Rekordtemperaturen und Überschwemmungen – Superlative in immer kürzeren Intervallen. Und der Mensch hat das zum größten Teil selbst zu verantworten.
Die Fakten sprechen eine deutliche Sprache: Die Erde erwärmt sich weiterhin in einem rasanten Tempo und die Meeresspiegel steigen stärker an als bisher prognostiziert. Das besagt der jüngste Report des sogenannten Zwischenstaatlichen Ausschusses für Klimaänderungen (IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), der am Freitag, dem 27. September in Stockholm veröffentlicht wurde. (more…)
North Carolina State University researchers have developed a way for search engines to provide users with more accurate, personalized search results. The challenge in the past has been how to scale this approach up so that it doesn’t consume massive computer resources. Now the researchers have devised a technique for implementing personalized searches that is more than 100 times more efficient than previous approaches.
At issue is how search engines handle complex or confusing queries. For example, if a user is searching for faculty members who do research on financial informatics, that user wants a list of relevant webpages from faculty, not the pages of graduate students mentioning faculty or news stories that use those terms. That’s a complex search. (more…)
University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.
Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — Brain drain is so severe in Ethiopia that the nation’s health minister has complained there are more Ethiopian doctors in Chicago than in his own country.(more…)
Times of India Leads Online News Ranking, While Also Generating Significant Traffic from Abroad
New Delhi, 1 October 2013 – comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a report highlighting online news readership in India based on data from its comScore MMX service. The report showed that there has been significant growth in daily readership of news and information content in the past year, with an increase of 34 percent to 9.4 million average daily visitors to the category. (more…)
Enduring two typhoons over a three-week period in August, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers, working in partnership with the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), have successfully deployed an OceanCube Observatory System in waters off Motobu Peninsula, Japan — a biodiversity hotspot that is home to ecologically significant coral reefs. The observatory system enables real-time monitoring of temperature, salinity, and other chemical, biological and physical data critical to understanding the health of and changes in the coral reef ecosystem.
Okinawa is situated at the northernmost end of the border between the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. The coral reefs there support the highest diversity of endemic species, plants and animals in the world. These coral reefs are also economically valuable, generating as much as 3 trillion yen ($30 billion) globally, and 250 billion yen ($2.5 billion) in Japan. (more…)
Cost control is one of the major challenges that companies face and when it’s for a small business, things come to survivability. Thus, the latest technologies and tools that promise to cut down the costs of a company is readily tested and accepted by the small business concerns. VoIP/IP telephony or online applications to make cheap/free calls are always welcome by the business owners who would like to enjoy anything doesn’t have a price tag attached to it.
There are many business owners who work with overseas clients and frequently travelling is not a very feasible option. Travelling abroad is not at all a financially viable option, if it has to be undertaken quite frequently. Phone conferences were a great way to have one-to-one meetings but it had its own downsides – they were costly and very difficult to arrange. Phone conferences often proved to be confusing and led to misunderstandings. Internet and especially after the advent of broadband, it has become really easy for medium and small-scale companies to maintain cheaper communication channels with their clients. (more…)
Nur internationaler Protest kann ihr Aussterben jetzt noch verhindern
Berlin – Erneut ist an der Küste Neuseelands ein Maui-Delfin tot aufgefunden worden. Damit hat sich der Bestand der kleinsten und seltensten Meeresdelfine der Welt weiter verringert. Zurzeit rechnen Experten nur noch mit zirka 46 lebenden Tieren. Noch vor vierzig Jahren gab es etwa 1800 Maui-Delfine. Verantwortlich für den Rückgang der Population ist die Küstenfischerei mit Stell- und Schleppnetzen.
„Erst kürzlich hat die neuseeländische Regierung einen neuen Schutzplan für einen weiteren kleinen Teil des Verbreitungsgebietes der Maui-Delfine aufgelegt. Diese Pläne sind jedoch völlig unzulänglich und zielen darauf ab die Öffentlichkeit zu beschwichtigen“, sagt Thomas Tennhardt, Vorsitzender der NABU International Naturschutzstiftung, die sich seit ihrer Gründung für den Schutz der Mauis engagiert. „Neuseeland ignoriert die dringenden Empfehlungen der weltweiten Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft. Damit riskiert das Land sein grünes Image.“ (more…)
