Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and others, which displayed images of teens abusing alcohol and drugs, “constitutes electronic child abuse”.
According to a new study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University suggests that teens who use social media are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol.
Continue reading… “Does Facebook promote drug and alcohol abuse in teens?”
Are you ready to show off your artistic prowess?
The DaVinci Institute is pleased to announce a “call for artists” for the Inventor Art Competition.
The theme of this competition is inventors and their great inventions. Inventors chosen may be contemporary or from any time in the past. They just have to show the mark of being a great inventor.
When you think of a great inventor, who do you think of? What invention did they create?
Continue reading… “DaVinci Institute announces Inventor Art Competition”
Facebook also has 870 million unique users.
Social networking site Facebook reached 1,000,000,000,000 page views in June. It’s also got 870 million unique users, according to Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner. That makes it the number-one site in terms of broad reach of Internet users.
Brazil is set to start gathering oil in new places.
Want to get a feel for how crazy the post-peak oil fossil fuels industry is getting? Here’s as good an example as any: Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras is about to embark on an unprecedented oil-gathering mission. It’s about to attempt to extract 30 billion barrels of oil from reserves that are locked in deepwater sub-salt fields at least 60 miles off the coast and up to five miles underwater. In order to get at the incredibly hard-to-get oily good stuff, Brazil is spending an estimated $226 billion — and $127 billion will be spent on exploration and production alone.
The product of that venture is already taking shape: a veritable floating “offshore city” has sprung up over 100 kilometers (62 miles) off the coast of Brazil, and it will lead the effort to drill into the deep sea sub-salt…
Continue reading… “Brazil builds $127 billion “Offshore City” to harvest oil in the deep sea”
Are anesthetics as safe as we think they are?
The majority of people reading this sentence will, at some point in their lives, undergo a medical treatment that requires general anesthesia. Doctors will inject them with a drug, or have them breathe it in. For several hours, they will be unconscious. And almost all of them will wake up happy and healthy.
We know that the general anesthetics we use today are safe. But we know that because they’ve proven themselves to be safe, not because we understand the mechanisms behind how they work. The truth is, at that level, anesthetics are a big, fat question mark. And that leaves room for a lot of unknowns. What if, in the long term, our anesthetics aren’t as safe for everyone as we think they are?
Continue reading… “Going Under: What we don’t know about anesthetics”
The PumpTire consists of an inner tube, the tire itself, and a special uni-directional air valve that screws into the stem of the inner tube. When the pump is active, it uses the tire’s rolling motion to draw in air from the atmosphere, through the one-way valve and into a lumen that runs along the outer edge of the tire. As the tire rolls, it squishes the lumen flat, forcing air into the main tube and when the weight of the tire is removed, the lumen re-inflates before it’s rolled over again. The system automatically shuts the valve when the desired pressure is reached. The doesn’t require any special modifications or rims…
Continue reading… “Self-Inflating bike tires promise a future free of hand pumps”
Filling without drilling.
Scientists claim to have found the secret of a “completely painless” filling by identifying a material that can repair decaying teeth within weeks.
The unplanned pregnancy rate among women with incomes below the federal poverty line jumped by 50 percent between 1994 and 2006.
Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned and they are increasingly concentrated among low-income women, according to a new study.
Continue reading… “Unplanned pregnancies increase among low-income women”
Most Americans (64%) say that parents are not putting enough pressure on their children to do well in school as U.S. students are underperforming on international tests. By contrast, 68% of the Chinese public take the opposite position and say that parents in their country are putting too much pressure on their children to succeed academically.
Continue reading… “64% of Americans say parents do not put enough pressure on students”
Most people would choose longer hours and higher pay even if it won’t make them happy.
Money might not be able to buy you love, but it seems most people would be willing to choose it over happiness if the results of a new survey are to be believed.
Continue reading… “People choose higher paying jobs over happiness”
Beech galls in Patagonia inhabited by Saccharomyces eubayanus, the species
researchers think combined with domesticated yeast to create a lager-producing hybrid.
Mystery solved! Scientists have discovered the “missing link” in beer brewing. Ladies and gents, take a good look at the orange-colored galls on the beech tree to your left: they were found to harbor the specific strain of yeast that makes lager beer possible.
How did lager beer come to be? After pondering the question for decades, scientists have found that an elusive species of yeast isolated in the forests of Argentina was key to the invention of the crisp-tasting German beer 600 years ago.
It took a five-year search around the world before a scientific team discovered, identified and named the organism, a species of wild yeast called Saccharomyces eubayanus that lives on beech trees…
Continue reading… “Scientists discovered the “Missing Link” of beer brewing”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.
