Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.

At a time when Malthusian worries are resurgent and people fear the consequences for an overcrowded planet, the decline in fertility is surprising and somewhat reassuring. It means that worries about a population explosion are themselves being exploded—and it carries a lesson about how to solve the problems of climate change.

Today’s fall in fertility is both very large and very fast. Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain—from 1800 to 1930—took just 20 years—from 1965 to 1985—in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006—and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.

On the other hand:

The Malthusians are right that the world’s population is still increasing and can do a lot more environmental damage before it peaks at just over 9 billion in 2050.

On a vaguely related topic, many Chinese never learned how not to get pregnant.

---

Can’t wait for the religious-right-wing to go nuts over this…

DAILYMAIL – Human eggs and sperm have been grown in the laboratory in research which could change the face of parenthood.

It paves the way for a cure for infertility and could help those left sterile by cancer treatment to have children who are biologically their own.

But it raises a number of moral and ethical concerns. These include the possibility of children being born through entirely artificial means, and men and women being sidelined from the process of making babies.

Read the article to find out more about each questions.

Why this universe?

What is everything made of?

How does complexity happen?

Will string theory ever be proved correct?

What is the singularity?

What is reality really?

How far can physics take us?

This may explain a lot about some of our regular commenters.

Adults with little Internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds.

The results suggest Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.

As the brain ages, a number of structural and functional changes occur, including atrophy, or decay, reductions in cell activity and increases in complex things like deposits of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, which can impact cognitive function.

Research has shown that mental stimulation similar to the stimulation that occurs in individuals who frequently use the Internet may affect the efficiency of cognitive processing and alter the way the brain encodes new information.

Found by Brother Uncle Don.

The Times – October 19, 2009:

That exercise is the key to losing our collective weight is something that we know so deep in our cultural guts that to question it would be ridiculous.

Except that is what the most cutting-edge obesity researchers are now doing. The recent studies show that the benefits of exercise for weight loss have been overstated. This idea is shocking. It goes so far against the orthodoxy that it is not something many can accept. And certainly for governments and the food industry that places them under so much pressure, it is too much to swallow.

But, as Professor Boyd Swinburn, director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, says: “This is provocative in many ways . . . but my concern is that if we put the emphasis on exercise we are unlikely to tackle the obesity problem as we are not driving at the root cause.”

The idea that exercise will help to shed pounds is fairly recent — emerging at the same time that obesity began to boom in the 1980s.

Strap yourself in: We’re in for the return of Cold War politics, the rise of new dominant powers, and a full-blown space war, according to a new book. What are the chances his dire predictions will come true?

Written in 20 year increments, The Next 100 Years by George Friedman looks out over our coming century, with an eye towards geopolitics and international power. In the next twenty years, Friedman predicts that the global war on terror, which he terms the US-Jihadist war, will be winding down, a smaller conflict that will have little consequence after all is said and done.

Instead, numerous problems will crop up in the former Soviet bloc as Russia works to regain its former power by reclaiming older territories through economic growth and outright bullying.

[... A] major point of conflict in the next century, especially in the next fifty years as populations begin to drop, won’t be over immigrants illegally entering countries, it will be over which countries can lure in the most new workers to help prop up their own economies and lagging workforces.

While the major powers around the world such as the United States and Russia will have economic slowdowns during this stretch, smaller nations will use this opportunity to rise on their own.

Lots, lots more, if you read the full review. Or the book.

Bad translation upon worse translations manipulated for political ends. Here’s another example that makes the God-was-an-alien-experimental-biogenetisist seem more plausible. Assuming you ignore the staggering amount of physical evidence for evolution, that is.

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.
[...]
She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”. The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth.”
[...]
She writes in her thesis that the new translation fits in with ancient texts.

[...]“There was already water,” she said.

“There were sea monsters. God did create some things, but not the Heaven and Earth. The usual idea of creating-out-of-nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is a big misunderstanding.”

---

Real fake                                     Fake fake

---

Will this be a way for ‘death panels’ to get rid of expensive heart patients? Jolt ‘em, kill ‘em, remove the hack so they can’t be tracked.

A US researcher is calling for legislation to enforce tighter security on implanted cardiac devices after he hacked one wirelessly to produce a potentially fatal electric shock.

The scenario may sound like something out of a detective novel or far-fetched thriller movie script but the danger is real and should be taken seriously, says Kevin Fu, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, who specialises in the security of RFID systems.
[...]
Doctors can access modern pacemakers and defibrillators over the Internet via a short-range wireless link similar to those used in RFID devices. The system allows them to monitor patients remotely and install software updates.

This means a hacker could access confidential medical information as well as reprogram the devices, Fu says.
[...]
The hacking device could be built into something the size of a cellphone and infect IMDs with malware randomly as the killer walked down the street.

---

Millions of women drink alcohol before having sex because they lack confidence in their bodies, a study suggests.

Almost half of those questioned said they preferred sex while under the influence of alcohol because it helped them lose their inhibitions and be more adventurous.

Researchers, who surveyed 3000 women aged 18-50, found on average they slept with eight men, but were drunk with at least five, and on two occasions couldn’t remember the man’s name the next day, the Herald Sun reports.

Four out of 10 had been tipsy when sleeping with a partner for the first time.

---

EU funding ‘Orwellian’ artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for “abnormal behaviour” – Telegraph __ Maybe they can scan DU and figure out what’s wrong with a couple of the commentators.

A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as “agents” to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.

Its main objectives include the “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence”.

Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a “sinister step” for any country, adding that it was “positively chilling” on a European scale.

According to this fascinating article, a lot of people with synaesthesia don’t realize others don’t see things as they do. Many can do amazing things that we ordinary people can’t. Have they evolved into a better form of human? Are you, or do you know, one of them?

Dr Simner studies synaesthesia – a condition caused by an unusually high number of connections between two areas of the brain’s sensory cortex, making two senses inseparable. Synaesthetes, as they are known, have experiences that might seem extremely strange to any non-synaesthete. The extra connections might be between the brain area that processes colours and the area that processes language.
[...]
“One of the most common variants is called grapheme-colour synaesthesia,” says Dr Simner.

“People with this variant know the colour of letters of the alphabet. So they know that the letter ‘A’ may be red. But not just any red, it’s a certain shade of crimson. And B is turquoise-blue.”
[...]
“If you want to define synaesthesia in a purely neurological sense, it’s just the predisposition to have extra pathways between areas of the brain,” says Dr Simner. “And we can see those connections.”

---

An 18 year old from a village in Nepal outdoes US companies spending millions on R&D. Too much ‘out of the box’ thinking for us nowadays, I guess. An example of why we have dropped to #2 in competitiveness? At least we have this.

---