@The Convergence of ICT, the Environment, Climate Change, EV and HEV Transportation & Distributed Renewable Energy

For all their virtual accomplishments, gamers aren't feted for their real-world usefulness. But that perception might be about to change, thanks to a new wave of games that let players with little or no scientific knowledge tackle some of science's biggest problems. And gamers are already proving their worth.

In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.

A year later, people playing an astronomy game called Planet Hunters found a curious planet with four stars in its system, and to date, they've discovered 40 planets that could potentially support life, all of which had been previously missed by professional astronomers.

On paper, gamers and scientists make a bizarre union. But in reality, their two worlds aren't leagues apart: both involve solving problems within a given set of rules. Genetic analysis, for instance, is about finding sequences and patterns among seemingly random clusters of data. Frame the analysis as a pattern-spotting game that looks like Candy Crush, and, while aligning patterns and scoring points, players can also be hunting for mutations that cause cancer, Alzheimer's disease or diabetes.

"Our brains are geared up to recognise patterns," says Erinma Ochu, a neuroscientist and Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow at the University of Manchester, explaining why scientists are turning to gamers for help, "and we do it better than computers. This is a new way of working for scientists, but as long as they learn how to trust games developers to do what they do best – make great games – then they can have thousands of people from all around the world working on their data."

The potential is huge. As a planet we spend 3bn hours a week playing online games, and if even a fraction of that time can be harnessed for science, laboratories around the world would have access to some rather impressive cognitive machinery. The trick, though, is to make the games as playable and addictive as possible – the more plays a game gets, the larger the dataset generated and the more robust the findings.

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Only six of the previous Winter Olympics host cities will be cold enough to reliably host the Games by the end of this century if global warming projections prove accurate.

I was in Abu Dhabi hanging out with a Dutch guy and a German guy as part of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week when Tesla, incidentally, announced that it was opening new Supercharger stations connecting the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Unfortunately, we were too busy with other things to catch that news, so I’m just getting to covering this. Even more unfortunately, European Superchargers are yet to be placed within range of my home in Southwest Poland…. but hopefully it won’t be too long until they are here. Here’s Tesla’s most up-to-date European Supercharger map:

The acquisition of Connected Home startup Nest by Google last week has stirred up several questions around what it might mean for Google to have access to the data which Nest uses in its smart thermostat and smoke detector. In addition, several publications have been looking into Nest’s investors; however, it seems one of Nest’s unnamed investors comes straight out of the City of Light.

For those who attended LeWeb in 2012, it should come no surprise that the very man who interviewed Tony Fadell on stage - Kima Ventures LP & CEO of Iliad, Xavier Niel is reported to have entered into Nest’s first round of fundraising alongside Kleiner Perkins in 2010. Niel, who stated in the interview that he knew Fadell since his days at Apple (not surprising given Apple’s original European headquarters was in Paris, and Niel has been a key figure in the ecosystem for over 15 years), appears to be the only non-US Investor to have gotten in the on the deal, according to Crunchbase.

Niel has invested in upwards of 1000 startups over the past 10 years, and there’s no sign of slowing down. Kima Ventures, his VC fund run by Jeremie Berrebi, announced in December “Kima 15,” a program by which startups can apply with fixed terms for a $150K investment for 15% of their company, with a promise of cash in the bank (in approved) in 15 days.

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Twenty kilometers (12 miles) from England’s Kent and Essex coasts, the world’s largest offshore wind farm has started harvesting the breezes over the sea. Located in the Thames Estuary, where the River Thames meets the North Sea, the London Array has a maximum generating power of 630 megawatts (MW), enough to supply as many as 500,000 homes.

The wind farm became fully operational on April 8, 2013. Twenty days later, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite captured this image of the area. The second image is a closeup of the area marked by the white box in the top image. White points in the second image are the wind turbines; a few boat wakes are also visible. The sea is discolored by light tan sediment—spring runoff washed out by the Thames.

To date, the London Array includes 175 wind turbines aligned to the prevailing southwest wind and spread out across 100 square kilometers (40 square miles). Each turbine stands 650 to 1,200 meters apart (2,100 to 3,900 feet) and 147 meters (482 feet) tall. Each is connected by cables buried in the seafloor, and power is transmitted to two substations offshore and to an onshore station at Cleve Hill.

With construction operations working out of Ramsgate, the Array is eventually supposed to grow to 245 square kilometers (95 square miles). The wind farm sits on two natural sandbanks, with water as deep as 25 meters (80 feet). The site was chosen because of its proximity to onshore electric power infrastructure and because it stays out of the main shipping lanes through the area.

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For most of us, measles and whooping cough are diseases of the past. You get a few shots as a kid and then hardly think about them again.

But that's not the case in all parts of the world — not even parts of the U.S.

As an from the Council on Foreign Relations illustrates, several diseases that are easily prevented with vaccines have made a comeback in the past few years. Their resurgence coincides with changes in perceptions about vaccine safety.

Since 2008 folks at the think tank have been plotting all the cases of measles, mumps, rubella, polio and whooping cough around the world. Each circle on the map represents a local outbreak of a particular disease, while the size of the circle indicates the number of people infected in the outbreak.

As you flip through the various maps over the years, two trends clearly emerge: Measles has surged back in Europe, while whooping cough is has become a problem here in the U.S.

Childhood immunization rates plummeted in parts of Europe and the U.K. after a 1998 study falsely claimed that the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella was linked to autism.

That study has since been found to be . But fears about vaccine safety have stuck around in Europe and here in the U.S.

Viruses and bacteria have taken full advantage of the immunization gaps.

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The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of "leaky" smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users' private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.

The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.

Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.

Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes.

Scooping up information the apps are sending about their users allows the agencies to collect large quantities of mobile phone data from their existing mass surveillance tools – such as cable taps, or from international mobile networks – rather than solely from hacking into individual mobile handsets.

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Polar bears are regularly thought of as being among the animals most burdened by climate change, often described as starved creatures floating aimlessly on shrinking icebergs. But new research is depicting the Arctic’s greatest predator as one that can actually adapt well to a changing climate, at least when it comes to modifying its diet.

Recent research of polar bears’ diets has produced a vast body of evidence that the bears are turning to other sources of sustenance in times when seals, its preferred prey, are hard to come by. Scientists have spent some time tracking Arctic polar bears’ eating habits while they hunt. According to a series of papers published last year in various ecology journals, polar bears ate everything from snow geese – including their eggs – to caribou, grass seeds and berries.

"What our results suggest is that polar bears have flexible foraging strategies," Linda Gormezano, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a co-author of several of the papers, told NBC News. 

A polar bear’s favorite meal is indeed seal pup. The white predator stalks its prey by roaming the edge of the sea ice and waiting for seals to pop their unsuspecting heads out of the water. But with the ice shrinking in parts of the Arctic, and ice break-up occurring as much as three weeks earlier in some areas than it did 30 years ago, the bears find it increasingly difficult to nab a tasty seal.

“There is little doubt that polar bears are very susceptible as global climate change continues to drastically alter the landscape of the northern polar regions,” Robert Rockwell, a researcher in the American Museum of Natural History’s department of ornithology and co-author of a Dec. 2013 study on polar-bear diets, said in a statement. “But we’re finding that they might be more resilient than is commonly thought.”

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When it comes to climate change, small could be beautiful. Christy McCain of the University of Colorado Boulder looked at more than 1,000 scientific studies of mammalian behaviour and responses to climate change in North America and came to one big conclusion: bigger animals are more likely to experience stress than the smaller ones. A tiny shrew in the American forests was 27 times less likely to respond to climate change than a moose not far away.

She settled on 140 scientific papers that contained population responses from 73 North American mammal species, and examined a number of observations that could be called a response. Was there some sort of local extinction? Did the creature’s range contract, did it shift, did the species numbers increase? Did seasonal behaviour betray any change? Was there any variation in body size? Or in genetic diversity?

She and her colleague Sarah King report in Global Change Biology that only about half of the mammals responded as expected to climate change; 7% did the opposite of what might be expected and the remaining 41% betrayed no response. Those characteristics that indicated a response to climate change were large body size and restricted times in the day when a mammal might be active.

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The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.

The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in the UK.

The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can”, according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets.

The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more – including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.

An agency presentation from 2011 – subtitled “SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit” – reveals the program collected an average of 194 million text messages a day in April of that year. In addition to storing the messages themselves, a further program known as “Prefer” conducted automated analysis on the untargeted communications.

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Follow all the sustainable business action at the final day of the World Economic Forum. As we round up the 44th annual event look out for coverage on scaling up the circular economy.

On Dec. 18, the Boston Zoning Commission did something that promises to give the city back a piece of its past while potentially catapulting it into a strange new future: It approved a new rule making it legal to start a commercial farm inside city limits.

Until the turn of the 20th century, it wasn’t all that unusual for Bostonians to earn their living through farming, and as late as 1895, the city was producing more crops and livestock products than any Massachusetts town except Dartmouth. This changed as the city modernized and grew denser, driving real estate prices up and eventually, in 1965, leading to the passage of a citywide zoning code that introduced all kinds of bureaucratic obstacles to starting a farm anywhere in Boston.

No longer. The new zoning ordinance, known as Article 89, explicitly lays out what kinds of farms Bostonians are allowed to start—from how many acres they can be to whether farmers are allowed to slaughter chickens on site. (The answer to that second one is no.) Thomas M. Menino signed off on the ordinance as one of his final acts as mayor, opening the door to an unfamiliar vision of Boston—as a city that grows its own food.

What will urban farming look like? The most obvious agrarian fantasies—cows grazing on the Common, like they did until 1830, or the concrete bustle of Dewey Square giving way to the peaceful swaying of corn stalks—are, perhaps just as obviously, the least likely to happen.

But not every farm looks like a farm any more. A new type of agriculture has been sprouting up in urban centers like Tokyo, New York, and Vancouver, British Columbia, and Boston’s new ordinance opens the city up to a whole range of ideas about how to integrate food production into city life.

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