While the world actually grows enough food to feed all its inhabitants, it isn't equally distributed. Nearly 500 million people in the developing world remain undernourished and, if projections hold true, that number could to 20% within a decade due to the impacts of climate change on global food production, according to a detailed analysis by The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn&Child Health (PMNCH), the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN System Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN), 1,000 Days, World Vision International and partners.
Is the world ready for a robot DJ?
Sometimes you have to be bold. People laughed at Microsoft when they introduced Microsoft Bob too; people didn't know they needed a graphical image of their office showing a fax machine to send a fax - until it was available.
A small-scale study found diets that reduce the surge in blood sugar after a meal - low-glycemic index or very-low carbohydrate - are better than a low-fat diet for those trying to achieve lasting weight loss. The study also found that the low-glycemic index diet had similar metabolic benefits to the very low-carb diet without negative effects of stress and inflammation as seen by participants consuming the very low-carb diet.
A new toilet system can turn human waste into electricity and fertilizers and even reduce the amount of water needed for flushing by up to 90 percent
The inventors in Singapore call it the No-Mix Vacuum Toilet and it has two chambers that separate the liquid and solid wastes. Using vacuum suction technology, like you find in airplane lavatories, flushing liquids requires only 0.2 liters of water while flushing solids require just one liter. The existing conventional commonly used in Singapore need 4 to 6 liters of water per flush so a single public toilet, that may be flushed 100 times a day, could save about 160,000 liters of water in a year – enough to fill a small pool.
While browsing facebook, I ran across a friend's posting of a link to a diagnostic test for autism and Asperger's that I hadn't run across before,The Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R). According to the abstract,
Even though arsenic is toxic for many organs in the human body, it is used in therapeutic medicine and the treatment of some forms of cancer, and is an active component of drugs against parasitic diseases.
James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, Ph.D, aged 92, is a chemist and creator of the Gaia Hypothesis. He is called the 'Godfather of Global Warming'.
What he was, to most people, was an alarmist more on the order of President Obama's Science Czar John Holdren, a doomsday zealot. And I don't mean 'alarmist' in the American political sense, i.e., anyone who accepts the science of climate change - I mean a real End Of The World Is Nigh prophet. So silly even the hysterical poster child of Think Progress, Joe Romm,
believed Lovelock was over the top.
Wikipedia's user-generated content has made it the world's largest, and most derided, encyclopedia.
Part of the openness model has also led to 'edit wars' when the anonymous "editors" disagree with each other. The dynamics of these conflicts provide an interesting window into collaborative content production and the emergence and resolution of conflicts in an online environment, say researchers led by Taha Yasseri of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
As we near the first week of July, with the start of the International Conference of High-Energy Physics in Melbourne (July 2nd-8th) and the July 4th press release at CERN on the new results of Higgs boson searches by ATLAS and CMS, the attention to new particle searches is understandably increasing. And the question is what the new 8-TeV data produced by the LHC this year will give.
Will the final word on the existence (or absence) of the Higgs boson be said ? Will there be new particle discoveries ? Will the LHC surpass the Tevatron precision on the measurement of the top quark mass ? Is the Standard Model going to show cracks from the result of other, off-the-spotlight measurements ?
Using 160 high-resolution tungsten leaves and dramatically faster leaf movement, Elekta’s new Agility multi-leaf collimator (MLC) radiation therapy treatment for cancer patients recently received 510(k) clearance (K121328) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), enabling U.S. medical centers to use it for patients with cancer.
An MLC is device made up of numerous, individual tungsten “leaves,” which shape beams of therapeutic radiation that are delivered from different angles around the patient. Using twice the number of leaves typical of many standard MLC’s, Agility precisely delivers radiation to the unique contours of the tumor, while reducing the risk of exposure to healthy tissue.
