Friday, January 21, 2011
There are today 7 billion humans living on this tiny planet. According to
recent figures, 5 billion of them have a cell phone (a mobile outside the
US). Few of them have any idea how these incredibly complex devices work,
making this the most attractive market on Earth. There are several ways to
tap this incredible market without selling cell phones. You might, for
example, sell books warning about the dangers of cell phones. More than a
dozen books have been published in the last few years warning that the
population problem might be solved the hard way, as cell phone users begin
to succumb to cancer. When will this be? Cell phones have been in
widespread use for about 10 years. According to Devra Davis, author
of "Disconnect," the latency period for cell-phone cancer can be decades.
This has revived the EMF paranoia that was set off two decades ago when the
New Yorker ran a scientifically illiterate series by writer Paul Brodeur
linking power-line fields to childhood leukemia. Although books linking
cell phones to cancer enjoy brisk sales it does not seem to have dampened
public infatuation with the cell phone. People can't imagine giving them
up. It has, however, created a new industry: cell phone protection
technology, such as the Q-Link Diode For Cell Phone & EMF Protection. This
is too depressing to continue.
Despite a ban, the charcoal trade in Somalia is booming. One Somali
parliamentarian declared that deforestation in Somalia for charcoal is more
dangerous for the country than piracy. In nearby Northern Kenya, the
numbers on the verge of starvation, some 5 million people, now far exceeds
the population of the whole country less than a century ago. What brought
this about? Earth cannot sustain an advanced population of 7 billion
without severe degradation of the environment. The signs are everywhere:
global warming, peak oil, ocean garbage patches, and deforestation.
The most exciting scientific treasure on Earth is about to be revealed. A
Russian drilling team is on the verge of reaching the surface of the lake,
1300 km from the South Pole, according to a story in yesterday's Nature.
It is the last uncharted environment on Earth. Drilling began 20 years ago,
and they must reach the liquid water by February 6 or wait until next
December. They must proceed carefully to avoid contamination of the
untouched environment.
The Department of Energy announced on 10 Jan 2011 that the United States
will close its only particle collider, the Tevatron, located at Fermilab in
Batavia, Illinois. The decision was contrary to the recommendations of the
US particle-physics communitys scientific advisory group, which believes
that the machine still has work to do. There is, of course always more
that can be done, but resources are finite. The Tevatron learned the things
it was built to learn and more; its closure should be seen as a measure of
scientific progress.
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