— BBC
“I’ve been a solar physicist for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
He shows me recent footage captured by spacecraft that have their sights trained on our star. The Sun is revealed in exquisite detail, but its face is strangely featureless.
Huffington Post UK: The Technological Revolution Is All Well and Good — But We Must Ensure That the Digital Skills Gap Is Bridged http://lnkd.in/dPN_AyC
Alberta Express: The next farm technology revolution. Rob Saik says big data will soon be a fact of life on farms, and producers will have to find ways to deal with it all http://lnkd.in/dNxbkBt
WALL STREET JOURNAL: How Is Our Digital Revolution Doing? http://lnkd.in/dn2-p4q
Continue reading “FUTURISM UPDATE (November 17, 2014) — Mr. Andres Agostini, Amazon” »
By Justin Huggler, Berlin — The Telegraph
Twenty-eight years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, its effects are still being felt as far away as Germany – in the form of radioactive wild boars.
Wild boars still roam the forests of Germany, where they are hunted for their meat, which is sold as a delicacy.
Continue reading “Radioactive wild boar roaming the forests of Germany” »
REUTERS: Western leaders confront Putin at G20 with threat of more sanctions. Western leaders warned Vladimir Putin at a G20 summit on Saturday that he risked more economic sanctions if he failed to end Russian backing for separatist rebels in Ukraine. Russia denied any involvement in an escalation of the separatist war in eastern Ukraine, where more than 4,000 people have been killed since April, but faced strong rebukes from leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. “I guess I’ll shake your hand but I have only one thing to say to you: you need to get out of Ukraine,” Harper told Putin at the summit in Brisbane, Australia, according to his spokesman Jason MacDonald. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/15/us-g20-summit-idUSKCN0IZ03C20141115
FORBES: IBM Signs $325 Million Supercomputing Deal With Dept. Of Energy http://lnkd.in/drkeJ8E
Continue reading “FUTURISM UPDATE (November 16, 2014) — Mr. Andres Agostini, Amazon” »
The cause of autism is still unknown, but we are definitely closer to figuring it out. A new study published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, from researchers at the University of Chicago revealed that autism and intellectual disability (ID) rates are linked with exposure to harmful environmental factors during congenital development.
“Essentially what happens is during pregnancy… there are certain sensitive periods where the fetus is very vulnerable to a range of small molecules – from things like plasticisers, prescription drugs, environmental pesticides and other things. Some of these small molecules essentially alter normal development. Autism appears to be strongly correlated with rate of congenital malformations of the genitals in males across the country, this gives an indicator of environmental load and the effect is surprisingly strong. The strongest predictors for autism were associated with the environment; congenital malformations on the reproductive system in males.” (1) - Andrey Rzhetsky, professor of genetic medicine and human genetics at the University of Chicago
NBC NEWS: Australia Accuses Russia of Trying to Reclaim ‘Lost Glories’ http://lnkd.in/dM5uq-2
CBC: Vladimir Putin stations Russian warships off Australia’s coast ahead of G20 Diplomatic drama has been simmering since a Malaysia Airlines plane was shot down over an area of Ukraine http://lnkd.in/dxQXaq3
THE ECONOMIST: A renewed Russian military build-up could be a prelude to more fighting. EVEN as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, was heading to the G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, tensions in Ukraine were escalating. http://lnkd.in/djazYuz
Continue reading “FUTURISM UPDATE (November 15, 2014) — Mr. Andres Agostini, Amazon” »
Johns Hopskins Medicine
A modified version of the Clostridium novyi (C. novyi-NT) bacterium can produce a strong and precisely targeted anti-tumor response in rats, dogs and now humans, according to a new report from Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers.
In its natural form, C. novyi is found in the soil and, in certain cases, can cause tissue-damaging infection in cattle, sheep and humans. The microbe thrives only in oxygen-poor environments, which makes it a targeted means of destroying oxygen-starved cells in tumors that are difficult to treat with chemotherapy and radiation. The Johns Hopkins team removed one of the bacteria’s toxin-producing genes to make it safer for therapeutic use.
BBC: Oil price falls below $80 a barrel http://bbc.in/1xChaon
FUTURE OBSERVATORY: An artificial retina based on semiconductor nanorods and carbon nanotubes. An international team of researchers has combined semiconductor nanorods and carbon nanotubes to create a wireless, light-sensitive, flexible film that could potentially act in the place of a damaged retina. http://lnkd.in/dCymrjH
FUTURE OBSERVATORY: Twisted-light waves transmitted in air over a 3-kilometer path. Could significantly increase data rates for non-fiber communications and improve encryption of quantum communications http://lnkd.in/dZJP7qw
Continue reading “FUTURISM UPDATE (November 14, 2014) — Mr. Andres Agostini” »
The audio in this archive file was compiled from a 1984 meeting of futurists, transhumanists, and progressives. The main topic of the meeting was the most appropriate ways to engage or advance these philosophies within government. For example, one significant point of discussion centered around whether running for office was an effective way to drive change.
In the course of the discussion, the primary viewpoint FM-2030 espoused was that some aspects of government — especially the concept of leadership — would become obsolete or be replaced by other aspects of society (see Part 1). However, he also expressed what he believed the core of a ‘true’ democracy might look like. This archive file is assembled from excerpts of that section of the discussion.
MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine
Scientists have for the first time grown a complex, fully functional organ from scratch in a living animal by transplanting cells that were originally created in a laboratory. The advance could in future aid the development of ‘lab-grown’ replacement organs.
Researchers from the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine, at the University of Edinburgh, took cells called fibroblasts from a mouse embryo and converted them directly into a completely unrelated type of cell — specialised thymus cells — using a technique called ‘reprogramming’. When mixed with other thymus cell types and transplanted into mice, these cells formed a replacement organ that had the same structure, complexity and function as a healthy native adult thymus. The reprogrammed cells were also capable of producing T cells — a type of white blood cell important for fighting infection — in the lab.
