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How salmon help keep a huge rainforest thrivingthe Great bear Rainforest is vital to the health of the planet.
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Sea otters: Saving kelp forests and our climatethe kelp forests fringing the North Pacific coast are one of the richest marine ecosystems On earth.
and disrupt the rich web of life that relies on it. So the otters are helping the forests to store as much carbon as they can.
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Astronaut food: Can you cook fries in space? If humans ever voyage to a planet far bigger than Earth,
However, when it reaches 3g, the bubbles are so small that they get stuck to the potato by capillary forces,
The pair found that the crust steadily thickens up to 3g becoming crispier oe and the chips fry faster.
Beyond 3g, however, the crust then starts to separate from the softer core of the potato,
as superheated steam from the moist potato flesh blows a bubble between the two. But who wishes to eat chips with bubbles in?
and in fact some disadvantages, from centrifuging to a force greater than 3g. This could be worth knowing for the food industry,
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Can this sneaky chimp read minds? Do you know what I'm thinking? Probably not,
Morell recounted on the website Slate this year. Dilly did not utter a food cry,
"but enough to construct a battery that could charge mobile phones or laptops in places where there is no grid, no power connection.
 Their cost analyses suggested that a single boiled potato battery with zinc and copper electrodes generates portable energy at an estimated $9 per kilowatt hour,
or shipping companies (cruise lines got satellite internet years ago, while most of Asia and Africa still lack it).
Then, a network of drainage canals with smaller ditches that connected to larger ones were dug to further drain the soil,
Reeds were seeded then across the site to dry out the new land before they were replaced by rapeseed,
Water management strategies should also be implemented down to the level of industrial sites, where improvements can build on existing networks of freshwater tributaries, tidal estuaries,
infrastructure and engineered ecosystems. Many types of industry and energy production oe including hydropower mineral extraction and mining or fuel production oe rely on vast quantities of water.
and supply system that supplies water to the site throughout the year. Composting toilets add nutrients for local farmland for lacking nitrogen
or liable for any diagnosis made by a user based on the content of this site.
The BBC is not liable for the contents of any external internet sites listed, nor does it endorse any commercial product
or advised on any of the sites. Always consult your own GP if you're in any way concerned about your health
or liable for any diagnosis made by a user based on the content of this site.
The BBC is not liable for the contents of any external internet sites listed, nor does it endorse any commercial product
or advised on any of the sites. Always consult your own GP if you're in any way concerned about your health
Funded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, the five-year project took cells from organic cows,
By the time the story was adapted loosely for the big screen in the 1973 film Soylent Green,
Nasa recently admitted that as part of a programme"to turn science fiction into fact  they are funding work to develop a 3d food printer.
only if there's no powerful actor that can rip off the benefits after the network has been put in place.
Computer scientists have been wrestling with this class of problem for decades. How about transport companies, who are doing it for real?
"Programmers risk excommunication if they violate canon law by bypassing Apple's banking system or ignoring its infallible doctrine.
Rebellious heretics can jailbreak an iphone and induce it to accept software anathematised by Apple,
but a heretic's phone is refused communion when presented for repair at the Apple Store.
 Dissenters have their own cult within the church: Apple Script. Predictive policing Mark Johnson The Economist 19 july 2013 On the use of big data in policing.
Systems rely on data analysis to find patterns in past crime, and use those to warn of crime-prone places and situations.
British police are testing a computer programme called Predpol:""Cops working with predictive systems respond to call-outs as usual,
which the computer suggests. Â Your free trial of the internet has expired Charlie Warzel Buzzfeed 18 july 2013 Useful wrap.
Nothing new, but everything brought into focus. The era of free online content and services is coming to an end.
The turning point was the successful launch of itunes in 2003, which showed how many people were willing to pay for digital content
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from the Microsoft Points traded by Xbox gamers, to the Co-op supermarket's savings stamps.
who runs the Tomorrow's Transactions blog at Consult Hyperion.""Kenya has the most successful mobile payment system in the world, M-Pesa.
Vodafone, is a multinational company, and therefore judged it a safer place to keep their savings than a Kenyan high-street bank.
with free wi-fi, plentiful soft furnishings and a library. But the Dutch airline is partnered to the Flying Blue group.
such as those that come with ebay sales. The fee for making one out to HMPO is £12 oe a whopping 15%surcharge on top of the cost of a passport
I scour ebay, but there doesn't seem to be much of a trade in pre-loaded Nectar cards.
I could leave my computer to"mine  for Bitcoins, using its processing power to slog away at the coalface of the Bitcoin economy,
I fire up my laptop for a final stab at getting hold of some Bitcoins, only to discover my virtual bank has suffered a very real robbery.
 But it's found a semi-ironic second life as a fund-raising instrument for charities.
The wastefulness of automation Frances Coppola Pieria 8 july 2013 If robots put more and more workers out of jobs,
Government builds free cloud-based backup for ungrateful nation Totient Medium 8 july 2013"The cloud backup program, called Prism, safely stores all American's phone
and email contacts so that they can be retrieved at any time in the future. A few thousand Americans are enrolled currently in a beta phase version of the program that would successfully backup all of their data
including the contents of their calls, emails, and documents, for years in a completely secure, state of the art data centre located in Utah.
 Lockdown Marco Arment 3 july 2013 Thoughts provoked by the shuttering of Google Reader. It's part of a much bigger problem.
Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft oe are turning against interoperability.""They want to lock you in, shut out competitors,
A&p stores and mail-order catalogues were the first browsers and apps. Â For more articles worth reading, visit The Browser.
If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future,
Instead of clear skies and open air, our atmosphere could be filled with lacy meshwork that filters air
An expanded range of screens and canopies built with minutely balanced filtering layers could work with convective air
Terreform's plans for a vast site covering Brooklyn's Navy yard shows a densely interwoven fertile fabric of elevated walkways,
and lightweight manufactured screens, all manicured like a fantastic topiary. Â My own work on Near-Living Architecture group at Waterloo,
Canada, has integrated densely massed microprocessor-controlled filters containing protocells within suspended canopy and wall surfaces.
a floating canopy of laser-cut aluminum meshwork is fitted with dense masses of interconnected glass and polymer filters.
who described the world as coming from an inner core of pure geometric forms. However, there are good reasons to pursue the opposite of these kinds of stripped forms.
and vacant sites are used more effectively. In Berlin, rooftop fishfarms have been started, with the waste going to feed agricultural plots in the city.
These substances are filtered into the fleshy fabric within the walls of our homes, not dead spaces but active processors,
and their leaf litter feeds the acidic soils that nurture networks of microorganisms, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria,
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Fleming says he advises the multiple sclerosis patients who email him at a rate of around one a week against self-infecting with helminths."
Juice seemed to be more effective than tablets containing cranberry, possibly because the active substances are absorbed more easily.
The alternative is tablets, but the evidence for their effectiveness is scant because so few good studies have been done.
or liable for any diagnosis made by a user based on the content of this site.
The BBC is not liable for the contents of any external internet sites listed, nor does it endorse any commercial product
or advised on any of the sites. Always consult your own GP if you're in any way concerned about your health
joining a growing franchise network (locally owned and operated) of agro dealers located in rural
In each store, owners are given an Android-powered tablet with software that allows them quickly and easily order inventory oe all at the touch of a button.
and coupled with satellite data, and used to map out rain patterns. Kilimo Salama then works with agronomists to calculate the index oe
%Through a simple text message, MFARM allows rural farmers in remote areas of Kenya to check the latest market prices,
near Amboseli, a game park in southwestern Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Service has collared  several lions with tracking devices that send text messages to cell phones of rangers
which emit mobile phone and satellite signals, allowing rangers to track them via Google earth. In Central Kenya's Ol Pejeta Conservancy
which hosts four of the world's last remaining seven northern white rhinos, owners plan to start test-flying a $75, 000 drone to live-stream information on the rhinos to rangers on the ground.
well and computer savvy. In fact its President, Davidson Ward oe an architecture graduate from the University of Minnesota oe is just 25.
too, might create if not a radically improved steam locomotive, then a better vacuum cleaner, mobile phone, electric plug or car.
while a host of largely anonymous inventors and designers has changed the very way we communicate with one another through computers and the internet,
mobile phones and a plethora of digital gizmos. Even then, designers simply can't help designing
but to bring it into line with the world of computers, fly-by-wire and digital technology.
just as light bulbs, the quarter in your pocket or even the mobile phone have been reworked and will continue to change.
Think of Apple and its iphone. Since it was launched in 2007, the company has sold over 250 million of the handsets worldwide.
it is easy to understand just how critical a redesign of the iphone is to the Californian-based company.
To keep pace with breathless developments in software while keeping the hardware oe the casing oe of the iphone up to date,
Apple's design team (led by British-born Sir Jonathan Ive) has produced six incarnations of this sleek mobile phone in as many years.
Most of the changes have involved updating software, yet the look of the phone has changed subtly, too, with a shifting balance between the use of aluminium, glass, plastic,
stainless steel and Colour in 2012, the iphone 5 was given a bigger screen, and sales rocketed anew.
Expect further annual changes as Apple competes in a hard-fought and crowded global market; the look of the phone affects sales as much as
what it can do. Much rests on Ive's shoulders. Like designs for a better toaster, lemon squeezer or London taxi, it seems safe to assume that a new iphone with a tweaked
and evolved design will appear soon. Sadly, I am less confident that my steam-hauled 21st Century Limited will be anything but a dream.
We can give a satellite an artificial eye that can photograph your backyard from space,
inter-converted and transported oe whether in computers, genes or the quantum states of atoms oe is linked closely to the field of thermodynamics,
For example, any processing of information oe changing a bit in a computer's binary memory from a 1 to a 0,
Anyone who has been to Yemen may also know about the country's limited internet a dismal GDP that fell a further 10%in 2011 and the population's endemic use of qat,
though the prospects for success might seem remote-Mareb has been the site of continuing violence between military forces
and gas pipelines and electricity towers to extract concessions from the central government. Other talks also outlined seemingly practical solutions for the country's future.
His solution is a website that could provide a unique 10-digit address-or Natural Area code-to everyone in Yemen based on GPS coordinates.
such as the incessant clapping after each speaker (a TED attribute parodied by the satricial website the Onion, in a series of videos).
Some also criticized the organizers for not live-streaming the event at Sanaa's coffee houses, one of the few places in the city with reliable high-speed internet.
Its latest innovation is its Swarm Database smartphone app which allows a fleet of beekeeping technicians who inspects hives across the country to enter troves of live data on farmers,
hives, honey and harvesting into Samsung smartphones. This information feeds into a central dashboard, which helps the company track production
The app also allows global consumers to connect more with Kenyan beekeepers, says CEO Ayer.
along with harvest date all on your screen.""It's a great way to visualize traceability, Â remarks Ayer."
The internet's best terrible person goes to jail: Can a reviled master troll become a geek hero?
Adrian Chen Gawker 27 november 2012a fascinating and thought-provoking profile of 27-year-old hacker and internet troll Andrew Auernheimer, perhaps better known as Weev.
says Auernheimer, so-called ipad hacker, and the man behind the infamous Goatse internet prank (we don't recommend that you Google this).
It's hard to sympathise with Auernheimer, he's an abrasive and provocative character. But the case he is being tried of poses a significant dilemma.
By discovering that AT&T had made accidentally the email addresses of subscribers to its ipad 3g wireless service publicly accessible,
How Google plans to find the ungoogleable Tom Simonite MIT Technology Review 27 november 2012the online search giant wants to improve its mobile search services by automatically delivering information you wouldn't think to search for online."
 says Jon Wiley, lead user experience designer for Google search. And carrying out what he calls"experience sampling  is the best way to do it oe that is,
Like the majority of consumer electronics, my camera has not been designed to be easily reparable. Thirty years ago,
Since the mobile phone handset market reached saturation in Europe and the United states about a decade ago,
Almost all new phones purchased are"upgrades Â, replacing functioning phones simply for reasons of fashion or for technological additions that many of us rarely use,
and which could otherwise easily be achieved through software upgrades to existing handsets. Indeed, most phone companies compete for business by automatically upgrading customers'phones every year.
And these smart phones use mined resources from some of the most ecologically sensitive areas of the world
as a recent Friends of the Earth campaign points out. Made to failthe idea that something that works fine should be replaced is ingrained now so in our culture that few people question it.
But it is a fairly recent concept, brought about by a revolution in the advertising and manufacturing industries,
Computer says nomany people wonder whether electronic products are being designed to fail, from television sets, which have heat-sensitive condensers deliberately fitted onto the circuit board next to a heat sink connected to the transistors,
to washing machines with ball-bearings fitted inaccessibly into the drums so they cannot be replaced. Specific lifespans are programmed by the manufacturers into chips in some equipment,
so that printers will stop working after a preset number of pages (sending a message:""internal error Â), coffee makers will cease functioning after a preset quota of brews,
Some computers are difficult to upgrade oe new versions of software are upwardly compatible so files won't work on older models or,
as in the new Apple Macbook Pro, the RAM is soldered to the motherboard, making it difficult
or replace the hard drive and battery. As a result, users can find themselves buying a new computer every couple of years.
Another trick is to make parts and accessories incompatible between brands or even models of the same brand.
or battery or charger for each device or brand of electronic equipment they buy, from phones to laptops to toothbrushes,
or adaptor when they upgrade from an iphone 4 to the iphone 5, for example. Some consumers are starting to hit back,
though, advising people on the internet how to find and remove the printer chip or overwrite the memory card software.
But this is technically challenging and time-consuming, and most people aren't even aware of the reason for their device no longer working.
Californian Kyle Wiens is the type of sophisticated electronics tinkerer that emperors of the IT industry like Microsoft
and Apple dream of employing. But Kyle is a guerilla geek oe he slipped through their net
and crossed over to the consumer side. Instead of dreaming up intricate ways of fitting more and more components into ever-slimmer gadgets, Kyle is taking them apart.
 Kyle and Luke began taking apart computers and other equipment, getting around the copyright protection by creating their own service manuals from scratch,
The pair called their site ifixit. com and over the past decade, they have expanded to hundreds more manuals,
encouraging home hackers to create their own manuals for the site oe"we're a Wikipedia of service manuals  oe
"When someone has repaired their broken ipad or whatever, it's a life-changing experience. That person will become a different consumer.
Motorola and Nokia, both of which were known for their durable phones with easily replaced long-lasting batteries
and make computers that are easily upgradable and repairable oe ifixit. com recently gave HPS Z1 model a score of 10 out of 10 for repairability.
If a chicken sits in front of two small opaque screens, and one ball disappears behind the first screen,
followed by four balls disappearing behind a second screen, the chicken walks towards the screen that hides four balls,
since four balls are better than one ball. The feat is made more impressive when you consider that the chicken in question is only three days old.
And it can do a lot more than add up. If one ball disappears behind the first screen
and four balls disappear behind the second, just as before, but then two of the four balls behind the second screen are moved visibly over to the first screen,
the chicken is faced now with two tasks. It must add two to one, and know that there are now three balls behind the first screen.
It must also subtract two from four, and realise that there are only two balls left behind the second screen.
The young chicken must overcome its initial impulse to approach the second screen, which initially hid four balls,
and instead approach the first screen, now hiding three balls. If this sounds complicated for the three-day-old bird,
think again. Infant chickens correctly approached the screen hiding more balls nearly 80%of the time.
Chimpanzees perform even better in their maths tests, succeeding in this sort of task 90%of the time.
The human capacity for language has allowed our species to transcend the core mathematical and numerical skills that are shared with other species both closely and distantly related.
Phone patents: An absurd battleapple blocks Samsung sales. Samsung blocks Apple sales. Apple ban overturned.
On any given day it's hard to keep track of which company's smartphones, tablet computers or other products are banned temporarily in which countries.
And it's not just Apple and Samsung which are at each other's throats-it seems that every week brings new stories of alleged patent infringement involving companies ranging from household names like HTC to more obscure outfits like Virnetx.
But what's the reason for this apparently endless series of patent battles involving smartphone and tablet firms?
One reason boils down to the nature of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, according to Daniel O'connor, a self-styled antitrust and internet policy wonk as well as senior director of public policy at the Computer
He says that software is a particularly active area for patents, especially anything to do with telecommunications, semiconductors and 4g data networks.
Software patents are also particularly broad and vague, and that makes infringement difficult to avoid.
O'connor believes Â-based on estimates from patent firm RPX-that there are about 250,000 active patents in the United states that may have some relevance to the activities of mobile device manufacturers out of a total of about 1. 5 million
That means that about 17%of all active patents in the United states are potentially patents on smartphone technology.
000 patents actually describes about five million restrictions on what mobile device makers can do while they design a new model.
when designing a new feature for a mobile device, but probably not 50 or 500. And five million?
but Apple developers testified that they didn't pay any attention to anyone's patents
when it comes to software. A recent study found that if every software producing firm in America wanted to check just the new software patents issued in a given year,
about two million patent attorneys working full time would be needed to do the job. That's a problem because there are only about 40,000 registered patent attorneys and agents in the entire United states according to the United states Patent and Trademark Office.
Christina Mulligan, one of the authors of the report and a postdoctoral associate at Yale Law school, says that the main problem is that software patents are so broad and vague that they are essentially impossible to index,
and even if you tried you'd probably only find 25 of the 50 patents your software may infringe,
and Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC halted their hostilities this way. But, before this happens, companies often spend considerable sums buying up patent portfolios that they can use as bargaining chips during negotiations.
but buy up software patents with the sole purpose of making money from them by enforcing the patent rights against purported infringers.
But, for the moment, the software patent perfect storm shows no sign of abating. The only likely winners are the patent attorneys.
and indicated their choices on a touch screen or by colouring in ovals on a response form.
what makes scouts stop campaigning for less popular sites; they don't get voted out as if they were participating in some insect version of Dancing with the Stars.
and selects the best site. Instead it is distributed the highly process of friendly competition among the scout bees that identifies the best site.
Hence the cognitive effort that each scout bee must make is evidently quite small relative to the information processing done by the entire swarm.
Best of the web: Planets, pandemics and powerthe vanishing groves Ross Andersen Aeon 16 october 2012 A superb essay on the world's oldest trees, the bristlecone pines of California,
Google throws open doors to its top-secret data center Steven Levy Wired 17 october 2012 A visit to the beating heart of the digital age.
It's a server farm in North carolina and, says Levy, This is what makes Google Google:
its physical network, its thousands of fiber miles, and those many thousands of servers that, in aggregate, add up to the mother of all clouds.
This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day...Only critical employees have been permitted even a peek inside.
Until now. This must be heaven Sam Harris Sam Harris 12 october 2012 You may have heard about or read the recent Newsweek cover story in which a neurosurgeon,
Eben Alexander, described his experience of the afterlife. He'd contracted bacterial meningitis and fallen into a coma in
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Making mobile phones work for the poorthe numbers speak for themselves: Today, there are more than five billion mobile phones in developing countries and nearly one mobile phone line per adult in Sub-saharan africa.
 Such a direct and affordable channel has existed never before, and mobile phones are hailed now as a powerful tool to lift millions out of poverty.
As their numbers have grown, so too have their many uses. Take a company called Sproxil,
and make payments using their mobile phones. Efforts such as these represent an impressive first step. Â However, focusing on the technology betrays a truth that must be understood
I believe that we must complement the existing mobile networks with well structured human networks. What do I mean by a human network?
To understand what they are and the impact they can have, our network of more than 850 Community Knowledge Workers (CKWS) in Uganda offers a good example.
 A typical CKW is a local person, often a subsistence farmer, chosen by their community.
Equipped with a phone-and trained in how to effectively use it-they spend a portion of each day visiting the fields of other farmers.
 This human network helps farmers increase productivity and earn more for their efforts while providing much-needed information to organizations that work with these farmers.
The central importance of the human network cannot be underestimated. Â Trusted local people play several critical roles.
Making Human Networks Humthe good news is that there are many different types of human networks throughout Sub-saharan africa.
and its network of"Community Health Workers  to be more effective and efficient in delivery of health services.
 We are exploring creative ways to extend the network of"cash-in and cash-out  points used by a mobile money operator in Uganda to reach deeper into the socioeconomic pyramid.
and businesses through these networks is a bigger challenge that requires lots of pieces to come together.
tested, iterated and improved in the field with the human network and their intended audience.
and phones with 12 keys (remember your first phone?)will continue to be used for years to come.
 in many cases the most effective form of communication may be recorded through voice instead of text or web.
 CKWS use smartphones, but we made this decision only after extensive field testing and compelling evidence that the business case was increased stronger with functionality.
and working with their existing human networks goes a long way to ensuring success. Â Layer on Layerbut
 Once a mobile-enabled human network with a sustainable business model is established, there are often ample opportunities for creative expansion-either providing other types of related services or moving into new domains entirely.
 This approach, developed over the past ten years, is beginning to prove out the potential of mobile phones.
they will provide services to the hundreds of millions of people across Sub-saharan africa who have access to a mobile phone,
 The hard work of building mobile networks has largely been completed, even in the most rural areas.
 We now have the opportunity to maximize their social value oe layering human networks on top of the mobile ones to directly benefit people from the largest cities to the most rural villages across Sub-saharan africa.
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