallons of BP oil gushes into the Gulf every day. Fragile eco-systems are wrecked, sea life is slimed, fishermen and boaters who make their living from the Gulf are facing ruin and BP, we discover, had no real plan for handling a catastrophe of this magnitude.

They pretend to mean it and we pretend to believe it.

There it was again. A basic mismatch between the stated function and the actual way the system works.

Now stay with me here. Although it may sound like it, this is not just ranting about the ineffectiveness of government and the need to get those bureaucrats off our backs and out of our lives.

I’m instead thinking here about the extraordinary things that appear to be coming our way in the months ahead and seriously wondering if there is any chance that the institutions that we have developed to deal with issues of this significance are even close to being capable to do so. Are they able to even begin to be effective in this unprecedented environment? Are the coming events going to highlight the fundamental mismatch between government’s abilities and people’s needs? Are we watching the beginning of the end of government as we know it?

Let’s take the oil spill again and I’ll try to build a picture for you of what seems to be happening.

Here is a blog entry by a medical doctor detailing the mental, emotional and spiritual effects of the Gulf disaster. Among other things it says: ‘People are starting to grieve over what they see as the end of their lifestyle and work. Realities are setting in and there is a definite threat of people moving from sad to hopeless.’ The mass public media though is not representing the reality of the mega-disaster; it is instead promoting government and corporate agendas.” (There’s that mismatch again between responsibility and action.)

Think about this. We’re not talking about Haiti here. When was the last time you read anything about an important percentage of the U.S. population “grieving over the end of their lifestyle and work” because of a natural disaster? This is qualitatively different than any other non-human based disaster - even hurricane Katrina - where damage is done, but one can rebuild and continue. Here the impact is such that people are starting to lose hope.

Is that realistic?

Well, in the last two weeks my friend DK Matai started to shine a new light on the situation in a piece he wrote for Huffington Post that laid out a new scenario relative to the disaster. DK tries to get your attention right from the beginning:

As much as one million times the normal level of methane is showing up near the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, enough potentially to create dead zones in the water. “These are higher levels than we have ever seen at any other location in the ocean itself,” according to sources cited by Reuters. The “flow team” of the US Geological Survey estimates that 2,900 cubic feet of natural gas, which primarily contains methane, is being released into the Gulf waters with every barrel of oil. The constant flow of around 65,000 barrels of crude oil places the total daily amount of natural gas at over 188 million cubic feet. So far, over 13 billion cubic feet may have been released, making it one of the most vigorous methane eruptions in modern human history.uch as one million times the normal level of methane is showing up near the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, enough potentially to create dead zones in the water. “These are higher levels than we have ever seen at any other location in the ocean itself,” according to sources cited by Reuters. The “flow team” of the US Geological Survey estimates that 2,900 cubic feet of natural gas, which primarily contains methane, is being released into the Gulf waters with every barrel of oil. The constant flow of around 65,000 barrels of crude oil places the total daily amount of natural gas at over 188 million cubic feet. So far, over 13 billion cubic feet may have been released, making it one of the most vigorous methane eruptions in modern human history. (You can read more of DK and his team’s insightful analysis at mi2g.net)

So now you’ve got the picture of humans having punctured the surface of an underwater methane bomb, the likes of which no one has ever seen before.

Let me see. Is that what the government is telling us? Is that the analysis that we’re getting from all of these people that we pay to “protect” us?

About the time that DK’s article was published CNN reported that our government essentially shut off freedom of the press as it is associated with the Gulf event. No reporter can now get closer than 20 meters from any activity or installation related to the oil spill. This, even though just a couple of weeks earlier the Coast Guard admiral in charge of the whole affair had reassured everyone that the press would have unfettered access to any location within the operation. And now, BP is apparently colluding with local law enforcement to intimidate journalists.

What happened? Why the change in attitude? Are they trying to cover something up? Have they learned something that they don’t want us to know? In the face of large, rapid change, government’s first (and often only) response is to control. As the level of disruptiveness and significance of an event increases, the trend in policy approaches is clear: provide fewer and fewer options. The no-fly list is a great example of this: constrain everyone. Never illuminate. Don’t incentivize. No innovation. Just control the information and restrain the public. Can you visualize this approach being successful with any really huge disaster? Or a series of disasters? Did it work well with Katrina?

There is a fundamental mismatch between the way government sees the world and the world that is emerging. We have entered an era where the events and potential events are fundamentally such that it is impossible that government as it is presently constituted could ever provide effective solutions. We’re therefore looking into a future that is mismatched with our capabilities and will almost certainly force a redesign of the system and encourage the emergence of something that WILL work - a new world.

We see the indicators of this all around us. In the face of large natural disasters (think Katrina) it is never the authorities who solve the immediate problems of lack of supplies, order and utilities. In fact, as often as not, the folks we pay to provide solve these problems add significantly to the initial post-event crisis.

It is groups of citizens, self-organizing and coming together in ad hoc configurations that put things together initially and get them going again. Corporations step in with supplies. Nongovernmental organizations leap into the vacuum. What is it that allows those kinds of networks to be effective? Communications - telephones and the Internet.

I’m not just picking on the government (although that’s easy to do) - the problem is universal and is reflected in almost every sector of our human systems. The financial system isn’t working, the global economic system may be having a near death experience, the energy sector is seeing major change. We’re seeing the beginning of a new era that is signaled by any of a number of fundamental mismatches between capability and context, but one of the big ones will be the end of government as we have known it.

What comes next? Big punctuations in the status quo set up the distinct ability of the system to reconfigure itself. I certainly don’t know for sure, but think for a minute of the role that the Internet could play in allowing emergent, dynamic, rapidly reconfigurable, relatively transparent “government”. Certainly we’re evolving the capability to field these capabilities in the business area - responding quickly with resources of all kinds to rapidly changing situations.

Also, consider what the response might be to a significant failure of the current system. I could see groups of enlightened individuals vowing never to “do that” again and developing a new framework of values and principles that would underpin the emergence of a new world - a new form of government, new economy, new energy, new agriculture, etc.

These kinds of situations will provide the necessity that is required for humans to reinvent themselves in very basic ways. We will become effective operators (and creators) in the new environment by learning from the past and evolving new capabilities. It could be very profound.

How long will it be before we decide that the old government model is obsolete? May be sooner than you think.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Finland Makes Broadband a Legal Right - (BBC News - July 1, 2010)
Finland has become the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right for every citizen. From 1 July every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection. Finland has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015. It is believed up to 96% of the population are already online and that only about 4,000 homes still need connecting to comply with the law.

GENETICS/ HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

NIST Team Advances in Translating Language of Nanopores - (PhysOrg - June 24, 2010)
National Institute of Standards and Technology scientists have moved a step closer to developing the means for a rapid diagnostic blood test that can scan for thousands of disease markers and other chemical indicators of health. The team reports it has learned how to decode the electrical signals generated by a nanopore — a “gate” less than 2 nanometers wide in an artificial cell membrane. For more than a decade, scientists have sought to use a nanopore-based electrical detector to characterize single-stranded DNA for genetic sequencing applications. Now they are being used to identify, quantify and characterize each of the more than 20,000 proteins the body produces-a capability that would provide a snapshot of a patient’s overall health at a given moment.

Surgeons Carry Out World’s First Full Face Transplant - (Telegraph - July 8, 2010)
Surgeons in Paris have completed the world’s first full face transplant including eyelids, facial muscles and even the lachrymal canals which will allow Jerome to cry “naturally”, said Professor Laurent Lantieri, the surgeon who led the operation. Although Spanish medics claimed to have carried out a full transplant in April, Prof Lantieri claimed his was definitely the first, because lips and a full lachrymal system had been swapped - something which was once considered impossible.

Scientists Create 3D Models of Whole Mouse Organs - (Yale University - June 23, 2010)
Yale University engineers have for the first time created 3D models of whole intact mouse organs using fluorescence microscopy. Combining an imaging technique called multiphoton microscopy with “optical clearing,” which uses a solution that renders tissue transparent, the researchers were able to scan mouse organs and create high-resolution images of the brain, small intestine, large intestine, kidney, lung and testicles. They then created 3D models of the complete organs-a feat that, until now, was only possible by slicing the organs into thin sections or destroying them in the process, a disadvantage if more information about the sample is needed after the fact.

Vision Improves with the Right Outlook - (Discovery - April 29, 2010)
According to research by Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer and colleagues, the placebo effect has astonishing power. New research shows that eyesight markedly improves when people are experimentally induced to believe that they can see especially well. Their expectations actually enhanced visual clarity, rather than simply increasing alertness. The findings add to the evidence that visual perception depends not just on relaying information from your eyes to your brain, but also on experience-based assumptions about what you can see. Those expectations can lead people to ignore unusual objects and events.

Genes That Mean You Will Live to 100 Discovered by Scientists - (Telegraph - July 1, 2010)
A team of researchers at Boston University found the “genetic signatures of exceptional longevity” by studying more than 1,000 people who have reached 100 and comparing them with the general population. While environment and family history are factors in healthy ageing, these genetic variants play a critical and complex role in conferring exceptional longevity they found. The team identified a group of genetic variants that can predict exceptional longevity in humans with 77% accuracy - a breakthrough in understanding the role of genes in determining human lifespan.

Stem Cells from Blood a ‘Huge’ Milestone - (Science News - July 1, 2010)
Blood drawn with a simple needle stick can be coaxed into producing stem cells that may have the ability to form any type of tissue in the body, according to three independent research groups. The new technique will allow scientists to tap a large, readily available source of personalized stem cells. The groups used similar methods to prod certain immune cells in human blood to become induced pluripotent stem cells. The new studies accomplished the reprogramming feat by using viruses to deliver a four-gene cocktail that reverts the cells to a naïve state in which any developmental path is open.

DISCOVERIES ENABLED BY NEW TECHNOLOGY

A New Way to Find Earths - (PhysOrg - July 9, 2010)
A team of astronomers from Germany, Bulgaria and Poland have used a completely new technique to find an exotic extrasolar planet. The same approach is sensitive enough to find planets as small as the Earth in orbit around other stars. The group used Transit Timing Variation to detect a planet with 15 times the mass of the Earth in the system WASP-3, 700 light-years from the Sun in the constellation of Lyra. This newly discovered planet is among the least massive planets known to date and also the least massive planet known orbiting a star which is more massive than our Sun.

Ancient Legends Once Walked Among Early Humans? - (USA Today - June 28, 2010)
Siberia’s Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who led the study offered no answer for what happened to this “archaic” human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago. But at least one scholar has an intriguing answer: “The discovery of material evidence of a distinct hominin (human) lineage in Central Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago does not come as a surprise to those who have looked at the historical and anecdotal evidence of ‘wild people’ inhabiting the region,” wrote folklorist Michael Heaney of the UK’s Bodleian Library Oxford.

NEW REALITIES

Large Hadron Collider Rival Tevatron May Have Found Higgs Boson - (Telegraph - July 12, 2010)
The Tevatron, the huge particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois - the most powerful in the world after the Large Hadron Collider - is expected to be retired when the CERN accelerator becomes fully operational, but may have struck a final blow before it becomes obsolete. If the rumors are correct, physicists at Fermi have found the Higgs boson. That is the last of the particles posited by the standard model of particle physics still to be found. It is said to explain why other particles have mass, and its discovery would confirm the standard model.

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Methane in Gulf “Astonishingly High” - (Reuters - June 22, 2010)
As much as 100,000 times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone. Texas A&M University oceanography professor John Kessler and his crew took measurements of both surface and deep water within a 5-mile radius of BP’s broken wellhead. “There is an incredible amount of methane in there. We need to determine why that is,” he said. Methane occurs naturally in sea water, but high concentrations encourage the growth of microbes that gobble up oxygen needed by marine life. Kessler said oxygen depletions have not reached a critical level yet.

Oil Spread Leaves Horror in its Wake - (MSNBC - June 30, 2010)
This independent footage of the extent of the oil spill, subsequent fires in the water and death of marine life in Gulf of Mexico was taken by conservationist John Wathen. There seems to be no way to get around a 10 second commercial paid for by BP preceding the video clip. However, given what follows, it’s difficult to imagine that this BP public relations effort is going to provide the company with any benefit. See also: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/38028832#38028729

The Gulf Oil Spill as the Unfolding of Prophecy - (Reality Sandwich - June 30, 2010)
Recent articles reveal that there is a gigantic bubble of methane gas underneath the Gulf of Mexico, which has helped to create the enormous pressure that makes it unlikely, if not impossible, that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill can be stopped by human means. Video taken by undersea robots show oil and gas leaking from many fissures in the earth, far beyond the range of the well hole. This suggests that the underground containment structure is cracking apart. If the current effort to build relief wells fails or is ineffective, there are no more known technological fixes available. The article goes on to project various possible subsequent scenarios.

How BP Gulf Disaster May Have Tiggered a ‘World-killing’ Event - (Helium - July 9, 2010)
This article covers much of the same information about the methane bubble and its possible consequences as others in this section, however it also adds some bits. The media has been kept away from the emergency salvage measures being taken to forestall the biggest catastrophe in human history. The federal government has warned them away from the epicenter of operations with the threat of a $40,000 fine for each infraction and the possibility of felony arrests. Why is the press being kept away? Word is that the disaster is escalating. Reports, filtering through from oceanologists and salvage workers in the region, state that the upper level strata of the ocean floor is succumbing to greater and greater pressure. That pressure is causing a huge expanse of the seabed-estimated by some as spreading over thousands of square miles surrounding the BP wellhead-to bulge. Some claim the seabed in the region has risen an astounding 30 feet.

Truth and Consequences - (New Earth News - June 26, 2010)
In this 15-page .pdf file, you may wish to start on page 6, with the first of five scenarios which this author sees as possible outcomes of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

China Fears Consumer Impact on Global Warming - (New York Times - July 4, 2010)
Even as Beijing imposes the world’s most rigorous national energy campaign, the effort is being overwhelmed by the billionfold demands of Chinese consumers. For example, while China has imposed lighting efficiency standards on new buildings and is drafting similar standards for household appliances, construction of apartment and office buildings proceeds at a frenzied pace. And rural sales of refrigerators, washing machines and other large household appliances more than doubled in the past year in response to government subsidies aimed at helping 700 million peasants afford modern amenities.

Debate on Geoengineering - (Democracy Now - July 8, 2010)
Supporters of geoengineering have proposed radical ways to alter the planet to decrease the level of greenhouse gas emissions. Proposals include creating artificial volcanoes to pollute the atmosphere with sulfur particles, fertilizing the oceans and placing sun-deflecting aluminum foil in the sky. But opposition is growing to geoengineering. This video clip features Indian environmentalist, scientist, philosopher and eco-feminist, Vandana Shiva, and geopolitical analyst and columnist, Gwynne Dyer.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Wolfram/Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine - (Wolfram/Alpha website - no date)
This is an exceptionally fine web resource that can provide computational answers for a remarkable breadth of questions. From the website’s homepage: Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.” Listen to the introduction (here) to understand the scope of the site.

AUGMENTED/ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Computers Learn to Listen, and Some Talk Back - (June 24, 2010 - New York Times)
The artificial intelligence technology that has moved furthest into the mainstream is computer understanding of what humans are saying. People increasingly talk to their cellphones to find things, instead of typing. Both Google’s and Microsoft’s search services now respond to voice commands. More drivers are asking their cars to do things like find directions or play music. The number of American doctors using speech software to record and transcribe accounts of patient visits and treatments has more than tripled in the past three years to 150,000. Translation software being tested by DARPA is fast enough to keep up with some simple conversations: with some troops in Iraq, English is translated to Arabic and Arabic to English. Later this summer, a new model of the Ford Edge will recognize complete addresses, including city and state spoken in a single phrase.

ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

Guide to Recent Battery Advances - (Technology Review - June 29, 2010)
Electric vehicles, hybrids, and renewable energy have at least one thing in common: if they’re ever going to be more widely used, representing the majority of cars on the road or a large share of electricity supply, batteries need to get significantly better. Batteries will need to store more energy, deliver it faster and more reliably, and ultimately, cost far less. The specific ways batteries need to improve vary by the application, but in all these areas, researchers have been making significant headway.

Blimps Could Replace Aircraft in Freight Transport - (Guardian - June 30, 2010)
Despite languishing in sci-fi B-movies for most of the last 70 years, the British government’s former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford, said several major air and defence companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, were working on designs, and the US defence department had recently made a large grant to help develop the technology.Helium-powered ships could be carrying freight - and even passengers - in as little as a decade’s time.

PUBLIC HEALTH

Scientists Invent First Male Contraceptive Pill - (Telegraph - June 28, 2010)
Researchers in Israel have finally been able to create a oral pill that deactivates sperm before they reach the womb and only needs to be to be taken once every three months. The breakthrough pill could be available in as little as three years, according to the scientist behind the discovery. The pill removes a vital protein in sperm that is required for a woman to conceive. So while sperm still get through to the uterus they are unable to fertilize an egg.

Advance in Quest for HIV Vaccine - (Wall St. Journal - July 9, 2010)
U.S. government scientists say they have discovered three powerful antibodies, the strongest of which neutralizes 91% of HIV strains, more than any AIDS antibody yet discovered. They are now deploying the technique used to find those antibodies to identify antibodies to influenza viruses. The HIV antibodies were discovered in the cells of a 60-year-old African-American gay man, known in the scientific literature as Donor 45, whose body made the antibodies naturally. The trick for scientists now is to develop a vaccine or other methods to make anyone’s body produce them as well.

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Researchers Develop Drug Delivery System Using Nanoparticles Triggered by Electromagnetic Field - (PhysOrg - July 8, 2010)
A new system for the controlled delivery of pharmaceutical drugs has been developed by a team of University of Rhode Island chemical engineers using nanoparticles embedded in a liposome that can be triggered by non-invasive electromagnetic fields. liposomes are tiny nanoscale spherical structures made of lipids that can trap different drug molecules inside them for use in delivering those drugs to targeted locations in the body. The superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles the researchers embed in the shell of the liposome release the drug by making the shell leaky when heat-activated in an alternating current electromagnetic field operating at radio frequencies.

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

U.S. Plans Cyber Shield for Utilities, Companies - (Wall St. Journal - July 8, 2010)
The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program. The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system, these people said. Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million. Some industry and government officials familiar with the program see Perfect Citizen as an intrusion by the NSA into domestic affairs, while others say it is an important program to combat an emerging security threat that only the NSA is equipped to provide.

TRENDS OF GOVERNMENT

Wall St. Congratulates Washington - (TruthOut - June 28, 2010)
This editorial - satire structured as a letter of appreciation from Wall St. CEOs to Washington - contains enough grains of truth that it is worth overlooking the tone.

7 Outrageous Examples of Police Spying and Harassment of Peaceful Activists - (AlterNet - July 3, 2010)
According to a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), law enforcement agencies around the country have acted as diligent Thought Police, relying on dubious justifications to spy on Americans based on little more than their political beliefs. After Cold War, federal agencies enacted new rules against spying on people for their politics. But in 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, leaning heavily on the attacks of 9/11, suspended those restrictions. Here are 7 examples of what that suspension has encouraged.

Guide to the Sovereign Debt Crisis - (Business Insider - May 13, 2010)
Niall Ferguson of Harvard University provides a perspective on sovereign debt using 41 PowerPoint slides. These slides accompanied his lecture titled “Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspectives on Current Predicaments” at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. Even without the text of Ferguson’s lecture, the slides are fairly self-explanatory.

States: The New Strategic Defaulters - (Real Clear Markets - July 6, 2010)
As the bond yields of certain US states rise, especially Illinois and California, the comparisons to Greece have been obvious. But there is a key difference: state debt crises are almost entirely a matter of solvency. Because of the long-term nature of most state debts, states face little rollover risk and could even weather a complete loss of access to debt markets - so long as they act to get their books into balance going forward. If the federal government will bail out a state that defaults on its bonds, then default may be a good fiscal strategy: it allows the state to engage in spending that will ultimately be paid for by taxpayers elsewhere.

SOCIAL TRENDS

Death by Gadget - (New York Times - June 26, 2010)
“Blood diamonds” have faded away, but we may now be carrying “blood phones.” An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity - smartphones, laptops and digital cameras - are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices. Electronics manufacturers want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.” Yet now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these “conflict minerals” out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.

CONTACT AND THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE

Aliens Found by Radio Signal? - (NPR - May 26, 2010)
In August, Jerry Ehman, a professor at Ohio State University volunteering with SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, saw six numbers and letters on the computer printout in front of him - six symbols that have become one of the grandest riddles in modern science. SETI scientists traced it back to the constellation Sagittarius, just to the northwest of the globular cluster M55. But when they looked for the source, there was nothing there, no planet, no star. Still, the shape of the signal, its narrow AM/FM-like focus, not to mention its surprisingly tantalizing frequency suggested intentionality. For scientists, a big puzzle still is: Why only one signal? If an alien intelligence is trying to send a message somewhere, wouldn’t it make sense to send the message a few times? The signal landed once on Aug. 15, 1977. It never repeated.

UFO Shuts Down Chinese Airport, Military Link? - (OAL News- July 9, 2010)
A Chinese airport was dramatically closed after an unidentified craft was detected by baffled air traffic controllers. They spotted the UFO on radar screens forcing bosses to ground flights and divert planes away from Xiaoshan airport in the eastern city of Hangzhou. The mysterious object glowed on monitoring instruments late on Wednesday night and was photographed by a local resident. China Daily reported that authorities may know more about the UFO than they are acknowledging and hinted that there may be a military connection.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Arkansas, Texas and Arizona Lead the Nation in Child Food Insecurity - (PR Newswire - July 1, 2010)
New state-level data on child food insecurity was announced today by Feeding America, revealing that Arkansas, Texas and Arizona have the highest rates of child food insecurity in the country at nearly 25%. In addition, the study includes regional data on food insecurity for children under the age of 5. In the South, more than one in five children or nearly 22% of young children are food insecure - the highest rate in the nation. The Western region of the country has the second highest rate of young child food insecurity at nearly one in five, or 19.6%. The Midwest has a rate of more than one in six, or 18.6%; and the Northeast has a rate of nearly one in seven, or 13.7%.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

In Face of Worker Unrest, Chinese Regime Launches ‘Strike-Hard’ Campaign - (Epoch Times - June 26, 2010)
Among the several-dozen Chinese plants where strikes took place in May, two serve as examples of the very different outcomes: the Japanese-owned Honda factory in Foshan, Guangdong Province, and a Chinese-owned and operated cotton mill in Pingdingshan City, Henan Province. Honda workers eventually claimed victory and received pay raises, while striking workers at the Pingdingshan cotton mill were brutally cracked down on by 2,000 to 3,000 police on June 1. However, experts say that responding to the workers demands with brute force will not work. Dr. Showing Young, an Associate Professor of the Department of Business Administration at National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan, said, “With the proliferation of cheap modern communication technologies, the regime will find it increasing difficult to suppress Chinese workers from organizing protests and strikes.”

The Three Biggest Lies about the Economy - (Market Watch - June 29, 2010)
Here are three economic “truths” that deserve further consideration. For example, Unemployment is below 10%. An analysis of data at the U.S. Labor Department shows that there are 79 million men in America between the ages of 25 and 65. And nearly 18 million of them, or 22%, are out of work completely. (The percentage of employable women who are out of work is lower.) Or this one: The U.S. is sliding into “socialism”. For a system allegedly being strangled in its bed, U.S. capitalism seems to be in astonishingly robust shape. Numbers published by the Federal Reserve a few weeks ago show that corporate profit margins have just hit record levels. Meanwhile, federal spending, about 25% of the economy this year, is expected to fall to about 23% by 2013. In 1983, under Ronald Reagan, it hit 23.5%. In the early 1990s it was around 22%.

Secret Gold Swap Has Spooked The Market - (The Telegraph - July 11, 2010)
When it emerged last week that one or more banks had lent 380 tons of gold to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in return for foreign currencies, initially analysts were pointing fingers at Greece, Spain, Portugal, or a combination of the three. However, the day after original reports about the swaps, BIS emailed a statement saying that the swaps had not been conducted with monetary authorities but purely with commercial banks. But it is almost inconceivable that a single commercial bank could have accumulated so much gold alone. In this case, one or more of the so-called bullion banks would have agreed to act on behalf of a monetary authority. The swap generated about $14B - not enough really to make much of a splash. But the question remains: who needed the liquidity?

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH - articles off the beaten track which may - or may not - have predictive value.

Too Rich to Live? - (Wall St. Journal - July 10, 2010)
It has come to this: Congress, quite by accident, is incentivizing death. When the Senate allowed the estate tax to lapse at the end of last year, it encouraged wealthy people near death’s door to stay alive until Jan. 1 so they could spare their heirs a 45% tax hit. Now the situation has reversed: If Congress doesn’t change the law soon-and many experts think it won’t-the estate tax will come roaring back in 2011. The math is ugly: On a $5 million estate, the tax consequence of dying a minute after midnight on Jan. 1, 2011 rather than two minutes earlier could be more than $2 million; on a $15 million estate, the difference could be about $8 million.

Counter-drug Policies, Security and Governance in Afghanistan - (New York University - June , 2010)
This is a thought-provoking contrarian study of counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan just released by the New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. Among other things, it suggests that “all feasible attempts at suppression or reduction of the opiates industry in Afghanistan under present conditions will result, other things being equal, in increasing the economic size of the industry, and therefore increasing the rents and taxes accruing to insurgents and corrupt officials. This applies equally to crop eradication, interdiction, and alternative livelihood programs. Therefore counternarcotics programming increases rather than decreases both violent insurgency and official corruption. If counternarcotics policies are effectively targeted at pro-insurgency traffickers, they may be able to reduce insurgency by enabling pro-government traffickers and corrupt officials to enjoy a monopoly.”

Energy Department Lags in Saving Energy - (New York Times - July 7, 2010)
Like flossing or losing weight, saving energy is easier to promise than to actually do - even if you are the Department of Energy. Its website advises that choosing new lighting technologies can slash energy use by 50 - 75%, but the department is having trouble taking its own advice. According to an internal audit just recentlyreleased, many of its offices are still installing obsolete fluorescent bulbs. In one case, the Department of Energy made most of the investment by installing timers to shut off lights at night when it moved into a new building in 1997. But it got no benefit: as of March of this year, it had not bought the central control unit needed to run the system.

JUST FOR FUN

Sucker for Soccer: Octopus Predicts World Cup Finalist - (Guardian - July 8, 2010)
Dubbed the psychic octopus, the English-born Paul (hatched at the Sea Life Park in Weymouth) has correctly predicted all of Germany’s World Cup results including the recent 1-0 defeat. He predicted Germany’s wins against England and Argentina, and even Serbia’s defeat of Germany in the group stage. Paul’s handlers at Aquarium Sea Life in the western city of Oberhausen have turned him into a betting phenomenon by putting mussels into two glass boxes, with one box having Germany’s flag while the other carries the flag of their opponents. Paul is then left to choose one box to open to retrieve the mussel. Bookmaker William Hill is so impressed by Paul’s predictive powers that he was offering even odds that he will pick the winner of the final on Sunday, between Spain and Holland. But that’s not all: Mani is a psychic parrot (click here) from Singapore belonging to a roadside astrologer Muniyappa. Till now the parrot has predicted correctly all the quarter final matches as well as the semi final match between Spain and Germany. But this time both these animals have contrasting views when the final world cup match is concerned. And one of them will be right.

A FINAL QUOTE…

“There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another that states that this has already happened.”
- Douglas Adams

CONTACT US

Edited by John L. Petersen
johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

PRIVACY POLICY: We don’t share your information with anyone.

FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT…

• Northwestern University’s Gregory Ryskin proposes that the oceans periodically produce massive eruptions of explosive methane gas… enough to cause global catastrophes (such as wiping out dinosaurs all over the earth).
• San Francisco has become the first city in the US to require mobile phone retailers to post radiation levels next to the handsets they sell.
• What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? Check out a report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way.
• Peak oil postponed again according to the International Energy Agency.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday - (New York Times - June 11, 2010)
Proponents of the Singularity foresee a time in the near future when human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past. Of course, some people will opt for inadequacy, while others will have inadequacy thrust upon them because the keys to the next phase of evolution may be beyond the grasp of most people. Some of the Singularity’s adherents portray a future where humans break off into two species: the Haves, who have superior intelligence and can live for hundreds of years, and the Have-Nots, who are hampered by their antiquated, corporeal forms and beliefs (and perhaps by a lack of the funds necessary to pay for near-immortality). Andrew Orlowski, a British journalist who has written extensively on techno-utopianism says, “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”

NEW REALITIES

Schrödinger’s Kit: Tools That Are in Two Places at Once - (New Scientist - June 23, 2010)
Quantum theory is our most successful theory of physics. There is not one shred of experimental evidence that doesn’t fit with its predictions. The question is, how hard can we push it? Experiments have never had the sensitivity to pinpoint a weak spot in quantum mechanics. But thanks to a breakthrough earlier this year, that might be about to change. A new swathe of experiments is coming onto the scene that should be up to the job. Welcome to the dawn of the quantum machines.

Element 114 on the Brink of Recognition - (New Scientist - June 24, 2010)
The periodic table is set to get bigger, now that three labs have independently made atoms of element 114. There’s still one big uncertainty though - should it be classified as a metal or as a noble gas? In 1999, researchers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, claimed to have made atoms of element 114, but no confirmation was available. Now teams at two other laboratories say they have produced it.

GENETICS/ HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

Plastic Antibodies Shown to Fight Off Antigens in the Body Just Like the Real Thing - (Pop Sci - June 9, 2010)
A team of researchers from UC Irvine and the University of Shizuoka in Japan has created plastic antibodies that successfully function in the bloodstream of living animals to identify and fight a variety of antigens. Using plastic nanoparticles that had previously shown the ability to mimic natural antibodies, the team used a process known as molecular imprinting to stamp the shape of the antigen melittin, the primary toxin in bee venom, onto the antibody. By imprinting tiny antigen-shaped craters into the individual particles, the plastic antibodies were then finely tuned to attach themselves to those antigens in the blood. The team then dosed laboratory mice with lethal doses of melittin followed by an injection of the artificial antibodies. Those mice that received the antibodies showed a far higher survival rate.

Stem Cell Therapy Damage Seen in Kidney Disease Case - (BBC News - June 17, 2010)
It has been shown that it is possible to reprogram adult stem cells, taken from bone marrow, to become a range of specific cell types - including kidney cells - and animal studies have indicated that injecting stem cells directly into organs, including the kidney, is safe. However, a new complication has been seen in a patient with kidney disease who received stem cell therapy. Stem cells were injected into the kidney, but the patient suffered tissue damage and died from an infection. The patient developed tissue damage at the injection sites. Experts said there was a gap between research and treatment.

Now Scientists Read Your Mind Better Than You Can - (Reuters - June 22, 2010)
Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself, and might offer a powerful tool for advertisers or health officials seeking to motivate consumers, researchers said on Tuesday. They found a way to interpret “real time” brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen would actually use sunscreen during the following week. The scans were more accurate than the volunteers were, Emily Falk and colleagues at UCLA reported. People were right about themselves just half the time; based on brain scans, the researchers predicted 75% of behavior correctly.

Rats Breathe with First Functional, Lab Grown Lungs - (Impact Lab - June 25, 2010)
A team at Yale constructed the tiny lungs for rats using a relatively
new process called “decellularization.”. The researchers then removed
rats’ left lungs and stitched in lab-grown replacements which inflated,
though not fully. Tests showed that they were taking in oxygen and
releasing carbon dioxide at 95% of normal efficiency. The researchers
allowed the animals to breathe with the lungs for up to 2 hours before
euthanizing them because of blood clots. We may be two decades away from
growing functional, replacement lungs for humans, but this experiment
was an incredible proof-of-concept. We are another step closer to
off-the-shelf body parts.

DISCOVERIES ENABLED BY NEW TECHNOLOGY

Study Identifies Proteins that Modulate Life Span in Worms - (Phys Org - June 16, 2010)
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified a new group of proteins involved in determining the life span of laboratory roundworms. Blocking the expression of one member of the group can extend the worm’s life span by up to 30 percent. Because the proteins work in the worms’ reproductive systems, the research represents yet another intriguing link between longevity and fertility.

Fin to Limb Evolution Clue Found - (BBC News - June 24, 2010)
Marie-Andree Akimenko, from the University of Ottawa in Canada, and her colleagues have identified two new genes that code for proteins that are important in the structure of fins. The loss of these genes could have been an “important step” in the evolutionary transformation of fins into limbs. These proteins are found in fish larvae and they eventually develop into the bony fin rays of mature fish. This suggested that the “ancient family of genes persisted in [bony fish] and was lost when they evolved” into four-footed animals, Dr Akimenko said.

Mega Disasters - Methane Explosion - (You Tube - May 11, 2010)
This video clip explores the controversial paper published by Northwestern University’s Gregory Ryskin. His thesis: the oceans periodically produce massive eruptions of explosive methane gas… enough to cause global catastrophe on a regular basis!

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

The Microbe Factor and Its Role in Our Climate Future - (Yale - June 1, 2010)
Microbes have been absorbing and releasing greenhouse gases ever since they first evolved in the ocean more than 3.5 billion years ago and spread on land about 2 billion years ago. In the process they’ve influenced the Earth’s climate. But the influence doesn’t just flow one way. As the climate changes, it can change the planet’s microbial menagerie. Scientists are only just starting to figure out some of the rules that govern this feedback. However, they recognize that as we raise the planet’s temperature, we will alter the planet’s microbes. And as we change the world’s microbes, we will also change their impact on the climate.

Cape Lobster Industry Faces Crisis - (Cape Cod Times - June 13, 2010)
Water temperatures that are killing off far more lobsters than make it into a cooking pot. Lobstermen south of Cape Cod have seen their catches nosedive for the past decade, from more than 20 million pounds in 1997 to less than 5 million last year. In the past, overfishing, water pollution, pesticides and an outbreak of shell disease were blamed for the failure of the fishery. But tough fishing regulations have done nothing to reverse the trend, and some scientists now believe water temperature may be the primary obstacle to recovery.

Bribes on Whaling - (The Times - June 14, 2010)
An investigation has exposed Japan for bribing small nations with cash and prostitutes to gain their support for the mass slaughter of whales. The undercover investigation found officials from six countries were willing to consider selling their votes on the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The revelations come as Japan seeks to break the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling. The governments of St Kitts and Nevis, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Grenada, Republic of Guinea and Ivory Coast all entered negotiations to sell their votes in return for aid. The top fisheries official for Guinea said Japan usually gave his minister a “minimum” of $1,000 a day spending money in cash during IWC and other fisheries meetings.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

San Francisco Passes Cell Phone Radiation Law - (BBC News - June 23, 2010)
San Francisco has become the first city in the US to require mobile phone retailers to post radiation levels next to the handsets they sell. “This is not about discouraging people from using their cell phones,” said Tony Winnicker, spokesman for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has said he will sign the legislation into law. “This is a modest commonsense measure to provide greater transparency and information to consumers.” A similar right-to-know measure failed in the California senate earlier this month following heavy lobbying by the mobile phone industry.

Power from Thin Air - (Economist - June 10, 2010)
Wireless technology: It is already possible to send electricity without wires. Can devices be powered using ambient radiation from existing broadcasts? In 1898 Tesla proposed a “world system” of giant towers that would form both a global wireless communications network and a means of delivering electricity over large areas without wires. But Tesla’s backers, including the financier J.P. Morgan, pulled out. They worried that the delivery of electricity through the air could not be metered, and there would be nothing to stop people from helping themselves. However, both Tesla and his backers may vindicated, as researchers find ways to pull power out of the air without paying for it-a technique known as “energy scavenging” or “energy harvesting”.

ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

Disaster in the Amazon - (New York Times - June 4, 2010)
BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever.

Peak Oil Postponed Again - (Telegraph - June 24, 2010)
So there is plenty of oil and gas after all. Prices will bumble along gently until well into the next decade. We are becoming more efficient in our use of energy, with 3pc extra savings annually. That is a faster pace than the rising real cost of fuel. Mankind will not run out of fuel for a very long time. That at least is the story today from the International Energy Agency. Their medium-term outlook for fossil fuel markets is a dazzling contrast with last year’s warnings that a combination of break-neck industrialization in China and lack of investment in new oil fields (thanks to the credit freeze) would exhaust global spare capacity by 2013.

What Do You Do with Non-Biodegradable Plastics? - (Al Fin Energy - May 16, 2010)
Northeastern University student researchers have come up with an apparatus to convert plastic waste into clean energy without releasing harmful emissions. Self-sustainability is the key to the double-tank combustor design. Plastic waste is first processed in an upper tank through pyrolysis, which converts solid plastic into gas. Next, the gas flows to a lower tank, where it is burned with oxidants to generate heat and steam. The heat sustains the combustor while the steam can be used to generate electric power.

Lithium Market Could Bloom as Tide Goes Out on Oil - (Phys Org - June 23, 2010)
Lithium-based batteries are used in everything from mobile phones and laptops, to iPods and iPads, as well as military and medical hardware. They have even made their way into the human body, powering pacemakers. But the main reason companies are betting on lithium is the projected explosion in the number of electric and hybrid electric vehicles. All will need batteries. Lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, and potentially new batteries such as lithium-air, are seen as the best option by many manufacturers over other battery types as they are lightweight and efficient, and can hold more power.

World’s Most Advanced Electric Motorcycle - (Pop Sci - June 9, 2010)
The MotoCzysz E1pc is a race bike built by a tiny Oregonian company focused on pushing the limits of electric performance to the absolute max. It packs 10 times the battery capacity of a Toyota Prius and 2.5 times the torque of a Ducati 1198 into a package that looks like something out of a 24th-century Thunderdome. 10 individual lithium polymer cells that each weigh 19.5 Lbs and were hand-assembled by a company that typically builds batteries for NASA. The level of integration here hints at the kind of work that’s gone into the rest of the bike. There are no wires connecting the batteries to the bike or any exposed terminals. Instead, posts on the batteries lock into receivers on the bike’s frame, at once making the electrical connection and supporting the batteries’ weight. The proprietary internal arrangement allows the batteries to be swapped out in just a couple of seconds. This is one screaming machine.

Canada, US, Each Has 100 Years of Gas Reserves - (Al Fin Energy - may 15, 2010)
The Canadian Society for Unconventional Gas estimates there are between 700 trillion and 1,300 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas reserves in conventional and unconventional plays such as shale, tight sands and coal-bed methane. The United States possesses a total resource base of 1,836 trillion cubic feet.

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nanotubes Give Batteries a Jolt - (Technology Review - June 21, 2010)
A lithium-ion battery with a positive electrode made of carbon nanotubes delivers 10 times more power than a conventional battery and can store five times more energy than a conventional ultracapacitor. The nanotube battery technology, developed by researchers at MIT and licensed to an undisclosed battery company, could lead to batteries that improve heavy-duty hybrid vehicles and allow faster recharging for electronic gadgets, including smartphones.

Metal, Heal Thyself - (Economist - June 10, 2010)
Researchers have devised an ingenious way for the damaged surfaces of metals to repair themselves when they come to harm. The surfaces of many metal objects are coated with other metals for protection. Iron, for instance, is frequently galvanised with zinc. The basic idea of the new technology is to infiltrate this coating with tiny, fluid-filled capsules. When the metal coating is punctured or scratched, the capsules in the damaged area burst and ooze restorative liquids, in the form of compounds called trivalent chromates. These react with nearby metal atoms and form tough, protective films a few molecules thick to ameliorate the damage. The idea has been around for a while; the challenge was making it work.

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Did Twitter Cost McChrystal His Command? - (Wired - June 24, 2010)
That’s the argument John Timpane makes in the Philadelphia Inquirer: that our hypermetabolic, Twitter-fueled media culture allowed the remarks from General McChrystal ’s crew to spread so far and so fast, Obama had almost no choice but to relieve him. Think of it as information blitzkrieg. Fast, overwhelming, decisive: It’s a case study in how tightly connected 21st-century media can whip a story into a full-on tsunami, with startling consequences for individual careers and national policy. How fast? McChrystal was already replaced by the time the Rolling Stone article that started it all hit newsstands.

TRENDS OF GOVERNMENT

U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan - (New York Times - June 13, 2010)
The U. S. has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself. The previously unknown deposits - including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium - are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe. An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

EPA Reverses Controversial ‘Human Guinea Pig’ Rule - (Wired - June 22, 2010)
Under proposed changes to federal research ethics standards, the Environmental Protection Agency will no longer accept studies that use people as guinea pigs in chemical tests. In 2006, under chemical-industry pressure, and over arguments that the studies were scientifically and ethically bankrupt, the EPA declared such data acceptable. On June 16, the EPA reversed its decision. Almost every standard code of medical ethics forbids human tests of drugs or chemicals that may cause harm, but can provide no direct benefit. The chemical industry, however, has long argued that the EPA should accept data from tests in which healthy volunteers are paid for exposing themselves to pesticides and other known toxins. Critics say the resulting science is worthless, with companies running tests on small, non-representative groups of people, such as healthy young men, in order to create a false impression of safety.

SOCIAL TRENDS

The End of Men - (The Atlantic - July/August, 2010)
Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? Here is a report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way- and its vast cultural consequences.

World Could Be Plunged into Crisis in 2014 - (Daily Mail - June 17, 2010)
A ‘Doomsday’ moment will take place in 2014 - and will determine whether the 21st century is full of violence and poverty or will be peaceful and prosperous, according to a Cambridge University professor. In the last 500 years there has been a cataclysmic ‘Great Event’ of international significance at the start of each century, he claims. Professor Nicholas Boyle has pinpointed the global financial crisis as the trigger for the next ‘Great Event’. And he claims the U.S., with its waning economic influence but unrivalled military power, holds the key to determining the course and character of the next 90 years.

CONTACT AND THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE

European Union Parliamentarian Calls For End to UFO Secrecy - (UFO Blogger - June 4, 2010)
Following UFO disclosure by the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Uruguay, Russia, and New Zealand governments which are planning to publish their own x-files in public domain in next few weeks, and the CIA disclosure document revealing that DIA Remote Viewers ’saw’ Extraterrestrial on Saturn moon Titan, now the Italian EU MP Mario Borghezio has tabled a written statement in which he calls on member of states to disclosure the documents relating to UFOs. (Editor’s note: The article includes links to all of the documents referred to above.)

NASA Astronauts on Extraterrestrial Life - (Daily Galaxy 14, 2010)
“We have contact with alien cultures.” - Dr. Brian O’leary an American scientist and a former NASA astronaut and the deputy team leader for NASA’s Mariner 10 Venus-Mercury television science team. “In my official status, I cannot comment on ET contact. However, personally, I can assure you, we are not alone! - Charles J. Camarda, an engineer and U.S. astronaut who flew his first mission into space onboard the NASA Space Shuttle mission STS-114. (Editor’s note: The sentences above constitute the entire text of the article. Without a context for either of the statements, they remain tantalizing comments - but only that.)

NASA Warns Solar Flares from Huge Space Storm Will Cause Devastation - (Telegraph - June 14, 2010)
Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013. Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs. “We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa’s Heliophysics division.

Invisible Extraterrestrials? World-Leading Physicist Says “They Could Exist in Forms We Can’t Conceive” - (Daily Galaxy - June 20, 2010)
The intriguing remark was made by Lord Martin Rees, a leading cosmologist and astrophysicist who is the president of Britain’s Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen of England. Rees, who last month hosted the National Science Academy’s first conference on the possibility of alien life, said he believes the existence of extra terrestrial life may be beyond human understanding. “They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognize them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology. I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

DEMOGRAPHICS

The World We Eat In is Changing - (Agriculture News - June 13, 2010)
In Mauritania in West Africa, rice prices doubled over the first three months of the year, according to the World Food Program. Over the same period, the price of corn rose 59% in Zimbabwe and 57% in neighboring Mozambique. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a box of fish that cost $10 a year ago is now $25. The price of a 25-kilogram bag of rice has doubled to $30. In China, food costs rose 5.9% in April over a year ago. India’s food prices were up 17% in April over a year earlier. Going into the year 2010 a billion people in our world were already going hungry and well on their way to pandemic malnutrition and starvation.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

The Time We Have Is Growing Short - (NY Review of Books - May 25, 2010)
Article by Paul Volker on the current systemic problems. “One basic flaw running through much of the recent financial innovation is that thinking embedded in mathematics and physics could be directly adapted to markets. A search for repetitive patterns of behavior and computations of normal distribution curves are a big part of the physical sciences. However, financial markets are not driven by changes in natural forces but by human phenomena, with all their implications for herd behavior, for wide swings in emotion, and for political intervention and uncertainties.”

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH - articles off the beaten track which may - or may not - have predictive value.

Why Investors Can’t Think for Themselves - (Wall St. Journal - June 19, 2010)
Sometimes the most interesting answers to financial questions come from scientific labs. A study recently published in the journal Current Biology
(here) found that the value you place on something is likely to go up when other people tell you it is worth more than you thought, and down when others say it is worth less. More strikingly, if your evaluation agrees with what others tell you, then a part of your brain that specializes in processing rewards kicks into high gear. In other words, investors often go along with the crowd because-at the most basic biological level-conformity feels good. Moving in herds doesn’t just give investors a sense of “safety in numbers.” It also gives them pleasure.

JUST FOR FUN

Most Dangerous Object in the Office - (Wired - May 24, 2010)
Beware of geeks bearing fire. Fire footbag is the hot new craze. And don’t miss the embedded video clip (shot in a men’s room, no doubt for reasons of non-combustability).

Cattelan’s ‘Middle Finger’ to be Displayed at Milan Exchange - (Bloomberg - June 17, 2010)
The Italians have a sense of humor - not to mention a great sense of marketing genius. The City of Milan is likely to approve the one week display of Maurizio Cattelan’s controversial sculpture of the middle-finger gesture in front of the Italian Stock Exchange, Mayor Letizia Moratti said. The Carrara marble sculpture, called “Against Ideology,” will be part of an exhibition of the artist’s works at the Palazzo Reale Museum in September. “Milan’s fashion week needs events to draw attention. Art and Cattelan’s works are part of this,” said the mayor.

A FINAL QUOTE…

“Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”
~ Ray Bradbury

CONTACT US

Edited by John L. Petersen
johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

PRIVACY POLICY: We don’t share your information with anyone.

FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT…

• Soon there will be a trillion sensors connected to the Web.
• In the future, people with diabetes may be able to monitor their blood sugar levels using a glucose “tattoo.”
• A new type of shock absorber under development converts the bumps and jolts of vehicles on rough roads into usable electricity.
• NASA reports that an unknown object approaching the Earth from deep space is almost certainly artificial in origin.

PUNCTUATIONS
by John L. Petersen

First of all, I’d like to remind you again that Lee Carroll and Kryon are coming to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia on the 17th of July. It’s guaranteed that Lee and Kryon will provide significant insights that will allow you to make more sense out of all that is happening around and to us in these extraordinary days. I always find them most provocative. You can get more information by clicking on the banner to the right.

To fear or not to fear

A sad thing happened recently in our little town. Our courthouse burned down a couple of years ago and in the last 18 months a beautiful, new structure has arisen to anchor our main intersection. (It’s easy to find; it’s at the second of three traffic lights along the main street. And those are the only three traffic lights in the whole county.) The top two floors of the structure include the court rooms and associated offices. On the bottom floor are all of the usual county offices - assessor, clerk, commissioners, planning commission, etc.

When it was designed, the then commissioners and architect determined rightly that the upper floors (where all of the conflicts and criminals would be) should be secured with the usual airport-like guards, magnetometers, and inspections. The first floor would be open to the public like almost every other local office facility in the state. If you were just coming to pay your taxes or register to vote or attend a commission meeting, you could just walk in. In our friendly little community, that’s the way the present offices are and the way it’s always been from the very first day the county was chartered. Remember, we’re a town of 600 people in a county of 16,000 in the mountains of West Virginia.

Well, then some security guy from state government came in and essentially said that there were security threats out there and the whole building should be secured. The sheriff agreed and a big argument ensued. The president of the county commission argued that open government (something that she had campaigned on) also means physically open facilities that allows citizens to have easy access to officials and offices. The newspaper editor weighed in suggesting that because of 9/11 and the shoe bomber and the unsuccessful bombing attempt in Times Square there clearly was a terrorist threat that we all should be worrying about and those who thought the offices should be open to just anyone were naïve.

Of course, there were personalities involved in the whole thing, but the basic proposition was essentially, should we be afraid or not be afraid . . . of an abstract, undefined threat.

Sadly, fear prevailed. It was interesting how literally over 100 people vocally contacted the commissioners confirming that they thought that there was an (undefined) threat that needed to be defended against and that the whole building should be locked up. The vote was 2 to 1 for securing it at the front door.

This is not just a small town story. This is an illustrative example of a fundamental, corrosive issue in this country and the world today. This susceptibility to fear is being overtly manipulated by politicians, bureaucrats, policy makers, and most anyone else who wants to sell you something.

In the case of terrorism, it’s just not justified. Not even close - and yet we are letting it consume great amounts of our lives, our time and our fortune. Let me tell you why.

First of all, to put the “threat” into perspective, as risk expert Bruce Schneier says, “Compared to the real risks in the world, the risk of terrorism is so small that it’s not worth a lot of worry. As John Mueller pointed out, the risks of terrorism “are similar to the risks of using home appliances (200 deaths per year in the United States) or of commercial aviation (103 deaths per year).”

Maybe that’s why when asked last year, (even with their watch list that reportedly now includes 1 million individuals who they think present some kind of potential “threat”), the TSA couldn’t point to one terrorist plot that all of their airport security apparatus had prevented or nipped in the bud.

That’s emblematic of a more fundamental issue: the government really never does this stuff right. Jim Fallows writing in The Atlantic hit the nail on the head.

How would it respond to this weekend’s Times Square bomb threat? Well, by extrapolation from its response to the 9/11 attacks and subsequent threats, the policy would be:

- All vans or SUVs headed into Midtown Manhattan would have to stop and have their contents inspected. If any vehicle seemed for any reason to have escaped inspection, Midtown in its entirety would be evacuated;

- A whole new uniformed force — the Times Square Security Administration, or TsSA - would be formed for this purpose;

- The restrictions would never be lifted and the TsSA would have permanent life, because the political incentives here work only one way. A politician who supports more open-ended, more thorough, more intrusive, more expensive inspections can never be proven “wrong.” The absence of attacks shows that his measures have “worked”; and a new attack shows that inspections must go further still. A politician who wants to limit the inspections can never be proven “right.” An absence of attacks means that nothing has gone wrong — yet. Any future attack would always and forever be that politician’s “fault.” Given that asymmetry of risks, what public figure will ever be able to talk about paring back the TSA?

You can read the whole interesting article here.

But this is not about the overreaction or lack of effectiveness of a government agency. There’s nothing new about that. This is much more serious. The artificial sense of threat - this worst-case thinking - is corroding us as a society. It’s changing who we are and how we see ourselves and potentially setting us up for a far worse situation.

Bruce Schneier, mentioned above, is the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT in the UK. He’s also an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Schneier was kind enough to give me permission to reprint here the piece from his blog that also ran on the CNN site.

Worst-case thinking makes us nuts, not safe
By Bruce Schneier

When someone is proposing a change, the onus should be on them to justify it over the status quo. But worst case thinking is a way of looking at the world that exaggerates the rare and unusual and gives the rare much more credence than it deserves.
It isn’t really a principle; it’s a cheap trick to justify what you already believe. It lets lazy or biased people make what seem to be cogent arguments without understanding the whole issue. And when people don’t need to refute counterarguments, there’s no point in listening to them.

There’s a lot of truth here . . . but the story doesn’t end with Schneier’s assessment.

The larger issue is that a fearful society lays the groundwork for authoritarian governments. Alan Hall, writing in the May 2010 issue of The Socionomist, very persuasively argues that, “As society becomes more fearful, many individuals yearn for the safety and order promised by strong, controlling leaders … fear creates the conditions under which such individuals gain control.” You can access the whole of The Dow of Dictatorship: Socionomic Origins of Authoritarianism here. (Sorry, but I don’t know how to get it without subscribing.)

So, the next time after you’re finished taking off your shoes and belt and you’re finally waiting for your flight and you hear the ever-present warning about Threat Level Orange and the need to report any unaccompanied bags that you might see, just remember: There is no threat that justifies anything above “Threat Level Green”, we’ve made it all up based upon ungrounded fear. The government has (predictably) overreacted; it has cost us all extraordinary amounts of time, money and lost opportunity and it has produced broad-based corrosive apprehensive in our society and potentially started us on the way to a (more) oppressive government.

Have a good day!

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

The Coming Data Explosion - (New York Times - May 31, 2010)
One of the key aspects of the emerging “Internet of Things” - where real-world objects are connected to the Internet - is the massive amount of new data on the Web that will result. As more and more “things” in the world are connected to the Internet, it follows that more data will be uploaded to and downloaded from the cloud. And this is in addition to the burgeoning amount of user-generated content - which has increased 15-fold over the past few years. Google VP Marissa Mayer said, “This data explosion is bigger than Moore’s law.” HP CEO Mark Hurd put it this way in June 2009: “More data will be created in the next four years than in the history of the planet.” One thing is for sure: the internet companies that survive will have to know how to sprocess and make sense of massive quantities of data flowing through the Web - and do it in real-time.

Analytics Software Must Adapt or Die - (Read Write Web - June 2, 2010)
Soon there will be a trillion sensors connected to the Web, which will result in an explosion of online data. Sensor data, along with other Web data such as feeds, should be managed as enterprise assets. Here’s a view of how that might be handled.

NEW REALITIES

Earth’s Biodiversity Linked to the Solar-System’s Milky Way Orbit - (Daily Galaxy - June 1, 2010)
Researchers at UC, Berkeley found that marine fossil records show that biodiversity increases and decreases based on a 62-million-year cycle. Our own star moves toward and away from the Milky Way’s center, and also up and down through the galactic plane. One complete up-and-down cycle takes 64 million years- suspiciously close to the Earth’s biodiversity cycle. If future studies confirm the galaxy-biodiversity link, it would force scientists to broaden their ideas about what can influence life on Earth. “Maybe it’s not just the climate and the tectonic events on Earth,” one researcher said. “Maybe we have to start thinking more about the extraterrestrial environment as well.”

“There Was No Big Bang!” Say Several Leading Cosmologists - (Daily Galaxy - June 11, 2010)
Several of the worlds leading astrophysicists believe there was no Big Bang that brought the universe and time into existence. Proponents of branes propose that we are trapped in a thin membrane of space-time embedded in a much larger cosmos from which neither light nor energy -except gravity- can escape or enter and that “dark matter” is just the rest of the universe that we can’t see because light can’t escape from or enter into our membrane from the great bulk of the universe. And our membrane may be only one of many, all of which may warp, connect, and collide with one another in as many as 10 dimensions -a new frontier physicists call the “brane world.” Stephen Hawking, among others, envisions brane worlds percolating up out of the void, giving rise to whole new universes.

Science Catches Water Doing Some Bizarre Things - (Daily Galaxy - June 9, 2010)
Recently exotic new states of water caused Harvard researchers to question what we really know about one of the most common and abundant substances on the planet. irst there was the discovery that you can actually burn salt water (see related posts below) if you zap it with just the right radio frequency, fueling hopes that plain old seawater could someday be converted to abundant clean energy. Now researchers are finding that water forms a floating bridge when exposed to high voltages. Other researchers also recently discovered that you can make water stay frozen at very warm temperatures if you coat it with a special diamond mixture.

GENETICS/ HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

From Californians’ DNA, a Giant Genome Project - (New York Times - May 28, 2010)
More than 130,000 members of Kaiser Permanente in Northern California have volunteered to have their DNA scanned by robotic, high-speed gene-reading machines as part of the largest human genome study of its kind ever attempted. The goal of the study is to help scientists uncover the genetic roots of chronic disease and, perhaps, to find out why some people live longer than others. What makes the Kaiser study unique is that members of a single, colossal cohort will have their genomes scanned uniformly, then paired with their medical histories. “It is absolutely the largest study of its kind, and it has enormous statistical power.”

Glucose ‘Tattoo’ Could Track Blood Sugar Levels for Diabetics - (Health Day - June 4, 2010)
In the future, people with diabetes may be able to monitor their blood sugar levels using a glucose “tattoo.” This new type of continuous glucose monitor relies on fluorescent nanoparticle ink injected under the skin to detect blood sugar levels with a watch-sized or smaller monitor worn over the skin, according to the researchers at MIT who are developing the new technology. The glucose “tattoo” ink would be made from carbon nanotubes that can reflect infrared light back through the skin to the monitor, and this new device has the potential to free people with diabetes from having to do numerous finger pricks each day or to change a continuous glucose monitor device every three to seven days to keep track of their blood sugar levels.

DNA Logic Gates Herald Injectable Computers - (New Scientist - June 3, 2010)
DNA-based logic gates that could carry out calculations inside the body have been constructed for the first time. The work brings the prospect of injectable biocomputers programmed to target diseases as they arise. “The biocomputer would sense biomarkers and immediately react by releasing counter-agents for the disease,” says Itamar Willner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, who led the work.

Doctors to ‘Print’ New Organs for Transplant Patients - (Mail Online - June 4, 2010)
Doctors might one day be able to ‘print’ living body parts they need for surgery, including blood vessels and entire organs. The technique is known as bio-printing and it could make the transplant list a thing of the past. the 3D bio-printer, developed by US company Organovo, is already capable of growing arteries and its developers say arteries ‘printed’ by the device could be used in heart bypass surgery in five years. More complex organs such as hearts, and teeth and bone should be possible within ten years.

DISCOVERIES ENABLED BY NEW TECHNOLOGY

Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind - (New York Times - June 1, 2010)
Music neuroscience is helping us understand Alzheimer’s. There are Alzheimer’s patients who cannot remember their spouse, but they can remember every word of a song they learned as a kid. Both humans and parrots are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. By studying the behaviors of other vocal learners as well - dolphins, seals, songbirds - we may be able to learn more about how memory works.

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Megaborg Oil Spill - (You Tube - April 30, 2010)
Over 20 years ago, the State of Texas used a natural remediation technology using microbes that turn crude from oil spills literally into a safe and benign fish food. This video clip, produced by the State of Texas General Land Office, demonstrates microbial remediation technologies. The technology was developed by Dr. Carl Oppenheimer, founder of Oppenheimer BioTechnology, Inc, http://www.obio.com, based in Austin. This company has a proven track record in the Mega Borg oil spill disaster off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and in marshland bioremediation in the same region which took only 6 weeks to restore. “OBIOTech” has been listed on the EPA’s National Contingency Product Plan Schedule since 1991.

Nigeria’s Agony Dwarfs the Gulf Oil Spill - (Guardian - May 30, 2010)
In the Niger delta, according to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks. In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico. With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. Locals blame the oil that pollutes their land and can scarcely believe the contrast with the steps taken by BP and the US government to try to stop the Gulf oil leak and to protect the Louisiana shoreline from pollution.

Another Gulf Oil Spill: Well near Deepwater Horizon Leaking Since at Least April 30 - (Al - June 8, 2010)
The Ocean Saratoga, has been leaking since at least April 30, according to a federal document. While the leak is decidedly smaller than the Deepwater Horizon spill, a 10-mile-long slick emanating from the Ocean Saratoga is visible from space in multiple images gathered by Skytruth.org, which monitors environmental problems using satellites.

Gulf Oil Dispersants: Helpful or Harmful? - (Smart Planet - May 24, 2010)
Now that hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants have been pumped into the Gulf of Mexico to try to stop the oil leak from reaching the fragile coastal marshes of Louisiana (too late), scientists at U.C. Santa Barbara are racing to figure out how the dispersants might impact oil-eating microbes that could help clean up the spill. Oil is a very complex substance, according to principal researcher David Valentine. By 2008, for instance, his team had traced 1,500 different compounds in the Santa Barbara oil seep - at least 1,000 of them eaten by microorganisms.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Steve Jobs: Post-PC Era is Nigh - (CNet - June 1, 2010)
Jobs said the day is coming when only one out of every few people will need a traditional computer. He noted that advances in chips and software will allow tablet devices like the iPad to do tasks that today are really only suited for a traditional computer, things like video editing and graphic arts work. The move, Jobs said, will make many PC veterans uneasy, “because the PC has taken us a long ways.” “We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable,” he said.

‘Imaginary’ Interface Could Replace Screens and Keyboards - (Tech News Daily - June 7, 2010)
Researchers are experimenting with a new interface system for mobile devices that could replace the screen and even the keyboard with gestures supported by our visual memory. Called Imaginary Interfaces, the German project uses a small, chest-mounted computer and camera to detect hand movements. Users conjure up their own imaginary set of graphical interfaces. For example, people can manually draw shapes and select points in space that have programmed functions, such as a power switch or a “send” key, for example. This interface could allow people to use gestures during phone calls, much as they do in face-to-face conversations, while eliminating traditional hardware elements.

AUGMENTED/ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Japanese Robots to Take Over the Moon by 2020 - (Daily Tech - June 1, 2010)
Another Asian superpower is thirsting for the resources buried on Earth’s largest natural satellite. JAXA, Japan’s space program, is looking to pour $2.2B USD into plans to put an army of robots (peaceful robots, of course) on the Moon. Japan, always on the cutting edge of technology, has come up with all sorts of creative and outlandish uses for robots. But its lunarbots may just steal show. JAXA plans on landing humanoid robots on the moon by 2015. After receiving the official backing, the mission timeline has been expanded to include plans for a full fledged robot space-base by 2020.

ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

Biodiesel from Sewage Sludge “Very Close” to Economical - (Al Fin Energy - May 20, 2010)
Municipal sewage sludge is a “pre-processed” lipid feedstock for biofuels production and is relatively concentrated, compared to forestry and agricultural leavings and waste. It would seem to be an ideal feedstock for biofuels - if only there were not so much oil and other fossil fuels waiting to be used! Existing technology can produce biodiesel fuel from municipal sewage sludge that is within a few cents a gallon of being competitive with conventional diesel refined from petroleum, according to Dr. David Kargbo, with the US EPA’s Office of Innovation, Environmental Assessment & Innovation Division.

Harnessing the Power of the Pothole - (New York Times - June 4, 2010)
A new type of shock absorber under development by the Levant Power Corporation converts the bumps and jolts of vehicles on rough roads into usable electricity. Usually, shock absorbers dissipate the energy of bouncing vehicles as heat. But the new shocks can use the kinetic energy of bounces to generate watts, putting the electricity to use running the vehicle’s windshield wipers, fans or dashboard lights, for example. The devices, called GenShocks, can be installed both in ordinary and hybrid vehicles, lowering fuel consumption by 1 to 6 percent, depending on the vehicle and road conditions, said Shakeel Avadhany, chief executive of the company, which is based in Cambridge, Mass.

International Market for Wood and Wood Pulp Expanding Rapidly - (Al Fin Energy - May 28, 2010)
In Sweden, biomass has surpassed oil to become the number one source of energy generation - now producing 32% of all energy needs. And, biomass-based energy consumption is projected to rise another 10% in 2011. GP Cellulose’s multimillion-dollar overhaul of its Brunswick pulp mill has slashed the amount of water it uses and decreased pressure on the drinking water supplies for most of Southeast Georgia and Northeast Florida. Through a recycling process, the water is used to produce about 70% of the mill’s electricity.

The Future of Biofuels - (Al Fin Energy - May 24, 2010)
Synthetic biology represents the future of a lot of things that make human life interesting, enjoyable, and productive - including fuels. Craig Venter’s company, Synthetic Genomics, has a contract from Exxon to generate biofuels from algae. Exxon is prepared to spend up to $600 million if all its milestones are met. Dr. Venter said he would try to build “an entire algae genome so we can vary the 50 to 60 different parameters for algae growth to make superproductive organisms.”

Exxon $600 Million Algae Investment - (Bloomberg - June 3, 2010)
A brown paste made of sugar cane waste is called bagasse. The algae gorging on the treat - filling themselves with fatty oils - will double in size every six hours. By the end of 2010, Exxon hopes to get the cost down to $60 to $80-a-barrel - clearly within range of the price of crude oil.

Seven New Algae Ventures - (Al Fin - May 29, 2010)
Algae (and other microbes) represent a qualitatively new form of biomass — a much denser and more prolific form of biomass than most analysts have accounted for in their long term energy projections. Algae biomass will be a game changer. Later, as the production of oil-from-algae improves, algal oils will be a game changer. Here are 7 new algal ventures attempting to prove their worth.

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nano Building Blocks for a New Class of Optical Circuits - (KurzweilAI.net, June 2, 2010)
By chemically building clusters of nanospheres from a liquid, a team of Harvard researchers, in collaboration with scientists at Rice University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Houston, has developed novel devices with amazing and exotic optical properties not found in nature - by simply evaporating a droplet of particles on a surface. The finding demonstrates simple scalable devices that exhibit customizable optical properties suitable for applications ranging from highly sensitive sensors and detectors to invisibility cloaks.

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Radiation Risks Cited in Full-body Airport Scans - (Daily News - June 1, 2010)
Full-body airport security scanners manufactured by Rapiscan Inc. expose the skin to high radiation levels that may lead to cancer and other health problems, according to researchers from the University of California, San Francisco. Particularly at risk, the researchers said, are travelers who are pregnant, elderly or have weakened immune systems. The machines emit X-ray energy levels that would be safe if they were distributed throughout the body, but a majority of that energy is delivered to the skin and underlying tissue at levels that “may be dangerously high,” the researchers wrote last month to the White House Office of Science and Technology. Officials with the Department of Homeland Security defended the use of Rapiscan’s backscatter machines. The amount of energy emitted from the machines is equal to two minutes in flight at cruising altitude, said Dr. Alex Garza, chief medical officer for the Department of Homeland Security.

U.S. Faces Remote Sabotage Cyber Danger - (Reuters - June 3, 2010)
The potential for sabotage and destruction is “something we must treat very seriously,” General Keith Alexander said in his first public remarks since the new U.S. Cyber Command was activated on May 21. “In short, we face a dangerous combination of known and unknown vulnerabilities, strong adversary capabilities and weak situational awareness,” he said. Senior aides to President Barack Obama are weighing such issues as how the laws of warfare apply to a digital attack routed through a neutral country, he said.

iRobot Demonstrates New Weaponized Robot - (IEEE Spectrum - May 30, 2010)
iRobot released today new video of its Warrior robot, a beefed up version of the more well-known PackBot, demonstrating use of the APOBS, or Anti-Personnel Obstacle Breaching System, an explosive line charge towed by a rocket, with a small parachute holding back the end of the line. The APOBS, iRobot says, is designed for “deliberate breaching of anti-personnel minefields and multi-strand wire obstacles.” It is used to “clear a path of obstacles for the soldiers to walk through,” producing a path 45 meters long and 0.6 meters wide.

TRENDS OF GOVERNMENT

The Blog Prophet of Euro Zone Doom - (New York Times - June 8, 2010)
For years, almost nobody paid attention to the sky-is-falling alarms of Edward Hugh, a gregarious British blogger and self-taught economist who repeatedly predicted that the euro zone could not survive. Living a largely hand-to-mouth existence here on his part-time teacher’s salary, he sent one post after another into the Internet wilderness. It was the height of policy folly, he warned, to think that aging, penny-pinching Germans could successfully coexist under one currency umbrella with the more youthful, credit-card-wielding Irish, Greeks and Spaniards who shared the euro with them. But as questions rise over how European governments can escape their debt trap and resume growth, Mr. Hugh, who has been pondering this topic for years, is for the first time being turned to for insights and wisdom. His analysis is level-headed and may not be far off the mark.

America’s Predicament - (American Thinker - June 10, 2010)
America’s public debt recently exceeded 13 trillion, or more than 90% of the country’s GDP. Public debts of more than 60% of GDP are considered unhealthy. Public debts above 90% of GDP cause severe disruptions in the country’s financial framework and the economy at large. According to the Obama administration, America’s public debt will exceed 100% of GDP in the next fiscal year. History shows that most countries whose debt exceeds this mark are rarely able to control it. This level of indebtedness usually leads to currency debasement. In the few historical examples whereby countries were able to contain debts of more than 100% of GDP, the debts were almost always contracted as a result of extraordinary one-time expenditures, usually war. America’s debt, on the other hand, is a result of decades of structural deficits. This means that we have grown accustomed to spending more than we can afford (in part because we now have an effectively permanent state of war).

CONTACT AND THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE

NASA: Is Approaching Space Object Artificial? - (Daily Galaxy - May 29, 2010)
NASA authorities report that an unknown object approaching the Earth from deep space is almost certainly artificial in origin rather than being an asteroid. Object 2010 KQ was detected by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona earlier this month, and subsequently tracked by NASA.. The mysterious artificial object has apparently made a close pass by the Earth, coming in almost to the distance of the Moon’s orbit, and is now headed away again into the interplanetary void. The object has used no propulsion during the time NASA has had it under observation. However the Spacewatch experts believe that it must have moved under its own power at some point, given its position and velocity.

What’s Wrong with the Sun? - (New Scientist - June 9, 2010)
The sun is under scrutiny as never before thanks to an armada of space telescopes. The results they beam back are portraying our nearest star, and its influence on Earth, in a new light. Sunspots and other clues indicate that the sun’s magnetic activity is diminishing, and that the sun may even be shrinking. Together the results hint that something profound is happening inside the sun. The big question is what? The flood of observations from space and ground-based telescopes suggests that the answer lies in the behaviour of two vast conveyor belts of gas that endlessly cycle material and magnetism through the sun’s interior and out across the surface.

Two Gamma-Ray Bubbles 65,000 Light Years Across Spewing from Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole - (Daily Galaxy - June 4, 2010)
The source of the hour-glassed-shaped bubbles is a mystery, but a new analysis of the Fermi data suggests that the gamma radiation traces out a pair of distinct bubbles that span some 65,000 light years from end to end - soaring above the disc of the galaxy. The Harvard-Smithsonian tea thinks the bubbles may have been blown out by the explosion of short-lived, massive stars born in a burst of new star formation about 10 million years or they may have been created about 100,000 years ago by high-speed jets of matter created when roughly 100 suns’ worth of material fell into the Milky Way’s black hole.

In New Space Race, Enter the Entrepreneurs - (New York Times - June 8, 2010)
At the Bigelow Aerospace factory, the full-size space station mockups sitting on the warehouse floor look somewhat like puffy white watermelons. The interiors offer a hint of what spacious living in space might look like. Four years from now, the company plans for real modules to be launched and assembled into the solar system’s first private space station. Paying customers - primarily nations that do not have the money or expertise to build a space program from scratch - would arrive a year later. If this business plan unfolds as it is written - the company has two fully inflated test modules in orbit already - Bigelow will be buying 15 to 20 rocket launchings in 2017 and in each year after, providing ample business for the private companies that the Obama administration would like to finance for the transportation of astronauts into orbit - the so-called commercial crew initiative.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Big Changes in Online News Consumption - (Gather - May 26, 2010)
Nearly half (49%) of all adults consider the internet their primary source for news, there is a shift in what people are doing with that news - nearly 80% of adults ages 18+ are actively sharing news stories online. However, the manner in which people share news online varies greatly based on their age - while 68% of those aged 45 and older share news primarily via email, 54% of those under the age of 45 share news primarily via Facebook, and a full 90% of respondents 24 years and younger use Twitter and Facebook to share news (double the respondents 40+).

Surging Costs Hit Food Security in Poorer Nations - (Associated Press - June 7, 2010)
Families from Pakistan to Argentina to Congo are being battered by surging food prices that are dragging more people into poverty, fueling political tensions and forcing some to give up eating meat, fruit and even tomatoes. With food costing up to 70% of family income in the poorest countries, rising prices are squeezing household budgets and threatening to worsen malnutrition, while inflation stays moderate in the United States and Europe. Compounding the problem in many countries: prices hardly fell from their peaks in 2008, when global food prices jumped in part due to a smaller U.S. wheat harvest and demand for crops to use in biofuels. No single factor explains the inflation gap between developing and developed countries but poorer economies are more vulnerable to an array of problems that can push up prices, and many are cropping up this year.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

Owners Stop Paying Mortgages, and Stop Fretting - (New York Times - May 31, 2010)
A growing number of the people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. The average borrower in foreclosure has been delinquent for 438 days before actually being evicted, up from 251 days in January 2008, according to LPS Applied Analytics. People use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by. This type of modification does not beg for a lender’s permission but is delivered as an ultimatum: Force me out if you can. Any moral qualms are overshadowed by a conviction that the banks created the crisis by snookering homeowners with loans that got them in over their heads.

Risks to Global Economy Have Risen Significantly, Top IMF Official Warns - (Telegraph - June 9, 2010)
“After nearly two years of global economic and financial upheaval, shockwaves are still being felt, as we have seen with recent developments in Europe and the resulting financial market volatility,” Naoyuki Shinohara, the IMF’s deputy managing director, said in Singapore on Wednesday. “The global outlook remains unusually uncertain and downside risks have risen significantly.” Mr Shinohara, the former top currency official in Japan, added that “a key concern is that the room for continued policy support has become much more limited and has, in some cases, been exhausted.”

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH - articles off the beaten track which may - or may not - have predictive value.

Exxon Valdez: How It Destroyed the Economy 20 Years Later - (Huffington Post - June 8, 2010)
The Exxon Valdez disaster, which occurred on March 24, 1989, played a major role in the collapse of the economy some 19 years later. After lengthy litigation, Exxon managed to get the amount of punitive compensatory damages reduced from the hoped-for $5 billion to $500 million. But back when Exxon had reason to imagine it might actually have to part with the $5 billion, the oil giant needed to find a way to meet the potential cash flow requirements. Exxon found a savior in the form of J.P. Morgan & Co., who extended the beleaguered company a line of credit in the amount of $4.8 billion. Of course, that put J.P. Morgan on the hook for any potential judgment against Exxon. So the bank went looking for a way to mitigate that risk. J.P. Morgan’s creative solution? A deal so new that it didn’t even have a name: eventually, the one settled on was “credit-default swap.”

Mozart to Help Treat Sewage - (Orange News - June 3, 2010)
A German sewage plant has unveiled a new scheme to speed up the sewage process - by playing Mozart to their microbes. Officials believe the composer’s music helps to stimulate activity among the tiny organisms that break down waste. The scheme was developed by scientists at German firm Mundus who say microbes are particularly partial to harmonies and rhythms. When combined with large quantities of oxygen, the sonic patterns stimulate activity and help to breakdown sludge more efficiently. “If it means we can save $1200 per month on sludge disposal, then it would definitely be worth it,” said plant sewage manager Detlef Dalichow. Classics such as The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro are being piped in around-the-clock. (Editor’s note: We’re not sure if the “magic” is the music or the “large quantities of oxygen”. On the other hand, if the entire universe is sentient, well, why not?)

JUST FOR FUN

Yike Bike - (Yike Bike website - 2010)
The world’s most lightweight electric bike folds down into something the size of a backpack. Its designers wanted to create something that could dramatically change urban transport, enabling city dwellers a fast, safe and easy way to navigate their environment. You might not wish to ride it to work on snowy days, but for elegant design, check this out.

Top 10 Photos Taken by Hubble Space Telescope in Last 16 Years - (Gukurup - August 27, 2007)
These photographs are not new, but they are worth another viewing. As Daily Mail, reporter Michael Hanlon wrote the photos “illustrate that our universe is not only deeply strange, but also almost impossibly beautiful.” For example, see the image of the Sombrero Galaxy - 28 million light years from Earth - voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.

A FINAL QUOTE…

“One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”
- Henry Miller

A FINAL NOTE…

If you’d like to take part in an International Delphi Survey and Scenario development project about Latin America 2010 - 2030, please click here.

CONTACT US

Edited by John L. Petersen
johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

PRIVACY POLICY: We don’t share your information with anyone.

FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT…

• President Hugo Chavez has urged supporters to use Twitter to blow the whistle on currency speculators.
• Using snippets of DNA and other molecules, billions of identical, waffle-like structures can be created that can be turned into logic circuits using light rather than electricity as a signaling medium.
• Human industry is building up a mighty hunger for CO2, the villainous greenhouse gas. It is becoming a problem to get enough of the stuff.
• Check out a vehicle that behaves like a plant, photosynthesizing carbon dioxide from the air and exchanging oxygen back into the atmosphere.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Tweet for Traitors - (Associated Press - May 16, 2010)
President Hugo Chavez has urged supporters to use Twitter to blow the whistle on currency speculators and announced that police raids on illegal traders would continue as Venezuela’s government tries to defend the embattled bolivar. The socialist leader asked Venezuelans to send messages identifying illegal traders. He described them as “thieves” who must be punished for currency speculation, which he blames for rapidly rising inflation. “My Twitter account is open for you to denounce them,” Chavez said during his weekly radio and television program. “We’re going to launch several raids. We’ve already launched some raids, thanks to the complaints from the people.”

NEW REALITIES

First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell - (JCVI - May 20, 2010)
Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit genomic research organization, have published results describing the successful construction of the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cell. The team synthesized the 1.08 million base pair chromosome of a modified Mycoplasma mycoides genome. The synthetic cell is called Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 and is the proof of principle that genomes can be designed in the computer, chemically made in the laboratory and transplanted into a recipient cell to produce a new self-replicating cell controlled only by the synthetic genome.

Does Newly Discovered Supernova Point to Unknown Laws of Physics? - (Daily Galaxy - May 20, 2010)
In the past decade, robotic telescopes have turned astronomers’ attention to strange exploding stars that may point to new and unusual physics. An international team of astronomers has uncovered a supernova whose origin cannot be explained by any previously known mechanism and which promises exciting new insights into stellar explosions.

Man Infects Himself with (Computer) Virus - (PC World - May 27, 2010)
We are one step closer to the future: Dr. Mark Gasson, a British scientist has become the first human being to contract a computer virus by way of an RFID chip implanted in his wrist. Gasson and his colleagues then created a virus and put it on the chip. When Gasson went into the lab and the lab’s computers read the code, the virus implanted itself into the database and began to replicate. Now if any of his other colleagues swipe their traditional swipe-cards to get into the lab, the virus can replicate itself on their swipe-cards. His experiment shows that viruses can be transferred wirelessly from implant devices to the computers they communicate with.

GENETICS/ HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

Found: Genes that Let You Live to 100 - (Times - May 16, 2010)
Scientists have discovered the “Methuselah” genes whose lucky carriers have a much improved chance of living to 100 even if they indulge in an unhealthy lifestyle. The genes appear to protect people against the effects of smoking and bad diet and can also delay the onset of age-related illnesses such as cancer and heart disease by up to three decades. The secret of longevity probably lies in having the right “suite” of genes, according to new studies of centenarians and their families. Such combinations are extremely rare - only one person in 10,000 reaches the age of 100.

ADHD Linked to Pesticide Exposure - (CNN - May 17, 2010)
Children exposed to higher levels of a type of pesticide found in trace amounts on commercially grown fruit and vegetables are more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than children with less exposure, a nationwide study suggests. Children with above-average levels of one common byproduct had roughly twice the odds of getting a diagnosis of ADHD, according to the study. Exposure to the pesticides, known as organophosphates, has been linked to behavioral and cognitive problems in children in the past, but previous studies have focused on communities of farm workers and other high-risk populations. This study is the first to examine the effects of exposure in the population at large.

Silica Cages Help Anti-cancer Antibodies Kill Tumors in Mice - (EurekAlert - May 21, 2010)
Packaging anti-cancer drugs into particles of chemically modified silica improve the drugs’ ability to fight skin cancer in mice, according to new research. Results show the honeycombed particles can help anti-cancer antibodies prevent tumor growth and prolong the lives of mice. Anti-cancer antibodies target a particular protein on cancer cells and - in a poorly understood way - kill off the cells. Examples include herceptin for one form of breast cancer and cetuximab for colon cancer. Unlike popping a pill, however, current antibody-based treatments require patients to go in for intravenous drips into the arm which are expensive and expose healthy tissue to the antibody, causing side effects. Packaging antibodies into particles would concentrate them at the tumor and possibly reduce side effects and other research has shown silicon to be well tolerated by cells, animals and people.

Can Bacteria Make You Smarter? - (Discovery News - May 24, 2010)
Tiny organisms living naturally in the soil and carried in the air can actually make us more positive and alert when ingested or breathed in, say researchers from the Sage Colleges of Troy, N.Y. At the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego today, scientists presented research that showed a particular bacterium increased learning abilities in mice when ingested. Studies had already shown that the bacterium could increase serotonin levels and decrease anxiety. It’s another reason to get out into the great outdoors.

Beer Belly Linked to Alzheimer’s Disease - (BBC News - May 20, 2010)
A US study of more than 700 adults showed that being overweight is associated with smaller brain volume, a factor linked with dementia. The finding was particularly strong in those with high levels of visceral fat - fatty tissue which sits around the organs. The results showed that as body mass index increased, brain volume decreased - a finding that has been reported in other studies. But the findings also showed a closer connection between abdominal fat and the risk of dementia. The link between visceral fat and smaller brain volume was independent of overall weight.

Researchers Create Retina from Human Embryonic Stem Cells - (Kurzweil AI - May 27, 2010)
University of California, Irvine (UCI) scientists have created an eight-layer, early-stage retina from human embryonic stem cells, the first three-dimensional tissue structure to be made from stem cells. It also marks the first step toward the development of transplant-ready retinas to treat eye disorders such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration that affect millions.

DISCOVERIES ENABLED BY NEW TECHNOLOGY

Crystals at the Center of the Earth - (Wired - May 11, 2010)
Seismic waves traveling between Earth’s poles move faster than those moving east-west, and now scientists think they may know why. The iron alloys in the solid inner core of the Earth appear to have crystallized in such a way that it’s easier for energy to pass on the north-south axis than on the east-west, as described in a new study led by Maurizio Mattesini, a geologist at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His study suggests that as the crystals formed, they received a particular alignment, known as anisotropy, which makes it easier for waves to travel in one direction than the other.

Archaeologists Discover 2,700-year-old Tomb in Mexico - (Guardian - May 18, 2010)
The tomb, found at a site built by Zoque Indians in Chiapa de Corzo, in southern Chiapas state, may be almost 1,000 years older than the better-known pyramid tomb of the Mayan ruler Pakal at the Palenque archaeological site, also in Chiapas. The man - probably a high priest or ruler of Chiapa de Corzo, a prominent settlement at the time - was buried in a stone chamber. The body of a one-year-old child was laid carefully over the man’s body inside the tomb, while that of a 20-year-old male was tossed into the chamber with less care, perhaps sacrificed at the time of burial. The older man was buried with jade and amber collars and bracelets and pearl ornaments. His face was covered with what may have been a funeral mask with obsidian eyes. Nearby, the tomb of a woman, also about 50, contained similar ornaments.

Horned Dinosaurs Island-hopped from Asia to Europe - (BBC News - May 26, 2010)
Horned dinosaurs previously considered native only to Asia and North America might also have roamed the lands of prehistoric Europe, say scientists. Europe in the Late Cretaceous was not a single landmass, but a group of islands known as Tethyan archipelago. Palaeontologists have announced the discovery of fossils belonging to a horned creature in the Bakony Mountains of western Hungary. The find may give them a better understanding of the environment during the late period of dinosaur evolution.

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Live Feeds from Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) - (BP - May 27, 2010)
This is a live video feed from the Deepwater Horizon oil leak. Throughout the extended “top kill” procedure - which may take up to two days to complete - very significant changes in the appearance of the flows at the seabed may be expected. These will not provide a reliable indicator of the overall progress, or success or failure, of the top kill operation as a whole. BP will report on the progress of the operation as appropriate and on its outcome when complete.

Scientists Identify Virulent New Strains of Ug99 Stem Rust - (EurekAlert - May 26, 2010)
Four new mutations of Ug99, a strain of a deadly wheat pathogen known as stem rust, have overcome existing sources of genetic resistance developed to safeguard the world’s wheat crop. The new “races” have acquired the ability to defeat two of the most important stem rust-resistant genes, which are widely used in most of the world’s wheat breeding programs. “With the new mutations we are seeing, countries cannot afford to wait until rust ‘bites’ them,” said Dr. Ravi Singh, distinguished senior scientist International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. The reddish-brown, wind-borne fungus known as Ug99 has decimated up to 80% of Kenyan farmers’ wheat during several cropping seasons, and scientists estimate that 90% of the wheat varieties around the world lack sufficient resistance to the original Ug99.

China Drought Highlights Future Climate Threats - (Nature News - May 11, 2010)
Since last September, the Yunnan province has had 60% less rainfall than normal. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, 8.1 million people - 18% of Yunnan’s population - are short of drinking water, and US$2.5-billion worth of crops are expected to fail. Scientists in China say that the crisis marks one of the strongest case studies so far of how climate change and poor environmental practices - such as replacing rainforest with rubber trees known as ‘water pumps’ by locals because of their insatiable thirst and which now cover 20% of the prefecture’s land - can combine to create a disaster.

What Do You Do with Non-Biodegradable Plastics? - (Al Fin Energy - May 16, 2010)
Northeastern University student researchers have come up with an apparatus to convert plastic waste into clean energy without releasing harmful emissions. Self-sustainability is the key to the double-tank combustor design. Plastic waste is first processed in an upper tank through pyrolysis, which converts solid plastic into gas. Next, the gas flows to a lower tank, where it is burned with oxidants to generate heat and steam. The heat sustains the combustor while the steam can be used to generate electric power.

YeZ Concept Car Sucks in C02, Exhales Oxygen - (CNET - May 21, 2010)
Here is a vehicle that behaves like a plant, photosynthesizing carbon dioxide from the air and exchanging oxygen back into the atmosphere. Meet the YeZ, a concept two-seater that makes other eco cars blush when it comes to zero and even negative emissions. Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation is behind this clever little creation in partnership with General Motors and Volkswagen. YeZ, pronounced yea-zi, which means “leaf” in Mandarin, works its magic of photoelectric conversion with the help of state-of-the-art solar panels on the roof, wind power conversion via small wind turbines in the wheels, and carbon dioxide absorption and conversion through the bodywork. This last bit is made of a metal-organic framework that can apparently absorb carbon dioxide and water molecules from the air. Through the series of chemical reactions, energy is generated, and it’s then stored in the car’s lithium ion batteries.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Limitless, Cheap Chips Made Out of DNA Could Replace Silicon - (PopSci - May 11, 2010)
Silicon chips are on the way out, at least if Duke University engineer Chris Dwyer has his way. The professor of electrical and computer engineering says that using the unique properties of DNA to coax circuits into assembling themselves could produce more logic circuits in a single day than the entire global silicon chip industry could produce in a month. Indeed, DNA is perfectly suited to such pre-programming and self-assembly. Dwyer’s recent research has shown that by creating and mixing customized snippets of DNA and other molecules, he can create billions of identical, waffle-like structures that can be turned into logic circuits using light rather than electricity as a signaling medium.

Controlling Computers with Your Mind - (Future Tense - May 12, 2010)
Dean Pomerlau, a researcher at Intel and his group are using software to analyze MRI brain scans to determine what a subject is thinking about. He says they can predict the result with about 90% accuracy. While Dean cautions that having this technology in a practical application available to anyone is still many years away, it holds tremendous potential to help the disabled. One possible application of the technology might be to create a pill full of tiny robots that swim up to your brain and embed themselves there to transmit your thoughts.

Seven Atom Transistor Sets the Pace for Future PCs - (BBC News - May 24, 2010)
If the new seven atom transistor can be made in large numbers it could mean chips with components up to 100 times smaller than on existing processors. The Australian creators of the transistor hope it is also a step towards a solid-state quantum computer. The transistor is not the smallest ever created as two research groups have previously managed to produce working single-atom transistors. However, the device is many times smaller than the components found in chips in contemporary computers. On chips where components are 22 nanometres in size, transistor gates are about 42 atoms across.

Sony Shows Rollable OLED Display - (PC World - May 27, 2010)
Sony has developed a flexible color display that’s sturdy enough to be wrapped around a pencil while still showing video images. The 4.1-inch screen has a resolution of 432 by 240 pixels, which is similar to that offered by many mass-market cell phones. The screen contains newly-developed organic thin-film transistors that are used to make the driver circuitry to run the display. The transistors can be directly made on a flexible substrate and remove the need for rigid driver chips that would prevent the screen from being rolled.

AUGMENTED/ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Wikitude Drive Beta - Test Drivers Wanted - (Wikitude - May 20, 2010)
Wikitude Drive, the first mobile Augmented Reality (AR) satellite navigation system with global coverage, is looking for test drivers. Wikitude Drive, the Grand Prize Winner of the Global Navteq LBS Challenge 2010 at Mobile World Congress last February in Barcelona, transforms your Android smartphone into a mobile navigation system looking a bit like something out of a science fiction movie. Driving directions not only appear on screen, they are overlaid on the live video stream of the very street you are driving on. As a result, you are seeing the real world and real road in front of you, while being directed by a digital route on top of it.

ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

The Growing Hunger for Carbon Dioxide - (Al Fin Energy - May 6, 2010)
Human industry is building up a mighty hunger for CO2, the villainous greenhouse gas. It is becoming a problem to get enough of the stuff. For example, the company Algenol is making — to situate its algal farms next to Valero oil refineries, so as to siphon off the CO2 byproduct of the refinery to feed its algae. Other companies making similar plans include Ceres, and Joule. Another CO2 hungry process being discussed is the German project to use wind-generated electricity to produce methanol.

Plotting the Global Hydrocarbon Collapse - (Peak Generation - May 9, 2010)
More than 90% of the world’s energy comes from non-renewable sources - and its decline can be projected on a Hubbert bell curve. We are familiar with the concept of peak oil. But Hubbert’s model proves versatile, as the exploitation of any non-renewable resource - from oil to uranium - follows similar patterns. Experts in the fields of coal, natural gas and nuclear power are beginning to talk of vastly inflated reserves figures and pointing to resource depletion within the next two decades. This, if it proves accurate, would involve all our main sources of energy declining drastically, all within a relatively short timeframe.

“Deep Green”: Kite-Based Tidal Power - (Good Blog - May 13, 2010)
The Swedish start-up Minesto is working on a new kind of underwater turbine, called “Deep Green.” The kite-like apparatus is tethered to the ocean floor, at a depth of anywhere from 60 to 150 meters. Then, as a tide or current pushes against the kite, it moves from side to side because its wings create a lift force. As it moves, water flows through a turbine in the kite. And because it’s moving, the velocity of the flow of water through the turbine can be 10 times the surrounding stream flow, according to Minesto. In theory, Deep Green should be much cheaper to install and maintain than other wave-power technologies, because these things are relatively small. Each kite’s wingspan is about 40 feet. One of these kites, working for an hour, could generate enough power to supply about two weeks’ power for the average home.

Shale Gas Revolution Changes World Energy Balance - (Al Fin Energy - May 10, 2010)
Over the past decade, new techniques have been developed that drastically cut the price tag of shale gas production. One of the biggest effects of the shale boom will be to give Western and Chinese consumers fuel supplies close to home-thus scuttling a potential natural-gas cartel. The political fallout from shale gas will throw world politics for a loop. Shale-gas resources are believed to extend into countries such as Poland, Romania, Sweden, Austria, Germany-and Ukraine. Once European shale gas comes, the Kremlin will be hard-pressed to use its energy exports as a political lever. “The shale boom also is likely to upend the economics of renewable energy. It may be a lot harder to persuade people to adopt green power that needs heavy subsidies when there’s a cheap, plentiful fuel out there that’s a lot cleaner than coal, even if gas isn’t as politically popular as wind or solar.” (Wall Street Journal).

Gene-Engineering the Best of all Possible Algae - (Al Fin Energy - May 10, 2010)
Iowa State University scientists are hard at work engineering the best genetic strain of algae for the production of biofuels. The researchers are investigating the process of genetically stacking traits in algae for biofuels production. With a $4.37 million grant from the U.S. DOE, ISU genetics professor and project lead Martin Spalding intends to develop a micro-algal platform allowing algae to be treated as a crop. The best analogy to this is stacking traits in corn. “Farmers could plant simple unmanipulated lines of corn that have high yield,” Spalding says, “but you wouldn’t get the drought tolerance you want. You could plant drought-tolerant corn, but you wouldn’t get standability. But by genetically manipulating corn, you get all the traits you need.”

Bladeless wind turbine inspired by Tesla - (PhysOrg - May 7, 2010)
A bladeless wind turbine whose only rotating component is a turbine/driveshaft could generate power at a cost comparable to coal-fired power plants, according to its developers at Solar Aero. The New Hampshire-based company recently announced its patent on the Fuller wind turbine, which is an improvement on a patent issued to Nikola Tesla in 1913.

Nuclear Reactor Aims for Self-Sustaining Fusion - (Technology Review - May 25, 2010)
In a few years, an experimental nuclear fusion reactor near Moscow could be the first to yield a self-sustaining fusion reaction. If the Italian-Russian project is successful, it would be a key milestone for fusion power. The proposed reactor is based on a design developed at MIT, where three similar reactors based on the same design have already been built. The “Ignitor”, as it’s called, is a tokamak reactor, a doughnut-shaped device that uses powerful magnetic fields to produce fusion by squeezing superheated plasma of hydrogen isotopes.

Electric Car Breaks World Record: 623 Miles Without Recharging - (Impact Lab - May 27, 2010)
The Japan Electric Vehicle Club broke its own Guinness World Record last weekend by driving an electric vehicle for a distance of 623.76 miles (1,003 kilometers) without recharging. The new distance record nearly doubles the old record of 345 miles (555.6 kilometers) that was set last November. The Tokyo-based Japan Electric Vehicle Club, a group of electric vehicle enthusiasts, converted the Daihatsu Mira EV from gas to electric using Sanyo lithium-ion batteries.

PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUES

Discovery May Lead to Safer Drinking Water, Cheaper Medicine - (EurekAlert - May 26, 2010)
A discovery that may pave the way to helping reduce health hazards such as E. coli in water could also make chemicals and drugs such as insulin cheaper to produce and their production more environmentally friendly. Queen’s University biochemistry professor Zongchao Jia and post-doctoral student Jimin Zheng discovered exactly how the AceK protein acts as a switch in some bacteria to bypass the energy-producing cycle that allows bacteria like E. coli and salmonella to go into a survival mode and adapt to low-nutrient environments, such as water. The discovery opens the door for scientists to identify a molecule that can keep the bypass switch from turning on so bacteria will die in water.

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Outstanding in Their Field Effect - (EurekAlert - May 25, 2010)
Rice University researchers have discovered thin films of nanotubes created with ink-jet printers offer a new way to make field-effect transistors (FET), the basic element in integrated circuits. While the technique doesn’t scale down to the levels required for modern microprocessors, Rice’s Robert Vajtai hopes it will be useful to inventors who wish to print transistors on materials of any kind, especially on flexible substrates. The nanotube-based circuitry is created using high-end ink-jet printers and custom inks.

Antibacterial Silver Nanoparticles are a Blast - (EurekAlert - May 24, 2010))
Your running shoes, socks and even computer keyboard may be impregnated with silver nanoparticles that can kill some bacteria, keep you smelling sweet and preventing the spread of infection among computer users. Researchers in India point out that silver nanoparticles are not only antibacterial against so-called gram-positive bacteria, such as resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae but, also against gram-negative Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Bacterial resistance to conventional antibiotics is threatening human health the world over. Medicinal chemists are desperately trying to develop new compounds that can kill strains such as MRSA (methicillin, or multiple-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and E. coli O157. Frontline defenses, such as environmentally benign and cost-effective antibacterial compounds could prevent such infective agents spreading through contact with computer keyboard, phones and other devices.

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Digital Photocopiers Loaded with Secrets - (CBS - April 19, 2010)
Almost all copiers made since 2002 have a hard drive buried inside, which stores images of every document that is scanned or copied - turning an office staple into a a digital time-bomb packed with highly-personal and/or sensitive data.

Chemical Concussions and Secret LSD: Pentagon Details Cold War Mind-Control Tests - (Wired - May 11, 2010)
More than 30 years after it was written, the Pentagon has released a memorandum detailing its involvement in the CIA’s infamous Cold War mind-control experiments. Most of the details included in the 17-page document have been revealed in earlier CIA papers. Still, there are some tantalizing new details. Take the origins of MK-ULTRA, the notorious CIA program that dosed thousands of unwitting participants with hallucinogenic drugs. Not surprisingly, the released report also doesn’t address darker questions that persist about the specifics of the CIA projects. Last year, a group of vets sued the agency for illnesses and trauma caused by the “diabolical and secret [MK-ULTRA] testing program,” which they allege included experiments with nerve gas, psychochemicals, and brain implants.

TRENDS OF GOVERNMENT

More Cities on Brink of Bankruptcy - (CNBC - May 26, 2010)
The possibility of a bankruptcy filing by the city of Harrisburg, Pa., the state capital, looms large these days - and it could be the first in a series, say some Wall Street traders. Harrisburg, population 55,000, owes nearly $70 million in debt payments this year, and it’s unclear where that money will come from. On May 1, the city missed a $452,282 loan payment related to the incinerator. Raising taxes or selling assets, like real estate or parking lots, are options for Harrisburg. So is a restructuring plan - either inside or outside of bankruptcy. If Harrisburg does file for bankruptcy, it would do so under Chapter 9 - which is employed by cities, but rarely. In one closely watched case, the city of Vallejo, Calif., has been in Chapter 9 since 2008.

Gates, Congress, and Obama: Mutually Assured Debacle - (Huffington Post - May 27, 2010)
A historic opportunity to tame a voracious source of our horrific federal debt is being squandered by short sighted games, some of them abysmally selfish. At a post World War II high in inflation adjusted dollars, we have the smallest Navy and Air Force we have had since 1946, and the Army is just barely above its post World War II low. Our major equipment inventories are, on average, older than at any point in the last sixty years. The current Pentagon plan is to make both problems worse, at higher cost.

CONTACT AND THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE

Former Legislator Makes Statement on Un-Released Eisenhower Briefing on Extraterrestrials - (ExoNews - May 12, 2010)
Henry W. McElroy, a former New Hampshire state legislator, claims he saw a briefing for President Eisenhower that revealed the presence of extraterrestrials in the United States. It went on to discuss a possible meeting being arranged between the President and extraterrestrial entities. The alleged briefing witnessed by McElroy supports earlier whistleblower testimonies that President Eisenhower did in fact meet with extraterrestrials in 1954 and 1955. The article also lists four former U.S. astronauts and two former U.S. presidents, among others, who have made informative statements concerning this general topic.

DEMOGRAPHICS

9/11 Link to Rise in Male Fetal Death Rate - (BBC News - May 24, 2010)
The stress caused by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center may have led to an increase in miscarriages of male foetuses, US researchers say. A study found 12% more male babies, more sensitive to stress than female ones, were lost in September 2001 after the 20th week of pregnancy than in a “normal” September. Data says fewer boys were born in all states three to four months after 9/11. The review by the University of California, Irvine, is said to support the theory of “communal bereavement”.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

US Money Supply Plunges at 1930s Pace as Obama Eyes Fresh Stimulus - (Telegraph - May 26, 2010)
The M3 money supply in the United States is contracting at an accelerating rate that now matches the average decline seen from 1929 to 1933, despite near zero interest rates and the biggest fiscal blitz in history. The M3 figures - which include broad range of bank accounts and are tracked by British and European monetarists for warning signals about the direction of the US economy a year or so in advance - began shrinking last summer. The pace has since quickened. Larry Summers, Obama’s top economic adviser, has asked Congress to “grit its teeth” and approve a fresh fiscal boost of $200bn to keep growth on track.

Are We Hiring Yet? - (Atlantic - May 11, 2010)
The number of unemployed workers per job opening peaked at the end of 2009 at 6.1% — the highest level ever recorded. Even after three months of job growth, that number was still near its historic high. Remember, the unemployment rate does not tell us whether Americans are unemployed because they just lost their job (indicated by a high job separation rate), or because they have been out of job for an extended period of time (indicated by a low job finding rate). In fact, more than 95% of the change in the unemployment rate since the beginning of the recession is due, not to job separation, but record-low job finding, the Cleveland Fed reported. See graph in article.

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH - articles off the beaten track which may - or may not - have predictive value.

Communications Satellite Avoided Interference by a Second, Rogue Satellite - (Sun Sentinel - May 24, 2010)
The owner of a satellite that transmits programming to all U.S. cable systems says it avoided interference from another, out-of-control satellite that was drifting into its path. SES World Skies says programming transmitted by its AMC 11 satellite was not affected by the Galaxy 15 satellite, which is drifting out of control thousands of miles above the Earth and had threatened to wander into AMC 11’s orbit. Bottom line: there’s a growing amount of “junk” up there, some of which is no longer in anyone’s control.

Predictions for the Rest of 2010 - (Rense - May 25, 2010)
Here are 25 economic predictions for the rest of the year. They can’t all be right. One of them, dated 03/13/2010, is already clearly wrong: “In fact, the euro has recently stabilized. My gut is that the dollar sell-off will be sharp and swift.” And we have not had run-away inflation. But the overwhelming consensus is that things will be in the proverbial handbasket rolling downhill by the second half of the year. If nothing else, they make interesting reading.

JUST FOR FUN

Weird Clouds Look Even Better from Space - (Wired - May 12, 2010)
Cloud-watching from Earth can be endlessly entertaining, but some of the most amazing cloud patterns can only be properly appreciated from space. Satellites can take in thousands of miles of the Earth’s surface in one shot, revealing complicated and intriguing cloud patterns we could never see from below. Here are some of the best cloud formations - seen from above.

A FINAL QUOTE…

“The future influences the present just as much as the past.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

A FINAL NOTE…

If you’d like to take part in an International Delphi Survey and Scenario development project about Latin America 2010 - 2030, please click here.

CONTACT US

Edited by John L. Petersen
johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

PRIVACY POLICY: We don’t share your information with anyone.

FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT…

• The ‘Living Earth Simulator’ will mine economic, environmental and health data to create a model of the entire planet in real time.
• Using single-molecule computation, physicists have demonstrated a calculation speed thousands of times faster than a PC.
• Google Ventures has sunk an undisclosed sum into a startup that “offers customers new ways to analyze the past, present and the predicted future.”.
• Facebook has reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

PUNCTUATIONS
by John L. Petersen

Don’t forget that Lee Carroll and KRYON are coming to Berkeley Springs on the 17th of July. There are already more than 20 signed up, so there’s going to be a good group. It will be a great time. Come out for the weekend at our little resort town and spend Saturday learning to see yourself and the future in a new way. Click on the banner on the right for more information.

I contributed a chapter to a new book, Transforming through 2012: Leading Perspectives on the New Global Paradigm which was published recently. It’s a digest that includes articles by Jean Houston, Bruce Lipton, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Daniel Pinchbeck, Carl Calleman, and Peter Russell, among others. It ranges all across the spectrum of ideas about what these authors think is happening in the next few years. I found it interesting. Calleman, for example says it’s not 2012 we should be focused upon, but October 2011 - next year. That accelerates things a bit. I recommend it. Take a look.

Speaking of change, I’m constantly running into people who really believe that the pace of time is rapidly increasing. I don’t know exactly what that means, but maybe the effect is a perception that our experience of time is changing - it passes more quickly. My sense is that this is not a byproduct of physical aging but is a general feeling shared by many if not most people. Some of it is driven and enabled by technology that exposes us to much more information in a given period of time and allows us to do far more than was possible in the past. Accomplishing more in a given amount of time would certainly translate into a sense of accelerating time.

In any case, we are certainly watching the emergence of major structural shifts across the board. In some cases these are attempts to hold on to the past, in others it is significant movement into the future. Today in the Washington Post for example, Dana Milbank makes the pretty persuasive case that the U.S. Republican party is fragmenting - “coming unglued”, is the term used. Think about that. If we’re watching a major American political party that has been around for more than a century and a half starting to come apart, it is a big deal. It signals a fundamental shift in the attitudes of a sizable group of people . . . all trying to hold on to the past, I’d say.

And then in the New York Times, there’s a piece about the beginning of the end of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as a metric of economic health. Even though a number of us have disparaged the use of this index for many years as not being at all representative of the full spectrum of important indicators that fully reflect the health of a country, it has been in use for all of my life. Now it appears that is about to change - and the change is in the right direction of being far more inclusive and comprehensive.

Attempts to deal with change are almost always (and necessarily) based upon concepts and values of the past. We bring the tools and perspectives from an earlier, far simpler time and try to use them to craft policies to deal with change that is far more complicated than in previous times. Often times, though well meaning, these initiatives lack common sense. I was in California last week visiting a friend and asked her what she was doing later that day. She was going up to a major penitentiary to visit her brother who was locked up for the rest of his life. He was the victim of California’s “three-strikes” policy that dictates that when someone has committed three felonies, no matter how severe, they are automatically given a life sentence. This 47 year old man had committed a couple of felonies when he was 18, served his time and then run afoul of the law one more time at age 45 which sent him back to prison for all of his remaining days on this earth. “What did he do?”, I asked. Well, I was told, he was caught looking at an “inappropriate” web page in a public library which, in the enlightened state of California, is a felony.

I couldn’t believe it. I’m not a fan of pornography, but the notion that looking at anything on a computer in a library is a felony, really is hard for me to understand. Furthermore, the willingness of Californians, whose government is essentially bankrupt and is shutting down agencies and support to education and public safety, to spend more than $70,000 per year to warehouse some poor soul for maybe 30 years at a cost of over $2 million, because he was looking at dirty pictures really lacks common sense.

I think there are a lot of knee-jerk, reactive responses that are going to come out of our legislators in the coming years that will rather soon be seen to be quite foolish. We don’t understand complex change and we really don’t understand rapidly accelerating complex change. New approaches are needed for all of this. My guess is that government can never get ahead of the curve - can never act with foresight and wisdom - and will increasingly become marginalized.

As a matter of fact, I think the collapse of representative democracy (as we practice it, at least) is almost certain in time as information technology fundamentally and very rapidly changes what and who we know and how we can organize ourselves. Freedom of speech was a concept conceived for individuals who were severely limited in whom they could influence and how fast they could do it. The notion that many thousands of people can rapidly mobilize themselves around certain ideas or concepts (under the protection of the Constitution) and that single individuals can now inflame millions of people with rhetoric that does not have to be true, is a dramatically different environment than the framers of the Constitution (or anyone since) ever envisioned.

It will be interesting to see how it all evolves.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Bristol Psychologist Seeking Tweets about Dreams - (BBC News - April 24, 2010)
A Bristol (UK) academic is to take part in a worldwide experiment to collect and analyze people’s dreams using the social networking service Twitter. The 10 judged the best will be analysed by Dr Parker, who is a member of the Association for the Study of Dreams. The best 10 tweeted dreams will appear on www.twitter.com/dreamshrink . We have no idea what the criteria for “best” may be, but this is the first time we have seen Twitter being used for international research.

Europe’s Plan to Simulate the Entire Planet - (Technology Review - April 30, 2010)
The ‘Living Earth Simulator’ will mine economic, environmental and health data to create a model of the entire planet in real time. Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich intends to create a kind of Manahattan project to study, understand and tackle these techno-socio-economic-environmental issues. His plan is to gather data about the planet in unheard of detail, use it to simulate the behaviour of entire economies and then to predict and prevent crises from emerging. Think of it as a kind of Google Earth for society. Imagine a similar model that uses in real time things like financial transactions, health records, travel details, carbon dioxide emissions and so on to build a model of not just the planet but the entire society that populates it. The great worry, of course, is that it will not be the great public universities and government-funded research institutes that complete this task.

Lie-Detection Brain Scan Could Be Used in Court for First Time - (Wired - May 3, 2010)
A Brooklyn attorney hopes to break new ground this week when he offers a brain scan as evidence that a key witness in a civil trial is telling the truth. If the fMRI scan is admitted, it would be a legal first in the United States and could have major consequences for the future of neuroscience in court. Laboratory studies using fMRI, which measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain, have suggested that when someone lies, the brain sends more blood to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex. In a very small number of studies, researchers have identified lying in study subjects (.pdf) with accuracy ranging from 76% to over 90%. But some scientists and lawyers like New York University neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps doubts those results can be applied outside the lab.

NEW REALITIES

Jupiter Loses One of its Stripes; Scientists are Stumped - (Daily Mail - May 12, 2010)
The largest planet in our solar system is usually dominated by two dark bands in its atmosphere, with one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere. The band was present in at the end of last year before Jupiter ducked behind the Sun on its orbit. However, when it emerged three months later the belt had disappeared. Jupiter loses or regains one of its belts every ten of 15 years, although exactly why this happens is a mystery.

X-ray Discovery Points to Location of Missing Matter - (NASA - May 11, 2010)
NASA astronomers have detected a vast reservoir of intergalactic gas about 400 million light years from Earth. This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the “missing matter” in the nearby Universe is located in an enormous web of hot, diffuse gas. This missing matter - which is different from dark matter - is composed of baryons, the particles, such as protons and electrons, that are found on the Earth, in stars, gas, galaxies, and so on. A variety of measurements of distant gas clouds and galaxies have provided a good estimate of the amount of this “normal matter” present when the universe was only a few billion years old. However, an inventory of the much older, nearby universe has turned up only about half as much normal matter, an embarrassingly large shortfall.

GENETICS/ HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

Search for Genes Leads to Unexpected Places - (New York Times - April 27, 2010)
Dr. Marcotte and his colleagues at the University of Texas have discovered hundreds of other genes involved in human disorders by looking at distantly related species. They have found genes associated with deafness in plants, for example, and genes associated with breast cancer in nematode worms. The scientists took advantage of a peculiar feature of our evolutionary history. In our distant, amoeba-like ancestors, clusters of genes were already forming to work together on building cell walls and on other very basic tasks essential to life. Many of those genes still work together in those same clusters, over a billion years later, but on different tasks in different organisms.

Big Brother to Track Your Medication Compliance with Electronic Transmitters in Pills - (Natural News - April 27, 2010)
New technologies are in the works that will allow the government to remotely monitor and track whether ordinary citizens are complying with taking medications prescribed by conventional doctors. One new technology described at the U.S. Senate Committee on Aging allows “pills to be electronically outfitted with transmitters” which would track the patient’s compliance with medications and broadcast that information back to government health care enforcers who check for “compliance and efficacy.” (Editor’s note: we suspect that, if one wanted to, it would be fairly easy to “game” the system on this one.)

President’s Cancer Panel Recommends Precaution with Cell Phones and Wireless Technologies - (Electromagnetic Health - May 6, 2010)
The President’s Cancer Panel reported that “the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated” and named cell phones and other wireless technologies as potential causes of cancer that demand further research and precaution. In its recommendations, the panel stated “Methods for long-term monitoring and quantification of electromagnetic energy exposures related to cell phones and wireless technologies are urgently needed given the escalating use of these devices by larger and younger segments of the population and the higher radiofrequencies newer devices produce. ” Link to the original report sponsored by the NIH.

New Detection Technology Identifies Bacteria, Viruses, Other Organisms Within 24 Hours - (Science Daily - May 6, 2010)
Law enforcement authorities seeking to detect bioterrorism attacks, doctors diagnosing diseases and regulatory agencies checking product safety may find a new ally in a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory detection technology. The process detects viruses and bacteria with the use of 388,000 probes that fit in a checkerboard pattern in the middle of a one-inch wide, three-inch long glass slide. The current operational version contains probes that can detect more than 2,000 viruses and about 900 bacteria.

Scientists to Test Ultrasound as a Male Contraceptive - (BBC News - May 11, 2010)
Based on early work, University of North Carolina experts believe a blast of ultrasound to the testes can safely stop sperm production for six months. With a grant of $100,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation they will push ahead with more clinical trials. “Our long-term goal is to use ultrasound from therapeutic instruments that are commonly found in sports medicine or physical therapy clinics as an inexpensive, long-term, reversible male contraceptive suitable for use in developing to first world countries.”

DISCOVERIES ENABLED BY NEW TECHNOLOGY

Photosynthetic Fish and Other Oddities - (Technology Review - May 4, 2010)
Photosynthetic humans - endowed with the power to derive energy from the sun - are a popular construct of science fiction. But Pamela Silver, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, aims to push that concept into reality. Silver’s research focuses on cyanobacteria, a microbe responsible for almost 50 percent of the earth’s photosynthetic ability. Her team aims to harness the organisms’ photosynthetic powers by engineering them to generate fuel and other valuable chemicals.

‘Starving Yogi’ Astounds Indian Scientists - (Breitbart - May 10, 2010)
An 83-year-old Indian holy man who says he has spent seven decades without food or water has astounded a team of military doctors who studied him during a two-week observation period. Prahlad Jani spent a fortnight in a hospital under constant surveillance from a team of 30 medics equipped with cameras and closed circuit television. During the period, he neither ate nor drank and did not go to the toilet. The long-haired and bearded yogi was sealed in a hospital in a study initiated by India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the state defence and military research institute. The DRDO hopes that the findings, to be released in several months, could help soldiers survive without food and drink, assist astronauts or even save the lives of people trapped in natural disasters. “If Jani does not derive energy from food and water, he must be doing that from energy sources around him, sunlight being one,” said Shah.

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

World’s 2010 Nature Target Will Not Be Met - (BBC News - April 29, 2010)
The world’s governments will not meet their internationally-agreed target of curbing the loss of species and nature by 2010, a major study has confirmed. Virtually all species and ecosystems show continued decline, while pressures on nature are increasing, it concludes. The study confirms what conservationists have known for several years. The 2010 target was adopted in 2002, but the scientists behind this study say implementation has been “woeful”.

Fears for Crops as Shock Figures from America Show Scale of Bee Catastrophe - (Guardian - May 2, 2010)
Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter. Since 2006 more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers. Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods.

Signs of a Coming Magnetic Pole Reversal - (Earth Changes Media - May 1, 2010)
Geophysicists specializing in Earth Core dynamics, supported by the National Science Foundation, may have charted the illusive signs and symptoms of a “pole reversal” which may occur sooner than anyone conceived. Furthermore, their findings suggest is far less time between the beginnings of a reversal event, and the event itself. It was originally thought we would witness a decade or two of a ‘bouncing North Pole’ prior to a full reversal event. Now it is believed it could happen in short order.

Farmers Cope with Roundup-Resistant Weeds - (New York Times - May 3, 2010)
American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds. To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing. The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.

Profound Decline in Fish Stocks Shown in UK Records - (BBC News - May 4, 2010)
Researchers used port records dating from the late 1800s, when mechanised boats were replacing sailing vessels. They say this implies “an extraordinary decline” in fish stocks and “profound” ecosystem changes. Four times more fish were being landed in UK ports 100 years ago than today, and catches peaked in 1938.

Mediterranean Gray Whale Appears Back from the Dead - (BBC News - May 10, 2010)
A gray whale has appeared off the coast of Israel, shocking conservationists. However, the North Atlantic population of gray whale became extinct sometime in the 17th or 18th Century, for reasons that are not clear. So the appearance of an individual within the Mediterranean Sea is a major surprise. The whale may have inadvertently travelled a huge distance from its natural habitat thousands of kilometres away in the Pacific Ocean. However, it raises the possibility that gray whales have returned to former haunts in the western hemisphere.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Google Invests in Firm that Tries to Predict the Future - (Computer World - May 3, 2010)
Google’s investment arm, Google Ventures, has sunk an undisclosed sum into Recorded Future, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that “offers customers new ways to analyze the past, present and the predicted future.” Recorded Future’s own Web site doesn’t list any products for sale, but the company appears to have developed a data analytics technology that could be used to try to predict future stock market events or even terrorist activity, according to blog posts and videos on its site. The technology looks at how frequently an entity or event is referred to in the news and around the Web over a period of time, then uses that data to project how it might behave in the future.

Single Molecule Can Calculate Thousands of Times Faster Than a PC - (Daily Galaxy - May 11, 2010)
An experimental demonstration of a quantum calculation by researchers in Japan has shown that a single molecule can perform Fourier transform operations thousands of times faster than any conventional computer. Researchers in Japan describe a proof-of-principle calculation they performed with an iodine molecule. The calculation involved that computation of a discrete Fourier transform, a common algorithm that’s particularly handy for analyzing certain types of signals.

AUGMENTED/ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Japan’s Brainwave Initiative: Mind-Reading Bots by 2020 - (H Plus - May 4, 2010)
The Japanese government and private sector are collaborating on a new initiative to develop bots with AI capable of detecting when you’re hungry, cold, or in need of assistance, and electronics that can be controlled by thought alone. The project envisions coordination between three different kinds of bots: “visible” (think Asimo), “virtual” (think Avatar), and “unconscious” (think embedded sensor), all in a cooperating system to provide a complete set of social services to both augmented and non-augmented humans in the urban environment. Such a networked robotic system would possess the intelligence to modify its communication techniques - including thought, speech, and gesture - to meet the needs of the current situation.

Augmented-Reality Floor Tiling - (Technology Review - April 28, 2010)
Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada have developed floor tiles that can simulate the look, sound and feel of snow, grass or pebbles underfoot. Such a tool could perhaps be used for augmented reality applications, tele-presence, training, rehabilitation or even as virtual foot controllers. The floor could even function as a giant touch-screen controlled by feet, acting as a way of navigating a giant map on the floor of a building lobby or public square.

Will Robots Evolve to Ask: “What is Life?” - (Daily Galaxy - May 11, 2010)
Some go so far as to say that robot “emotions” may already have occurred-that current robots have not only displayed emotions, but in some ways have experienced them. Rodney Brooks author of “Flesh and Machines,” and former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, “Robots are made of different sorts of components than we are - we are made of biomaterials; they are silicon and steel - but in principle, even human emotions are mechanistic.” A robot’s level of a feeling like sadness could be set as a number in computer code, he said. But isn’t a human’s level of sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot’s numbers be any less authentic than a human’s?

ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

Can World’s Largest Laser Zap Earth’s Energy Woes? - (CNN - April 28, 2010)
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are trying to use the world’s largest laser - it’s the size of three football fields — to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth. If they’re successful, the scientists hope to solve the global energy crisis by harnessing the energy generated by the mini-star.

The Train that Never Stops at a Station (Softhunder - April 13, 2010)
A new Chinese train innovation allows people to get on & off a bullet train without the train stopping. No time is wasted. If there are 30 stations between Beijing and Guangzhou , just stopping and accelerating again at each station will waste both energy and time. Even a 5 minute stop per station would result in a total loss of 2.5 hours (5 min x 30 stations). Watch the YouTube simulation.

GLOBAL EPIDEMIC

New Clue to Fighting Dengue Fever - (BBC News - May 06, 2010)
Dengue fever is a viral infection spread by a mosquito bite. It is a major cause of illness worldwide, and cases are on the rise. There is currently no licensed vaccine or drug treatment. Researchers, based in the UK and Thailand, took blood samples from infected volunteers and found antibodies produced in response to the virus do not do a very effective job. Rather than neutralizing the virus, they actually help it infect more cells, springing into action when a person is infected a second time by a different strain of the virus.

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Facebook’s Gone Rogue - (Wired - May 7, 2010)
Facebook has decided to turn “your” profile page into your identity online - figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public. So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

Pentagon’s Mach 20 Glider Disappears, Whacking ‘Global Strike’ Plans - (Red Ice Creations - May 3, 2010)
The Pentagon’s controversial plan to hit terrorists half a planet away has suffered a setback, after an experimental hypersonic glider disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. In its first flight test. the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 was supposed to be rocket-launched from California to the edge of space. Then it would could screaming back into the atmosphere, maneuvering at twenty times the speed of sound before landing north of the Kwajalein Atoll, 30 minutes later and 4100 nautical miles away. Thinly wedge-shaped for better lift, equipped with autonomous navigation for more precision, and made of carbon-carbon to withstand the assault of hypersonic flight, the hope was it could fly farther and more accurately at a lower angle of attack than other craft returning to Earth. Instead, nine minutes after launch, Darpa researchers lost contact with the craft. They’re still trying to figure out why.

SOCIAL TRENDS

Syphilis Cases Rise Sharply in China - (BBC News - May 6, 2010)
Syphilis is now the most commonly reported communicable disease in Shanghai, China’s second-largest city. Pregnant women are also increasingly passing the disease to their children. No other country has seen such a rise since the discovery of penicillin. The rise is linked directly to China’s economic reforms and the growing number of migrant workers and men with expendable income, which has led to a growth in the commercial sex industry.

Science has Changed in Our Lifetime - (BBC News - March 30, 2010)
Modern science has changed from a vocation to a career path, to the detriment of the subject, according to Professor James Lovelock, the man who developed the Gaia theory. As he put it, it used to be “a sin against the holy ghost to fudge data”, but that career pressures now meant scientists “tended to adjust data to what the bosses wanted”.

DEMOGRAPHICS

‘Strategic’ Mortgage Defaults Jump to 12% of Total - (Bloomberg - April 29, 2010)
About 12% of all mortgage defaults in February were “strategic,” up from 4% in mid-2007, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. Borrowers are more likely to stop paying their mortgages the higher their credit scores and the larger their loans, the analysts said. Strategic defaults also increase based on how much more borrowers owe in housing debt than their homes are worth. A fifth of U.S. homes carrying mortgages were worth less than their loans in the fourth quarter, according to Seattle- based Zillow.com, which runs a real estate data Web site.

Surprise Tax Hit on Foreclosures - (Wall St. Journal - May 8, 2010)
For Americans considering walking away from an unaffordable mortgage: Beware of taxes. Though not every homeowner who’s underwater on a mortgage need worry, many are finding that a foreclosure or other form of housing loss can lead to a big tax obligation. Federal and state tax laws have long viewed canceled debt as income (and therefore taxable) because consumers who borrow money to buy a house-or who pull money out of their house to buy cars and such-and then don’t pay it back “wind up ahead of where they were,” says an IRS spokesman.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

The European Crisis In Eight Simple Charts - (Zero Hedge - May 9, 2010)
Here is a simplified representation of why anything and everything that the EU, ECB and the IMF can do is simply delay the inevitable disintegration of the eurozone and the upcoming eventual debt payment moratorium.

Europe’s Web of Debt - (New York Times - May 1, 2010)
With one final graph, you can see the interconnected debt between the five PIIGS and their primary lenders: banks and governments in Germany, France and the UK.

US States Consider Starting Their Own Banks - (TruthOut - April 30, 2010)
At least eight U.S. states are considering proposals to start state-run banks in the wake of an economic crisis where many private banks ceased or greatly decreased their lending, literally shrinking the money pool available in state economies. North Dakota is the only one out of the 50 U.S. states that is still operating with a fiscal surplus, and some economists argue it is in part due to the state-owned Bank of North Dakota - the only bank of its kind in the U.S. - which has been able to pump money into its own economy by making loans to farmers, small businesses and families.

U.S. Goes Low-Tech On China Exports - (Geo-Graphics - April 22, 2010)
Over the past decade, trade between the United States and China has grown dramatically while also becoming significantly more imbalanced. One factor contributing to this imbalance is U.S. export controls on certain high-tech products deemed important for national security. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has bluntly observed that “America’s decades-old, bureaucratically labyrinthine [export control] system does not serve our 21st-century security needs or our economic interest.”

China Widens Its Reach - (Forbes - April 21, 2010)
While the rest of the world suffered through its worst financial crisis in a half century, China went shopping. Since 2005, China has made 185 deals worth $100 million or more, totaling more than $222 billion. The largest of these deals was the $12.8 billion joint venture between Chalco and Alcoa made to purchase 12 percent of Rio Tinto back in 2008. This deal was struck in Australia which has been China’s most popular destination both in terms of quantity and dollar amount. Indicative of the large future the Chinese government has in store for its country, the most popular sectors for these deals have been metals and energy, respectively.

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH - articles off the beaten track which may - or may not - have predictive value.

Not Even in South Park? - (New York Times - April 25, 2010)
Two months before 9/11, Comedy Central aired an episode of South Park in which Prophet Muhammad, (upon whom be peace) was depicted with a turban, a 5 o’clock shadow, and introduced as “the Muslim prophet with the powers of flame.” That was a more permissive time. Two weeks ago in an episode that mentioned him, the Prophet never showed his face. He “appeared” from inside a U-Haul trailer and then from inside a mascot’s costume. These gimmicks then prompted a writer for the New York-based Web site revolutionmuslim.com to predict that the creators of South Park would end up like Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker murdered in 2004 for his scathing critiques of Islam. The “South Park” case is illuminating, not because it tells us anything new about the lines that writers and entertainers are no longer allowed to cross, but because it’s a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all.

JUST FOR FUN

Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish - (New York Times - May 4, 2010)
For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.” However, for the past two years the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to excise these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language. (If you’re still scratching your head about that last one, it probably should be “The Juicier Juice”.) For ten of the “best”, click here.

A FINAL QUOTE…

“The future is purchased by the present.” - Samuel Johnson

A FINAL NOTE…

If you’d like to take part in an International Delphi Survey and Scenario development project about Latin America 2010 - 2030, please click here.

CONTACT US

Edited by John L. Petersen
johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

PRIVACY POLICY: We don’t share your information with anyone.

FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT…

• Eventually Google is likely to become a regulated quasi-utility.
• Some 700 feet deep in the waters off California’s Santa Barbara, sits a group of football-field-sized asphalt domes unlike any other underwater features known to exist.
• Stem cells extracted from surgery leftovers could repair damaged hearts.
• A small generator embedded in the sole of a hiking shoe could power portable devices.

PUNCTUATIONS
by John L. Petersen

Well, this has certainly been a big couple of weeks for change. Rather amazing wild cards.

LEE CARROLL and KRYON

I want to say a couple of words about them, but first would like to invite you to come be with us in Berkeley Springs on the 17th of July when Lee Carroll, the spokesperson for the amazing wisdom of KRYON again comes to be with us. Lee was here two years ago and over 80 people enjoyed an extraordinarily stimulating Sunday afternoon listening to the two of them.

This will be a very special event that will certainly give you a new and valuable perspective on the major change that has and may transpire this year. Click here or on the banner on the right for more information. Hope to see you with us.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Apparently a paper will be published in the esteemed scientific journal NATURE in June that suggests CO2 is only responsible for 10-15% of the global warming - casting increasing question about what the net effect of the climate change that we are really experiencing will be. Although I’m not a fan of the polarization and politicizing that has accompanied this debate, it is important that we understand where truth lies in all of this because the change could be quite profound. Burt Rutan has done another great presentation summarizing his take on things that you can find here. Canadian and economist Jeff Rubin has a great speech on the economics of climate change here. It’s a wonderfully informative way to spend a half hour.

My take on this, as I’ve said here before, is that we are on the cusp of rapid cooling with the possibility of a mini Ice age and that we should start getting ready for it. This opinion is growing in the scientific community: the minimal solar activity that we have been seeing will result in significant cooling.

WILD CARDS

John Mauldin’s Outside the Box this week gave some indication of the potential domino-effect that the financial failure of Greece might be to the financial situation in Europe. I heard a similar assessment on NPR today. This is a really big deal.

The global situation is aggravated by the growing disfunctionality of our government and financial systems. This piece is an illuminating look at the problem.

Speaking of really big deals, we’ve had a couple of them in the last two weeks. When the last issue was published the Iceland volcano was spouting forth, shutting down air travel in Europe. I had a number of friends suggest that The Arlington Institute initiate a project around wild cards using the volcano as a case. I was going to put a bunch of volcano stories in this edition . . . and then the oil drilling platform off New Orleans blew up and is now spewing millions of gallons of oil into the ocean. The Washington Post had this rather nice piece of reporting on an event that has the potential of becoming the worst environmental disaster ever. It will be interesting to see what the effect this might have on future deep drilling for oil. There’s a chance, I suspect, that it might do to the oil industry what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did for the nuclear power business.

Unconventional sources like Half Past Human and George Ury believe that we are in for a whole string of big events like this throughout this year. If they are right, it could be quite memorable.

All of this argues for getting one’s personal house in order to be able to deal with this shift. The requirement, it seems, is to learn how to transcend all of the dysfunction and not get sucked down emotionally or otherwise by it all. I believe that a new world is aborning and becoming a new human - both in terms of how one sees one’s self and the rest of reality — will be required to both navigate the transition and to be a contributor to the new world. There may be nothing else as important as this.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Google and Library of Congress Archive Tweets - (CNN - April 14, 2010)
Every single public tweet, dating back to the very first missive posted on March 21, 2006, will now be housed in the government’s Library of Congress. Plus, Google is making the Twitter archive searchable. The Library of Congress — which boasts millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections — announced on Wednesday (via Twitter) that is has acquired all public tweets in the Twitter archive. “Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition. I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data,” wrote a Library of Congress representative in a Facebook note.

Google vs. Governments - (Wired - April 24, 2010)
In the end, Google will become a regulated quasi-utility. It’s easy to suggest why this should happen, but profoundly difficult to imagine how. Yet where there’s a will, the political elites will eventually find a way. The key challenge for Google involves slowing down the process. Arguably, this now matters more to shareholders than new product development. Regulated companies make smaller profits than you’d otherwise expect.

NEW REALITIES

Ancient Asphalt Domes Discovered off California Coast - (Science Daily - April 25, 2010)
Some 700 feet deep in the waters off California’s jewel of a coastal resort, Santa Barbara, sits a group of football-field-sized asphalt domes unlike any other underwater features known to exist. About 35,000 years ago, a series of apparent undersea volcanoes deposited massive flows of petroleum 10 miles offshore. The deposits hardened into domes that were discovered recently by scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and UC Santa Barbara. the dome structures contain about 100,000 tons of residual asphalt and compares them to an underwater version of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, complete with the fossils of ancient animals. Essentially, this is what oil looks like after 35,000 years.

GENETICS/ HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

Cows on Drugs - (New York Times - April 17, 2010)
Agribusiness argues - as it has for 30 years - that livestock need to be given antibiotics to help them grow properly and keep them free of disease. But consider what has happened in Denmark since the late 1990s, when that country banned the use of antibiotics in farm animals except for therapeutic purposes. The reservoir of resistant bacteria in Danish livestock shrank considerably, a World Health Organization report found. And although some animals lost weight and some developed infections that needed to be treated with antimicrobial drugs, the benefits of the rule exceeded those costs.

Stem Cells from Surgery Leftovers Could Repair Damaged Hearts - (EurekAlert - April 26, 2010)
Scientists have for the first time succeeded in extracting vital stem cells from sections of vein removed for heart bypass surgery. Researchers funded by the British Heart Foundation found that these stem cells can stimulate new blood vessels to grow, which could potentially help repair damaged heart muscle after a heart attack. Heart bypass surgery involves taking a piece of vein from the person’s leg and grafting it onto a diseased coronary artery to divert blood around a blockage or narrowing. Professor Madeddu said. “These cells might make it possible for a person having a bypass to also receive a heart treatment using their body’s own stem cells.

Silicon Shrinkwrap Melts Smoothly Onto Cat Brain to Monitor Activity in Real Time - (Popular Science - April 19, 2010)
Implanting clunky electrodes or other devices inside people’s heads could someday give way to smoother, silkier neuromedicine. Scientists say that they have successfully measured the electrical activity of cat brains by using a silk-silicon surface mesh. Silk films can easily be rolled up and slipped through a small hole made in the skull. When wetted with saline, the film helps the silicon circuits conform directly to the brain’s surface and even slip inside crevices. There are also no biocompatibility issues, because the silk eventually dissolves over time and leaves behind a network of silicon circuits too thin to cause any harm.

New Discovery Prevents Spread Of Cancer - (News Room America - April 21, 2010)
Like microscopic inchworms, cancer cells slink away from tumors to travel and settle elsewhere in the body. Now, researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College report that new anti-cancer agents break down the looping gait these cells use to migrate, stopping them in their tracks. Mice implanted with cancer cells and treated with the small molecule macroketone lived a full life without any cancer spread, compared with control animals, which all died of metastasis.

Son’s Autism Leads to Innovation - (BBC News - April 24, 2010)
Stephen Lodge said the idea for his Speaks4Me system came to him years ago but has been waiting for technology to catch up in order to make it a reality. His eleven-year-old son, Callum, is non-verbal and uses his father’s invention to speak. Speaks4Me runs on any device that can run the Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 operating system and uses drag-and-drop to move images from one area of the screen to another to form sentences. The user then presses a speech button to “verbalize” the sentence. It takes half an hour or less to learn to use the system. Lodge is also hoping that it will prove useful to stroke survivors - about a third of whom lose the ability to speak, either temporarily or permanently.

DISCOVERIES ENABLED BY NEW TECHNOLOGY

Particulate Matter from Fires in the Amazon Affects Lightning Patterns - (Science Daily - April 25, 2010)
Scientists researched data on lightning patterns in the Amazon to show how clouds are affected by particulate matter emitted by the fires used for slash-and-burn foresting practices. Researchers found that while low levels of particulate matter actually help the development of thunderstorms, the reverse is true once a certain concentration is reached - the particles then inhibit the formation of clouds and thunderstorms. “The clouds just dry up.” Exactly how man-made pollution impacts clouds, rainfall and weather patterns remains poorly understood, and natural particulates, such as those generated by Iceland’s recent volcano eruptions may add to this effect.

Classic Maya History is Embedded in Commoners’ Homes - (EurekAlert - April 15, 2010)
Maya commoners found a way to record their own history - by burying it within their homes. A new study of the objects embedded in the floors of homes occupied more than 1,000 years ago in central Belize begins to decode their story. Maya in the Classic period (A.D. 250-900) regularly “terminated” their homes, razing the walls, burning the floors and placing artifacts and (sometimes) human remains on top before burning them again. Evidence suggests these rituals occurred every 40 or 50 years and likely marked important dates in the Maya calendar. After termination, the family built a new home on the old foundation, using broken and whole vessels, colorful fragments, animal bones and rocks to mark important areas and to provide ballast for a new plaster floor.

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Arctic Sea Ice Is Highest for This Date in 8 Years - (Watt’s Up with That? - April 22, 2010)
As of today, JAXA shows that we have more ice than any time on this date for the past 8 years of Aqua satellite measurement for this AMSRE dataset. What can be said about the short term trend in Arctic sea ice is that for the past two years, it has recovered from the historic low of 2007. It recovered in 2008, and more in 2009. It appears that it is on track now for a third year of recovery in 2010. See also: IARC-JAXA Information System

Rewiring Plants Could Supersize Crops - (Wired - April 19, 2010)
With a bit of biomathematical wizardry, researchers have found a new way for plants to breathe. The newly discovered chemical reactions would allow plants to process carbon dioxide more efficiently. Crops could grow to enormous size. “We wondered if we could take parts designed by nature, and rewire them together in a mix-and-match approach to get something that’s more efficient for human needs,” said synthetic biologist Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute.

UK Water Use Worsening Global Crisis - (BBC News - April 19, 2010)
The amount of water used to produce food and goods imported by developed countries is worsening water shortages in the developing world, a report says. For example, two-thirds of the water used to make UK imports is used outside its borders. The Engineering the Future, an alliance of professional engineering bodies, says this is unsustainable, given population growth and climate change. Developed countries must help poorer nations curb water use. “We must take account of how our water footprint is impacting on the rest of the world,” said Professor Roger Falconer, a member of the report’s steering committee.

Can We Cool the Planet through Geoengineering? - (NPR - April 15, 2010)
To stop or slow down the effects of global warming, one approach that has recently gained popularity is what scientists call geoengineering, essentially retrofitting the Earth with technology to reduce global warming. The field includes proposals to cool the Earth by capturing carbon dioxide emissions, changing the reflectivity of the sun or even redirecting sunlight away from the Earth. The idea is controversial, fraught with scientific uncertainties and ethical issues, but there are also some very good reasons to take the idea seriously.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Networked Networks Are Prone to Epic Failure - (Wired - April 15, 2010)
Networks that are resilient on their own become fragile and prone to catastrophic failure when connected, suggests a new study with troubling implications for tightly linked modern infrastructures. Electrical grids, water supplies, computer networks, roads, hospitals, financial systems - all are tied to each other in ways that could make them vulnerable. Most theoretical research on network properties has focused on single networks in isolation. In reality, many important networks are tied to each other. Anecdotal evidence hints at their fragility, but the underlying mathematics are largely unexplored.

Car that Drives Itself Gets Closer to Reality - (BBC News - April 24, 2010)
Software developed by the researchers at North Carolina State University helps a computer keep a car within a lane on a highway while staying aware of other lanes and vehicles travelling alongside. It can even read road signs. The technology relies completely on computer vision programming, which allows a computer to understand what a video camera is looking at - whether it is a stop sign or a pedestrian. The program uses algorithms to sort visual data and make decisions related to finding the lanes of a road, detecting how those lanes change as a car is moving, and controlling the car to stay in the correct lane. It does this - while avoiding other vehicles and without becoming confused by multiple lanes.

Brain-like Computing on an Organic Molecular Layer - (EurekAlert - April 25, 2010)
In the brains, information processing circuits-neurons-evolve continuously to solve complex problems. Now, a research team from Japan and Michigan Technological University has created a similar process of circuit evolution in an organic molecular layer. This computer is massively parallel: The world’s fastest supercomputers can only process bits one at a time in each of their channels. Their circuit allows instantaneous changes of ~300 bits. Their processor can produce solutions to problems for which algorithms on computers are unknown, like predictions of natural calamities and outbreaks of disease. The molecular processor also heals itself if there is a defect.

AUGMENTED/ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Car Steered with Eyes - (Science Daily - April 24, 2010)
The eyeDriver software is a prototype application for steering the research vehicle Spirit of Berlin using eye movements. The software was designed by computer scientists at Freie Universität Berlin in collaboration with the company, SMI (SensoMotoric Instruments). The eye movements of the driver are collected and converted into control signals for the steering wheel. The application uses a converted bicycle helmet equipped with two cameras and an infrared LED, as well as a laptop computer with special software. One of the cameras is pointed to the front in the same direction as the person wearing the helmet (scene camera), while the other camera films one eye of the wearer (eye camera).

ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

Battery Breakthrough Promises Lighter Weight, More Power - (Wired - April 8, 2010)
A new kind of battery called lithium-air could replace existing lithium-ion batteries. They have a lithium anode that is electrochemically coupled to atmospheric oxygen through an air cathode. By contrast, current lithium-ion batteries have a carbon anode and a metal oxide-based cathode. Vishal Sapru, industry manager for power and energy system at research firm Frost & Sullivan, estimates that a typical lithium-air battery can offer an output of 1800 watts per kilogram compared to about 120 to 350 watts per kilogram seen in lithium-ion batteries.

Shoe Power Generator - (EurekAlert - April 25, 2010)
Dr. Ville Kaajakari, assistant professor at Louisiana Tech University, has developed a technology that harvests power from a small generator embedded in the sole of a shoe. Kaajakari’s innovative technology is based on new voltage regulation circuits that efficiently convert a piezoelectric charge into usable voltage for charging batteries or for directly powering electronics. “This technology could benefit, for example, hikers that need emergency location devices or beacons,” said Kaajakari. “For more general use, you can use it to power portable devices without wasteful batteries.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Wireless Nano Sensors Could Save Bridges, Buildings - (Science Daily - April 12, 2010)
Civil structures are prone to continuous and uncontrollable damage processes during their designed service lifespan. These damaging processes might be due to weather, aging of materials, earth tremors, and a lack of maintenance. A continuous monitoring system is needed to improve safety. Unfortunately, the costs and required time expenditure often mean monitoring is not carried out in a timely manner and trivial problems, such as small cracks and fissures, ultimately become serious conditions that threaten the integrity of a structure. Nanotechnology and wireless systems could be the answer.

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Air Force Launches Secretive Space Plane - (Wired - April 23, 2010)
The Air Force has fended off statements calling the X-37B a space weapon, or a space-based drone to be used for spying or delivering weapons from orbit. In a conference call with reporters, the most intriguing answer came when deputy undersecretary for the Air Force for space programs Gary Payton acknowledged, “In all honesty, we don’t know when it’s coming back for sure.” The military has been looking into the idea of an orbital space platform for decades. A vehicle such as the X-37 could be a valuable platform for intelligence gathering with the advantage of a satellite’s point of view, but the flexibility of an aircraft that can be launched relatively quickly and maneuvered in orbit much easier than a traditional satellite.

Expert Finds Security Holes in Passports and Smart Cards - (Science Daily - April 25, 2010)
Since 2007, every new U.S. passport has been outfitted with a computer chip. Embedded in the back cover of the passport, the “e-passport” contains biometric data, electronic fingerprints and pictures of the holder, and a wireless radio frequency identification (RFID) transmitter. A new study from Prof. Avishai Wool of Tel Aviv University’s School of Electrical Engineering finds serious security drawbacks in similar chips that are being embedded in credit, debit and “smart” cards. The vulnerabilities of this electronic approach — and the vulnerability of the private information contained in the chips — are becoming more acute. Using simple devices constructed from $20 disposable cameras and copper cooking-gas pipes, Prof. Wool and his students have demonstrated how easily the cards’ radio frequency signals can be disrupted.

The More You Use Google, the More Google Knows About You - (AlterNet - April 9, 2010)
From Google Search to Google Earth, every move you make can be tracked by some feature of Google — and intelligence agencies are drooling over the data. In June 2007, Privacy International, a U.K.-based privacy rights watch-dog, cited Google as the worst privacy offender among 23 online companies. According to the report, no other company was “coming close to achieving [Google's] status as an endemic threat to privacy.” What most disturbed the authors was Google’s “increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user’s life and lifestyle choices.” The result: “the most onerous privacy environment on the Internet.”

Security Brief: Cell Phones to ‘Smell’ Biochem Attack? - (CNN - April 21, 2010)
If you ever get caught up in a chemical or biological weapons attack, your cellphone may save your life. Or at least that’s the ambition of the Department of Homeland Security. The Department’s science and technology team has begun talks with four cell-phone manufacturers on designing ‘nextgen’ phones that would be able to sense a wide variety of noxious chemical compounds in the air - and alert the user. The director of the “Cell-All” program at the DHS, Stephen Dennis, tells CNN that within a year, “We expect up to 80 prototype cell phones to be developed that can be then tested against various agents.”

TRENDS OF GOVERNMENT

The Price of Assassination - (New York Times - April 13, 2010)
President Obama, who during his first year in office oversaw more drone strikes in Pakistan, a country the USA is not at war with, than occurred during the entire Bush presidency, last week surpassed his predecessor in a second respect: he authorized the assassination of an American - Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Imam who after 9/11 moved from Virginia to Yemen, a base from which he inspires such people as the Fort Hood shooter and the would-be underwear bomber.

SOCIAL TRENDS

Celebrity Endorsements Do Not Help Political Candidates - (NCSU News - April 26, 2010)
Two new studies from North Carolina State University show that young voters are not swayed by celebrity endorsements of political candidates - and sometimes voters like the candidate less as a result of receiving a celebrity’s endorsement. “Celebrities have been involved in politics for a long time, but there is an increasing interest in the role celebrities play in presidential politics,” says Dr. Michael Cobb, associate professor of political science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the studies. “We set out to determine if celebrity endorsements influence voting decisions, particularly among young people.”

CONTACT & THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory Returns First Images - (BBC News - April 24, 2010)
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has provided an astonishing new vista on our turbulent star. The first public release of images from the satellite record huge explosions and great looping prominences of gas. SDO is equipped with three instruments to investigate the physics at work inside, on the surface and in the atmosphere of the Sun. The probe views the entire solar disc with a resolution 10 times better than the average high-definition television camera. This allows it to pick out features on the surface and in the atmosphere that are as small as 350km across. See article for remarkable photographs.

Something Not Quite Right in the Heavens - (Earth Changes Media - April 16, 2010)
Something seems unusual with the traditional cause and effect time-linked-means associated with plasma discharge. The article’s author suggests it is not geo-magnetic storms we have historically witnessed over the past few millennia (maybe 2000 - 3000 years), but a more galactic-driven form of charged particle discharge. “In other words, I believe the initial source comes from outside our solar system. I would suggest it comes from identified - and unidentified celestial orbs.”

DEMOGRAPHICS

The 47% That Doesn’t Pay Taxes - (Atlantic - April 14, 2010)
It’s important to understand why roughly half of Americans aren’t paying federal income taxes. Most of them receive generous tax credits - the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), child-care credits, subsidies for college and savings - worth more than their tax burden, according to the Tax Policy Center. Today this $50 billion program is one of the largest component of our welfare system. But rather than appear on the budget (or in the news) as a spending program, it appears as tax relief. America’s political/entertainment climate has scared politicians from announcing welfare programs as spending programs. So instead, many of them appear in the budget as tax relief. One inevitable result is that fewer Americans appear to be paying taxes.

Tax Day: Who Really Pays? - (Mother Jones - April 15, 2010)
Everyone in America pays some sort of taxes, which may take the form of income, sales or property taxes imposed by state and local governments, in addition to federal income, payroll and excise taxes. Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) estimates that the share of total taxes (federal state and local taxes) paid by taxpayers in each income group is quite similar to the share of total income received by each income group in 2009. For example, the share of total taxes paid by the richest one percent (22.1 percent) is not dramatically different from the share of total income received by this group (20.4 percent).

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

With Flights Grounded, Kenya’s Produce Wilts - (New York Times - April 20, 2010)
Truly, we are all connected. If farmers in Africa’s Great Rift Valley ever doubted that they were intricately tied into the global economy, they know now that they are. Because of a volcanic eruption more than 5,000 miles away, Kenyan horticulture, which as the top foreign exchange earner is a critical piece of the national economy, was losing $3 million a day and shedding jobs. The pickers were not picking. The washers were not washing. Temporary workers were told to go home because refrigerated warehouses at the airport were stuffed with ripening fruit, vegetables and flowers, and there was no room for more until planes could take away the produce. Already, millions of roses, lilies and carnations have wilted. The planes are back in the air, but the effects of a volcano continents away have not gone unfelt.

We Can Try to Inflate Away the Government’s Debt, But We’ll Go Broke First - (Fabius Maximum - April 16, 2010)
The Boomers expect inflation; many yearn for it. Not only will this fix the government’s excess debt, but it will provide another opportunity to get rich. We experienced inflation during the 1970?s and know how to benefit from it. Leverage up, buy real estate, gold, and commodities. Easy money. Too bad it’s probably a fantasy. Unexpected inflation is the magic pill of government finance. It played a major role in evaporating the massive WWII debt, from 108% of GDP in 1946 to 25% in 1975. Expected inflation is painful, perhaps fatal. As it might be for the US in the next decade.

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH - articles off the beaten track which may - or may not - have predictive value.

This Volcano Is About More Than Flights - (Business Insider - April 18, 2010)
When Eyjaflallajokull erupts, usually Kalta, which is right next door, does so too. But Katla is a larger system and the eruption is generally much more severe. What has also to be considered is that there are a whole line of craters between Katla and Vatnajokull, which are also a worry. Laki, an even greater threat than Katla, lies along this line. Iceland’s Laki volcano erupted in 1783, freeing gases that turned into smog. The smog floated across the Jet Stream, changing weather patterns. Many died from gas poisoning in the British Isles. Crop production fell in western Europe. Famine spread. The winter of 1784 was also one of the longest and coldest on record in North America. New England reported a record stretch of below-zero temperatures and New Jersey reported record snow accumulation. The Mississippi River also reportedly froze in New Orleans.

Is Iceland’s Massive Katla Volcano Primed to Erupt? - (Daily Galaxy - April 19, 2010)
Eyjafjallajokull has served as the opening act or at the least a contributing trigger for Katla three times in succession in the past. The volcano Katla, if triggered, could pose a far more serious threat, as much as ten times stronger than what was just experienced with Eyjafjallajokull with stronger tremors and more lava of course, but also a much larger ash plume. The two volcanoes are only separated by approximately 12 miles above ground, but geologists believe that beneath the surface they are linked by a series of shared magma channels which is why they so often erupt in relative unison.

A FINAL QUOTE…

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” - Thomas Jefferson

A FINAL NOTE…

If you’d like to take part in an International Delphi Survey and Scenario development project about Latin America 2010 - 2030, please click here.

CONTACT US

Edited by John L. Petersen
johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

PRIVACY POLICY: We don’t share your information with anyone.

FUTURE FACTS - FROM THINK LINKS

DID YOU KNOW THAT…

• Forty thousand years ago the planet had four species of humans, including one newly discovered.
• The best earthquake predictor just might be a toad.
• Mounting evidence in both humans and animals suggests that infection with particular parasitic worms seems to protect against a number of inflammatory diseases.
• Antimatter has triggered the largest explosion ever recorded.

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Judge Invalidates Human Gene Patent - (New York Times - March 29, 2010)
A federal judge has struck down patents on two genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. The decision, if upheld, could throw into doubt the patents covering thousands of human genes and reshape the law of intellectual property. Judge Sweet ruled that the patents were “improperly granted” because they involved a “law of nature.” He said that many critics of gene patents considered the idea that isolating a gene made it patentable “a ‘lawyer’s trick’ that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result.” The case could have far-reaching implications: about 20% of human genes have been patented, and multibillion-dollar industries have been built atop the intellectual property rights that the patents grant.

How the Internet Has Changed the Face of Terrorism - (Guardian - April 4, 2010)
Why did Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova become a suicide bomber on the Moscow subway? The most common explanation is revenge - that like other “Black Widows” who lost husbands or male relatives in the Kremlin’s wars in Chechnya, she was seeking to avenge her husband’s death. But perhaps we shouldn’t ignore a simpler reason: the internet. The web has become a potent tool for recruiting volunteers. According to Kommersant newspaper, Dzhennet and her husband met while chatting online; at the time she was just 16.

New Ways to Read Economy - (Wall St. Journal - April 8, 2010)
Economic prognosticators have a history of looking to nontraditional signs of impending boom or bust. For instance, some economists consider cardboard-box production a leading indicator of economic activity. But the newest offbeat indicators, made possible by improving systems for collecting and disseminating data, are painting even timelier and more geographically specific pictures of economic forces, economists say. One rich repository of predictive data is Web searches, said Hal Varian, Google Inc.’s chief economist. Jumps in such queries as “unemployment office” and “jobs” can help predict increases in initial jobless claims, he said. Other search terms, he added, can anticipate traditional data on travel behavior and sales of cars and homes.

NEW REALITIES

Discovery That Quasars Don’t Show Time Dilation Mystifies Astronomers - (Phys Org - April 9, 2010)
The phenomenon of time dilation is a strange yet experimentally confirmed effect of relativity theory. One of its implications is that events occurring in distant parts of the universe should appear to occur more slowly than events located closer to us. Time dilation should be a property of the universe that holds true everywhere, regardless of the specific object or event being observed. However, a new study has found that this doesn’t seem to be the case - quasars, it seems, give off light pulses at the same rate no matter their distance from the Earth, without a hint of time dilation.

Gene Research Reveals Fourth Human Species - (Financial Times - March 24, 2010)
Forty thousand years ago the planet was more crowded than we thought,” said Terry Brown, an expert in ancient DNA at Manchester University. Until recently scientists believed there were just two members of the genus Homo alive at the time: Neanderthals whose ancestors left Africa 400,000 years ago, and modern humans, who left about 50,000 years ago. The picture changed in 2003 when archaeologists found remains of a third species, the tiny “hobbit”, which had survived on the Indonesian island of Flores until 14,000 years ago. A new discovery shows that a fourth type of hominid was living as recently as 40,000 years ago. The discovery by Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute is based on DNA sequences from a finger bone fragment discovered in a Siberian cave.

Toad is a Telltale for Impending Quakes - (Breitbart - March 30, 2010)
The best hope yet of an earthquake predictor could lie in a small, brown, knobby amphibian. The male common toad (Bufo bufo) gave five days’ warning of the earthquake that ravaged the town of L’Aquila in central Italy on April 6, 2009, killing more than 300 people and displacing 40,000 others, according to a recent study. The study is one of the first to document animal behavior before, during and after an earthquake. Findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of early warning system.

GENETICS/ HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

Fighting Allergies by Mimicking Parasitic Worms - (Technology Review - April 9, 2010)
How about swallowing a batch of pig whipworm eggs, or deliberately infecting oneself with the fecal-dwelling hookworm? Yucky as these options sound, mounting evidence in both humans and animals suggests that infection with these parasitic worms seems to protect against a number of inflammatory diseases, including asthma and allergy, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, and type 1 diabetes. Because parasitic infection is unappealing to even the most severe allergy sufferer, some scientists hope to decipher how these organisms control the immune systems of their human hosts and to develop new therapies that replicate the parasites’ beneficial effect.

Advanced Retinal Implant Developed - (Kurzweil AI - March 30, 2010)
Bionic Vision Australia and University of New South Wales researchers have developed an advanced retinal implant to enable patients suffering from degenerative vision loss caused by retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration to perceive points of light in the visual field that the brain can then reconstruct into an image. The device consists of a miniature camera mounted on glasses that captures visual input, transforming it into electrical signals that directly stimulate surviving neurons in the retina.

Paralysed Limbs Revived by Hacking into Nerves - (New Scientist - April 1, 2010)
A number of gadgets are being developed that plug into the network of nerves that normally relay commands from the spinal cord to the muscles, but fall silent when a spinal injury breaks the chain. New ways to connect wires to nerves allow artificial messages to be injected to selectively control muscles just as if the signal had originated in the brain. Limbs that might otherwise never again be controlled by their owners can be brought back to life. One new solution, known as the flat interface nerve electrode (FINE), is a cuff that squashes a nerve flat to bring fibre bundles closer to the surface - and to the eight electrodes in the device’s soft rubber lining.

Tiny Drill Attacks Tough Tumors - (Technology Review - April 6, 2010)
Osteosarcoma is an aggressive and difficult-to-treat bone tumor that’s found most commonly in adolescent children and large-breed dogs. At Texas A&M University, veterinarians are testing a new technology that delivers radiation directly to solid bone tumors. During a two-hour procedure, the vets use a drill roughly the size of an electric toothbrush to inject a radioactive isotope directly into the tumor, in the hopes of shrinking it without harming surrounding tissue.

DISCOVERIES ENABLED BY NEW TECHNOLOGY

Empathy and Violence Have Similar Circuits in the Brain - (Phys Org - April 9, 2010)
A study Researchers from the University of Valencia, Spain has concluded that the prefrontal and temporal cortex, the amygdala and other features of the limbic system (such as insulin and the cingulated cortex) play “a fundamental role in all situations in which empathy appears”. Moya Albiol says these parts of the brain overlap “in a surprising way” with those that regulate aggression and violence. As a result, the scientific team argues that the cerebral circuits - for both empathy and violence - could be “partially similar”.

Magnets Can Manipulate Morality - (Discovery News - March 29, 2010)
Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists from MIT, Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it more difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have big implications for not only neuroscientists, but also for judges and juries.
“It’s one thing to ‘know’ that we’ll find morality in the brain,” said Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. “It’s another to ‘knock out’ that brain area and change people’s moral judgments.”

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Iceland Waits for Volcanic Shoe to Drop - (New Scientist - March 23, 2010)
Volcanologists have warned that previous Eyjafjallajökull eruptions have triggered eruptions of neighboring Katla, one of the largest volcanoes in Iceland. Katla erupted every 40 to 80 years in the thousand years before the last eruption in 1918. The larger volcano, beneath the larger Mýrdalsjökull glacier, has a reputation for triggering huge jökulhlaup - the Icelandic term for the sudden release of meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets. Its last eruption generated a peak discharge of 1.6 million cubic metres per second within 4 to 5 hours and moved so much debris that Iceland’s coastline was extended by 4 kilometers.

Melting Ice Caps May Trigger More Volcanic Eruptions - (New Scientist - April 3, 2010)
A warmer world could be a more explosive one. Global warming is having a much more profound effect than just melting ice caps - it is melting magma too. Vatnajökull is the largest ice cap in Iceland, and is disappearing at a rate of 5 cubic kilometres per year. as the ice disappears, it relieves the pressure exerted on the rocks deep under the ice sheet, increasing the rate at which it melts into magma. An average of 1.4 cubic kilometres has been produced every century since 1890, a 10% increase on the background rate.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Twitter Developing Censorship-proof Technology - (Daily Galaxy - March 23, 2010)
Evan Williams, CEO and co-founder of Twitter, which has been credited with helping anti-government protesters in Iran to organize resistance, said software developers were working on “interesting hacks” to stop any blocking by foreign governments. “We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well. The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about. I am hopeful there are technological ways around these barriers,” he said.

3D without the Glasses: Introducing pCubee - (Phys Org - March 31, 2010)
The usual 3D technology uses a stereoscopic principle in which a slightly different image is presented to each eye, thanks to the special glasses the viewer has to wear. Now a device named pCubee gives you the experience of 3D without the need for the glasses. The pCubee consists of five LCD screens arranged as a cubic “fish tank” box that viewers can pick up, tilt, shake or turn to watch the 3D content or play games with virtual objects that seem to be within the box. Instead of stereoscopy, the device uses a principle called motion parallax, which is one of the means by which we usually perceive depth in a three dimensional scene.

Promising Approach to Chemical Computing - (Computing Now - March, 2010)
A multinational European project has begun work on a biologically inspired, “wet” computer designed to mimic living brain functions through chemical assembly processes and pharmaceutical manufacturing techniques. The Neuneu project will exploit several properties of chemical systems for their computing power. “This is the first step towards real-life construction of an artificial chemical brain with well-defined architecture of connections between artificial neurons,” said professor Andy Adamatzky at the University of the West of England. “It will be a massive parallel computer made of lipid bubbles.”

AUGMENTED/ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Synapse on a Chip - (H Plus - March 30, 2010)
The memristor - the so-called “missing link of electronics” memory technology that can change its resistance in varying levels - has been around on paper for nearly 40 years. However it wasn’t until 2010 that a group at the University of Michigan led by Dr. Wei Lu demonstrated that it can be used to build brain-like computers. New Scientist reports that “memristors can behave uncannily like the junctions between neurons in the brain.” Scientific American describes a US military-funded project that is trying to use the memristor “to make neural computing a reality.” DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics Program (SyNAPSE) is funded to create “electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels.”

Smart Pill Reports Back - (Technology Review - April 7, 2010)
The medicine cabinet of the future could help make sure patients take their medications on time via a myriad of smart technologies. There are already pill bottles that wirelessly report to a computer when a cap has been opened, and devices for automatically dispensing medicine at the right time, and for reminding patients to take their meds. Now researchers at the University of Florida have engineered a smart pill with a tiny antenna and microchip that could signal when it has made it into a patient’s stomach–reporting to a cell phone or computer that she has taken her medicine. Their design is the latest of several high-tech pill-reporting efforts to improve patient adherence and provide accurate reporting.

ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

Solar-Powered Desalination - (Technology Review - April 8, 2010)
Saudi Arabia meets much of its drinking water needs by removing salt and other minerals from seawater. Now the country plans to use one of its most abundant resources to counter its fresh-water shortage: sunshine. Saudi Arabia’s national research agency is building what will be the world’s largest solar-powered desalination plant in the city of Al-Khafji. When completed at the end of 2012, the plant will produce 30,000 cubic meters of desalinated water per day to meet the needs of 100,000 people. main goal is to reduce the cost of desalinating water. Half of the operating cost of a desalination plant currently comes from energy use, and most current plants run on fossil fuels. Depending on the price of fuel, producing a cubic meter now takes between 40 and 90 cents.

Microbes Ooze Oil for Renewable Energy - (Biodesign Institute - March 30, 2010)
Video clip: Cyanobacteria species Synechocystis is getting a genetic makeover. The bacteria has learned to release its oil without dying - which may boost oil production significantly.
The researchers had earlier modified these microbes to self-destruct and release their lipid contents. In the group’s latest effort however, the energy-rich fatty acids were extracted without killing the cells in the process.

Nuclear Energy Facts Report - (Learning About Energy - April, 2010)
The Facts Report itself contains only facts that manifest in the physical world; no opinions, conclusions, recommendations, or attempts at consensus-building. However, it is preceded with some explanatory material on energy production, and conclude with some comments on the historical context. The report is not intended to be public relations document for the general public, but an interactive reference document, for people who work in, or report on, the energy production field.

Tobacco Touted as Future Fuel - (The Australian - March 31, 2010)
Genetically modified tobacco could be used as biofuel to help solve the US energy crisis, researchers say. Tobacco is an attractive “energy plant” because it can generate a large amount of oil and sugar more efficiently than other crops, said Vyacheslav Andrianov, a researcher at the Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Furthermore, it would not affect a major food source, unlike other biofuels made from corn, soybeans and other crops.

Thin Film Solar Panels Take Leap Toward Affordable Renewable Energy - (Cooler Planet - April 1, 2010)
Over the past decade continual breakthroughs have made the manufacture of thin-film solar panels less expensive while improving their efficiency in producing electricity. Some are even capable of rivaling the power produced by their heavy silicone counterparts. Abound Solar, a Colorado based company, has claimed they can produce thin-film photovoltaics at $1 per watt. That makes it cost-competitive with fossil fuels. By comparison, crystalline silicone panels cost roughly $4 per watt to make.

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Smallest Superconductor Promises Cool Electronics - (New Scientist - March 30,2010)
Ohio University researchers have made four-molecule-long nanowires — the smallest superconducting structure yet reported. The nanowires achieve two objectives of engineers trying to maintain exponential growth in the power of electronics: making components smaller and making them produce less waste heat. The nanoscopic wires were made by placing a mixture of a large organic molecule and a salt of the metal gallium. The molecules in the mixture then automatically arrange themselves into long strings or wires that are superconducting.

TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Winged Warriors Train for Terror, Drug Wars - (AOL News - March 28, 2010)
Inscentinel Ltd. is a British biotechnology company specializing in harnessing the olfactory ability of insects for trace vapor detection. The company’s primary focus is the development of a new generation of handheld portable detectors, through the use of live honeybees. The science is based on the acute olfactory sense of honeybees. Bees are trained to recognize particular odors (e.g. that of explosives) and associate that smell with a food reward. Honeybees make excellent detectors because they are inexpensive, quick to train (a few minutes per bee) and have extremely low limits of detection (odors can be detected to parts per trillion levels). See also inscentinel.com.

SOCIAL TRENDS

Sex Virus Blamed for Rise in Head and Neck Cancers - (Reuters - March 26, 2010)
The number of head and neck cancers linked to a virus spread by oral sex is rising rapidly and suggests boys as well as girls should be offered protection through vaccination. Despite an overall slight decline in head and neck cancers in recent years, cases of a particular form called oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) have increased sharply, particularly in the developed world.

CONTACT & THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE

Antimatter Triggers Largest Explosion Ever Recorded - (Daily Galaxy - April 9, 2010)
The super-supernova SN2007bi is an example of a “pair-instability” breakdown. At sizes of around four megayottagrams (that’s thirty-two zeros) giant stars are supported against gravitational collapse by gamma ray pressure. The hotter the core, the higher the energy of these gamma rays - but if they get too energetic, the gamma rays can begin pair production: creating an electron-positron matter-antimatter pair out of pure energy as they pass an atom. This means that the entire stellar core acts as a gigantic particle accelerator. The antimatter then annihilates its opposite, as antimatter is wont to do.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Multiple Generations under One Roof, Again - (Live Science - March 18, 2010)
Adult children are moving back in with parents, and grandparents are taking up residence with their kids’ families. Sound like old times? In fact, multi-generational households are making a comeback. Some 49 million Americans now live in such an arrangement, up from 28 million in 1980. The tight-knit families could be the result of both social and economic factors, including the recession but more broadly reflecting a years-long trend, according to study researchers from the Pew Research Center’s Social and Demographic Trends project.

Sharp Increase in March in Personal Bankruptcies - (New York Times - April 1, 2010)
More Americans filed for bankruptcy protection in March than during any month since the federal personal bankruptcy law was tightened in October 2005, a new report says, a result of high unemployment and the housing crash. Federal courts reported over 158,000 bankruptcy filings in March, or 6,900 a day, a rise of 35% from February. Filings invoking Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code, a simple and inexpensive option, are rising faster than more complex Chapter 13 reorganization filings, under which consumers repay a portion of their debts so they can keep their homes, suggesting that more homeowners are simply walking away from underwater mortgages.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

From Lithuania, a View of Austerity’s Costs - (New York Times - April 1, 2010)
Faced with rising deficits that threatened to bankrupt the country, Lithuania cut public spending by 30% - including slashing public sector wages 20 - 30% and reducing pensions by as much as 11%. Even the prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, took a pay cut of 45%. And the government didn’t stop there. It raised taxes on a wide variety of goods, like pharmaceutical products and alcohol. Corporate taxes rose to 20% from 15%. The value-added tax rose to 21%, from 18%. But austerity has exacted its own price, in social and personal pain.

Be Careful What You Wish for on Currencies - (Reuters - March 19, 2010)
Before pressing China to allow a maxi-revaluation of the yuan, western commentators need to think through the consequences carefully. The idea that devaluing the dollar (and by extension euro and yen) will cause payment imbalances to disappear and boost employment in the West with little or no impact on inflation and living standards is a pipe dream. Since most observers assume bilateral relationships between the dollar and other major currencies would not alter significantly, China is in fact being pressed to permit a balanced depreciation of the dollar, euro, yen and other major currencies.

Where’s the Recovery in U.S. Consumer Spending? - (Seeking Alpha - March 29, 2010)
The Commerce Department released figures for February consumer spending on March 29th. The report indicated that consumer spending was up 0.3% in February, but personal incomes were flat. If income is not going up, but consumer spending is going up, there are only three possible explanations. Consumers have gotten increased credit and are borrowing more, they are spending savings, or they are selling assets. A figure on ‘Personal Income Receipts on Assets’ that includes interest and dividend income decreased by $16.5 billion in both February and January and that may indicate that the public is quite possibly a net seller of assets.

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH - articles off the beaten track which may - or may not - have predictive value.

Not Feeling Well? Perhaps You’re ‘Marijuana Deficient’ - (AlterNet - March 23, 2010)
The therapeutically active components in marijuana - the cannabinoids -mimic compounds our bodies naturally produce - so-called endocannabinoids - that are pivotal for maintaining proper health and homeostasis. In recent years scientists have discovered that the production of endocannabinoids (and their interaction with the cannabinoid receptors located throughout the body) play a key role in the regulation of proper appetite, anxiety control, blood pressure, bone mass, reproduction, and motor coordination, among other biological functions. Just how important is this system in maintaining health? In studies of mice genetically bred to lack a proper endocannabinoid system the most common result is premature death.

Towards the Empathic Civilization - (Financial Times - March 26, 2010)
Jeremy Rifkin writes, “The human race is in a twilight zone between a dying civilization on life support and an emerging one trying to find its legs. Old identities are fracturing while new identities are too fragile to grasp. Our new ideas about human nature throw into doubt many of the core assumptions of classical economic theory. For example, how do we explain hundreds of millions of young people sharing creativity and knowledge in collaborative spaces such as Wikipedia and Linux?

JUST FOR FUN

Stunning Photographs of Sleeping Insects Covered in Dew - (Daily Mail - March 31, 2010)
Glistening in the early morning, these insects look like creatures from another planet as dew gathers on their sleeping bodies. Captured in extreme close-up, one moth appears to be totally encrusted in diamonds as it rests on a twig. The exquisite photographs were taken by physiotherapist (and amateur photographer) Miroslaw Swietek at around 3am in the forest next to his home in rural Poland. Using a flashlight, the 37-year-old amateur photographer hunts out the motionless bugs in the dark before setting up his camera and flash just millimetres from them.

A FINAL QUOTE…

“The past can’t see you, but the future is listening.” ~Terri Guillemets

A FINAL NOTE…

If you’d like to take part in an International Delphi Survey and Scenario development project about Latin America 2010 - 2030, please click here.

CONTACT US

Edited by John L. Petersen
johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
www.arlingtoninstitute.org

PRIVACY POLICY: We don’t share your information with anyone.