Technology has immortality, cures for the worlds devastating diseases, quantum computing and a host of other science fiction notions in its grasp. Current trends in a number of areas indicate that over the next 10 years many of these technologies will come to fruition. "The Next 10 Years" tracks the trends that will transform our everyday lives in almost unimaginable ways.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

WSJ.com - Cellular Carriers Work To Outdo Google, Yahoo: "Envisioning a lucrative wireless search and advertising market, U.S. cellphone companies are shying away from deals with Internet giants such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in favor of partnerships with small start-ups they can more easily control.
Google, Yahoo and other Internet companies are targeting wireless search as a major new growth area as cellphone use proliferates globally. They see billions of dollars in potential revenue from selling advertising that is linked to searches for ringtones, games, local listings and mobile Web content."

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Wired News: Diesel Hybrids on the Fast Track: "Hybrid gas-electric vehicles are the current champions of fuel economy, but they may soon get lapped. Auto manufacturers are making tracks to produce diesel hybrids that will go even further on a gallon of fuel.

Hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius, Honda Civic Hybrid and Ford Escape Hybrid employ an electric motor that assists the engine and enables the vehicles to go between 15 and 50 percent further on a tank than a comparable gasoline vehicle. But a new generation of hybrid diesel prototypes being developed by General Motors, DaimlerChrysler and Ford could soon surpass these milestones"

Researchers show how the brain turns on innate behavior: "Innate or 'instinctive' behaviors are inborn and do not require learning or prior experience to be performed. Examples include courtship and sexual behaviors, escape and defensive maneuvers, and aggression.

Using the common fruit fly as a model organism, the researchers found through laboratory experiments that the innate behavior is initiated by a 'command' hormone that orchestrates activities in discrete groups of peptide neurons in the brain. Peptide neurons are brain cells that release small proteins to communicate with other brain cells and the body. "

Better get used to killer heat waves: "-For the next week, much of the nation should expect more 'extreme heat,' the National Weather Service predicts.

-In the month of August, most of the United States will see 'above normal temperatures,' forecasters say.

-For the long-term future, the world will see more and worse killer heat waves because of global warming, scientists say.

The July burst of killer heat waves around the world can't be specifically blamed on global warming. And they aren't the worst ever - they still can't quite hold a melting candle to the scorching heat of America's 1930s Dust Bowl. But the trend is pointed in that direction, experts say. "

comment: biodiesel anyone?

First Ever World Map of Happiness Produced: "Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at the University’s School of Psychology, analysed data published by UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the Veenhoven Database, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the UNHDR, to create a global projection of subjective well-being: the first world map of happiness.

The projection, which is to be published in a psychology journal this September, will be presented at a conference later in the year. Participants in the various studies were asked questions related to happiness and satisfaction with life. The meta-analysis is based on the findings of over 100 different studies around the world, which questioned 80,000 people worldwide. For this study data has also been analysed in relation to health, wealth and access to education. "

AIDS virus may hide in the gut: study - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The AIDS virus hides out inside people's intestines, researchers said on Saturday in a report that offers new understanding of the incurable infection.

The virus replicates in the lining of the gut and does much of its damage to the immune system there, Satya Dandekar, chairwoman of the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California Davis Health System, and colleagues reported."

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Scientists Say They’ve Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA - New York Times: "Researchers believe they have found a second code in DNA in addition to the genetic code.

In a living cell, the DNA double helix wraps around a nucleosome, above center, and binds to some of its proteins, known as histones. The genetic code specifies all the proteins that a cell makes. The second code, superimposed on the first, sets the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped. The spools both protect and control access to the DNA itself."

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Cooking oil cars turn the table on high fuel prices: "The sky-high price of crude oil is scaring everyone.

Biodiesel has Hollywood backers like actress Julia Roberts and Morgan Freeman, is sung about by country star Willie Nelson but also meets the political correctness of the American right wing which has made the campaign against imported oil a mantra.

'It's better for the engine, way better for the environment, it's cheaper, but it depends how you price your labor,' said Dan Goodman, an entrepreneur in residence at the University of Maryland Business School who runs his Mercedes on biodiesel. "

ProteinNanoparticle Material Mimics Human Brain Tissue: "Studying the magnetism of many natural substances, such as rocks, soils, and biological materials, can be difficult because they tend to be a mix of several magnetic components. This means that valuable structural and functional information, which can be obtained from a material’s magnetic properties, is often left undiscovered. "

Wired News: Warming Pacific Hurts Food Chain: "FARALLON NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, California -- On these craggy, remote islands west of San Francisco, the largest seabird colony in the contiguous United States throbs with life.
But the steep decline of one bird species for the second straight year has rekindled scientists' fears that global warming could be undermining the coastal food supply, threatening not just the Farallones but entire marine ecosystems.
Tiny Cassin's auklets live much of their lives on the open ocean. But in spring, these gray-and-white relatives of the puffin venture to isolated Pacific outposts like the Farallones to dig deep burrows and lay their eggs.
Adult auklets usually feed their chicks with krill, the minuscule shrimp-like crustaceans that anchor the ocean's complex food web.
But not this year. Almost none of the 20,000 pairs of Cassin's auklets nesting in the Farallones will raise a chick that lives more than a few days, a repeat of last year's 'unprecedented' breeding failure, according to Russ Bradley, a seabird biologist with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory who monitors the birds on the islands."

Commentary: And there are still those that believe global warming is a scam by tree huggers!

Talking Points - The Rise of the Super-Rich by Teresa Tritch - New York Times: "The gap between rich and poor is unfortunately an old story.
It is the stuff of parables and literature. It is a force in social history and political economy, from electoral campaigns to reform movements and revolutions.
But in the United States today, there’s a new twist to the familiar plot. Income inequality used to be about rich versus poor, but now it’s increasingly a matter of the ultra rich and everyone else. The curious effect of the new divide is an economy that appears to be charging ahead, until you realize that the most of the people in it are being left in the dust. President Bush has yet to acknowledge the true state of affairs, though it’s at the root of his failure to convince Americans that the good times are rolling. The gap between rich and poor is unfortunately an old story.
It is the stuff of parables and literature. It is a force in social history and political economy, from electoral campaigns to reform movements and revolutions.
But in the United States today, there’s a new twist to the familiar plot. Income inequality used to be about rich versus poor, but now it’s increasingly a matter of the ultra rich and everyone else. The curious effect of the new divide is an economy that appears to be charging ahead, until you realize that the most of the people in it are being left in the dust. President Bush has yet to acknowledge the true state of affairs, though it’s at the root of his failure to convince Americans that the good times are rolling. "

Grease Is the Word: Fill It Up With Fry Oil - New York Times: "ON a recent return trip from Massachusetts to my home in New Jersey, a distance of 160 miles, I burned a total of two cups of diesel fuel in my 2001 Volkswagen Jetta TDI.

Jim Norman, the author of this article, says that after more than 2,000 miles on veggie oil, there seem to be few disadvantages to the transformation. Since that would indicate fuel economy of more than 600 miles per gallon, something didn’t quite compute."

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Wired News: Blog for Netscape, Earn Big Bucks: "Dollar signs went off in the blogosphere Wednesday as blog pioneer and recent Netscape recruit Jason Calacanis offered up to $1,000 a month to woo volunteer posters away from popular reader-generated link sites like Digg and Reddit."

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

A Tissue Engineer Sows Cells and Grows Organs - New York Times: "In April, when the two-year-old institute that Dr. Atala directs for Wake Forest’s School of Medicine moved into some 50,000 square feet of space in the Piedmont Triad Research Park, it became one of the world’s largest research facilities dedicated to regenerative medicine, a practice that aims to refurbish diseased or damaged tissue using the body’s own healthy cells.

The field of tissue engineering is large in this endeavor, with researchers like Dr. Atala exploring a basic approach. To repair or replace parts, they seed a biodegradable scaffold with cells and insert it into the body, where the cells, if all goes smoothly, mature into functioning tissue. "

Monday, July 10, 2006

How a Computer Knows What Many Managers Don't - New York Times: "IF movies like '2001: A Space Odyssey' and 'The Matrix' are any indication, humans are not comfortable with the idea of artificial intelligence controlling their fate.

So why ever trust a computer model to run your investments? Because, in the real world, it seems to pay off."

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Biodiesel.org - Biodiesel 101: "What is biodiesel?
Biodiesel is the name of a clean burning alternative fuel, produced from domestic, renewable resources. Biodiesel contains no petroleum, but it can be blended at any level with petroleum diesel to create a biodiesel blend. It can be used in compression-ignition (diesel) engines with little or no modifications. Biodiesel is simple to use, biodegradable, nontoxic, and essentially free of sulfur and aromatics."

General Information: "Biodiesel is a renewable fuel produced from vegetable oils or animal fats. Renewable feedstocks include soybeans, canola, cotton seed, mustard seed, tallow, rape seed, sunflower seed, and restaurant grease. Biodiesel is used in place of petroleum based-diesel fuel. Most diesel cars require no modifications to the fuel system to run on biodiesel.

Biodiesel begins as a vegetable based oil. The oil is chemically transformed into methyl esters (biodiesel) and glycerin (a byproduct). The chemical process is known as transesterfication. Biodiesel can be made from new oil, but the biodiesel is usually made from used oil from a local restaurant. "

American Coalition for Ethanol: "Welcome to ethanol.org, the official website of the American Coalition for Ethanol. ACE is the grassroots voice of the ethanol industry, a membership-based association dedicated to the use and production of ethanol.

Ethanol's production drives economic development, adds value to agriculture, and moves our nation toward energy independence. Its use cleans America's air and offers consumers a cost-effective choice at the pump. "

Australian Ethanol Limited: "Here at Australian Ethanol Limited our mission is to create a profitable and sustainable ethanol business in Australia and, where appropriate, overseas. We aim to provide our shareholders with commercial long term returns by adopting a smarter approach to the development of industrial projects in our core markets. Our focus on integration, smarter ideas, better technology and a complete understanding of our business is our key strength. "

An Unlikely Spark in Alternative Energy - New York Times: "AFTER a year of stellar performance, producers of alternative energy — from ethanol to solar and wind power — took a beating in the stock market this spring.

Up more than 80 percent from May 2005 to May 8 this year, the PowerShares WilderHill Clean Energy fund, an exchange-traded fund that tracks the sector, tumbled more than 20 percent by June 30. "

Friday, July 07, 2006

WSJ.com - Higher Temperatures Cited For Increase in Wildfires: "New research suggests that higher regional temperatures have contributed to an increase in large and costly wildfires that have hit the Western U.S. in recent years.

The study, published yesterday in the online version of the journal Science, argues that unusually high temperatures in the Western U.S. have led to earlier and longer dry seasons, making it easier for large fires to erupt."

Thursday, July 06, 2006

SPACE.com -- New Technique Could Image Oceans on Faraway Planets: "A thin plastic 'starshade' shaped like a giant daisy flower could one day help astronomers observe faraway planets by blocking out unwanted light from their parent stars, a new study reports.

When telescopes point to a distant planet, the small amount of light reflected by the planet is overshadowed by the light from its parent star, making it especially difficult to be seen. For this reason, only two extrasolar planets have been seen directly, and there are no detailed images of any planet beyond our solar system."

Wired News: Tweaking Genes in the Basement: "Eugene Thacker is a professor of literature, culture and communications at Georgia Tech and a member of the Biotech Hobbyist collective. Just as the computer hobbyists sought unconventional applications for computer circuitry, the new collective is looking for 'non-prescribed uses' of biotechnology, Thacker said.

The group has published a set of informal DIY articles, mimicking the form of the newsletters and magazines of the computer hobbyists -- many of which are archived online. Thacker walks readers through the steps of performing a basic computation using a DNA 'computer' in his article 'Personal Biocomputing' (PDF). The tools for the project include a $100 high school-science education kit and some used lab equipment."

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Carbon nanotube building blocks open up possibilities for advanced electronics: "Carbon cylinders a few billionths of a meter in diameter and a few microns long, these nanotubes are one of the strongest structures known and have unique electrical and thermal properties.

This promising method to add defects to carbon nanotube walls was developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, who are interested in improving the materials for thermoelectric power generation, the use of heat differences to generate electricity. Thermoelectric conversion is the principle behind thermocouples, thermal diodes and solid-state refrigerators. "

Monday, July 03, 2006

New process makes diesel fuel and industrial chemicals from simple sugar: "But the oil price hike has also fueled a race to find new sources for chemical intermediates - compounds that are the raw material for many modern plastics, drugs and fuels. Behind the scenes, American industry uses millions of tons of chemical intermediates, which are largely sourced from petroleum or natural gas.

James Dumesic, a University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical and biological engineering professor, reports in the June 30 issue of the journal Science on a better way to make a chemical intermediate called HMF (hydroxymethylfurfural) from fructose - fruit sugar. HMF can be converted into plastics, diesel-fuel additive, or even diesel fuel itself, but is seldom used because it is costly to make. "

Link between income and happiness is mainly an illusion: "People surveyed about their own happiness and that of others with varying incomes tended to overstate the impact of income on well-being, according to a new study. Although income is widely assumed to be a good measure of well-being, the researchers found that its role is less significant than predicted and that people with higher incomes do not necessarily spend more time in more enjoyable ways.

Two Princeton professors, economist Alan B. Krueger and psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, collaborated with colleagues from three other universities on the study, being published in the June 30 issue of Science. The new findings build on their efforts to develop alternative methods of gauging the well-being of individuals and of society. The new measures are based on people's ratings of their actual experiences, instead of a judgment of their lives as a whole. "

Researchers Achieve First Electrowetting of Carbon Nanotubes: "Now, with the aid of an 1875 study of mercury's electrical properties, researchers from the California Institute of Technology have succeeded in forcing liquid mercury into carbon nanotubes. Their technique could have important applications, including nanolithography, the production of nanowires with unique quantum properties, nano-sized plumbing for the transport of extremely small fluid quantities, and electronic circuitry many times smaller than the smallest in existence today. "

Climate change brings new options for farming - Yahoo! News: "STONELEIGH PARK (Reuters) - Climate change provides many new opportunities for farmers, like tea and energy crops, but also poses challenges including the threat of new insects and diseases, a British government minister said.

'We want to see farmers seize opportunities for new crops that a changing climate is going to bring,' junior environment minister Ian Pearson said on Sunday."

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Change Agent: Process Modeling Will Deliver on SOA's 'IT Agility' - Yahoo! News: "Perhaps the most significant advance of business process management over its workflow and enterprise application integration ancestors is the integration of modeling with executable process design. Once strictly a standalone technology, process modeling has become a standard feature of BPM suites, which then go on to execute and monitor the modeled processes. By including a modeling tool in the suite, BPMS vendors give process owners on the business side a way to assert direct influence over the IT implementation."

'Green' Burials Growing in Popularity: "It sits on the eastern fringe of New York's Finger Lakes region and is bounded on three sides by 8,000 acres of protected forests: the perfectly natural place to spend an eternity. The 93-acre Greensprings Natural Cemetery is the first of its kind in New York and one of just a handful in the United States, where interest in 'green' burial is just taking root. "

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Pomegranate juice may be cancer weapon - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A daily glass of pomegranate juice showed potential for slowing the growth of prostate cancer in a small study but more evidence is needed before doctors recommend it, U.S. scientists said on Saturday.

A study funded by a juice maker found men who drank the beverage had a longer time until doubling of their blood levels of PSA -- a protein that indicates the presence of prostate cancer. Patients with short doubling times are more likely to die from the cancer."

Electromechanical imaging in liquid environments a pathway toward molecularlevel resolution of biological systems: "Scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have overcome several hurdles faced by electromechanical imaging techniques with a simple solution of operating piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) in a liquid environment. The team found that imaging in an aqueous environment enabled the microscope to minimize negative effects, namely electrostatic tip-surface interactions and capillary forces, and overcome these barriers to achieve higher resolution imaging. "

Vt. Dairy Farm Harnesses Power of Cow Pies - Yahoo! News: "BRIDPORT, Vt. - The cows at the Audet family's Blue Spruce Farm make nearly 9,000 gallons of milk a day — and about 35,000 gallons of manure.

It's long been the milk that pays, but now the Audets have figured out how to make the manure pay as well. They're using it — actually, the methane that comes from it — to generate electricity.
With the help of their power company, Central Vermont Public Service Corp., the Audets have devised a way to extract the methane from the manure and pipe it to a generator."