The Pace Of Scientific Innovation Is Speeding Up

Image from Atelier

Wall Street Journal: Science Is Stepping Up the Pace of Innovation

Big advances in astronomy and genetics.

Every year on the website Edge, scientists and other thinkers reply to one question. This year it’s “What do you consider the most interesting recent news” in science? The answers are fascinating. We’re used to thinking of news as the events that happen in a city or country within a few weeks or months. But scientists expand our thinking to the unimaginably large and the infinitesimally small.

Despite this extraordinary range, the answers of the Edge contributors have an underlying theme. The biggest news of all is that a handful of large-brained primates on an insignificant planet have created machines that let them understand the world, at every scale, and let them change it too, for good or ill.

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CSN Editor: Are we in a new age of scientific discovery .... it looks like it.

No Rules For Cyber-Robot Wars

Rules For Robot-War -- Irfan Husain, DAWN

DOES the deployment of a computer virus by one state against another constitute an act of war? In this wired world, sabotaging a country’s computer systems through malware, or a piece of computer code designed to cause damage, is surely an offensive action equivalent to firing a missile at an enemy.

But thus far, international law has not kept pace with technology, and states can and do use these unseen weapons to further their agendas. Thus, malware like Stuxnet and Flame have apparently been launched against Iranian computers by American and Israeli experts to slow down its nuclear programme and to spy on its leaders.

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My Comment: I have been commenting regularly that as cyber attacks become more sophisticated and targeted, it will only be a matter of time before we experience a cyber 9/11 attack that will incapacitate critical computer networks (i.e. travel, banking, etc.) as well as critical infrastructures (electrical, water, etc..) that are dependent on computer networks.

When that day happens .... the debate on rules for cyber attacks and the consequences of launching one will then start.

An Environmental Apocalypse Soon?

Tojo, Indonesia: A villager walks through a burnt forest after a slash and burn practice to open the land for agriculture. Photograph: Yusuf Ahmad/Reuters

Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed The Environmental Point Of No Return? -- Scientific American

Although there is an urban legend that the world will end this year based on a misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar, some researchers think a 40-year-old computer program that predicts a collapse of socioeconomic order and massive drop in human population in this century may be on target.

Remember how Wile E. Coyote, in his obsessive pursuit of the Road Runner, would fall off a cliff? The hapless predator ran straight out off the edge, stopped in midair as only an animated character could, looked beneath him in an eye-popping moment of truth, and plummeted straight down into a puff of dust. Splat!

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My Comment: I have always been a skeptic of such predictions .... believing that man and nature will always find ways to overcome such obstacles and limitations. In fact .... we are already experiencing depopulation in many first world nations .... and it has nothing to do with changes in the environment but changes in social behavior and personal decisions.

Did Carbon Dioxide Just Save The Earth?

Earth's atmosphere lights up at infrared wavelengths during the solar storms of March 8-10, 2012. A ScienceCast video explains the physics of this phenomenon. Play it!

Carbon Dioxide Just Saved Earth -- Don Surber

God bless the John Amos power plant across the river from Poca, West Virginia, and all the other producers of CO2.

Those tiny molecules of carbon dioxide along with their cousins, nitric oxide, spared life on the planet from becoming crispy critters earlier this month.

It seems the Sun belched its biggest a coronal mass ejection in 7 years and the thermosphere absorbed 26 billion kWh of energy. The thermosphere is part of that invisible cloud of gases that blankets the Earth. Scientists call it the atmosphere.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson - We Stopped Dreaming

Neil deGrasse Tyson Makes The Case For Doubling The NASA Budget -- The Next Big Future

The 2008 bank bailout of $750 billion was greater than all the money NASA had received in its half-century history; two years’ U.S. military spending exceeds it as well. Right now, NASA’s annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that–a penny on a dollar–we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.

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Are We Living In A Designer Universe?

The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. Photo: WALES NEWS SERVICE

From The Telegraph:

The creators of the world were closer to men than to gods, argues John Gribbin.

The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and sceptics, one possibility has been almost ignored – the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.

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The Natural Selection Of Leaders (Commentary)

Was he born for the job? (Image: David Brown/Polaris/Eyevine)

From New Scientist:

IMAGINE this. You and your colleagues are gathered round a conference table, with coffee and biscuits. You open the door and greet the first sharp-suited candidate of the day. Before evening falls, one lucky applicant will hear the unlikely phrase: "We would like to offer you the job of being our boss."

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It's Google's World, We Just Live In It

From Salon:

It's fun to trash the search-monster's Buzz, but there's a method to its social networking smart-phone madness.

Is this what world domination looks like? On Wednesday, Google announced it was building an ultrafast, one-gigabit-per-second broadband network designed to showcase "innovative" Internet applications. On Tuesday, Google launched Google Buzz, integrating social networking functions into Gmail. Last month, Google debuted its Nexus One smart phone.

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The Great Global Warming Collapse -- A Commentary

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Photograph: Getty Images

From The Globe And Mail:

As the science scandals keep coming, the air has gone out of the climate-change movement.

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

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Microsoft’s Creative Destruction -- A Commentary

From The New York Times:

AS they marvel at Apple’s new iPad tablet computer, the technorati seem to be focusing on where this leaves Amazon’s popular e-book business. But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone, search engines like Google, digital music systems like iPod and iTunes or popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter.

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Digital Doomsday: The End Of Knowledge

Information is stored in many forms, but will it be readable in the future?
(Image:WesternWolf/Flickr/Getty)

From The New Scientist:

"IN MONTH XI, 15th day, Venus in the west disappeared, 3 days in the sky it stayed away. In month XI, 18th day, Venus in the east became visible."

What's remarkable about these observations of Venus is that they were made about 3500 years ago, by Babylonian astrologers. We know about them because a clay tablet bearing a record of these ancient observations, called the Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa, was made 1000 years later and has survived largely intact. Today, it can be viewed at the British Museum in London.

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Fight, Fight, Fight: The History Of Human Aggression And Weapon Development

From Live Science:

The use of weapons may date back well before the rise of humanity, given evidence that even our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, can use spears to hunt other primates. To see how fighting evolved from hand-to-hand combat to world war, here are 10 major innovations that revolutionized combat.

--Charles Q. Choi

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Climate Change's Latest Storm -- A Commentary

From The Wall Street Journal:

Good news for the Earth, bad news for the IPCC.

It's been a good week for the future of Life as We Know It. First the keepers of the climate-science consensus admitted that the Himalayan glaciers are not on the verge of disappearing, as these columns pointed out last month. Now we've learned that there wasn't much science behind the claim, also trumpeted in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report, that rising temperatures were leading to more-intense storms and more-expensive natural catastrophes.

This is good news for everyone, except perhaps the IPCC itself.

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China, Google And The Cloud Wars -- A Commentary

Google has threatened to quit China over censorship and cyberattacks. Photo AFP

From Holman Jenkins, Wall Street Journal:

What does Google know about you? What does the Chinese government know about you?

Now you know a less-spoken reason why Google has gone to the mattresses over Chinese hacking. Always in the cards, since the birth of the Web, was the possibility that some great Internet business—a Yahoo or Google or Amazon or Facebook—would be destroyed overnight by a cataclysmic loss of trust in its protection of consumer data.

We haven't seen this phenomenon yet, but it has seemed almost inevitable that sooner or later we will.

Google's response to the discovery that Chinese hackers—likely government hackers—had tried to ransack its servers has been both energetic and obfuscating. "We love China and the Chinese people," said CEO Eric Schmidt. "This is not about them. It's about our unwillingness to participate in censorship."

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More Abundance by Owning Less

From Discovery News:

Less is more; let the music show you how. We've witnessed the progression: albums to compact discs to digital files a la iTunes, where each step takes less material and less effort to get the music to the listener. Now, internet radio (places like SOMA FM and Pandora) draws the material piece down to nothing (although maybe there's a greater bandwidth component if you're continuously piping music across the airwaves, instead of just once at purchase, as is the case with digital files).

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When Robots Want Rights

Many believe super-intelligent machines are inevitable,
but will we treat them as mere property? REUTERS

From The Globe And Mail:

Many believe super-intelligent machines are inevitable, but will we treat them as mere property? REUTERS

In late November, Gecko Systems announced that it had been running trials of a “fully autonomous personal companion home-care robot,” also known as a “CareBot,” designed to help elderly or disabled people live independently. The company reported that a woman with short-term memory loss broke into a big smile when the robot asked her, “Would you like a bowl of ice cream?” The woman answered “yes,” and presumably the robot did the rest.

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Climate Change Is Nature's Way -- A Commentary

From The Wall Street Journal:

Climate Change Is Nature's Way.

Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet's climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?

Climate change is not the fault of man. It's Mother Nature's way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.

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Calls To Debate 'Fertility Outsourcing'

Most countries do not permit commercial surrogacy, say experts (Source: iStockphoto)

From ABC News (Australia):

In a world where rich countries look for cheap labour in poor ones, bioethicists, lawyers and women's health advocates are raising questions about the outsourcing of baby-making - especially to countries like India.

Australian sociologist Associate Professor Catherine Waldby of the University of Sydney told a recent conference in Brisbane that India was undercutting the US as a preferred source of surrogate mothers for couples from developed countries.

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U.S. Exhausted Oil And Gas Supplies — Repeatedly -- A Commentary

From The Houston Chronicle:

What city contributed most to the making of the modern world? The Paris of the Enlightenment and then of Napoleon, pioneer of mass armies and nationalist statism? London, seat of parliamentary democracy and center of finance? Or perhaps Titusville, Pa.

Oil seeping from the ground there was collected for medicinal purposes — until Edwin Drake drilled and 150 years ago — Aug. 27, 1859 — found the basis of our world, 69 feet below the surface of Pennsylvania, which oil historian Daniel Yergin calls “the Saudi Arabia of 19th-century oil.”

For many years, most oil was used for lighting and lubrication, and the amounts extracted were modest. Then in 1901, a new well named for an East Texas hillock, Spindletop, began gushing more per day than all other U.S. wells combined.

Since then, America has exhausted its hydrocarbon supplies.

Repeatedly.

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Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

From New Statesman:

We have, it seems, led the planet into the age of ecocide. Can civilisation survive the unavoidable environmental catastrophe? To stand a chance we will need cool heads, not fiery dreams.

During the past century empires crashed, new states foundered, utopian projects failed and entire civilisations melted down. Revolutionary change was the norm, as it has been throughout modern times. Yet today many of us assume our present way of life will last for ever, and any suggestion that it may be facing intractable difficulties is dismissed as doom-mongering. The result is that the precariousness of modern civilisation is underestimated and the impression that things can go on indefinitely, much as they do now is touted as hard-headed realism.

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