State of the World 2007: Notable Trends | Worldwatch Institute

State of the World 2007: Notable Trends | Worldwatch Institute: "* In the last half-century, the world’s urban population has increased nearly fourfold, from 732 million in 1950 to more than 3.2 billion in 2006. (p. 7)

* Africa now has 350 million urban dwellers, more than the populations of Canada and the United States combined. Asia and Africa are expected to double their urban populations to roughly 3.4 billion by 2030. (p. 4)

* The vast majority of net additions to the human population—88 percent of the growth from 2000 to 2030—will be urban dwellers in low- and middle-income countries. (p. 7)"

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR)

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Yet, contrary to what many in India might think, China is not a malevolent, sinister international entity out there to demolish India, but a state which is simply pursuing its own strategic interests in a hard-headed fashion on its way to great power status. It is time for India to realize that India's great power aspirations cannot be realized without a similar cold-blooded realistic assessment of its own strategic interests in an anarchic international system where there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR)

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "There is also nothing extraordinarily benign in China's attempts to improve its bilateral relations with India in recent times. After cutting India down to size in various ways, China does not want India to move closer to the United States in order to contain China. On this geopolitical chessboard, while both Washington and Beijing are using India toward their own strategic ends, India has ended up primarily reacting to the actions of other."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR)

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "This is not much different than the stated U.S. policy of preventing the rise of other powers that might threaten its position as a global power. Just as the United States is working toward achieving its strategic objective, China is pursuing its own strategic agenda."

Foreign Policy: The Hidden Pandemic

Foreign Policy: The Hidden Pandemic: "So what drives up crime rates? Researchers can agree upon little beyond the general notion that crime soars in places where there is a combination of a high percentage of young males, ample drugs, and easy access to guns. Economic inequality and urbanization also accelerate crime rates (but experts disagree by how much). And, once criminal behavior takes root in a neighborhood or city, it takes a long time and an immense effort to reclaim the streets.

It is easy to dismiss growing crime rates as either a local problem or one that has been with us since time immemorial. But that would be a major mistake. Because, though we may have recently lost ground, the problem has the potential to be a far greater global nightmare. Consider China and India. They have growing populations of young males, growing levels of economic inequality, and rapid urbanization. And, though drugs and guns are still relatively hard to come by, they’re becoming easier to obtain every day. If these two nations become more like other poor countries in this regard, too, their crime rates could soar to unimagined levels. Suffice it to say, the crime pandemic would never be hidden from anyone again."

Foreign Policy: The Hidden Pandemic

Foreign Policy: The Hidden Pandemic: "The world is experiencing a crime pandemic. Crime rates are on the rise almost everywhere, and these statistics typically are distinct from the death and mayhem that comes with terrorism, civil war, or major conflict. The data reflect the booming number of civilians assaulted, robbed, or murdered by other civilians who live in the same city, often in the same neighborhood. Frequently, the victims are as poor as the criminals."

Europe of 2057: A big future is seen in poll - International Herald Tribune

Europe of 2057: A big future is seen in poll - International Herald Tribune: "PARIS: The Europe of 2057 is a larger place, its borders stretched eastward to encompass Turkey and, probably, Russia. It is a greener place, where wind and sun power have supplanted fossil fuels. It has been the battleground for at least one new war. And the dominant language is English.

This vision of Europe's future emerges from a new trans-Atlantic poll timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the European Union. The results are not uniform across the six countries polled — Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States — but, as through a hazy crystal ball, images of the world to come take shape."

WFS Forecasts for the Next 25 Years

WFS Forecasts for the Next 25 Years: "Forecast #9: Companies will see the age range of their workers span four generations. Workers over the age of 55 are expected to grow from 14% of the labor force to 19% by 2012. In less than five years, 77 million baby boomers in the United States will begin reaching age 65, the traditional retirement age. As a result, the idea of 'retirement' will change significantly."

WFS Forecasts for the Next 25 Years

WFS Forecasts for the Next 25 Years: "Forecast #1: Generation Y will migrate heavily overseas. For the first time, the United States will see a significant proportion of its population emigrate due to overseas opportunities. According to futurists Arnold Brown and Edie Weiner, Generation Y, the population segment born between 1978 and 1995, may be the first generation in U.S. history to have many of its members leave the U.S. to pursue large portions of their lives, if not their entire adult lives, overseas."

WFS Forecasts for the Next 25 Years

WFS Forecasts for the Next 25 Years: "Forecast #3: Workers will increasingly choose more time over more money. The productivity boom in the U.S. economy during the twentieth century created a massive consumer culture--people made more money, so they bought more stuff. In the twenty-first century, however, workers will increasingly choose to trade higher salaries for more time with their families. Nearly a third of U.S. workers recently polled said they would prefer more time off rather than more hours of paid employment."

Planet Gets a Lemon as Global Car Industry Revs Up | Worldwatch Institute

Planet Gets a Lemon as Global Car Industry Revs Up | Worldwatch Institute: "The world’s auto manufacturers produced a record 67 million vehicles in 2006, putting more cars on the road than ever before, according to a new Vital Signs Update from the Worldwatch Institute. While global production grew 4 percent last year, China increased its production by nearly 30 percent, overtaking Germany to become the third largest producer.

'America’s car addiction is becoming a global phenomenon with no sign of reversing,” says Worldwatch Senior Researcher Michael Renner, who authored the update. “This trend begs immediate and innovative transportation solutions to address the consumption of fossil fuels that is harming our climate.”

China’s rise represents the most dramatic change in the world auto industry, with production there more than quintupling in the last decade. Sales within China surpassed the 3 million mark in 2005, with nearly 9 million passenger cars on the country’s roads. While this is still a comparatively small fleet, it is likely to grow rapidly in coming years, and China is expected to become a major exporter within the next four years."

Traffic congestion, road accidents, air pollution, climate change, and peak oil are all challenges the world faces from car-centered transportation, according to the Institute’s State of the World 2007 report. On average, urban car travel uses nearly twice as much energy as urban bus travel.

Global Incident Map Displaying Terrorist Acts, Suspicious Activity, and General Terrorism News

Global Incident Map Displaying Terrorist Acts, Suspicious Activity, and General Terrorism News: "Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity"

Saving Earth From the Ground Up - washingtonpost.com

Saving Earth From the Ground Up - washingtonpost.com: "Exactly 250 years after the Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus gave science the means to catalogue the living Earth, with his system of scientific sorting and naming, 'we may have discovered at a crude guess 10 percent of the life forms on Earth,' said Wilson. 'We are flying blind in many aspects of preserving the environment, and that's why we are so surprised when a species like the honeybee starts to crash, or an insect we don't want, the Asian tiger mosquito or the fire ant, appears in our midst.' In other words: Start thinking about the bugs."

Change to gene theory raises new challenges for biotech - International Herald Tribune

Change to gene theory raises new challenges for biotech - International Herald Tribune: "Last month, a consortium of scientists published findings that challenge the traditional view of the way genes function. The exhaustive, four-year effort was organized by the United States National Human Genome Research Institute and carried out by 35 groups from 80 organizations around the world. To their surprise, researchers found that the human genome might not be a 'tidy collection of independent genes' after all, with each sequence of DNA linked to a single function, like a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.

Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood. According to the institute, these findings will challenge scientists 'to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do.'"

Foreign Affairs - Book Review - The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times - Odd Arne Westad

Foreign Affairs - Book Review - The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times - Odd Arne Westad: "The Cold War began and ended in Europe, but some of its most severe effects were felt in the Third World. Despite the fact that both the United States and the Soviet Union could claim impressive anticolonial credentials, they viewed the upheavals set in motion by decolonization as an extension of their confrontation. The consequent interventions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America tended to extend and accentuate local quarrels, with dismal consequences for all."

Foreign Affairs - The Special Relationship, Then and Now - Lawrence D. Freedman

Foreign Affairs - The Special Relationship, Then and Now - Lawrence D. Freedman: "A look back over recent decades reveals that the United States is by no means always the most ready to resort to armed force. The recently published Human Security Report, a study of modern conflict financed in part by the Canadian government, contains a table ranking countries according to their participation in international wars since 1946. The United Kingdom tops the list with 21 instances, followed by France (19) and the United States (16). Many of the British and French entries refer to attempts to hold on to or stabilize their former colonies (while the British were staying out of Vietnam, they were heavily engaged in Malaysia). But colonialism is only part of the story. Since the end of the Cold War, the United Kingdom and France have been regularly involved in humanitarian interventions. The war in Iraq was the fifth military operation Blair has authorized, after air strikes against Iraq in 1998 and operations in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan. This is not to mention the small contingent the British sent to East Timor."

Foreign Affairs - The Special Relationship, Then and Now - Lawrence D. Freedman

Foreign Affairs - The Special Relationship, Then and Now - Lawrence D. Freedman: "The incident serves as a reminder that the policies of major powers reflect a calculation of interests and an analysis of the dynamics of conflict -- and that the policies adopted by the United States are a product of shifting power balances within a particular administration as much as a product of any built-in ideological disposition."

KurzweilAI.net

KurzweilAI.net: "Critics say questions about dangers that could arise with manmade organisms -- which can reproduce on their own -- remain unaddressed.

'The notion is that, as we engineer more complex systems, our ability to predict their behavior diminishes,' said Boston University microbiologist James Collins. 'How can we ensure that we don't create something dangerous? Now is the time to start thinking about it.'"

The Singularity Institute Blog : Blog Archive : The Power of Intelligence

The Singularity Institute Blog : Blog Archive : The Power of Intelligence: "Well, one trick cured smallpox and built airplanes and cultivated wheat and tamed fire. Our current science may not agree yet on how exactly the trick works, but it works anyway. If you are temporarily ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about your current state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon. A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory. If one does not quite understand that power which put footprints on the Moon, nonetheless, the footprints are still there - real footprints, on a real Moon, put there by a real power. If one were to understand deeply enough, one could create and shape that power. Intelligence is as real as electricity. It’s merely far more powerful, far more dangerous, has far deeper implications for the unfolding story of life in the universe - and it’s a tiny little bit harder to figure out how to build a generator."

Swarm Behavior - National Geographic Magazine

Swarm Behavior - National Geographic Magazine: "Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights. "

Wired Science - Wired Blogs

Wired Science - Wired Blogs: "Synthetic biology -- the emerging science of creating genomes, cellular components and even whole cellular organisms from scratch -- confronts regulators with some tricky problems. At the moment, the research and its products aren't exactly unregulated -- the NIH has rules for conducting biotech research, the FDA would still evaluate a drug made by synthetic organism, the EPA would oversee the potential release of synthetic organisms into the environment -- but it's not entirely clear whether synthetic biology could pose new, unexpected challenges."

Humanity gobbles a quarter of nature's resources - earth - 02 July 2007 - New Scientist Environment

Humanity gobbles a quarter of nature's resources - earth - 02 July 2007 - New Scientist Environment: "'If we want full-scale replacement of fossil fuels by biofuels, this would have dramatic implications for ecosystems,' says Haberl. He warns that some projections foresee four or fivefold increases in biofuel production.

This would mean clearing what remains of the world’s rainforests in countries such as Brazil and Argentina.

As well as wiping out thousands of species, this would have devastating effects on the climate, he argues. Unlike farmland, forests help to seed rainfall because they have high evaporation rates. 'The less evaporation there is, the less rainfall there is and the whole system dries up,' "

World Oil Supplies to Run out Faster than Expected – (Independent – June 14, 2007)
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2656034.ece
BP's recently published study shows that the world still has enough "proven" reserves to provide 40 years of consumption at current rates. The assessment, based on officially reported figures, has once again pushed back the estimate of when the world will run dry. However, scientists led by the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, say that global production of oil is set to peak in the next four years before entering a steepening decline which will have massive consequences for the world economy and the way that we live our lives. Clearly the experts are not all on the same page in this matter. However, everyone agrees that demand is surging.

100 Most Endangered Sites – (Reuters – June 9, 2007)
http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/group-names-100-most-endangered-sites/
20070608175609990001?cid=2359
Rising seas, spreading deserts, intensifying weather and other harbingers of climate change are threatening cultural landmarks from Canada to Antarctica, according to the World Monuments Fund. This year's list of the 100 most endangered sites includes 59 countries. The United States is home to more listed sites than any other country with seven sites noted.

KurzweilAI.net

KurzweilAI.net
In 100 billion years, everything we can see except local galaxies will have been pushed so far away by the universe's expansion that all other sources of light will have been redshifted beyond our ability to detect them, according to a paper that will appear in October.

All matter other than that in our galaxy will be invisible, and our view of the universe will look like it did in the pre-Hubble days. The cosmic microwave background, which has provided our most detailed understanding of the Big Bang, will also be gone.