Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

From the Mail & Guardian Online, http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=303044&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news/

As the EU turns 50, Pope says it’s on path to oblivion

Bloemfontein, South Africa

European leaders on Sunday celebrated the European Union’s 50th birthday, with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, telling the prime ministers or presidents of 27 countries that modern Europe was a dream come true.

But the birthday party summit for the EU — staged with rock concerts, Beethoven, beer and cake in brilliant sunshine in Berlin — was soured by the German Pope, Benedict XVI, who delivered a profoundly pessimistic verdict on Europe at 50, declaring that the continent could be heading for extinction.

Read the rest of this entry »

from http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/10810/1066/

Sugar-fuelled batteries - sweet!

By Adam Turner

Monday, 26 March 2007

Batteries powered by anything sugary - even flat lemonade - could run gadgets up to four times longer than conventional lithium ion batteries.

Researchers at Saint Louis University in Missouri have adapted enzymes from nature that can strip charges from sugar to generate electricity in fuel cells, reports Live Science.

The researchers have run a handheld calculator on a prototype sugar battery the size of a postage stamp, running the battery on sap, flat soft drink and sweetened drinks.

“This study shows that renewable fuels can be directly employed in batteries at room temperature to lead to more energy-efficient battery technology than metal-based approaches,” says study leader Shelley Minteer, Ph.D., an electrochemist at Saint Louis University.

The process combines sugar with air, generating electricity and water as the main byproducts. Materials used to build the batteries are biodegradable.

So far the researchers have run the batteries on sap from trees and cacti, flat soda and sweetened drink mixes. While it’s not the first fuel cell batteries to run on sugar, Minteer claims that this is the longest-lasting and most powerful of its type to date.

Hello, loyal readers! We are considering launching a guest-blogger program, where once a month a featured author takes over the blog for an entire week. How would you like to see a feature like this here on the Insights Blog? Please leave a comment and let us know!

While a certain number of people jump off the climate-change bandwagon, some without an obvous vested interest are climbing aboard, and sketching the outlines of a possible sustainable future. This article appeared last week in InfoWorld

March 14, 2007

CEOs urge feds for green-tech funding, support

Citing the all-important economic case for advancing green technology, TechNet today issued a challenge to Congress and the president to, among other things, invest more seed money in sustainable-energy initiatives and offer greater tax incentives to go green.

TechNet, a political network of CEOs, released its Green Tech Policy Agenda for America, spelling out the familiar and certainly important environmental and national-security-oriented cases for fostering green-tech growth, but also outlining the increasingly recognized business case for weaning the U.S. from its foreign-oil addiction and advancing more energy-efficient technologies such as solar, wind, biofuels, and fuel cell design.

Read the rest of this entry »

Trust me, this is a big deal!

Decades ago I read about laser sintering as a technique that the future might bring, and it looks like we’re getting close.

From the Cornell University Chronical Online http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Feb07/fabber.ws.html via truthout.

Low-cost, home-built 3-D printer could launch a revolution, say Cornell engineers
By Bill Steele

The Altair 8800, introduced in the early 1970s, was the first computer you could build at home from a kit. It was crude, didn’t do much, but many historians would say that it launched the desktop computer revolution.

Hod Lipson, Cornell assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, thinks a little machine he calls a Fab@Home may have the same impact.

Read the rest of this entry »

David Batsone is a contributing editor to Sojourners magazine.This article is an excerpt from his new book, Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade - and How We Can Fight It. It was circulated by truthout: http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/031507LB.shtml

From Sex Workers to Restaurant Workers, the Global Slave Trade Is Growing
By David Batsone
Sojourners

Thursday 15 March 2007

A thriving commerce in human beings is taking place behind the facade of most major cities and towns in the US and worldwide. Activists are pushing back, but they need reinforcements.

Twenty-seven million slaves exist in our world today. Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug loom sheds of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa.

Go behind the façade in any major town or city in the world today and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings. You may even find slavery in your own backyard. For several years my wife and I dined regularly at an Indian restaurant located near our home in the San Francisco Bay area. Unbeknownst to us, the staff at Pasand Madras Indian Cuisine who cooked our curries, delivered them to our table, and washed our dishes were slaves. Restaurant owner Lakireddy Reddy and several members of his family had used fake visas and false identities to traffic perhaps hundreds of adults and children into the United States from India. He forced the laborers to work long hours for minimal wages, money that they returned to him as rent to live in one of his apartments. Reddy threatened to turn them into the authorities as illegal aliens if they tried to escape.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like most everything else in life, learning your way around a new piece of software is instructive. (That’s about the most enthusiastic that I can get about the process.)

I have been setting up my new blog on Wordpress. In so doing, I have relied heavily upon a friend who prefers to remain nameless (doubtless to avoid being associated with me, and who can blame her). She had recently set up her own blog, and therefore was familiar with some of the speed bumps involved. Imposing upon her generosity, whenever I came to a part of the process that did not understand, rather than attempting to figure it out, I asked her.

One such problem — not a major problem, but every problem is one more damn thing, you know — was how to arrange for a post that I had written to automatically be published at a later time or date.

Read the rest of this entry »

The world of politics and ideology continues to spin out of control and out of recognition, as “conservatives” continue to promote ever-bigger governement expenditures (as in, “defense” spending) and ever-smaller tax receipts (as in, permanent tax cuts for the richest, on the theory that eventually the rest of us will live on the crumbs of the banquet); meanwhile “liberals” continue to promote ever more tyrannical government (as in voting for the Patriot Act, etc) with fewer protections for anyone.

As in so much else in the world, artists saw it coming. This via lewrockwell.com

The Future Has Caught Up With Us

by Paul Craig Roberts

John Derbyshire is the sole remaining adult writing for National Review. In a recent issue he noted that Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, first published in 1932, now reads like contemporary news. Huxley’s fearsome predictions of a 26th century world have all come true six centuries early – in vitro fertilization, genetically modified crops, stem-cell research, promiscuous recreational sex, the demise of marriage and families, and the epidemic use of prescription and illegal drugs to escape from anxiety, frustration and disappointment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since the 1970s I have had the sense that we will live to see Western Antarctica come out from under the ice. Maybe so, maybe no, but there is sure a lot more attention being paid to the subject now than there was then.

Antarctic ice braced by glacial till
By Robert Lee Hotz

Los Angeles Times

A vast undersea wedge of gravel and grit holds the ice streams of West Antarctica in place like a doorstop, even as a rise in the sea level caused by global warming threatens to undermine them, researchers at Pennsylvania State University said Thursday.

The discovery may give the world a bit of breathing room.

Read the rest of this entry »