Asian Rice Production may Slow Down due to Higher Temperatures

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

Production of rice — the world’s most important crop for ensuring food security and addressing poverty — will be thwarted as temperatures increase in rice-growing areas with continued climate change, according to a new study by an international team of scientists.The research team found evidence that the net impact of projected temperature increases will be to slow the growth of rice production in Asia. Rising temperatures during the past 25 years have already cut the yield growth rate by 10-20 percent in several locations.Around three billion people eat rice every day, and more than 60 percent of the world’s one billion poorest and undernourished people who live in Asia depend on rice as their staple food.

Study found that as the daily minimum temperature increases, or as nights get hotter, rice yields drop.

Published in the online early edition the week of Aug. 9, 2010 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the report analyzed six years of data from 227 irrigated rice farms in six major rice-growing countries in Asia, which produces more than 90 percent of the world’s rice.

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Posted in climate change, Environment, Food, food security, Global Warming | Leave a comment

Brain’s Wiring is More Like the Internet Than a Pyramid

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

The brain has been mapped to the smallest fold for at least a century, but still no one knows how all the parts talk to each other.

A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences answers that question for a small area of the rat brain and in so doing takes a big step toward revealing the brain’s wiring.It suggests that the distributed network of the Internet may be a better model for the human brain than a top-down hierarchy.

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Get directions using eyeglasses Using GPS

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

Japanese engineers have created a prototype device that places GPS navigation technology into a pair of wearable, seemingly everyday, glasses. The prototype specs, which were unveiled at Wireless Japan 2010 expo in Tokyo, offer an insight into how future GPS navigation systems could work. The glasses, known as the ‘Wearable Personal Navigation System’, house a battery, a microcomputer, a magnetic directional sensor and a number of LED lights. To put the glasses to work on getting users to their destination, users would need to enter their destination using a computer. Once a walking route has been calculated and sent over to the glasses. The glasses have integrated LEDs postioned in a circular fashion around the frame. The LEDs, which are visible in a user’s peripheral field of vision, will then change their colour and placement in order to show which direction users should be walking. The engineers responsible for the glasses at the University of Electro-Communications’ Nakajima Laboratory explained that navigation systems available today have a few problems that this prototype aims to solve. Current GPS devices–such as smartphones–require users to look down at a display while moving, instead of watching where you’re going. With these glasses, you’d be able to look ahead instead of looking down. With a little more development and a sleeker design (maybe in sunglasses?) this product would no doubt have its place within any geek’s gadget collection.

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Greenland Glacier Calves Ice Island Four Times the Size of Manhattan

Posted on August 8, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

A University of Delaware researcher reports that an “ice island” four times the size of Manhattan has calved from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. The last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk of ice was in 1962.Satellite imagery of this remote area at 81 degrees N latitude and 61 degrees W longitude, about 620 miles [1,000 km] south of the North Pole, reveals that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile long [70 km] floating ice-shelf.

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