changes

PALO ALTO, Calif.--A number of companies have been toiling away for years on a replacement for flash memory.

Nanochip, a relatively small company that has received VC funds from Intel, among others, says it will come out with a device in 2010 that will hold eight times as much data as flash. Additionally, the device's cost per gigabyte will be two to four times less, says Nanochip CEO Gordon Knight.

Many solutions have been proposed for replacing flash--phase change memory, spintronics, silicon nanocrystals--and so far no clear winner has emerged. Phase change memory, which involves heating microscopic points … Read more

Nobody's going to like this one. Liberals will feel attacked. Libertarians will nod glumly. Conservatives will feel they're being blamed for something that hasn't happened. And those who intend to ignore climate change will continue to accuse others of a conspiracy.

Peter Wells, a researcher in Cardiff, England, has published an article warning that climate change could lead to a global, militaristic totalitarian state. Here's where you can find the article, but it will cost money to see it all. So, a brief summary: Climate change will create severe challenges to numerous nations. It may prove … Read more

China is now No. 1. Not just in population. Nor just in economic growth among major nations. Not just in construction cranes or the building of coal-burning power plants. It's now the reigning champ of CO2 emissions. Despite the best efforts of numerous American utility companies and widespread use of air conditioning, SUVs and our own splurge in coal-burning, the United States has sunk to No. 2 in the CO2 derby.

The first to declare China the CO2 champ is the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Its estimates today show China put out 6,200 million tons of CO2 last … Read more

We have 10 years, folks. And then it's man the lifeboats, or head for the hills. That's the conclusion of James Hansen and five other scientists. They've just published a paper with the Royal Society in England. It says melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic could soon reach a point of no return. The team even says the recent reports from the United Nations' global warming conferences are too conservative in their projections of what could happen.

The paper urges quick and decisive action, including attempts to scrub greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Hansen is outspoken … Read more

Time to re-write one little section in my Webster's Dictionary. That's an old-time thing, ink on paper, you remember? It gives the fifth definition of "glacial" as "as slow as the movement of a glacier." Need to change that to read "fast" in the future.

British researchers have found the movement of Antarctic's glaciers is speeding up. During the decade ending in 2003, these southern glaciers speed up by 12 percent. That means these huge rivers of ice are speeding toward the ocean. There three things can happen: the ice melts, … Read more

We're not going to be the first generation of humans to cope with severe climate change. We may simply be the first to know just what's happening.

An international research team traced the growth of farming in Mexico's Iguala Valley. Their new report charts the rise of agriculture as the climate became warmer and wetter. Farming began after the last Ice Age. New lakes formed. Corn and squash were being regularly farmed 8,000 years ago. Then farming spread. Agricultural burning was used. Sixty-three hundred years ago domestic crops were plentiful. Forest clearing increased.

Then, around 1,… Read more

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday called for Congress to enact mandatory restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions by year's end.

At a news conference in Washington D.C. alongside Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Pelosi said that as part of a "Fourth of July energy independence package" of legislation, she said it is "absolutely essential" for the House to pass a European-style "cap-and-trade" proposal related to carbon dioxide. The compound, a greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere … Read more

A new scientific study funded by NASA shows that there will be even more rain and snowfall due to global warming. This latest data indicates that rain could increase as much as 13 percent over the next century. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted a maximum rainfall increase of 8 percent. So this new satellite-based data may lead to rejiggering currently used climate change models.

The whole report is now available online. You have to pay, or be a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to access the complete PDF.

Don't expect … Read more

Nashville is hundreds of miles from the nearest forest fires. Recently smoke levels there were 20 times normal. Health officials in the southeastern U.S. can now look at maps showing where the smoke is, and where it's going.

This smoke forecasting is being done by the Center for Forest Disturbance Science in Athens, Ga. Both hourly forecast updates and daily peak values of smoke concentrations are available on the Internet.

The 6-week-old fires have burned a half-million acres. And they're still outta control. These fires are a record for Georgia. That's sparked debate over lack of … Read more