The End of Oil As We Know It

From the New York Times:

The Age of Oil is at an end. Maybe not this year. Maybe not for five years. But signs of the coming collapse are evident.

Start at the White House. There, a week ago, President Bush touted tax breaks for oil companies that have just posted the largest profits in the history of American business. Yet he was dumbstruck when asked about the prospect of $4-a-gallon gasoline, a price that will force many families to choose between food and basic travel.

“Wait — what did you just say?”, the president asked after a reporter solicited his advice for Americans facing that price, which was predicted by many analysts.

Ten Emerging technologies 2008

Technology Review presents the 10 technologies that they think are most likely to change the way we live.

1 Modeling Surprise Combining massive quantities of data, insights into human psychology, and machine learning can help manage surprising events, says Microsoft's Eric Horvitz.

2 Probabilistic Chips Krishna Palem thinks a little uncertainty in chips could extend battery life in mobile devices--and maybe the duration of Moore's Law, too.

3 NanoRadio Alex Zettl's tiny radios, built from nanotubes, could improve everything from cell phones to medical diagnostics.

4 Wireless Power Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward a world of wireless electricity.

5 Atomic Magnetometers John Kitching's tiny magnetic-field sensors will take MRI where it's never gone before.

6 Offline Web Applications Adobe's Kevin Lynch believes that computing applications will become more powerful when they take advantage of the browser and the desktop.

7 Graphene Transistors A new form of carbon being pioneered by Walter de Heer of Georgia Tech could lead to speedy, compact computer processors.

8 Connectomics Jeff Lichtman hopes to elucidate brain development and disease with new technologies that illuminate the web of neural circuits.

9 Reality Mining Sandy Pentland is using data gathered by cell phones to learn about human behavior.

10 Cellulolytic Enzymes Frances Arnold is designing better enzymes for making biofuels from cellulose.

Read it all here.

One 100 Dollars A F*ckin Barrel !

H O L Y $ H I F T . . .

Tech Pioneers 2008

Here.

Sudden Climate Shifts Expected

Many of Earth's climate systems will undergo a series of sudden shifts this century as a result of human-induced climate change. A number of these shifts could occur this century. Society should not be lulled into a false sense of security by the idea that climate change will be a gradual process.

The work by an international team appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Great Recession of 2008

No one can be sure when a recession has begun, or when it has ended. The NBER designates the beginning of a recession months after it has started and designates its ending months (or sometimes years) after it has ended.

An inaccurate forecast of whether or not there is a recession today will not be proved false for 12 months or more. Read this article, which was published a month ago.

Ben Bernanke's book on The Great Depression.

US Recession A Fact

The US has entered its first full-blown economic recession in 16 years, according to investment bank Merrill Lynch.

This is how a recession works.

A Wireless & Mobile 2008

In 2008 these are the five technologies that definitely will take off, BBC News predicts: Web To Go, Ultra Mobile PCs, IPTV, WIMAX and Mobile VOIP.

Click to enlarge picture.

Jeff Bell on Halo 3

Jeff Bell of Microsoft was in charge of the Halo 3 launch and in his WOMMA Summit 3 keynote provided a detailed overview of the program--very impressive. In this interview he touches on the elements of the launch, the relationship between online and offline activities, and taking risks in marketing.

Sea Level Back to Future

In the journal Nature Geoscience, which launches in January 2008, researchers say the true maximum sea level rise could be 164 cm, about twice what the IPCC proposes.

They looked at what happened more than 100,000 years ago - the last time Earth was this warm.

Read the BBC coverage.

THE ICE-FREE ARCTIC

There is much talk of when the ocean will be totally free of ice in summer. Some scientists think it might be as soon as 2013.

Others, who find that date a little early, say ice-free summers almost certainly will come sooner than many people thought possible.

Read it all here.

Al Gore & IPCC Get Nobel Prize

Look here.