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ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2010) - Earth has run out of room to expand fisheries, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia researchers that charts the systematic expansion of industrialized fisheries.

He has an agreeably caustic and aggressive approach to outdated and erroneous ideas about the history of science. The book is a polemical essay, rather than a history, and welcome as such.

Thomas Levenson. My day job has me professing science writing at MIT, mostly teaching in the Institute's Graduate Program on Science Writing.

And yet, even today, seventeen years after the launch of the arxiv, every attempt to set up a preprint service for biologists has been a dismal failure, as noted by both Ginsparg and Timo Hannay (whose Science21 talk notes are up at Nature Networks. You can also get video and microblogging). Contrary to what a naive outsider's opinion might suggest, biologists appear to be highly resistant to the whole idea of sharing pre-publication results.

How do we relate human thought processes to measurable events in the brain? Mental chronometry, which has origins that date back more than a century, seeks to measure the time course of mental operations in the human nervous system [1]. From the late 1800s until 1950, the field was built almost entirely around a single method: measuring and comparing people's reaction times during simple cognitive tasks.

Apomediation is a new scholarly socio-technological term that characterizes the process of disintermediation (intermediaries are middlemen or "gatekeeper", e.g. health professionals giving "relevant" information to a patient, and disintermediation means to bypass them), whereby the former intermediaries are functionally replaced by apomediaries, i.e. network/group/collaborative filtering processes [Eysenbach, 2008 [WebCite] and 2007b]. The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands "in between" (latin: inter- means "in between") the consumer and information/service, i.e. is absolutely necessary to get a specific information/service. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which "stand by" (latin: apo- means separate, detached, away from) to guide a consumer to high quality information/services/experiences, without being a prerequisite to obtain that information/service in the first place. The switch from an intermediation model to an apomediation model has broadimplications for example for the way people judge credibility, as hypothesized and elaborated in more detail elsewhere [

Galison's first question is "What is Context?" He observes that the escape from externalist-internalist debates has resulted in an appeal to context. But, to phrase it in a Seinfeldian way: what's the deal with context?

ScienceDaily (May 22, 2010) - A major step toward being able to regulate nerve cells externally with the help of electronics has been taken by researchers at Linköping University and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. The breakthrough is based on an ion transistor of plastic that can transport ions and charged biomolecules and thereby address and regulate cells.

When we talk about participation, we have to be a bit more specific. On the publishing side, there's clearly more participation than we've ever seen in the past. But in order for this tidal wave of information to be useful, we need to be able to separate fact from fiction. We need to encourage participation on the receiving end. What we need is evaluating participation. With the breadth of niche information and sources we have the ability to get at the best of what is known on a myriad of topics and contexts. Every niche has its experts and its hacks, its enthusiasts and detractors. But for the remaining 95% of us who are not subject matter experts, deriving the accurate or useful information from the sea of what is available can be complicated, time-consuming and simply unverifiable. We need a way to quantify the value of information, or more specifically, the veracity of information.

http://www.ted.com Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, talks about his quest to make all knowledge computational -- able to be searched, processed and manipulated. His new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, has no lesser goal than to model and explain the physics underlying the universe.

Everyone has experienced a broken knob or a broken piece off of an appliance. You also know that while trying to get a new one you might have a long waiting period. Well there might be a prototype that is here to solve that problem. The Thing-O-Matic claims to manifest any three-dimensional plastic object in just minutes. The machine was shown first at a Las Vegas trade fair and is meant to make manufacturing more common for the average person.\n\n3,000 have already been sold at $790 a device. This model only makes plastic objects but the manufacturers say that in the future models could make metal and plastic models to make super cool gadgets. The machines make objects that are six by six by seven inches. The machine is not capable of making images but it does make boxes, tubes and get this- even action figures!

There are differences between the group's demonstrations. For crystals, Tittel's group used thulium-doped lithium niobate, whereas Gisin's group opted for neodymium-doped yttrium silicate. In addition, a different type of laser set-up has favoured Gisin's group, which reports a maximum storage time of some 200 ns at an efficiency of more than 20%; Tittel's group reports a storage time of 7 ns at an efficiency of 2%. On the other hand, the quantum memory of Tittel's group functions at a bandwidth of 5 GHz - some 40 times greater than Gisin's group - which means, potentially, far more information could be sent in the same time.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2010) - Solar power in southeastern Ontario has the potential to produce almost the same amount of power as all the nuclear reactors in the United States, according to two studies conducted by the Queen's University Applied Sustainability Research Group located in Kingston, Canada.

(PhysOrg.com) -- New research has shown that it is possible and affordable for the world to achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, if there is the political will to strive for this goal.

Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2011) - A team of biologists, clinical oncologists, pathologists and information scientists has established a strategy for identifying biomarkers. If a particular pattern of these biomarkers can be detected in the blood, this indicates a cancerous disease. An interdisciplinary research breakthrough that opens many doors.

The durable and relatively easy-to-produce material has innumerable applications, including recycling waste heat from industrial refineries or using auto exhaust heat to help recharge the battery in an electric car.

This is the Official Online (Youtube) Release of "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward" by Peter Joseph. [30 subtitles ADDED!] On Jan. 15th, 2011, "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward" was released theatrically to sold out crowds in 60 countries; 31 languages; 295 cities and 341 Venues. It has been noted as the largest non-profit independent film release in history. This is a non-commercial work and is available online for free viewing and no restrictions apply to uploading/download/posting/linking - as long as no money is exchanged. A Free DVD Torrent of the full 2 hr and 42 min film in 30 languages is also made available through the main website [below], with instructions on how one can download and burn the movie to DVD themselves. His other films are also freely available in this format.

The important debate on global warming under UN auspices provides but a partial picture of climate change; in addition to the devastating impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the ozone layer, the World's climate can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated "non-lethal weapons." Both the Americans and the Russians have developed capabilities to manipulate the World's climate. In the US, the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the ("Star Wars") Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes.