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Environmental/Earth Science. Fresh Water Scarcity And Cost-Effective Desalination. By Greg Borzo The scarcity of fresh water is an increasingly serious problem around the world due to growing populations and diminishing supplies of fresh water. Desalination could help alleviate these shortages, but it has traditionally been an extremely expensive process. The demand for water is so great that the worldwide desalination market is expected to reach an astonishing $87.8 billion by 2016, even though only about 1 percent of the world’s drinking water is produced by desalination. There is a huge need for technologies that could reduce this cost. To help meet this need, the Innovation Fund, the University of Chicago’s venture philanthropic proof-of-concept fund, awarded Heinrich Jaeger, the William J.
Friedman and Alicia Townsend Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago, $65,000 in its third round of funding at the end of 2011 to establish the commercial feasibility of a nanoparticle desalination system that Jaeger invented. Carbon bubble will plunge the world into another financial crisis – report | Environment. Global stock markets are betting on countries failing to adhere to legally binding carbon emission targets. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images The world could be heading for a major economic crisis as stock markets inflate an investment bubble in fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars, according to leading economists. "The financial crisis has shown what happens when risks accumulate unnoticed," said Lord (Nicholas) Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics.
He said the risk was "very big indeed" and that almost all investors and regulators were failing to address it. The so-called "carbon bubble" is the result of an over-valuation of oil, coal and gas reserves held by fossil fuel companies. The stark report is by Stern and the thinktank Carbon Tracker. The world's governments have agreed to restrict the global temperature rise to 2C, beyond which the impacts become severe and unpredictable.
Pension funds are also concerned.
Pysch/Behavioral Economics. A Focus on Distraction. Forecasting Fox. But Tetlock is also interested in how people can get better at making forecasts. His subsequent work helped prompt people at one of the government’s most creative agencies, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, to hold a forecasting tournament to see if competition could spur better predictions. In the fall of 2011, the agency asked a series of short-term questions about foreign affairs, such as whether certain countries will leave the euro, whether North Korea will re-enter arms talks, or whether Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev would switch jobs.
They hired a consulting firm to run an experimental control group against which the competitors could be benchmarked. Five teams entered the tournament, from places like M.I.T., Michigan and Maryland. How did they make such accurate predictions? For example, if you spent $1.10 on a baseball glove and a ball, and the glove cost $1 more than the ball, how much did the ball cost? Tetlock and company gathered 3,000 participants.
SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND SOCIETY: THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION IN AMERICA - Coyne - 2012 - Evolution. Yet another experiment showing that conscious “decisions” are made unconsciously, and in advance. In the last few years, neuroscience experiments have shown that some “conscious decisions” are actually made in the brain before the actor is conscious of them: brain-scanning techniques can predict not only when a binary decision will be made, but what it will be (with accuracy between 55-70%)—several seconds before the actor reports being conscious of having made a decision. The implications of this research are obvious: by the time we’re conscious of having made a “choice”, that choice has already been made for us—by our genes and our environments—and the consciousness is merely reporting something determined beforehand in the brain.
And that, in turn, suggests (as I’ve mentioned many times here) that all of our “choices” are really determined in advance, though some choices (e.g., whether to duck when a baseball is thrown at your head) can’t be made very far in advance! A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by C. S. Soon et al. Fig. 1. Fig. 2. Soon, C. Carbon nanotubes make it possible to grow human hearts. One of the most fundamental problems with growing organs in a petri dish (metaphorically speaking) is that organs don’t grow in petri dishes. That is to say, the naturally grown organs we’d like to replace were themselves grown in and amongst organs, which were themselves grown in and amongst others. This nature-nurture dichotomy highlights how much our genes rely on environmental constants for their mechanisms of action; all the fancy collagens in the world can’t anchor a cell to a basement membrane that isn’t there. Time and again we’ve seen admirable work in cell biology undone by the simple fact that these meticulously engineered cells are without the proper world in which to grow, and some organs have posed more problems than others.
A bladder is a relatively simple thing, just a balloon with a couple of special openings. In pursuit of this, the heart has a class of myocytes that form Purkinje Fibers, long cords that ferry pacemaker signals at a rate unsurpassed in the body. Why the mantis shrimp is my new favorite animal.
Welcome to the Multiverse. Theoretical cosmologist isn’t one of the more hazardous occupations of the modern world. The big risks include jet lag, caffeine overdose, and possibly carpal tunnel syndrome. It wasn’t always so. On February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno, a mathematician and Dominican friar, was stripped naked and driven through the streets of Rome. Then he was tied to a stake in the Campo de’ Fiori and burned to death. These days, cosmologists like me may be safer, but our ideas have grown only more radical. Also like Bruno, cosmologists are reaching far beyond what observational evidence can tell them. The extent of what astronomers can see is frustratingly limited by the speed of light: one light-year (about six trillion miles) per year.
Obviously, we don’t know what the unobservable part of the universe looks like. Here we are not talking about disconnected universes, but rather what we cosmologists call pocket universes. That’s where the multiverse comes from. Next page: Universe gets diverse. The Scale of the Universe 2.