Global Greenhouse Gas | Image : Networlddirectory.com

Part of a forest will be enclosed, heated up and pumped with CO2 to see who wins and loses if the planet heats up.

Global warming has found a willing victim: a small patch of spruce forest in the Chippewa National Forest in northern Minnesota.

There, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will create the conditions they expect to see in a warming world. Higher levels of carbon dioxide. Warmer average temperatures. Warmer soil.

Then scientists will watch, measure and record. They want to be able to see how microbes respond, how insect populations change, how decomposition rates change, how plants grow and produce seeds, and how water levels fluctuate. Sensors will try to determine what kind of feedback loops kick in that either increase or decrease temperature and carbon dioxide. Population studies will try to suss out which species do better and which suffer, under which conditions.

Ecosystems are wonderfully–or maddeningly–complex, depending on how you look at them. As a result they are notoriously difficult to study. They can’t be studied in a lab; in the field the variables are so many and the time scales needed to tease out trends are so long that ecologists are left with little ecosystem-wide experimental data. Read more ……

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of Earth’s near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. Global surface temperature increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) between the start and the end of the 20th century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century was caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation.

The IPCC also concludes that variations in natural phenomena such as solar radiation and volcanism had a small cooling effect after 1950. These basic conclusions have been endorsed by more than 40 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.

An increase in global temperature will cause sea levels to rise and will change the amount and pattern of precipitation, probably including expansion of subtropical deserts. Warming is expected to be strongest in the Arctic and would be associated with continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice. Other likely effects include increases in the intensity of extreme weather events, species extinctions, and changes in agricultural yields. Warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe, though the nature of these regional variations are uncertain. Source : Wikipedia

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Dr Jeegajeeva, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, received the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Awards worth RM630,500 to pursue a doctorate in medicine.

UiTM vice-chancellor Datuk Prof Dr Sahol Hamid Abu Bakar said Dr Jeegajeeva, one of the university’s excellent service award recipients last year, had vast experience in his field in several countries including Malaysia, Britain, Indonesia and Australia.

“UiTM is proud of Dr Jeegajeeva’s achievement. He is one of 10 individuals in Asia chosen for the scholarship,” he said at the presentation of the scholarship here Wednesday.

Australian High Commissioner to Malaysia Penny Williams presented the award. Read more ……

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Source : Forbes.com

Researchers are working to reconstruct the nervous system so that paralyzed limbs might be active again.

Peckham, a biomedical engineering professor at Case Western Reserve University, and Donoghue, a neuroscience professor at Brown University, have been able to reestablish that connection with stunning results, enabling partially paralyzed patients to stand up or write a letter. Peckham, 65, has since 1986 been outfitting paralyzed patients with implanted devices that hijack nerve signals from unaffected regions of patients’ bodies and use them to move otherwise lifeless parts. Now he is developing a networked system that he hopes will allow people control of up to five areas of their body at once.

Now the professors’ labs are working together in hopes of some day developing a system that allows a paralyzed patient to move his or her own hand or to sit up straight by thinking about it, the way most of us do. They are bridging the gap by using small pulses of electrical current to turn the nerves back on. Read more ……

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Source : Gawker.com

We know that science fiction is a form of media that changes the future – it’s influenced everyone from scientists to economists. But are new media technologies changing SF?

This week I was lucky enough to join scifi writers Cory Doctorow and JC Hutchins, along with scifi podcaster Steve Eley, to talk about the future of media – and especially scifi media. Our host was Small World podcaster Bazooka Joe, who asked some great questions. Not only did Doctorow get to describe his ideal ebook reader, but I got to talk about the future of online media. It was a damn good time. Read more ……

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Source : Howstuffworks.com

Nanotechnology is one of the most popular areas of scientific research, especially with regard to medical applications. We’ve already discussed some of the new detection methods that should bring about cheaper, faster and less invasive cancer diagnoses. But once the diagnosis occurs, there’s still the prospect of surgery, chemotherapy or radiation treatment to destroy the cancer. Unfortunately, these treatments can carry serious side effects. Chemotherapy can cause a variety of ailments, including hair loss, digestive problems, nausea, lack of energy and mouth ulcers. Read more ……

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the world. New technologies such as nanotechnology present us with new ways of treating patients that were unimaginable only a few years ago. However, there needs to be an understanding of the problems clinicians and patients face and the potential solutions scientists can develop to improve the efficacy of diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

On behalf of the UC San Diego School of Medicine and UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, it is privilege to invite you to participate in Application for Nanomedicine: New Strategies and Innovations to Understand, Treat, and Monitor Disease.

This unique webinar series brings expertise from many fields at UC San Diego and it is intended to demonstrate how nanotechnology can enhance the diagnosis, monitoring and cutting edge treatments of cancer. At UC San Diego we have built a program that incorporates nanotechnology in cancer care and we would like to educate you on this new discipline. This course will illustrate applications of nanotechnology in cancer treatment that are soon to be available in a clinic near you. Read more ……

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On September 30th, the invitions will go out by email. And Google has also announced that it is opening up Google Wave to some schools and businesses that use Google Apps.

Despite the company not having a set date for release, the excitement and hype surrounding Google wave is growing exponentially. “We don’t have a specific time-frame for public release, but we’re planning to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a developer preview,” the company said in a statement.

This is not just email or a way of sending data to someone else. Google Wave has been dubbed as “game-changing” by Mashable, a technology website. The new Google product, for those having a Google account, is likely to change dramatically upon its launch, especially within business, education, customer service, email and social networking.

Google describes its new baby as “a new model for communication and collaboration on the web” which will enable “participants on a wave to have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.” In GMail, Google’s email system, conversations can be connected in what is called a thread. But Wave goes a step further enabling editable conversations to develop. Effectively it’s rewriting the rules of email, Google says.

In Google Wave a user can create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on the wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. Instant messaging is virtually instantaneous in Wave with text appearing as typed on the recipients computer, thus saving time. Several people can be involved in conversations and in addition private conversations may be inserted into the thread. Read more ……