The LED lamp designed by Clay Moulton and named Gravia, forming a portion of his master’s thesis, has just won second place in the Greener Gadgets Design Competition as part of the Greener Gadgets Conference in New York City. ...

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If we have seen the possibilities and pitfalls in Big Science given to us by the American model, we also notice its results in other places,—for example in Japan. Japan's first experience with high-level business and industrial development forms a good illustration to see how one can get trapped on the economic path when something alien enters into the system. Yoshiro Hoshino writes: “There is nothing worse than war for bringing about the destruction of nature, human beings, factories, housing, and transportation systems, and for causing starvation and sickness, the discharge of untreated factory wastes, and the destruction of farm lands. When environmental destruction is understood in its broadest and most fundamental sense, the original culprit is war.” America, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, invaded Japan in another way. It looks as though the evil found another soil to grow and flourish in a vigorous manner. The present article Japan’s Second Defeat after the Second World War forms a chapter of my yet unpublished book Big Science and its Impact on Society....   more »

The poet Shelley, who immortalised the skylark, would have been saddened to know that threatened songbirds in Spain are losing their voice. A study has found Dupont’s lark, a relative of the skylark, is losing its singing range because numbers are falling. Biologists from the Donana National Park in Andalucia found that when male larks had fewer birds from which to learn new notes or ranges their repertoire decreased. The number of notes a male uses is vital in attracting females. Dupont’s lark, Chersophilus duponti, is found in Europe only in southern, central and north-east Spain and there are thought to be only 2,000 birds remaining as their natural habitat has been destroyed by man...    more »

On 29 March 2008, people around the world will switch off lights for one hour from 8-9 pm to show a stand against global warming...   more »

The fingerprints of man-made climate change are evident in seasonal timing changes for thousands of species on Earth, according to dozens of studies and last year’s authoritative report by the Nobel Prize-awarded international climate scientists. More than 30 scientists told The Associated Press how global warming is affecting plants and animals at springtime across the country, in almost every state. What is happening is so noticeable that scientists can track it from space. Satellites measuring when land turns green found that spring “green-up” is arriving eight hours earlier every year on average since 1982 in the northeastern United States...    more »

Among the giants of the imaginative promotion of the ideas of interplanetary travel, the colonising by man of nearby planets and the urgent need for peaceful exploration of outer space, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who has died aged 90, was pre-eminent, because of his hard and accurate predictions of the detailed technologies of space flight and the use of near-Earth space for global communications. Yet, in spite of his deep seriousness, JB Priestley described him in the 1950s as the happiest writer he had ever known. Tallish, bespectacled, rather big-eared and thinning on top, Clarke tended to be described by friends as a beaming and highly articulate shambles of a chap, a man to whom convention meant very little. Yet his mind was like a razor. Unlike earlier writers on space travel, his imagination and creativity sprang, not from fantasy, but from sharp scientific and technical insight, unfettered by the arbitrary limitations of the perceptions of his time. His amazing career was possible largely because he was never, in any ordinary sense, quite a part of this world. Indeed, he chose to live in Sri Lanka, partly because it helped him neutralise the influence of western culture. As he approached 80, it seemed that he had done almost everything that was possible in a lifetime…    more »

Managing climate change first appeared in The Hindu dated 13 March 2008 in which the claims and responsibilities of the developing and advanced societies are discussed. “The issue is often portrayed as a battle between the developed and the developing world. Wrong. It is something which affects us all and which we need to address together.” It is a matter of concern for us all—says Sir Richard Stagg who is a career diplomat and British High Commissioner to India.   more »

They take multiple pictures of the same scene under different exposures and combine them for detail. ...

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A new analysis of satellite images suggests that the ancient Maya used certain areas for agriculture, inducing drought that caused the downfall of the civilisation. The image, taken by the commercial satellite IKONOS, also reveals yellow discolorations in the dense forest canopy—probable sites of ancient Maya buildings. …   more »

Many of the achievements of Arabic science often come as a surprise. For instance, while no one can doubt the genius of Copernicus and his heliocentric model of the solar system in heralding the age of modern astronomy, it is not commonly known that he relied on work carried out by Arab astronomers many centuries earlier. Many of his diagrams and calculations were taken from manuscripts of the 14th-century Syrian astronomer Ibn al-Shatir. Why is he never mentioned in our textbooks? Likewise, we are taught that English physician William Harvey was the first to correctly describe blood circulation in 1616. He was not. The first to give the correct description was the 13th-century Andalucian physician Ibn al-Nafees… The golden age of Arabic science slowed down after the 11th century. Many have speculated on the reason for this. Some blame the Mongols’ destruction of Baghdad in 1258, others the change in attitude in Islamic theology towards science, and the lasting damage inflicted by religious conservatism upon the spirit of intellectual inquiry. But the real reason was simply the gradual fragmentation of the Abbasid empire and the indifference shown by weaker rulers towards science. …    more »

Giant Telescope

Astronomers at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona have released the first images taken using its two giant 8m diameter mirrors. The detailed pictures show a spiral galaxy located 102 million light-years away from the Milky Way. LBT has been 20 years in the making but promises to allow astronomers to probe the Universe further back in time and in more detail than ever before. …   more »