A thousand miles off California, the North Pacific Ocean Gyre contains one of the largest ecosystems on Earth--but it may be in danger from a deluge of accumulated plastic trash. Dubbed the "Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch," the debris at the center of the North Pacific Ocean has the potential to damage marine life and alter the biological environment. Though this issue has recently received popular media attention, there was little scientific information available on the composition, extent, and effects of the debris. The small pieces of plastic that make up most of the material are not detectable by satellites or airplanes. Researchers requiring detailed scientific sampling must use ships capable of traveling to this remote region.

Project Kaisei is a non-profit organization focused on increasing awareness of the scale of marine debris, its impact on our environment, and the solutions for both prevention and clean-up.

From August 2-21, a group of doctoral students and research volunteers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego embarked on an expedition aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon to explore the problem of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre.

The Global Mail is a philanthropically funded, not-for-profit news and features website. Our mission is to deliver original, fearless, independent journalism. We will strive to inform, provoke, expose - and entertain. Our audience is our only agenda. We have no advertisers to answer to, nor shareholders who seek to profit. And our generous philanthropic benefactor has no interest in what journalism we produce. What The Global Mail produces will be the evidence of that.

Interest brings groups together, but intent is what brings teams together to actually get things done.  Intentcasting is deceptively simple to describe. It consists in broadcasting your intent to make something happen. 

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today-perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system-in prison, on probation, or on parole-than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

Most popular web-based businesses are deflationary. They substitute expensive forms of content consumption for cheap ones, they make it logistically easier to deliver discounts to people who will respond to them, and they create numerous financially cheap forms of social status. As more activity moves on to the web, the main effect on the economy will be broadly lower prices and less need for employment.

"It is reasonable to project that in a mere five years, a protest like Occupy Wall Street wouldn't be possible. Here's a scenario to get your head around how things will change due to the introduction of bots..."

…retail commercial activity within resilient communities will be growing and in some cases exceeding the activity seen before the depression. The reason?  The effort these communities made in building locally viable open markets that promoted the wares of local producers.  

DataSift offers the most powerful and sophisticated tools for extracting value from Social Data. The amount that Internet users are creating and sharing through Social Media is exploding. DataSift offers the best tools for collecting, filtering and analysing this data. Social Data is more complicated to process and analyse because it is unstructured. DataSift's platform has been built specifically to process large amounts of this unstructured data and derive value from it.

In computing, ambient intelligence (AmI) refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. Ambient intelligence is a vision on the future of consumer electronics, telecommunications and computing that was originally developed in the late 1990s for the time frame 2010-2020. In an ambient intelligence world, devices work in concert to support people in carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals in easy, natural way using information and intelligence that is hidden in the network connecting these devices (see Internet of Things). As these devices grow smaller, more connected and more integrated into our environment, the technology disappears into our surroundings until only the user interface remains perceivable by users.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

How can you tell fact from fiction on the Internet? Join Truthsquad, a community fact-checking experiment led by NewsTrust, in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity. Together, we are developing a pro-am network to fact-check political claims during the 2012 elections - and aim to extend this small pilot site into a daily service by early 2012. By combining the Center's newsroom of investigative journalists with our moderated crowd-sourcing service and contributions from our partners, we hope to provide daily fact-checks, as well as engage visitors as active participants to verify controversial claims.