Vascular San Jose

A prototype imteractive map

Global warming increasing death rate of US trees, scientists warn Studies find wide range of tree species are dying with serious long-term effects fo

A black bear wanders through a meadow dotted with fallen trees on July 8, 2007 in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Photograph: Jeff Hutchens/Getty Images

By Alok Jha, green technology correspondent

"Trees in the western United States are dying twice as quickly as they did three decades ago and scientists think global warming is to blame.

In their surveys, ecologists found that a wide range of tree species were dying including pines, firs and hemlocks and at a variety of altitudes. The changes can have serious long-term effects including reducing biodiversity and turning western forests into a source of carbon dioxide as they die and decompose. That could lead to a runaway effect that speeds up climate change."

Link to article in Guardian

Cold Truth

At a recent celebration of the International Polar Year in New York, artists and scientists share work inspired by the shifting landscape of Antarctica.

by Catrinel Bartolomeu • Posted December 17, 2008 03:11 PM

"March 2009 will mark the end of the fourth ever International Polar Year (IPY), a scientific program that intensively studies the poles. In order to have full and equal coverage of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, a polar year actually spans two annual cycles. In the era of global warming and melting icecaps, polar research reaches beyond the scientific community, agitating politicians, celebrities, artists, musicians and implicating any person, really, who has experienced the weather. "

link

The Oxford Project

In the blink of an eye, children grow up and have children of their own. In the small town of Oxford, Iowa the transformations have all been caught on camera. Josh Landis reports in this clip from CBS Sunday Morning

link

Technology with personality / role playing?

The Huggable robot teddy developed by MIT Media Lab seeks to interact with user by using the characters (possibly in the future, but teddy bear for now) to overcome the coldness of technologies. The robot teddy is loaded with 1500 sensors on its skin, video cameras on its eyes, microphones in its ears, speaker in its mouth, and above all, an embedded PC with 802.11g wireless networking!!!

The suggested use for this robot teddy is for long distance communications between grandparents and kids, patients and doctors and so on - With its gears, the teddy is like a portal of intercommunication between two, and possibly some sort of role playing from one side to the other.. for example, the grandparents teaching a life lesson to their teenage grandsons or daughters can hide or transform their figure through the teddy -

This article reminds me the book Diamond Age, which I am reading right now and having great fun with. The story evolves around a piece of technology, the primer, which is a form of book that can interact with reader, usually little girls between age 4 to 8. The book tells the story customized based upon the reader's level of knowledge, environment and so on. On the other side of channel, there are people called Ractors (modern day actors, who embedded bunch of cells on their body to transform themselves into whatever characters in digital world), who reads the book for the kids as the script automatically updates from the reaction of the readers on the other side.

Here is the original article.
http://www.physorg.com/news148727070.html