W.R.R. Munro's Blog

If you liked ‘INTERVENTION – The Pandora Virus’, and if you’d like to know what Ayden and Tess face next, good news. The sequel, ‘INTEGRATION – Hacking Humanity’ isn’t far off.

Although it follows directly on from the first novel, ’INTEGRATION – Hacking Humanity’ is going in quite a different direction. Whereas ‘INTERVENTION – The Pandora Virus’ was primarily concerned with biotechnology, the sequel contemplates the human race’s continued integration with information technology.

‘INTEGRATION –...

I don’t want to sound like Dr Doom but I came across two disturbing articles recently.

In ‘The ocean is broken’ (Greg Ray, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Oct 2013) a sailor compared the empty ocean he traversed recently (in his sailing trip from Melbourne, Australia to Osaka, Japan) with the bountiful plenty experienced on the same trip only ten years ago. Empty of life that is. But full of garbage.

Then I read ‘Choking oceans complete ‘deadly trio’ for marine life ‘ (New Scientist No 2938, 12 Oct 2...

Have a listen to the slide-show version on YouTube

(Just in case, like me, you suspect the whole science v’s religion thing may have gone a little far.)

reason number…

“If it’s not testable, it’s not science.” Karl Popper, originator of the principle of falsifiability and generally regarded as one of the greatest science philosophers of the 20th century, said, “all knowledge is provisional [and] capable refutation at any moment”. (1)

Arguably this is one of science’s great...

…can cause a massive landslide.

Is this a political tipping point?

First Chris Christie gave his support to President Obama and now Michael Bloomberg has followed suit, explicitly citing Obama’s attempts to deal with climate change and making a link between climate change and the increased likelihood of extreme weather events like Sandy.

Could some good come from the tragic deaths, from the Big Apple’s suffering? Will this be the seed which grows and flourishes and results in the US declaring “w...

Sunday, October 28, 2012

“Hurricane Sandy, a menacing monster of a storm that forecasters said would bring “life-threatening” flooding, churned toward some of the nation’s most densely populated areas on Sunday…

New York went into emergency mode, ordering more than 370,000 people evacuated in low-lying communities from Coney Island in Brooklyn to Battery Park City in Manhattan and giving 1.1 million schoolchildren a day off on Monday. The subway closing was to darken every one of the city’s 468...

Sunday September 30, 2012

“Fish are likely to get smaller on average by 2050 because global warming will cut the amount of oxygen in the oceans in a shift that may also mean dwindling catches, according to a study on Sunday.

… ‘The reductions in body size will affect whole ecosystems,’ lead author William Cheung of the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Reuters of the findings in the journal Nature Climate Change.

His team of scientists said a trend towards smaller sizes was ‘expecte...

Tuesday September 18, 2012

“The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers recently released predictions that autonomous cars will account for up to 75 percent of vehicles on the road by the year 2040. The organization went even further, forecasting how infrastructure, society and attitudes could change when self-driving cars become the norm around the middle of the century.”

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/18/tech/innovation/ieee-2040-cars/index.html

Wednesday, December 21, 2033

“Walker? A...

Monday September 10, 2012

“New York is moving too slowly to address the potential for flooding that could paralyze transportation, cripple the low-lying financial district and temporarily drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

… the city is second only to New Orleans in the number of people living less than four feet above high tide — nearly 200,000 New Yorkers, according to the research group Climate Central.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/nyregion/new-york-faces-rising-sea...

Wednesday September 5th, 2012 – Bits of Mystery DNA, Far From ‘Junk,’ Play Crucial Role

“The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave.”

…”As scientists delved into the “junk” – parts of the DNA that are not actual genes containing instructions for proteins – they discovered a complex system that controls genes. At...

.

Wednesday August 29th, 2012 – Arctic ice low heralds end of 3-million-year cover

“From 1979 to 2000, the average volume of Arctic ice in September was 12,000 cubic kilometres. This year, it is less than 3000 cubic kilometres. “In plain words,” says Fortier, “we are three-quarters of the way to a summertime ice-free Arctic Ocean, with all the climatic, geopolitical, environmental and economic consequences.”

-http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528802.200-arctic-ice-low-heralds-end-of-3milli...