Len Rosen's blog

This is my last posting for the next few days. I will be taking my office apart so that we can move to our new apartment downtown next Tuesday. I will be unplugged and disconnected except by tablet. Expect me to be back in the saddle before the end of next week probably in time to provide you with some more headlines. In the interim these are the stories I share with you this week:

In this month's Report on Business Magazine, a supplement that comes with The Globe and Mail, one of Canada's national newspapers, Stanford University's Mark Jacobson provides a best case scenario

A team of researchers are asking the public to help them locate and count all the sources of CO2 coming from power plants on the planet.

Initial results from a selective breeding program at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany based in Cambridge in the UK, indicate the successful creation of a new super wheat.

Off-the-grid solar power is one of the solutions that could dramatically alter the lives of an estimated 1.5 billion humans who today have no access to electricity. Of these 80% come from countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. And of that 89% of the 80% live in rural areas versus 46% in urban locations.

If you ever have used a salad spinner to dry out your lettuce then you know the principle behind the GiraDora, loosely meaning "spinning washing machine" in Spanish.

It's official. The observatory atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii recorded on Thursday this week that we had reached 400.08 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Another interesting week of technology and science announcements has led me to pick the following five stories:

• World's Biggest Companies Tackling Climate Change;
• Idaho Potato Gets Better by Mixing Genes from Five Spud Varieties;
• Google Timelapse Shows Decades of Planetary Change in Seconds;

My wife and I have been downsizing and ridding ourselves of over 40 years of furniture collecting as we prepare to move to our new apartment in downtown Toronto. IKEA, the assemble-it-yourself furniture store, has figured largely in our lives in the last few months as we replace the old with some new things that are a better fit for our smaller space.

It occurred to me today as I was reading about researchers being able to reliably predict snowstorms on Mars, that what we humans are doing here on Earth could be perfect for terraforming our red neighbour.