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Sleep May Help Clear Brain For New Learning
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A new theory about sleep's benefits for the brain gets a boost from fruit flies in the journal Science.
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
found evidence that sleep, already recognized as a promoter of
long-term memories, also helps clear room in the brain for new learning.
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The World Health Organisation raises its warning of a global pandemic of swine flu
BY THE morning of Thursday April 30th 2,500 Mexicans were known to have symptoms that looked like the result of a new strain of influenza, and more than 170 had died, though only eight of the dead were confirmed carriers of the new virus. That virus has now turned up in 12 other countries on four continents and the deaths have begun beyond Mexico’s borders, starting with a baby in Texas. This could be the beginning of an influenza pandemic.
On Wednesday the World Health Organisation (WHO) promoted the new disease to level five of its six-level pandemic alert. Some countries have built up stocks of antiviral drugs. Luckily, they seem to work against the new strain. Vigilance at borders is being redoubled. China and Russia have started quarantining visitors with suspicious symptoms. Asian airports have dusted off heat-sensing equipment they had installed after earlier scares caused by cases of avian flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), to detect sick incoming passengers.
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The crisis has hit the emirate hard, but it is wrong to write it off
THE first glamorous residents have already made a home for themselves at “The World”, an archipelago of 300 artificial islands (pictured above) created off the coast of Dubai by Nakheel, one of the emirate’s big three developers. Pilot fish and parrot fish have colonised the man-made reef surrounding the islands. The reef, built from 34m tonnes of rock, forms a protective ring around the islands—a breakwater that stops the Gulf’s currents from slowly washing The World away.
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Nė shpėtim tė Qytetit tė Argjendtė
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Përpjekjet për të ruajtur këtë thesar shqiptar pak të njohur të periudhës Osmane
Nga Oliver Gilkes
Sajtet arkeologjike që ndodhen ngado në luginën e lumit Drini, në Shqipërinë jugore dëshmojnë një të kaluar të pasur historike, që nga Koha e Gurit deri në Erën Atomike. Një “fabrikë” me përmasa vërtet industriale për prodhim veglash guri e Mezolitit, që daton deri në 9000 pes., ndodhet në një rreze prej 5 kilometrash nga rrënojat mahnitëse të Antigonesë, qytet i shek IV p.e.s., themeluar nga Mbreti Pirro i Epirit, si dhe rrënojat e qytetit tjetër antik Adrianopol, ndërtuar nga perandori romak Adrian rreth vitit 125 e.j. Të gjitha këto rrethohen nga radhë bunkerësh ndërtuar në vitet 1980 për të mbrojtur Shqipërinë prej një sulmi te imagjinuar nga diktatori ksenofob Enver Hoxha.
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The Rise Of The Social Nervous System
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Joshua-Michele Ross
The Internet now connects humanity into a hive mind. Is that a good thing?
No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
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It's difficult to track the number of words in the English language, since neologisms--new words--are coined every day. The Global Language Monitor claims our lexicon will welcome its millionth word in the coming weeks; other experts disagree. Whenever it does occur, will the millionth word be something from the business world, like "carpocalypse," describing the state of the automotive industry? Or from Hollywood, like "momager," the mother of a celebrity who also serves as business manager? In these stories, we look at our changing language and highlight some of the new words that have entered it. Read on and you won't be an ugsome noob.
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With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King?
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Steve Lohr
In the Depression, smart college students flocked into civil engineering to design the highway, bridge and dam-building projects of those days. In the Sputnik era, students poured into the sciences as America bet on technology to combat the cold war Communist challenge. Yes, the jobs beckoned and the pay was good. But those careers, in their day, had other perks: respect and self-esteem.
Big shifts in the flow of talent can ripple through the nation and the economy for decades with lasting effect. The engineers of the Depression built everything from inter-city roads to the Hoover Dam, while the Sputnik-inspired scientists would go on, often with research funding from the Pentagon, to create the building-block innovations behind modern computing and the Internet.
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Lee Gomes
Inspiration: Still missing from computers is the sort of commonsense knowledge that humans have.
If you want computers to act smart, then program them to be dumb. That's been the guiding philosophy among computing researchers for nearly 20 years, and it's led to pay dirt in many forms, search engines included. A Google computer is as powerful as it is not because it knows anything about, say, "the causes of the civil war." Instead, it has lists of Web sites containing that string of characters, lists of other sites linking to them, and some well-tested rules for putting them together.
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LNG prices may tumble to as low as $0.70 MMBtu
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Shashank Shekhar
LNG prices have fallen to a-sixth of their value since their $25/MMBtu peak price in summer last year, market feedbacks indicate.
In a report titled 'Swimming in natural gas', Francisco Blanch, the famed Merrill Lynch energy analyst, said the supply of the clean fuel may outstrip its demand manifold this summer further plummeting its price to $0.70/MMBtu.
The lack of an OpecOpecLoading...-style organisation has allowed a free-fall of LNG prices, market insiders said.
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Sramana Mitra
Entrepreneurs can build future prosperity. But we first need to fix capitalism's systemic cultural problems.
I met Nassim Nicholas Taleb in San Francisco's Fort Mason Center once. Taleb is now famous for The Black Swan, a book through which he has popularized the idea that random accidents and uncertainties--he calls them Black Swans--determine the course of history and the trajectories of people's lives. (See "The Oracle of Doom.") I asked him, "What are you going to do about your thesis?" He answered, "I don't do. I just think and write."
For the moment, I have also been thinking and writing. My thinking has led me to conclude that innovation is a crucial need of the hour. But we have systemic problems holding innovation back.
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