“The Norwegian-designed Black Hornet Nano features a tiny camera and relays video and still images to a handheld control terminal.
It measures about 10cm by 2.5cm (4in by 1in) and weighs 16g (0.6oz).
The MoD, which also operates more than 300 larger-sized unmanned air vehicles in Afghanistan, said the Black Hornet is carried easily on patrol and works in harsh environments and windy conditions.
They have been in use in Afghanistan since 2012, a spokeswoman confirmed.”
“A small scale test currently being conducted in Germany might one day change the way we use both public and private transportation. Two local buses have been fitted with a unique system that can charge them wirelessly using PRIMOVE inductive wireless charging plates located under the surface of the road where the bus stop at each station.”
http://thefutureofthings.com/news/11577/wireless-charging-electric-bus-tested-in-germany.html
“A recently-published Harvard University meta-analysis funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has concluded that children who live in areas with highly fluoridated water have “significantly lower” IQ scores than those who live in low fluoride areas.
In a 32-page report that can be downloaded free of charge from Environmental Health Perspectives, the researchers said:
A recent report from the U.S. National Research Council (NRC 2006) concluded that adverse effects of high fluoride concentrations in drinking water may be of concern and that additional research is warranted. Fluoride may cause neurotoxicity in laboratory animals, including effects on learning and memory …
To summarize the available literature, we performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies on increased fluoride exposure in drinking water and neurodevelopmental delays. We specifically targeted studies carried out in rural China that have not been widely disseminated, thus complementing the studies that have been included in previous reviews and risk assessment reports …Findings from our meta-analyses of 27 studies published over 22 years suggest an inverse association between high fluoride exposure and children’s intelligence … The results suggest that fluoride may be a developmental neurotoxicant that affects brain development at exposures much below those that can cause toxicity in adults …
Serum-fluoride concentrations associated with high intakes from drinking-water may exceed 1 mg/L, or 50 Smol/L, thus more than 1000-times the levels of some other neurotoxicants that cause neurodevelopmental damage. Supporting the plausibility of our findings, rats exposed to 1 ppm (50 Smol/L) of water-fluoride for one year showed morphological alterations in the brain and increased levels of aluminum in brain tissue compared with controls …
In conclusion, our results support the possibility of adverse effects of fluoride exposures on children’s neurodevelopment. Future research should formally evaluate dose-response relations based on individual-level measures of exposure over time, including more precise prenatal exposure assessment and more extensive standardized measures of neurobehavioral performance, in addition to improving assessment and control of potential confounders.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/fluoride_b_2479833.html
“The main, stunning conclusion we can draw from the paper is that the rate of warming since 1900 is 50 times greater than the rate of cooling in the previous 5000 years“
“The debate around the accuracy of climate modelling and forecasting has been especially intense recently, due to suggestions that forecasts have exaggerated the warming observed so far – and therefore also the level warming that can be expected in the future. But the new research casts serious doubts on these claims, and should give a boost to confidence in scientific predictions of climate change.
The paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Geoscience, explores the performance of a climate forecast based on data up to 1996 by comparing it with the actual temperatures observed since. The results show that scientists accurately predicted the warming experienced in the past decade, relative to the decade to 1996, to within a few hundredths of a degree.
The forecast, published in 1999 by Myles Allen and colleagues at Oxford University, was one of the first to combine complex computer simulations of the climate system with adjustments based on historical observations to produce both a most likely global mean warming and a range of uncertainty. It predicted that the decade ending in December 2012 would be a quarter of degree warmer than the decade ending in August 1996 – and this proved almost precisely correct.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/27/climate-change-model-global-warming
“Prof Beddington made his comments in the final week of his tenure as the government’s chief scientific adviser.
“The [current] variation we are seeing in temperature or rainfall is double the rate of the average. That suggests that we are going to have more droughts, we are going to have more floods, we are going to have more sea surges and we are going to have more storms.
“These are the sort of changes that are going to affect us in quite a short timescale,” he warned.”
“something that could eventually effect us – and is beginning to send ripples through the Eurozone already”
