For governments and companies committed to the idea of powering our technological age with clean, renewable energy, wind power is a natural fit. Wind-powered technology has matured over the past two decades, driving down costs and driving up efficiency. Countries like Denmark and Germany have demonstrated that integrating a power source such as wind into the grid can easily provide more than 20 percent—sometimes significantly more—of the power needs of a given region.

With 9,000 megawatts of installed capacity, Spain ranked second in the world in 2005 in total installed capacity, behind Germany (16,000 megawatts) and ahead of the United States (6,500 megawatts). ...   more »

Opening a whole new interface between nanotechnology and neuroscience, scientists at Harvard University have used slender silicon nanowires to detect, stimulate, and inhibit nerve signals along the axons and dendrites of live mammalian neurons. ...   more »

A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and welfare timebomb could send the economic superpower into insolvency, according to research by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve. ...   more »

Edited by Architecture for Humanity, "Design Like You Give a Damn" is a compendium of innovative projects from around the world that demonstrate the power of design to improve lives. The first book to bring the best of humanitarian architecture and design to the printed page, Design Like You Give a Damn offers a history of the movement toward socially conscious design and showcases more than 80 contemporary solutions to such urgent needs as basic shelter, health care, education, and access to clean water, energy, and sanitation. Featured projects include some sponsored by Architecture for Humanity as well as many others undertaken independently, often against great odds.

Design Like You Give a Damn is an indispensable resource for designers and humanitarian organizations charged with rebuilding after disaster and engaged in the search for sustainable development. It is also a call to action to anyone committed to building a better world. ...   more »

Are you concerned about the furture? About where the accelerating changes occuring around us are taking us? - This site includes interviews conducted with forward-thinking people at the 2005 "Accelerating Change Conference" at Stanford University.

I recommend viewing the 13-minute summary video included at the top of this site. Warning: Not for the timid ...   more »

Pluto is a planet no more after the world's leading astronomers redrew the solar system today, ruling that only eight celestial bodies deserved the prestigious title. ...

"The eight planets are Mercury, Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune," said the IAU resolution that confirmed Pluto's relegation to "dwarf planet" status, where it will not even be the largest object. ...    more »

Beauty in the Ordinary Unlike American artists Richter wasn't interested in the purity of art. Idealism had disillusioned him from an early age. Instead he painted images without glory; images that rendered the ridiculous, ordinary; the tragic, ordinary; the beautiful, ordinary. Throughout his career Richter has shrunk from giving a psychological insight into his art, leaving his admirers and critics guessing and at times confused. According to him, his work forms from structures and ideas that surround him, nothing more profound than that.   more »

There’s a new outsourcing boom in South Asia - and a billion people are jockeying for the jobs. How India became the global hot spot for drug trials.

...As many as half of all clinical trials are already conducted in locations far from the pharmaceutical companies' home base, in countries like India, China, and Brazil. And many industry analysts expect the market to skyrocket, particularly as expanding libraries of genetic information increase the number of drugs coming out of the lab. The consulting firm McKinsey calculates that the market in India for outsourced trials will hit $1.5 billion by 2010.

Enticed by numbers like these, developing countries have been scrambling to catch Big Pharma's eye - India most aggressively of all. Like high tech call centers and software farms, which were meant to transform India's computer industry by creating skilled workers and a stockpile of modern equipment, drug trial outsourcing is seen as the fast route to economic and scientific growth - a money train that the country can't afford to miss. ...   more »

Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The discovery, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, gives direct evidence for the existence of dark matter.

"This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

These observations provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it is stronger on intergalactic scales than predicted by Newton and Einstein, removing the need for dark matter. However, such theories cannot explain the observed effects of this collision. ...   more »

The DNA sequences of humans and chimpanzees are 98 percent identical. Yet that 2 percent difference represents at least 15 million changes in our genome since the time of our common ancestor roughly six million years ago. Now a new computational technique has identified 49 regions that have changed particularly quickly between humans and chimps, and may have revealed at least one gene critical to the development of our larger brains. ...   more »

So far about a fifth of the Amazonian rainforest has been razed completely. Another 22 per cent has been harmed by logging, allowing the sun to penetrate to the forest floor drying it out. And if you add these two figures together, the total is growing perilously close to 50 per cent, which computer models predict as the "tipping point" that marks the death of the Amazon.

The models did not expect this to happen until 2050. But, says Dr Nobre, "what was predicted for 2050, may have begun to happen in 2005." Nobody knows when the crucial threshold will be passed, but growing numbers of scientists believe that it is coming ever closer. ...    more »

Aug. 11, 2006 — The Department of Homeland Security released a statement Wednesday advising Windows PC owners across the nation to update their computers or face a potential attack from hackers.

DHS made the announcement because the worm expected to be unleashed as a result of this vulnerability has the potential to shut down entire networks and require IT teams to scrub hundreds of thousands of PCs. ...   more »

The Greenland ice sheet is melting three times faster today than it was five years ago, according to a new study.

The finding adds to evidence of increased global warming in recent years and indicates that melting polar ice sheets are pushing sea levels higher, the authors report. ...   more »

Here's an interesting article discussing the importance of serious practice of an introspective discipline by explorers of the nature of consciousness, whether it be from a spiritual growth or from a innovative leadership training perspective.

"...As the Dalai Lama points out in his recent book, Buddhists have long claimed that with the development of highly refined states of attention known as “samadhi,” first-person experiential evidence has been found for the existence of a subtle continuum of individual consciousness prior to conception and following death. Scientific field studies such as the work of Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker also lend support to this view. [4] But thus far, mainstream science has largely chosen to ignore such evidence on the grounds that there must be a physical explanation for consciousness. ..."   more »

I had a fun experience with this site. I was reading through it, intrigued by the author's (M. Alan Kazlev) deep experience and knowledge about many different esoteric and spiritual paths. I was attracted by his commitment to the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and his comparisons of their work with other approaches to individual and collective tranformation. So I checked out Alan's recommended links to see if there were any that sounded interesting. (This is where the fun begins.) ...   more »

This is a fascinating website, full of excellent annotated references to recently published books re "a once and future encounter with an embryonic, numinous universe." Provides an ongoing update of Sri Aurobindo's seminal idea of a universe endowed with an innate evolutionary dynamic toward consciousness and transcendence.

"...A Creative, Organic Universe: From this holistic vista, the over fifteen hundred references posted here can testify to a once and future encounter with an embryonic, numinous universe. Science began by reading nature as a sacred book. The endeavor went on to explore and catalogue atom, cell, species and star. But its necessary method of looking down into matter and back in time reduced and lost life along the way. Earth and human were removed from privileged regard to a rare, contingent blossom not to appear again. This physical agenda, lately in search of a quantum theory of everything, seems almost Ptolemaic in its efforts to shore up an inadequate model and misplaced emphasis.

As the references attest, a growing number of researchers and scholars advocate a quite different scenario. An organically self-organizing universe is increasingly understood which can return life and intelligence to a central significance. In a biological cosmos whose innate properties give rise to sentient beings on cellular planets, its essence is most evident from whom they may become. No longer a random tangent, the manifest emergence of life, mind and informed selves can define a vectorial arrow of cosmogenesis. People are once more of cosmic notice, this time as its leading, creative, spiritual edge." ...    more »

This is one of the better elucidations I've seen of the current debate between proponents of "Intelligent Design" and neo-Darwinistic evolutionary theory. As with other such debates, it can be more informative to take a "both-and" rather than an "either-or" approach. Imo, the ideas in this article are also consistent with Sri Aurobindo's prescient thinking.

In recent decades, science has uncovered an impressive and ever-growing list of elements of universal 'design' which appear to be specifically conducive to the emergence of life. This deep and valuable concept, the anthropic principle, exists at the interface between cosmology and theology, and is aiding the growing rapprochement we are observing between science and spirituality. ...    more »

This one's for you Rich..! :-P

What is it about the spiral shape that the human mind finds so intellectually and visually enticing? Has the universe tuned us to develop a deep intuitive understanding of its importance? ...

While my own best current intuition expects a 2060 A.D. singularity, Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, Richard Coren, James Wesley, Damien Broderick, Robin Hansen, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, and a number of other careful thinkers have proposed a range of ETA's between 2020 and 2140, with 2020-2060 presently representing the majority of predictions, clustering around a 2040 mean. ...    more »

SCIY's readership is growing rapidly, and now totals over 5,000 distinct persons per month.. Page views are now over 12,000 per month ...   more »