"We have seen great leaps in digital technology in past the past five years. Smartphones, cloud computing, multi-touch tablets, these are all innovations that revolutionized the way we live and work. However, believe it or not, we are just getting started. Technology will get even better. In the future, we could live like how people in science fiction movies did.

Today’s post is about 10 upcoming, real-life products that is set to revolutionize the world as we know it. Get ready to control the desktop and slice Ninja fruits with your eyes. Get ready to print your own creative physical product. Get ready to dive into the virtual world, and interact with them. Come unfold the future with us."==http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/revolutionary-products/

"The universal wavefunction or universal wave function is a term introduced by Hugh Everett in his Princeton PhD thesis[1] The Theory of the Universal Wave Function, and forms a core concept in the relative state interpretation[2][3] or many-worlds interpretation[4][5] of quantum mechanics. It has also received more recent investigation from James Hartle and Stephen Hawking[6] in which they derive a specific solution to the Wheeler-deWitt equation to explain the initial conditions of the Big Bang cosmology.

Everett's thesis introduction reads:

Since the universal validity of the state function description is asserted, one can regard the state functions themselves as the fundamental entities, and one can even consider the state function of the entire universe. In this sense this theory can be called the theory of the "universal wave function," since all of physics is presumed to follow from this function alone.[7]

The universal wave function is the wavefunction or quantum state of the totality of existence, regarded as the "basic physical entity"[8] or "the fundamental entity, obeying at all times a deterministic wave equation.""===http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction

"...fixing inequality will take more than tinkering..."

http://chronicle.com/article/Mapping-a-N...my/146433/

EXCERPT: David Harvey would implore you to imagine life without capitalism—that is, if you can. Chances are, even if you’re puzzled by the manipulation of phantom money on Wall Street, troubled by society’s growing inequality, or disgusted with the platinum parachutes of corporate executives, you probably still conceive the world in terms of profits, private property, and free markets, the invisible hand always on the tiller.

[...] Capitalism can survive its contradictions, he writes, as long as it heaps more burdens—in the form of class inequality, degradation of the environment, and curtailing of human freedom—on the people and institutions already holding it up.

[...] At some point, he believes, the system can’t continue. [...] he raises the specter of violence as a potential response to the inequities of capital—the riots and protests in Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, and Sweden last year "look more and more like the prior tremors for a coming earthquake that will make the postcolonial revolutionary struggles of the 1960s look like child’s play."

"The longer it goes on," Harvey says quietly in his New York office, "the less I think that there is a possibility that it will be a peaceful transition."

[...] the supercharged capitalist culture of the United States, being a Marxist intellectual—even, according to Thomson Reuters, as one of the most frequently cited academics in the world—means often being overlooked in the public square. While Harvey draws big crowds and mainstream news media during appearances in Europe and South America, in this country his name appears mainly in small leftist outlets. "I get on the BBC, but I don’t get on NPR," he says. "There is a kind of taboo in the mainstream media of taking any of this seriously."

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism may be the book that introduces Harvey to a wider audience. After all, it lands at an auspicious moment....

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...110414.php

ARTICLE: In nature, the right amount of death at the right time might actually help boost a species' population density, according to new research that could help in understanding animal populations, pest control and managing fish and wildlife stocks.

In a paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, a Princeton University researcher and European colleagues conclude that the kind of positive population effect an overall species experiences from a loss of individuals, or mortality, depends on the size and developmental stage of the creatures that die.

If many juveniles perish, more adults are freed up to reproduce, but if more adults die, the number of juveniles that mature will increase because density dependence is relaxed, explained co-author Anieke van Leeuwen, a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Van Leeuwen worked with first author Arne Schröder, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, and Tom Cameron, a lecturer in aquatic community ecology at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom.

This dynamic wherein the loss of individuals in one developmental stage translates to more robust individuals in another stage can be important to managing wildlife, pests or resource stocks, van Leeuwen said. For instance, targeting the adults of an invasive insect could have a counterproductive effect of making more food available to growing larvae, she said.

"It doesn't matter which developmental stage you target, if you impose mortality on one you will get overcompensation on the opposite end of the size range," van Leeuwen said. "This effect can be especially advantageous in situations where we want to manage resources we want to harvest. Knowing that there are potential effects that result in an increase in that segment of the population we want to encourage is highly relevant."

At a certain point, of course, mortality becomes too high and the species as a whole declines, the researchers report.

The researchers compared existing theoretical and experimental work on the effect of mortality on population density to resolve various inconsistencies between the two. Existing mathematical models have predicted this phenomenon, and laboratory and field studies have shown that the effect holds true for a variety of animal species.

Many ecological theories and models, however, have ignored differences in body size and development, and predicted that a modest amount of mortality would result in an increase in the total number of individuals, the researchers wrote. On the other hand, experiments have predominantly shown — along with certain models — that mortality has a positive effect within certain life stages or size classes. The researchers concluded that the overlap of experimental and theoretical data indicates that the benefit of mortality is likely divided by developmental stage. In addition, the number of species in which the phenomenon has been observed makes it commonplace in the natural world.

- - - - - - -

The paper, "When less is more: Positive population-level effects of mortality," was published in the November 2014 issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

This work was supported by the Journal of Experimental Biology; the Swedish Research Council and the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries; the University of Leeds, the National Environment Research Council (grant no. NE/C510467/1) and the European Commission Intra-European Fellowship (FANTISIZE, #275873); and the National Science Foundation (grant no. 1115838).

http://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discus...-recovery/

EXCERPT: In an international study, Mayo Clinic researchers and collaborators have identified genetic markers that may help in identifying individuals who could benefit from the alcoholism treatment drug acamprosate. The findings, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, show that patients carrying these genetic variants have longer periods of abstinence during the first three months of acamprosate treatment....

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...110414.php

ARTICLE: The puzzle pieces of tectonic plates that make up the outer layer of the earth are not rigid and don't fit together as nicely as we were taught in high school.

A study published in the journal Geology by Corné Kreemer, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and his colleague Richard Gordon of Rice University, quantifies deformation of the Pacific plate and challenges the central approximation of the plate tectonic paradigm that plates are rigid.

Using large-scale numerical modeling as well as GPS velocities from the largest GPS data-processing center in the world – the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno – Kreemer and Gordon have showed that cooling of the lithosphere, the outermost layer of Earth, makes some sections of the Pacific plate contract horizontally at faster rates than other sections. This causes the plate to deform.

Gordon's idea is that the plate cooling, which makes the ocean deeper, also affects horizontal movement and that there is shortening and deformation of the plates due to the cooling. In partnering with Kreemer, the two put their ideas and expertise together to show that the deformation could explain why some parts of the plate tectonic puzzle didn't fall neatly into place in recent plate motion models, which is based on spreading rates along mid-oceanic ridges. Kreemer and Gordon also showed that there is a positive correlation between where the plate is predicted to deform and where intraplate earthquakes occur. Their work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Results of the study suggest that plate-scale horizontal thermal contraction is significant, and that it may be partly released seismically. . The pair of researchers are, as the saying goes, rewriting the textbooks.

"This is plate tectonics 2.0, it revolutionizes the concepts of plate rigidity," Kreemer, who teaches in the University's College of Science, said. "We have shown that the Pacific plate deforms, that it is pliable. We are refining the plate tectonic theory and have come up with an explanation for mid-plate seismicity."

The oceanic plates are shortening due to cooling, which causes relative motion inside the plate, Kreemer said. The oceanic crust of the Pacific plate off shore California is moving 2 mm to the south every year relative to the Pacific/Antarctic plate boundary.

"It may not sound like much, but it is significant considering that we can measure crustal motion with GPS within a fraction of a millimeter per year," he said. "Unfortunately, all existing GPS stations on Pacific islands are in the old part of the plate that is not expected nor shown to deform. New measurements will be needed within the young parts of the plate to confirm this study's predictions, either on very remote islands or through sensors on the ocean floor."

This work is complementary to Kreemer's ongoing effort to quantify the deformation in all of the Earth's plate boundary zones with GPS velocities – data that are for a large part processed in the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory. The main goal of the global modeling is to convert the strain rates to earthquake forecast maps.

"Because we don't have GPS data in the right places of the Pacific plate, our prediction of how that plate deforms can supplement the strain rates I've estimated in parts of the world where we can quantify them with GPS data," Kreemer said. "Ultimately, we hope to have a good estimate of strain rates everywhere so that the models not only forecast earthquakes for places like Reno and San Francisco, but also for places where you may expect them the least."

The abstract of the article can be found here: http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early...1.abstract.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...110414.php

EXCERPT: If you took the junk from the back of your closet and combined it with the dirty laundry already on your floor, you would have an even bigger mess. While this principle will likely always hold true for our bedrooms, it turns out that in certain situations, combining messes can actually reduce the disorder of the whole. An international team of researchers from Slovenia and Iran has identified a set of conditions in which adding disorder to a system makes it more orderly. This behavior is known as antifragility, a concept introduced recently to describe similar phenomena in statistics, economics and social science....

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/...rain-study

EXCERPT: Working shifts significantly damages people’s ability to think and remember, and doing so for at least a decade “ages” the brain by an extra six and a half years, new research has found. The findings are the latest to link working outside normal hours to an increased risk of health problems. Other studies have suggested links with cancers, heart attacks, strokes, ulcers and metabolic diseases such as diabetes....