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Ed Webb

Ptak Science Books: Science Noir and Steampunk--the Magic Lantern and Major Kong - 1 views

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    So many terms - how to describe the creeping horror or uncanny fear of technology pushed beyond where we can really grasp what it is doing?
Ed Webb

Artificial meat? Food for thought by 2050 | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

  • even with new technologies such as genetic modification and nanotechnology, hundreds of millions of people may still go hungry owing to a combination of climate change, water shortages and increasing food consumption.
  • Many low-tech ways are considered to effectively increase yields, such as reducing the 30-40% food waste that occurs both in rich and poor countries. If developing countries had better storage facilities and supermarkets and consumers in rich countries bought only what they needed, there would be far more food available.
  • wo "wild cards" could transform global meat and milk production. "One is artificial meat, which is made in a giant vat, and the other is nanotechnology, which is expected to become more important as a vehicle for delivering medication to livestock."
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  • One of the gloomiest assessments comes from a team of British and South African economists who say that a vast effort must be made in agricultural research to create a new green revolution, but that seven multinational corporations, led by Monsanto, now dominate the global technology field.
  • a threat to the global commons in agricultural technology on which the green revolution has depended
  • Up to 70% of the energy needed to grow and supply food at present is fossil-fuel based which in turn contributes to climate change
  • The 21 papers published today in a special open access edition of the philosophical transactions of the royalsociety.org are part of a UK government Foresight study on the future of the global food industry. The final report will be published later this year in advance of the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.
Ed Webb

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford: Science Fiction - 0 views

  • In the USSR writers of science fiction had the future as a semi-official responsibility.  Whatever they invented, they were expected to endorse the radiance to come.  But since the future, in Soviet SF as in every other kind, is a refraction of the present anyway, the scope was large for sly commentary on the present, and deniable ironisation of it on terms far freer than in realist Soviet literature, especially when the SF was being written by the brilliantly self-possessed Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
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