China’s doing things the rest of us don’t even know about, and unless we change quickly they will streak past us, futurist Frank Ogden says.
“They are speeding ahead in so many areas because they have the ability to get big things done very quickly,” the man known as Dr. Tomorrow told the Construction Specifications Canada conference here.
In three weeks they relocated the residents of a large city block in Shanghai, bulldozed the buildings and built a 1,000-bed isolation hospital using 10,000 conscripted workers, Ogden said.
On the last day of construction, a stream of ambulances was bringing in patients.
Edmonton Journal
TOKYO (Reuters) – Toyota Motor Corp. (7203.T) aims to start selling robots that can help look after elderly people or serve tea to guests by 2010, the Asahi daily reported on Tuesday.
Japan’s top automaker sees a declining birthrate and aging population leading to growing demand for robots that can help in tasks such as child care and nursing care, the report said.
NYTimes
Until now it has been impossible to accurately measure the levels of important chemicals in living brain cells in real time and at the level of a single cell. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Plant Biology and Stanford University are the first to overcome this obstacle by successfully applying genetic nanotechnology using molecular sensors to view changes in brain chemical levels. The sensors alter their 3-dimensional form upon binding with the chemical, which is then visible via a process known as fluorescence resonance energy transfer, or FRET. In a new study, the nanosensors were introduced into nerve cells to measure the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate—the major brain chemical that increases nerve-cell activity in mammalian brains.
PhysOrg
? del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add web pages you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only among your own browsers and machines, but also with others.
? Once you’ve registered for the service, you add a simple bookmarklet to your browser. When you find a web page you’d like to add to your list, you simply select the del.icio.us bookmarklet, and you’ll be asked for information about the page. You can add descriptive terms to group similar links together and add notes for yourself or for others.
? You can access your list of links from any web browser. Your links are shown to you with those you’ve added most recently at the top. In addition to viewing by date, you can also view all links with a specific keywords (you define your own keywords as you add the links), or search your links for keywords.
This Memorial Day weekend marks the 26th annual Morgan Hill Mushroom Mardi Gras celebrating the South Valley town?s greatest claim to fame – even greater, in fact, than the poppy jasper gemstone found only in the hills here. Visitors will swarm all over the city?s downtown to partake of the mushroom-themed cuisine and entertainment.
So what is it about this spongy little toadstool that sprouts up in moist, dark, dirt-laden places that will attract people to Morgan Hill this weekend? Quite a lot, actually.
The use of mushrooms in human cultures was explored extensively by Robert Gordon Wasson, an investment banker turned amateur ethnomycologist (someone who studies the relationship between people and mushrooms). Wasson discovered the world?s oldest documentation for mushroom use goes back at least 7,000 to 9,000 years ago to the Sahara region of Africa.
Now you might think that vast stretch of sand might be the last place to find mushrooms. After all, mushrooms like dark and moisture-laden places. Dry deserts seem very unpromising places as prime mushroom-growing real estate. But back several thousands years ago during the last Ice Age, the Sahara had a significantly different environment. Until the climate changed, a lush savanna made the Sahara ideal for growing mushrooms.
Hollister
The Bush administration asks a federal court to restore its ability to force internet service providers to give up customer data. Feds want to hide details of the case from the public.
The legal filing with the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York comes amid a debate in Congress over renewal of the Patriot Act and whether to expand the FBI’s power to seek records without the approval of a judge or grand jury.
Wired
Scientists have not only identified a critical gene involved in heroin addiction relapse, but they have also successfully blocked it, eliminating cravings for the drug.
The study was conducted on heroin-addicted rats. But the researchers now think that, within a few years, better treatments will become available to human heroin users who cannot quit due to insidious cycles of relapse.
NewScientist
An experimental supercomputer made from hardware that can reconfigure itself to tackle different software problems is being built by researchers in Scotland.
The system under construction at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre – part of Edinburgh University, UK – will use Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips instead of conventional microprocessors.
NewScientist
The New Protestant Ethic
One hundred years after the publication of Max Weber’s classic text, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the fateful relationship between Protestantism and capitalism has been renewed in American political discourse. Except this time it is no longer the original convergence theorized by Weber between the spirit of Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism whereby Christianity was destined to be ultimately secondary to the unfolding historical project of capitalism, but the opposite. In a contemporary political climate marked by the resurgence seemingly everywhere of faith-based politics, capitalism and its historical correlate—modernism—have actually folded back on themselves, quickly reversing modernist codes of economic secularism and political pluralism, in the interests of being reanimated with the evangelical spirit of religious fundamentalism. What Weber foresaw as a primal compact between Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism—this migration, first in Europe and then in Puritan America, of Puritan attitudes towards personal salvation based on giving witness by habits of frugality, hard work, and discipline into the essentially acquisitive spirit of capitalism—has been renewed in new key. On the centennial of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the political universe is suddenly dominated by the spirit of what might be called the New Protestant Ethic as the ideological reflex of the age of networked capitalism and empire politics.
CTheory
Every year, like a social drinker who wants to prove to herself that she’s not an alcoholic, I give up cannabis for a month. It can be a tough and dreary time – and much as I enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, alcohol cannot take its place.
Some people may smoke dope just to relax or have fun, but for me the reason goes deeper. In fact, I can honestly say that without cannabis, most of my scientific research would never have been done and most of my books on psychology and evolution would not have been written.
Some evenings, after a long day at my desk, I’ll slip into the bath, light a candle and a spliff, and let the ideas flow – that lecture I have to give to 500 people next week, that article I’m writing for New Scientist, those tricky last words of a book I’ve been working on for months. This is the time when the sentences seem to write themselves. Or I might sit out in my greenhouse on a summer evening among my tomatoes and peach trees, struggling with questions about free will or the nature of the universe, and find that a smoke gives me new ways of thinking about them.
Yes, I know there are serious risks to my health, and I know I might be caught and fined or put in prison. But I weigh all this up, and go on smoking grass.
Daily Telegraph
Craven’s system exploits the dramatic temperature difference between ocean water below 3,000 feet – perpetually just above freezing – and the much warmer water and air above it. That temperature gap can be harnessed to create a nearly unlimited supply of energy. Although the scientific concepts behind cold-water energy have been around for decades, Craven made them real when he founded the state-funded Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii in 1974 on Keahole Point, near Kona. Under Craven, the lab developed the process of using cold deep-ocean water and hot surface water to produce electricity. By the 1980s the Natural Energy Lab’s demonstration plant was generating net power, the world’s first through so-called ocean thermal energy conversion.
Wired
“The working memory in a bee is robust and flexible,” says Zhang. A short-term memory lasts about the same time in a bee as in a pigeon, he says. And a honeybee’s memory is flexible enough to perform a simplified version of a task employed to test memory in rhesus monkeys.
Science News
Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it. He speaks seven languages and is even devising his own language. Now scientists are asking whether his exceptional abilities are the key to unlock the secrets of autism.
Guardian UK
An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge’s unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to “non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals.”
The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth.
Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple’s divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion.
IndyStar via root.cellar
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