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"Last year, the South Pacific Island of Tokelau, a tropical atoll governed by New Zealand, became the first completely solar powered territory on Earth. Having invested $7.2 million on the project, the island of 1500 souls is now redirecting money it would have spent on oil to education, irrigation, and health care. Could Tokelau's experience be a harbinger for the rest of the world? Maybe, maybe not. It is worth remembering, after all, that most of the island's inhabitants are subsistence farmers, and that thousands of their countrymen have emigrated to New Zealand and Samoa. An advanced economy it is not."

UCLA researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano.   The UCLA team describes a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC) that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light, not visible light, making the cells nearly 70% transparent to the human eye. They made the device from a photoactive plastic that converts infrared light into an electrical current

On the other hand, humanity's malignant effect on the environment has accelerated the rate of extinction for plants and animals, which now reaches perhaps 50,000 species a year. But even here there was some good news. We reversed our first man-made global atmospheric crisis by banning chlorofluorocarbons -- by 2015, the Antarctic ozone hole will have shrunk by nearly 400,000 square miles. Stopping climate change has been a slower process. Nonetheless, in 2008, the G-8 did commit to halving carbon emissions by 2050. And a range of technological advances -- from hydrogen fuel cells to compact fluorescent bulbs -- suggests that a low-carbon future need not require surrendering a high quality of life. Technology has done more than improve energy efficiency. Today, there are more than 4 billion mobile-phone subscribers, compared with only 750 million at the decade's start. Cell phones are being used to provide financial services in the Philippines, monitor real-time commodity futures prices in Vietnam, and teach literacy in Niger. And streaming video means that fans can watch cricket even in benighted countries that don't broadcast it -- or upload citizen reports from security crackdowns in Tehran. Perhaps technology also helps account for the striking disconnect between the reality of worldwide progress and the perception of global decline. We're more able than ever to witness the tragedy of millions of our fellow humans on television or online. And, rightly so, we're more outraged than ever that suffering continues in a world of such technological wonder and economic plenty. Nonetheless, if you had to choose a decade in history in which to be alive, the first of the 21st century would undoubtedly be it. More people lived lives of greater freedom, security, longevity, and wealth than ever before. And now, billions of them can tweet the good news. Bring on the 'Teenies.

Based on the suggestions of the observers above, and my own active imagination, I offer the following as possible near-term advances in the evolution of the scientific method. Compiled Negative Results - Negative results are saved, shared, compiled and analyzed, instead of being dumped. Positive results may increase their credibility when linked to negative results. We already have hints of this in the recent decision of biochemical journals to require investigators to register early phase 1 clinical trials. Usually phase 1 trials of a drug end in failure and their negative results are not reported. As a public heath measure, these negative results should be shared. Major journals have pledged not to publish the findings of phase 3 trials if their earlier phase 1 results had not been reported, whether negative or not. Return of the Subjective - Science came into its own when it managed to refuse the subjective and embrace the objective. The repeatability of an experiment by another, perhaps less enthusiastic, observer was instrumental in keeping science rational. But as science plunges into the outer limits of scale - at the largest and smallest ends - and confronts the weirdness of the fundamental principles of matter/energy/information such as that inherent in quantum effects, it may not be able to ignore the role of observer. Existence seems to be a paradox of self-causality, and any science exploring the origins of existence will eventually have to embrace the subjective, without become irrational. The tools for managing paradox are still undeveloped.

Collectively, malaria, TB & HIV/AIDS cause more than five million deaths per year - nearly the entire population of the state of Washington - and represent one of the world's major public health challenges as we move into the second decade of the 21st century. In the May 26, 2011, edition of scientific journal Nature, Seattle BioMed Director Alan Aderem, Ph.D., along with Rino Rappuoli, Ph.D., Global Head of Vaccines Research for Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics, discuss recent advances in vaccine development, along with new tools including systems biology and structure-based antigen design that could lead to a deeper understanding of mechanisms of protection. This, in turn, will illuminate the path to rational vaccine development to lift the burden of the world's most devastating infectious diseases.

Scientists today claimed one of the milestones in the drive for sustainable energy - development of the first practical artificial leaf. Speaking here at the 241st National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, they described an advanced solar cell the size of a poker card that mimics the process, called photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert sunlight and water into energy.

essays in this book reflect pioneering efforts to study the global movement of ideas and institutions. They deal with topics of significant contemporary importance: initiatives to address the AIDS epidemic in East Africa; to protect the peoples and ecosystems of the Amazon; to advance the "truth and reconciliation" process in South Africa and in other areas of great conflict; to promote "civil society" in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; to advocate for environmental protection in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Japan; and to spread Rotary Clubs and encourage "social entrepreneurship" throughout the world. These essays highlight a wide range of research, paying close attention to the realities of particular situations and to current thinking about general processes.

Google recently announced that it will help fund groundbreaking research by computer scientists and economists at Tel Aviv University.  The Blavatnik School of Computer Science is attempting to help computers make better decisions using a term they dubbed "regret." Head of the program Professor Yishay Mansour began this project earlier this year at the International Conference on Learning Theory in Haifa, Israel.  He and the other researchers are working on algorithms that would allow computers to learn from their past failures in an effort to make better predictions.  This is referred to as "minimizing virtual regret" by Mansour. "If the servers and routing systems of the Internet could see and evaluate all the relevant variables in advance, they could more efficiently prioritize server resource requests, load documents and route visitors to an Internet site, for instance," says Mansour.

In a country where nearly 40 percent of households have no electricity, any new advancement that will help bring power to the world's second most populous nation, must be met with celebration and open arms.

In a paper published today, Thursday, 21 April, in IOP Publishing's journal Nanotechnology, Professor Mike Kelly, Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics, University of Cambridge, stated that you cannot mass produce structures with a diameter of three nanometres or less using a top-down approach.

Invisibility appears to be the next possible advance in the use of Terahertz radiation in medicine, security, and communications.

Two professors from the University of Illinois; one specializing in materials science, the other in electrical engineering, have combined their talents to take the idea of printing circuits onto non-standard materials one step further by developing a conductive ink that can be used in a traditional rollerball ink pen to draw circuits by hand onto paper and other porous materials. In their paper published in Advanced Materials, team leads Jennifer Lewis, Jennifer Bernhard and colleagues describe how they were able to make a type of ink from silver nanoparticles that would remain a liquid while in the pen, but would dry like regular ink once applied. The pen could was then used to draw a functioning LCD display and an antenna.

The immune system recognizes and neutralizes or destroys toxins and foreign pathogens that have gained access to the body. Autoimmune diseases result when the system attacks the body's own tissues instead. One of the most common examples is multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is a serious condition in which nerve-cell projections, or axons, in the brain and the spinal cord are destroyed as a result of misdirected inflammatory reactions. It is often characterized by an unpredictable course, with periods of remission being interrupted by episodes of relapse.

From the 1st through the 6th of February 2011, we were shooting, editing and screening an immediated autodocumentary video at the Transmediale digital art and culture festival in the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Along with events like Ars Electronica and Future Everything, Transmediale is one of the most significant media art events in Europe. We were honored to be included in the Open Zone, a space which will be open to the public, described in the festival programme as "a social experiment with different social territories that are occupied by artists and media activists". We are calling this project The Future of Art. Our goal was a short video which explores questions about the future of art, both in regard to its aesthetics, production, finance, curation, distribution and collection. In addition to conducting interviews at the festival, we were reaching out to several artists in advance of the festival over Skype. Our intention with the Skype interviewees is to extend the discourse beyond the geophysical limits of the festival by including artists who we wish could be here with us in Berlin in February.