Global warming rate discovered

The world is getting warmer - and US scientists now know precisely how much warmer. They calculated the radiation from the sun, the heat reflected back into space, and the rising temperature of the seas and say the extra warmth is equivalent to a 1 watt lightbulb shining constantly over an area of 1 sq metre everywhere on the planet.

"This energy imbalance is the smoking gun that we have been looking for," said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "It shows that our estimates of the human-made and natural climate forcing agents are about right, and they are driving the Earth to a warmer climate."

Most of the world - with the exception of the US and Australia - has signed up to the Kyoto protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions and further global warming. The US government has repeatedly argued that scientific opinion about global warming is divided. With this new research, US government-funded scientists have once again told the US administration that they believe global warming is real, and inexorable.

Computer models of future global warming suggest that planetary temperatures could rise by as much as 5.8C in the next century, with sea level rises of a metre. Since 1993, the world's oceans have risen at the rate of 3.2cm per decade. This is twice the sea level rise of the last 100 years. The warmer the oceans, the faster the planet's ice sheets will melt.
"We need to monitor the ice sheets and sea level precisely to be sure that the system is not running out of our control," Dr Hansen said.

Entertainment Industry Sues Downloaders Over New Internet

The lawsuits were filed Wednesday by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association (MPA) against the students, who swapped the files over a popular peer-to-peer program called i2hub, which was originally designed to help students socialize 社交 and do their homework.

The U.S. entertainment industry has struck a new blow against the illegal downloading of music and movies, suing 415 students who downloaded copyrighted files over an experimental and superfast new Internet.

The Internet2 system is a next-generation prototype that is much quicker than the current network and is currently deployed in about 200 colleges and universities. It allows users to download high quality movies in less than five minutes while an average song takes a mere 20 seconds to download.

"Quite simply, this special, high-speed Internet technology designed for important academic research has been hijacked for illegal purposes," Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA said. "That's why we decided to act quickly -- to let everyone know that illegal file-trading on Internet2 is not safe from detection."

Copyright infringement holds a penalty of 750 to 1,500 dollars per infringed work. The students who were sued each had an average of 2,300 illegal files on their computers.

Blogging Clicks With Colleges

First the Internet turned colleges upside down, extending classrooms and changing the way people learned. Next came Napster and other file-sharing tools, then Web logs. Now blogs are morphing into the next big thing on campus: wikis.

The wiki, which got its name from the Hawaiian word for “quick,” is the scrappy 零碎湊成的 little brother to the blog, an interactive Web page that can be changed by anyone who stumbles upon 絆倒、偶然碰見 it. While blogs let people publish their thoughts online, wikis take things a step further, creating freewheeling, collaborative communities: Students can edit one another's work, bounce ideas around or link to infinite other Web sites.

Sometimes wikis don‘t click. But at their best, wikis are provocative, inspiring, funny and addictive. Some course sites read like journals, some like debates and some shimmy 跳狐步舞 in and out of topics with music, photos and video pulling readers along.
One of Phillipson's students drew a picture of a poem; another made a movie. Wikis can encourage creativity, remove the limits on class time, give professors a better sense of student understanding and interest and keep students writing, thinking and questioning.


Wikis, including interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia, have been around for several years but they're just on the cusp of becoming mainstream; as the technology improves, they're popping up in a few classrooms and offices, and people are finding all sorts of uses for them.

Blogs already have seeped into everyday life on campus. At Johns Hopkins, two juniors just set up a service for students and faculty to start their own blogs. Georgetown University tinkered 焊鍋、粗修 with software to make it easy for professors to create blogs. There are course blogs on religion, war, literature, even cattle, at Texas A&M University.

Sony takes 3-D cinema directly to the brain

THE cult sci-fi movie The Matrix might not have such an improbable plot after all.
The first step towards a real-life version, in which cyber-reality is projected into the brains of people via an electrode feed, could be just over the horizon.

cyber world 資訊〈網路〉互動世界
cyber reality 網路〈互動〉實境
virtual reality 虛擬實境


Sony, the Japanese entertainment giant, has patented an idea for transmitting data directly into the brain, with the goal of enabling a person to see films and play video games in which they smell, taste and perhaps even feel things, New Scientist magazine says.

The patent is based purely on theory, not on any invention.

In Sony’s patent, the technique would be entirely noninvasive非入侵性. It would not use brain implants or other surgery. The patent has few details, describing only a device that would fire pulses of ultrasound 超音波脈衝 at the head to modify the firing patterns of neurons 神經元 in targeted parts of the brain.

The aim, it says, is to create “sensory experiences”, ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds.

Top up your mobile with the ultimate in power dressing

PEOPLE unable to tear themselves away from their iPods or mobile phones could find salvation in a Japanese invention: solar-powered clothes that will keep their favourite accessories constantly topped up

The energy is generated by solar panels that are less than half a millimetre thick, as pliable 柔軟的 as fabric, cheap to produce and can be dyed any colour.

Their inventor, Tsukasa Yoshida, a chemistry professor, envisages 想像出hundreds of applications, from umbrellas that can charge mobile phones to tents that can provide campers with enough power to run a laptop computer.

He claims that his invention overcomes two key pitfalls 陷阱、易犯的錯誤 of traditional solar panels: high cost and rigidity 僵硬.

The key breakthrough was finding a way to dye the solar panels a variety of colours and thus make them attractive. Black is the most efficient colour for a panel, but Professor Yoshida, of Gifu University, decided that the quest 探索 for “solar propagation” 繁殖 was more important. A traditional black solar panel may have an efficiency of about 12 per cent, while a red version of his “rainbow cell” is about half as energy efficient. “Having lots of colours is less efficient but it means that the panels can literally 簡直 go anywhere,” he said.

Professor Yoshida admits, though, that charging a mobile phone from completely empty to completely full might take around 20 hours, even in bright sunshine. The most efficient solar cells can convert only 20 per cent of the energy they receive from the sun into electricity.

Large surfaces such as buildings can be coated 上塗料 in panels, a feature that has led to another deal between Gifu and Sekisui, one of Japan’s largest construction companies. A house covered in rainbow cells could potentially cut annual electricity consumption from the grid 太陽能格板 by 50 percent.

Each star-shaped panel on Dr Yoshida’s prototype satin緞 jacket generates around 5 milliwatts per hour.
It is estimated that the global solar industry will be worth around £20 billion by 2010.

Advanced Micro's New Chip Challenges Intel

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday launched its first version of a computer chip that uses new technology to improve the performance of PCs, one week after larger rival Intel Corp. rolled out a competing product.

The new technology allows users to perform multiple tasks, such as downloading music, editing digital photos, or writing e-mail, without slowing their computers down.

AMD, of Sunnyvale, Calif., is targeting its so-called dual-core chips -- which have two computing engines on a single chip -- at digital media junkies and video gamers.

Hewlett-Packard is among the top computer manufacturers outfitting their systems with AMD's dual-core chip, called the Athlon 64 X2. The dual core technology also is being used by privately-held Alienware and other makers of expensive, custom-built PCs used for gaming.

Alienware is a high-performance personal computer company that specializes in customized gaming systems. Alienware also manufactures desktops and laptops for computer design, video editing, and music editing. They are located in Miami, Florida.


The AMD product, which was unveiled at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, is designed for desktop personal computers and laptops.

AMD is pricing its chip higher than Intel's, between $1,001 for the best-performing units and $537 for the low-end version. Intel has priced its Pentium D chip between $530 and $241.