IF THE world fails to act soon on climate change, "preserving security and stability even at current levels will become increasingly difficult". That's the blunt message of a statement released in Washington DC (PDF) last week by 10 high-ranking military officials from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the US.
Preserving stability will become increasingly difficult if the world fails to act on climate change
Image: Signal processing: Researchers at Cogito Health are developing mathematical models to detect vocal cues that may signal depression. The last graph represents the software’s confidence level in determining depression, from the beginning to the end of a vocal recording. In this example, the data shows a very high likelihood of depression. Credit: Cogito Health 
Darwin's theory of evolution can help us find life on alien planets, says a Nasa scientist Photo: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS - IVO SHANDOR 
Caught in the web: The internet can track our location and habits and information stored from accessing websites could be used against you
Unseasonal snowfall in Beijing, which scientists claim is the result of their geoengineering, November 2009. Photograph: ADRIAN BRADSHAW/EPA
Alina Novopashna, Corbis
Space Junk An artist's impression of space debris in low-Earth orbit. The U.S. government wants a better surveillance system to keep track of the thousands of space junk pieces. ESA 
From Future Pundit:The team, led by Assistant Clinical Professor of Public Health at Warwick Medical School Dr Oscar Franco, has discovered that simultaneously having obesity, high blood pressure and high blood sugar are the most dangerous combination of health factors when developing metabolic syndrome.
Read more ....
The QUaD collaboration uses the 2.6-meter telescope shown here to view the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background, a faintly glowing relic of the hot, dense, young universe. (Credit: Image courtesy of Nicolle Rager Fuller, NSF)
Comets feature prominently in at least a couple notable doomsday scenarios. In fact nature may eventually destroy us with an icy space rock, but so far none of the predictions related to comets or any other doomsday prognostications have come true. Credit: stockxpert
Winner: With 9581 votes, the medical X-ray radiograph was deemed the most important invention in the Science Museum.
Image: Cancer killers: Drug-laden nanoparticles (shown in pink) developed by BIND Biosciences have accumulated in a prostate-cancer cell (shown in green; cell nucleus in blue). The particles were designed to target prostate cancer cells. Scientists hope such particles will reduce side effects associated with chemotherapy. Credit: BIND Biosciences 
Eating quickly makes you put on weight Photo: GETTY 
Aida is embedded into the car's dashboard. The technology is being developed by MIT and Volkswagen
This image of the remnants of an exploded star was taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers. By studying it, astronomers gained a better understanding of new details about the role of supernova remnants as the Milky Way's super-efficient particle accelerators. (NASA/CXC/University of Ultrech/J.Vink/AFP) 
A large white shark approaches the tagging boat. The shark's head is visible right behind the boat, with the iconic dorsal fin behind that and the tip of the tail marking its full length. (Courtesy Stanford University/Susie Anderson)
From BBC:
New research finds that a quick glance at someone's facial structure may be enough for us to predict their tendency towards aggression. (Credit: iStockphoto/Thomas Perkins)
The world's largest cruise ship departed from Turku, Finland, on Oct. 30 en route to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where it will make its U.S. debut. Credit: Oasis of the Seas.
This map shows observation minus reanalysis (OMR) trends in the continental United States from 1979-2003. The trends are associated with land use and land-use changes. Researchers from Purdue and the universities of Colorado and Maryland conducted a study that showed land use can affect surface temperatures locally and regionally. Units are in degrees Celsius per decade. (Image courtesy of Souleymane Fall) - click to enlarge
From Slate:It's hard to come up with a simple answer for this one, because so many factors affect the calculation: Where was your beverage made? What's it packaged in, and how did that package get to you? How was it stored at the point of sale? Accounting for all these variables can make your head spin, but the best available research suggests that parsing out the difference might not be worth the headache.
From the Next Big Future:Brave New Climate reviews the work of Mark Z. Jacobson (Professor, Stanford) and Mark A. Delucchi (researcher, UC Davis) entitled “A path to sustainable energy by 2030” (p 58 – 65 Scientific American Nov 2009; they call it WWS: wind, water or sunlight).
Jacobson and Delucchi argue that, by the year 2030:
Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels.
Nuclear power results in up to 25 times more carbon emissions than wind energy, when reactor construction and uranium refining and transport are considered.Read more ....
From Future Pundit:Fat around your internal organs is thought to be a much bigger risk factor for heart disease than fat near the surface of the skin. Well, if you go on a diet, exercise, get your weight down, and then eventually go off the diet continued exercise will prevent the resulting weight gain from happening where the risk factor is greatest.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - A study conducted by exercise physiologists in the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Human Studies finds that as little as 80 minutes a week of aerobic or resistance training helps not only to prevent weight gain, but also to inhibit a regain of harmful visceral fat one year after weight loss.
The study was published online Oct. 8 and will appear in a future print edition of the journal Obesity.
From Times Online:
Image: With extroverts, robots can speak forcefully; with introverts, they are more soothing.
From The BBC:
New research confirms that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world's oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea. (Credit: Imagery (c) 2009 TerraMetrics. Map data (c) 2009 Europa Technologies / Courtesy of Google Maps)
Cameroon—At the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, more than a dozen residents form a gallery of grief, looking on as Dorothy—a beloved female felled in her late 40s by heart failure—is borne to her burial. 
Mount Kilimanjaro - Trees put moisture into the air via evapotranspiration, upslope winds precipitate it on Kilimanjaro. Image: WikimediaGore started this. Note to journalists everywhere: IT’S THE EVAPOTRANSPIRATION STUPID!
See this article to understand why linking snow on Kilimanjaro to small changes in global temperature is just flat wrong. The plains around Kilimanjaro have gone through years of deforestation. Less trees > less evapotranspiration > less snow.
Don’t believe me? Here’s news of a recent study from Portsmouth University Of Mt. Kilimanjaro ice waving us good-bye due to deforestation. Here’s another peer reviewed study from UAH saying the same thing.
From The Next Big Future:
There's more to intelligence than just IQ. (Image: David C Ellis/Getty) 
Dino Fight. This graphic illustration depicts the moment that "Jane," the T. rex found at Montana's Hell Creek Formation in 2001, was disfigured by another teenage T. rex.
Scientists say Mount Kilimanjaro's glaciers, which cap Africa's highest peak,
istockphoto.com
From Science Daily:
Analyses of a partial skeleton of a female Ardipithecus ramidus nicknamed Ardi, suggest the early human would have stood at just under 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall with both primitive traits, such as a small brains size similar to living chimpanzees and those shared with later hominids, such as bipedal posture. Credit: © 2009, J.H. Matternes.
An ancient geoglyph of a hummingbird (colibri in Spanish) on the edge to the Nazca plains was probably inscribed here as an offering for water/fertility in the fields that lie below
Credit: David Rosenberg/Getty Images
From The BBC:
A new, long-range Taser weapon could be launched from standard 40-millimetre grenade launchers (Image: SGT April L. Johnson/US DoD)
Hungry for Humans. In 1898, two man-eating lions terrorized railway workers, claiming 35 lives. The remains of the two lions are now on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Getty ImagesCHICAGO--On the outside, Microsoft's massive new data center resembles the other buildings in the industrial area.
Even the inside of the building doesn't look like that much. The ground floor looks like a large indoor parking lot filled with a few parked trailers.
It's what's inside those trailers, though, that is the key to Microsoft's cloud-computing efforts. Each of the shipping containers in the Chicago data center houses anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 servers, each of which can be serving up e-mail, managing instant messages, or running applications for Microsoft's soon-to-be-launched cloud-based operating system--Windows Azure.
We could run out of web addresses in the next two years, unless businesses and government organisations heed the advice of the European Commission Photo: GETTY 