Half the planet may face Food Crisis

Humanity must adapt to climate change now or face food crises that will affect half the world's population by 2100, warns a team of scientists led by David Battisti of the University of Washington, Seattle.

Rapid warming alters crop yields in both the tropics and subtropics, with the most-severe potential food shortages hitting the equatorial belt, home to the world's fastest-growing and poorest populations.  Water supplies are also affected by the climate, further imperiling food security, according to Battisti.

Studying historic food disruptions and temperature change, the researchers found that humanity has been able to adapt to conditions.  In the future, however, food systems will need to be rethought completely, the researchers argue. For instance, wheat currently makes up one-fourth of the calories consumed in India, but wheat yields there have been stagnant for a decade.

"We have to be rethinking agriculture systems as a whole, not only thinking about new varieties but also recognizing that many people will just move out of agriculture, and even move from the lands where they live now," says team member Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment.

Source - University of Washington, Seattle

Aussie travellers Google before they go

I was recently interviewed for an article written by Britt Smith of SMH.  The following is her article.

Aussie travellers Google before they go

Cyber-savvy tourists are travelling to their holiday destinations from their desks, long before they get on an aeroplane.

With the click of a mouse, soon-to-be jetsetters are transported into cities where they zoom around the streets, check out hotels and find the nearest pizza joint, bus stop or internet cafe.

And Australians can't get enough of the sophisticated, cyberspace tools.

About 20 million maps are being viewed on the internet in Australia every month - the third-most searched item after giant search engines Google and Yahoo, according to Sydney-based innovation expert Craig Rispin, who has worked for IBM and Apple.

And Nielsen NetRatings figures show Google Maps alone has 2.6 million Australian users each month.

"That's a lot of maps, that's huge, that's gigantic. People are really getting into this location-based searching," Rispin says.

"It's about imagining. Think about the amount of time people spend imagining what their holidays are going to be like - it's probably more time than they actually spend on their holidays.

"But now with the tools they don't have to visualise it - they have pictures."

Sophisticated cyberspace tools like Google Earth, Street View, and photo-sharing sites Flickr, are futuristic guide books that lets users fly anywhere in the world to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, buildings and up-to-date photos. They can even access street-level images of several countries.

The genius of the devices is that they're a one-stop-shop allowing the traveller to try before they buy, says Rispin.

He calls the phenomenon "location-based searching," made possible by the latest web technology which weaves together 3D images and text.

Rispin, who makes more than 100 overseas trips a year and researches every one of them online, isn't alone.

A recent Google-commissioned survey of Australians with internet access showed that 50 per cent used maps in the trip research process, and 80 per cent of those were online.

The survey also found 70 per cent used a website to help them decide which destination to visit.

Google Australia's Head of Travel, Claire Hatton said maps are "by far the biggest" searched item in the online travel sector.

"There is no doubt about it. Using maps has always been crucial to the travel process, but now it's more accessible and viewable - you can actually see the street," she says.

"People are using (web maps) to chose destinations and decide where to stay. It's a major part of how consumers use online to research holidays."

Hatton says hotels and tour operators are also jumping on board, adding maps to their websites for increased usability. And travellers are creating their own online travel maps using Google to share with friends and strangers.

Aside from the statistics, Rispin, says map searching is already mainstream, judging by the number of people he hears talking about it. But travellers, he says, usually couple the practise with text-based research on websites like the American tripadviser.com, which carries the tag line `Get the truth. Then go'.

Australians make up about 6 per cent of the site's traffic, he says, and its popularity is owed to independent, user-generated reviews.

It's such accessible resources that make him so confident that the 25 per cent of Australians who research their holidays online, will skyrocket to two-thirds within two years.

They'll be quick to catch on. A few mouse clicks could prevent a disastrous trip, he jokes.

"If you have ever travelled to Paris you want to see what the hotel looks like before you get there. I mean, you can be in the really bad part of town and you don't have any idea before you go.

"Now you can walk the streets and go, `oh that's just down the road' (with a) couple of clicks of the map."

Google's top ten overseas destination searches for 2008:

1. New Zealand
   
2. China
   
3. Singapore
   
4. London
   
5. USA
   
6. Beijing
   
7. Japan
   
8. Paris
   
9. New York
   
10. France
    

Yahoo7's top travel searches for 2008:

1. Gold Coast
   
2. Noosa (Sunshine Coast)
   
3. Apollo Bay (on the Great Ocean Road)
   
4. Surfer's Paradise
   
5. Melbourne
   
6. Alice Springs
   
7. Port Douglas
   
8. New Zealand
   
9. Vietnam
   
10. Europe
    

Nanotechnology Breakthroughs of the Next 15 Years

Nanotechnology — the manipulation of materials and machines at the nano-scale — one billionth of a meter — promises exciting new developments. Interviews with a group of nanotechnology experts yielded this list of likely developments:

Two to five years from now:

Car tires that need air only once a year.

Complete medical diagnostics on a single computer chip.

Go-anywhere concentrators that produce drinkable water from air.

Five to 10 years:

Powerful computers you can wear or fold into your wallet.

Drugs that turn AIDS and cancer into manageable conditions.

Smart buildings that self-stabilize during earthquakes or bombings.

10 to 15 years:

Artificial intelligence so sophisticated you can't tell if you're talking on the phone with a human or a machine.

Paint-on computer and entertainment video displays.

Elimination of invasive surgery, since bodies can be monitored and repaired almost totally from within.

Source - World Future Society

Forecasts for the Next 25 Years

Would you like to know what the next 25 years holds?  Here are 10 thoughts from the World Future Society.

Forecast #1: The world will have a billion millionaires by 2025. Globalization and technological innovation are driving this increased prosperity. But challenges to prosperity will also become more acute, such as water shortages that will affect two-thirds of world population by 2025.

Forecast #2: Fashion will go wired as technologies and tastes converge to revolutionize the textile industry. Researchers in smart fabrics and intelligent textiles (SFIT) are working with the fashion industry to bring us color-changing or perfume-emitting jeans, wristwatches that work as digital wallets, and running shoes like the Nike +iPod that watch where you’re going (possibly allowing others to do the same). Powering these gizmos remains a key obstacle. But industry watchers estimate that a $400 million market for SFIT is already in place and predict that smart fabrics could revitalize the U.S. and European textile industry.

Forecast #3: The threat of another cold war with China, Russia, or both could replace terrorism as the chief foreign-policy concern of the United States. Scenarios for what a war with China or Russia would look like make the clashes and wars in which the United States is now involved seem insignificant. The power of radical jihadists is trivial compared with Soviet missile capabilities, for instance. The focus of U.S. foreign policy should thus be on preventing an engagement among Great Powers.

Forecast #4: Counterfeiting of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society. Sophisticated new optical scanning technologies could, in the next five years, be a boon for currency counterfeiters, so societies are increasingly putting aside their privacy fears about going cashless. Meanwhile, cashless technologies are improving, making them far easier and safer to use.

Forecast #5: The earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event. The twenty-first century could witness a biodiversity collapse 100 to 1,000 times greater than any previous extinction since the dawn of humanity, according to the World Resources Institute. Protecting biodiversity in a time of increased resource consumption, overpopulation, and environmental degradation will require continued sacrifice on the part of local, often impoverished communities. Experts contend that incorporating local communities’ economic interests into conservation plans will be essential to species protection in the next century.

Forecast #6: Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century. Global fresh water shortages and drought conditions are spreading in both the developed and developing world. In response, the dry state of California is building 13 desalination plants that could provide 10%-20% of the state’s water in the next two decades. Desalination will become more mainstream by 2020.

Forecast #7: World population by 2050 may grow larger than previously expected, due in part to healthier, longer-living people. Slower than expected declines of fertility in developing countries and increasing longevity in richer countries are contributing to a higher rate of population growth. As a result, the UN has increased its forecast for global population from 9.1 billion people by 2050 to 9.2 billion.

Forecast #8: The number of Africans imperiled by floods will grow 70-fold by 2080. The rapid urbanization taking place throughout much of Africa makes flooding particularly dangerous, altering the natural flow of water and cutting off escape routes. If global sea levels rise by the predicted 38 cm by 2080, the number of Africans affected by floods will grow from 1 million to 70 million.

Forecast #9: Rising prices for natural resources could lead to a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic. Not just oil and natural gas, but also the Arctic’s supplies of nickel, copper, zinc, coal, freshwater, forests, and of course fish are highly coveted by the global economy. Whether the Arctic states tighten control over these commodities or find equitable and sustainable ways to share them will be a major political challenge in the decades ahead.

Forecast #10: More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities. Electronically enabled teams in networks, robots with artificial intelligence, and other noncarbon life-forms will make financial, health, educational, and even political decisions for us. Reason: Technologies are increasing the complexity of our lives and human workers’ competency is not keeping pace well enough to avoid disasters due to human error.

Source - World Future Society