A Japanese adventurer, with a history of impressive solo sailing feats, has become the first person to make a major ocean voyage-from Hawaii to Japan- with a wave powered boat.

Nature Magazine reports on a study examining the benefits for people who have had positive or even mystical experiences induced by the psychedelic drug psilocybin. The study offers more support to those who argue that, when used responsibly, some drugs more commonly taken for leisure can safely be used to relieve the stress associated with severe chronic diseases such as cancer.

The Martian Phoenix lander and analysis survey laboratory might be set for its final experiment after this weekend. The last sample looked at required so much vibration to break up the clumps that it has apparently damaged one of the ovens and caused a short circuit.

I can remember my dad telling me that when he was a boy, growing up in Cornwall in the 1930's and 40's, the climate was different, there were colder winters and hotter summers... I know in my lifetime the climate here in the south west of England has changed too, lately "summer" seems to be the odd hot week separated by long periods of overcast and the odd very wet week. In April we had snow, just last week in June we had hailstones.

So while it isn't getting warmer hereabouts, as in "Global Warming", it is getting wetter, and perhaps more moderate with less extremes between winter and summer, the seasons are more bland and mixed, and the plants appear to be reflecting this change too.

Worldwide demand for more oil sources is huge, and it isn't going away anytime soon. Oil exploration companies have turned to the highest tech possible to try and find the next big fields, and increasingly this mean deep searches, and under deep water. In order to analyze data collected by ocean research ships, one of the bright spots now is the use of tuned algorithms being run on custom supercomputers using the Cell CPU, because it is outstanding for 3-d modeling. One company using this tech is reporting that they are getting results six times faster than current industry efforts.

In an unpublished report, the World Bank concludes that 75% of the increase in food prices is the result of biofuel mandates.

On this day in history...

The King who lost America

LNER train's 125 mph

Times Archive, 1880: Latest intelligence, Afghanistan

MPs vote for 50 per cent pay rise

In many ways Senator Jesse Helms embodies Tarheel characteristics

Moon men return to earth ...

The Siege of Mafeking

And we have some little Jack Russel in our yard today, and I'd bet it is from a one day earlier fireworks barrage. The little doggie has a collar with phone number and name of owners, I looked in the phonebook, then on google maps, yep, same direction I saw and heard a lot of early celebrations going on last night. Can't prove it, but sure seems coincidental. Humans love fireworks, but pets mostly do *not*. Here are some recommendations from the Humane Society on having a fun whizzbang 4th and still not freak your dogs and cats out.

Business and tourism have somewhat triumphed over politics, as the two rival Chinas have initiated direct airline flights after 60 years of tensions.

California is experiencing basically non stop wildfires now, and the actual monetary cost of fighting them is rising. They are already way over budget from what they had originally intended to be the set aside sums. Will this become a very non trivial expense in the future if we continue to see great climate fluctuations?

There's a new design for a wave powered generator. The inventors call it the Anaconda because it is roughly a big water snake shaped flexible tube with a turbine at one end. Ocean waves passing by put pressure on the tube, and it forms a bulge, as it is passed down the length of the tube, eventually at the end the pressure behind the traveling bulge surges, and it encounters the turbine. A more detailed explanation here, Anaconda bulge wave turbine system

Several former top heads of various US science agencies are proposing the creation of an integrated overall Earth Sciences agency. In particular they want to merge NOAA and the Geological Survey, with much closer collaboration with several additional agencies.

If the world is heating up a little, sometimes the extremes will be more extreme, as in mega heatwaves. A new research paper says that some of the recent past historical heatwave incidents could become quite common, and reach even higher sustained temperatures, way above any sort of danger zone level for humans.

Danish and German researchers have found that the Earth's magnetic field can change rapidly, sometimes within a few months. They are basing this conclusion on nine years of data collected by the Orsted satellite.

Polaroid has a new pocket sized printer designed to give you a hardcopy of your cellphone snaps. It is USB connected or Bluetooth.

Under increasing public pressure over its decision to temporarily halt all new solar development on public land, the Bureau of Land Management said Wednesday that it was lifting the freeze, barely a month after it was put into effect.

LCD TVs, praised as being greener than the CRT because they consume much less power, may actually be speeding climate change due to the use of NF₃.

The whole wi-fi security issue is starting to crop up with increasing regularity in the mainstream media, but there is never any discussion, just warnings of the dangers and warnings of the consequences.

Most home wi-fi boxes offer three levels of "security" under the appropriate tab in the internal web server config page, none, WPA & WEP.

In various other tabs in the internal web server you can set things like channel number and network name, but chances are most of this is way over the head of the average user and they will instead use a set-up wizard and accept whatever defaults it suggests.

Summer is watermelon season, and the upcoming fourth of July celebration is also the height of melon consumption as part of the great backyard feast. Consumers of the giant luscious fruit can now know they are also enjoying a host of health benefits, including interesting new research that is showing it could well help in the love life department.

Insurance companies who cover homeowners and commercial buildings are in the business of insuring risk. If they guess correctly, they win, get to keep more of the customers money and go use that elsewhere to generate some more profits. If they guess wrong, they lose, and have to pay out in large sums, a very simple concept but quite complex today with various computer models driving the executive decisions and at what level premiums are set at. But really, how good are these catastrophe model programs, and are they adequate in dealing with fast changing climate and the economics of the fluctuating mortgage and property markets?

The extreme sudden rise in energy prices is starting to impact rural Americans in a large way. Entire small communities are in peril of just becoming near ghost towns, as transportation costs become simply impossible to meet. The shrinking jobs market as thousands of factories were moved overseas, which meant farther and farther away commutes chasing the remaining jobs, and the rising prices of everything else will necessitate hard choices.

A research paper from a collaboration of IBM, Google and the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory has come to the conclusion that there are over half a billion surfers on the internet who are still running older and unpatched versions of their browsers. The researchers aren't sure of the status of all the various really exotic unpatched and older plugins though, that data is still hard to come by, although the normal major plugins are covered.

Now isn't this interesting. The methods used for harsh interrogation against "enemy combatants" and which the administration claims are not torture, come from a training manual that was based on captured documents relating to methods used by the Chinese against US POWs during the Korean war. It was copied just about verbatim, the title changed, and used in training to precondition US intelligence agents and soldiers to resist such treatment if captured. Back then, the government and what returned POWs we had said the techniques used lead directly to brainwashing and false confessions, and basically constituted a combination of psychological and physical torture.

Was a common refrain from the english tourists in Spain, asking the price of something in Pesetas.

What was worse was "ex patriates" who actually lived in Spain, contantly converting the price of everything back into Pounds in order to see if it was a "good buy" or not.

"20 Ducados (cigarettes) are 50 pesetas, and a bottle of beer is 60", I would tell people, converting that to 25p and 30p doesn't make it any cheaper, any better, or make you smoke or drink more.

However, there is no shortage of examples in the modern world of people working in one "currency" and thinking in another, and this is where many of the problems start, because the relative values of exchange rates between any two given "currencies" pretty much constantly fluctuates.

Over on Asimovs Science Fiction there's an article on how we're "running out" of some rare earth metals used to make a lot of our current technology.  This got me thinking about the comparison on how we're using up all our oil.    

There's a fairly extensive internet revolt occurring in Sweden over a new law passed there that allows the state to snoop on all faxes, telephone calls and emails that cross the border. A mass email protest has started and authorities are being deluged and it is still ongoing.

Possibly coming soon to a nation near you, the latest black market expensive product, demanded by the addicted users, who can't do with out it, and banned by the authorities-the incandescent light bulb.

A species of chameleon has been discovered in Madagascar that has an entire life cycle in under a year. The juveniles spend the bulk of their life in the shell, hatch out, rapidly grow to adulthood and breed, laying the eggs for the next generation, then expire, right before the dry season starts. This is a new record for any four legged creature.

The economic fallout from the tomatoe and salmonella incidents is being felt more and more this harvest season as sales have plummeted. Some growers aren't even bothering to harvest, and are just letting the tomatoes rot on the vine, and the FDA still hasn't pinpointed the original source yet.

The first factory designed to manufacture the components to build solar thermal electric generating plants has opened in Las Vegas.