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
"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."
At a recent celebration of the International Polar Year in New York, artists and scientists share work inspired by the shifting landscape of Antarctica.
"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. "
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
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
On November 11th, U.C. grad students reviewed a flagged image from one of the weather station web cameras, which automatically tripped when large moving objects were scene near the main barn. The researchers later identified that it was unfortunately not the next zoological discovery slated for the pages of Nature or Science, but simply the greenmeme team exploring Blue Oak Ranch with reserve director, Mike Hamilton.
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