TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| On Work Tour in the West, Obama Visits Old Faithful This weekend, the president is pushing a plan for a health care overhaul, and getting in some family time. nytimes.com |
DNA could offer captive-breeding alternative to snow leopard studbook Captive breeding of endangered snow leopards ( Panthera uncia ) has relied since 1976 on an international studbook that matches animals at zoos around the world for purposes of keeping the big cats from becoming too inbred. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Nano-Risks: A Big Need for a Little Testing A decade ago the great worry about nanotechnology was that it could quite literally destroy the planet. As Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy warned in his essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” self-assembling nanobots could potentially spread out of our control (Mis-)programmed to replicate ad infinitum, these subsentient bots would spread across the landscape as a gray goo of devastation, consuming the earth and every unlucky creature who called it home.Nowadays we can only wish that our planet-dooming scenarios were so far-fetched. Our existential worries revolve around the all too immediate problems of global warming and disease, and nanotechnology--incorporated into improved solar panels, wind turbines or drug delivery mechanisms--could, if anything, emerge as an important tool to fight these threats. [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Rise of Instant Wireless Networks (preview) In this era of Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone, it is easy to take for granted our ability to connect to the world. Yet communication is most critical precisely at those times when the communications infrastructure is lost. In Haiti, for example, satellite phones provided by aid agencies were the primary method of communication for days following the tragic earthquake earlier this year. But even ordinary events such as a power outage could cripple the cell phone infrastructure, turning our primary emergency contact devices into glowing paperweights.In situations such as these, an increasingly attractive option is to create an “ad-hoc” network. Such networks form on their own wherever specially programmed mobile phones or other communications devices are in range of one another. Each device in the network acts as both transmitter and receiver and, crucially, as a relay point for all the other devices nearby. Devices that are out of range can communicate if those between them are willing to help--passing messages from one to the next like water in a bucket brigade. In other words, each node in the network functions as both a communicator for its own messages and infrastructure for the messages of others. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Eternal Fascinations with the End: Why We're Suckers for Stories of Our Own Demise Editor's note: This is the introductory article for the September 2010 special issue "The End" . Once again, the world is about to end. The latest source of doomsday dread comes courtesy of the ancient Mayans, whose calendar runs out in 2012, as interpreted by a cadre of opportunistic authors and blockbuster movie directors. Not long before, three separate lawsuits charged that the Large Hadron Collider would seed a metastasizing black hole under Lake Geneva. Before that, captains of industry shelled out billions preparing for the appearance of two zeros in the date field of computer programs too numerous to count; left alone, this tick of the clock would surely have shaken modern civilization to its foundations. [More] Black hole - Large Hadron Collider - Physics - Modern history - Relativity rss.sciam.com |