Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

The largest algal bloom ever recorded in China has turned the Yellow Sea green and may be related to pollution from agriculture and industry. The Guardian reports

Officials in the city of Qingdao had used bulldozers to remove 7,335 tonnes of the growth from beaches according to the Xinhua news agency.

The phenomenon has become an annual occurrence in the region over the past six summers. This year’s incident has swathed 28 900 sq km (11 158 sq miles), twice as much as the previous biggest bloom in 2008.

The algae, called Enteromorpha prolifera, is not toxic to humans or animals.

However the carpet on the surface can dramatically change the ecology of the environment beneath it. It blocks sunlight from entering the ocean and sucks oxygen from the water suffocating marine life.

The algae thrives on an abundance of nutrients in the sea. University of Cambridge and 

The July/August Issue of Fast Company Magazine has an interesting article about why are cars should change from what is essentially a black box technology platform on wheels to a more open technology platform like Android. If a car was more like a mobile app running android, we could install apps that tap into our cars sensors and other data. This would allow us to do all types of stuff (like driving better, for example). The article quotes Thejo Kote, CEO of Automatic, as saying: “Your car is the most expensive computer you own..but it is a black box. You don’t have access to it.”

The article also talks about some of the challenges to making your car more open to application developers, It then mentions an open source project that is trying to overcome some of these problems. That open source project is OpenXC, which provides a standard programming…

Juhu beach in Mumbai, India, is crowded out with people. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

At any public meeting on the environment over the past decade , there’s one question that almost always came up. It is a variation of ‘Why will no one talk about population?’ As a result, population is discussed endlessly while people grumble that no one ever talks about it.

The same oddly circular conversation happened in the Observer Review section in an article relating to the new book, 10 Billion, by Stephen Emmott, head of Microsoft’s Research Lab. Five full pages of extract and interview warned, ‘we’re ignoring … the biggest crisis in human history.’