In this issue:
The world’s oceans may be more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought. As more dead zones (patches of ocean severely deprived of oxygen) are being discovered, scientists exploring prehistoric mass marine extinctions now believe another round of extinctions is likely.
“What’s alarming to us as scientists is that there were only very slight natural changes [in the Late Cretaceous period] that resulted in the onset of hypoxia in the deep ocean,” says Martin Kennedy of the University of Adelaide’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. This suggests a vulnerability to the more-rapid increase of CO2 that is predicted over the next 50 years. It’s like “hitting our ecosystem with a sledgehammer,” he says.
Nature may have its own cure for “greenhouse oceans,” however. Kennedy and fellow researcher Thomas Wagner of Newcastle University observe that certain minerals in soils help in collecting and burying organic matter dissolved in seawater. And burying the excess carbon helps to restore marine oxygen concentrations and to cool the planet-oceans and all.
Source: University of Adelaide http://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news45241.html
“Clay mineral continental amplifier for marine carbon sequestration in a greenhouse ocean” by Martin Kennedy and Thomas Wagner (posted May 16, 2011) is available from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/12/1018670108.full.pdf+html?sid=31daf44c-6579-4b6a-b08d-7606a300a4ca
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is requesting ideas and information to help get the recently launched 100 Year Starship Study a little further off the ground. Specifically, DARPA is interested in business model proposals for sustaining private investment in long-distance interstellar travel over the next hundred years or longer. (The project will be free of government funding and oversight.)
The 100 Year Starship Study, a collaborative effort between DARPA and NASA, is an initiative to develop what the organizations are calling “the next era of space exploration” — an endeavor that is projected to extend over the next few generations.
Sources: 100 Year Starship Study, 100yearstarshipstudy.com. DARPA, http://www.darpa.mil.
A new mathematical model for predicting how quickly given technologies will improve could enable policy makers and venture capitalists to pick tech winners from losers a lot more easily. The model measures a design’s cost and complexity to forecast how easily it might be upgraded, or innovated compared with other designs.
“It gives you a way to think about how the structure of the technology affects the rate of improvement,” says Jessika Trancik, assistant professor of engineering systems at MIT, one of the authors of a recent paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers found that, the more complex a technology, the more time, effort, and money will go into improving it and the slower it will get better.
How might the model be used? Pretend for a moment that you’re a venture capitalist and you have to pick between two companies that make solar cells. Each company is marketing its own patented design; one converts more of the sun’s energy into electricity, but the other is easier to build. The model can tell you which of one of the two to invest in on the basis of whether the benefits of one (efficiency) are justified by the costs (complexity). The price of material and other factors may also be entered in to refine the calculation and provide a better prediction.
The researchers hope the model will also help designers improve their products and manufacturing processes.
Sources: MIT http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/accelerated-discovery-0517.html.
Read the paper, courtesy of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/12/1017298108.full.pdf+html
The Virtual Economy — roughly defined as exchanges of virtual goods, links, and digital labor such as tweeting — is valued at $3 billion, according to an April report commissioned by the World Bank. The report also lays out future growth areas and growing service sectors for the Virtual Economy. Among them:
“Entrepreneurs should focus on digital micro-work that benefits society. Examples include transcribing books, translating documents, and improving search-engine results,” said Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and the study’s main author.
Sources: World Bank http://www.infodev.org/en/Document.1056.pdf, Vili Lehdonvirta (personal site) http://virtual-economy.org/blog/world_bank_virtual_economy_rep.
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A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed.
The former executive director of MoveOn.org warns that more-personalized Internet searching may have hidden side effects. Read more
The President of the World Future Society lays out how smart technology will change the way we live and work. Read more
Arizona State University engineer Braden Allenby and Arizona State science and society professor Dan Sarewitz, authors of The Techno-Human Condition, talk to FUTURIST magazine assistant editor Rick Docksai about humanity’s capacities to keep up with innovation. Read more
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