the news:
blogs.thenews.com.pk/blogs/2012/05/04/politics-of-concerns/

dawnnews.com (Pakistan)

WASHINGTON: The World Bank on Monday chose Korean-born American health expert Jim Yong Kim as its new president, maintaining Washington’s grip on the job and leaving developing countries frustrated with the selection process.

Kim, a physician and anthropologist who makes for a somewhat unorthodox choice to head the global anti-poverty lender, won the job over Nigeria’s widely respected finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, with the support of Washington’s allies in Western Europe, Japan and Canada, as well as some emerging economies.

It was the first time in the World Bank’s history that the United States’ hold on the job was challenged.

The decision by the World Bank’s 25-member board was not unanimous, with emerging economies splitting their support.

Brazil and South Africa backed Okonjo-Iweala, while three sources said China and India supported Kim.

Kim, 52, who is president of Dartmouth College, will assume his new post on July 1 after Robert Zoellick steps down as head of the World Bank.

“I will seek a new alignment of the World Bank Group with a rapidly changing world,” Kim said in a statement.

He said he would work to ensure that the World Bank “delivers more powerful results to support sustained growth; prioritizes evidence-based solutions over ideology; amplifies the voices of developing countries; and draws on the expertise and experience of the people we serve.”

Okonjo-Iweala congratulated Kim and said the competition had led to “important victories” for developing nations, which have increasingly pushed for more say at both institutions.

Still, she said more effort was needed to end the “unfair tradition” that ensured Washington’s dominance of the global development lender.

“It is clear to me that we need to make it more open, transparent and merit-based,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “We need to make sure that we do not contribute to a democratic deficit in global governance.”

Some development experts criticized US President Barack Obama’s choice as lacking the economic and financial credentials needed to respond to the needs of rising middle-income countries, which are still riddled with poverty but which are increasingly looking for innovative ways to finance their development.

The United States said the process was open and transparent, but a number of emerging nations questioned whether candidates were assessed on their nationalities rather than on their merits, as World Bank members countries had agreed in 2010.

The United States has held the presidency since the World Bank’s founding after World War Two, while a European has always led its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund.

BREAKING THE MOLD
Unlike previous heads of the World Bank, Kim is not a politician, a banker or a career diplomat. He has worked to bring health care to the poor in developing countries, whether fighting tuberculosis in Haiti and Peru or tackling HIV/Aids in Russian prisons.

His training and experience, including directing the World Health Organization’s HIV/Aids department and developing treatments for a form of drug resistant tuberculosis, gave him immediate credentials as a campaigner on behalf of the poor.

He is also a founder of Partners In Health, which focuses on community health programs for impoverished nations. He earned both his medical degree and his doctorate in anthropology at Harvard University, where he helped set up the Global Health Delivery Project.

South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan welcomed the fact that non-Americans competed for the first time, but also said there were concerns the process was not fully merit-based.

“I think we are going to find that the process falls short of that,” he said.

As part of their efforts to gain greater say in global financial institutions, emerging economies are also pushing for greater voting power at the International Monetary Fund.

Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega said his country would not give additional money to the IMF to tackle the effects of the European sovereign debt crisis until the institution showed firm commitment to voting reforms.

Former Colombian finance minister Jose Antonio Ocampo withdrew from the race for the top World Bank post on Friday, saying the process had become highly political.

Nancy Birdsall, president of the Washington-based Center for Global Development, said it would be healthy if countries made public which candidate they supported and why.

“History was made because there were three candidates,” she said. “In the next round it would be good to have more transparency about which board member supported which candidate for what reason.”

Birdsall said it would be important for Kim to show early on that he was committed to change by appointing candidates from developing countries to other top posts.

Just after midnight on January 28, 2011, the government of Egypt, rocked by three straight days of massive antiregime protests organized in part through Facebook and other online social networks, did something unprecedented in the history of 21st-century telecommunications: it turned off the Internet. Exactly how it did this remains unclear, but the evidence suggests that five well-placed phone calls—one to each of the country’s biggest Internet service providers (ISPs)—may have been all it took. At 12:12 a.m. Cairo time, network routing records show, the leading ISP, Telecom Egypt, began shutting down its customers’ connections to the rest of the Internet, and in the course of the next 13 minutes, four other providers followed suit. By 12:40 a.m. the operation was complete. An estimated 93 percent of the Egyptian Internet was now unreachable. When the sun rose the next morning, the protesters made their way to Tahrir Square in almost total digital darkness.

for more please visit the URL given bellow:

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-shadow-web

Acclaimed meteorologist David Phillips lectures on climate change and building design
2012-02-29
Taking place at 6:00pm on Wednesday, March 7, 2012, a lecture by David Phillips will help architects, landscape architects and engineers appreciate the importance of applied meteorology in the face of accelerated climate change. Today’s buildings have an expected service life exceeding 100 years, but the climatological statistics used to determine numerous aspects of building design, maintenance and operations may not reflect what buildings may eventually experience as senior civic citizens. The same goes for our urban landscapes and municipal infrastructure. Join David Phillips to learn about the key phenomena building designers will have to reconsider and practically translate into their works.

David Phillips has been employed with Environment Canada’s weather service for over 40 years. He has published several books, papers and reports on the climate of Canada, including two bestsellers: The Day Niagara Falls Ran Dry and Blame It on the Weather. Phillips frequently appears on national radio and television as a commentator on weather and climate matters. He is a fellow of both the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. In addition to being awarded the Patterson Medal for Distinguished Service to Meteorology in Canada, David has been the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Waterloo and Nipissing University. In 2001, he was named to the Order of Canada.

The lecture takes place at 6:00pm in Room 103 of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto, located at 230 College Street.

Attendance at this event nets 2 core hours from the Ontario Association of architects. Admission is free, and snacks and refreshments will follow. Seating is limited to a first-come first-served basis.

lecture notification from:
www.canadianarchitect.com/news/acclaimed...g-design/1000965609/

(Mar. 2, 2012)
Plant science is key to addressing the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st Century, according to Carnegie's David Ehrhardt and Wolf Frommer. In a Perspective published in The Plant Cell, the two researchers argue that the development of new technology is key to transforming plant biology in order to meet human needs.
Plants serve as the conduit of energy into the biosphere, provide food and materials used by humans, and they shape our environment. According to Ehrhardt and Frommer, the three major challenges facing humanity in our time are food, energy, and environmental degradation. All three are plant related.
All of our food is produced by plants, either directly or indirectly via animals that eat them. Plants are a source of energy production. And they are intimately involved in climate change and a major factor in a variety of environmental concerns, including agricultural expansion and its impact on habitat destruction and waterway pollution.
What's more, none of these issues are independent of each other. Climate change places additional stresses on the food supply and on various habitats. So plant research is instrumental in addressing all of these problems and moving into the future. For plant research to move significantly forward, Ehrhardt and Frommer say technological development is critical, both to test existing hypotheses and to gain new information and generate fresh hypotheses. If we are to make headway in understanding how these essential organisms function and build the foundation for a sustainable future, then we need to apply the most advanced technologies available to the study of plant life, they say.
They divide the technology into three categories: existing technology that isn't being applied for all of its potential uses; new, readily envisioned technology; and technology we'd like to have, but don't know how to create.
The technological overview includes expanding existing technologies such as DNA sequencing, RNA cataloguing, mass spectroscopy, fluorescence-based microscopy, and electron microscopy, among many others. A key focus is on the advances possible through advanced imaging technologies.
Ehrhardt and Frommer point out that many of the most often-cited academic papers related to the development new technology, demonstrating the interest of the scientific community. "We certainly expect that new technologies will continue to revolutionize biological research," they say. "Plant science has not often been the driver of innovation but often enough has profited from developments made in other areas."

Silene stenophylla is a species of flowering plant in the family Caryophyllaceae. Commonly called narrow-leafed campion, it is a species in the genus Silene. It grows in the Arctic tundra of far eastern Siberia and the mountains of Northern Japan. Frozen samples, estimated via radiocarbon dating to be around 32,000 years old, were discovered in the same area as current living specimens; and in 2012, a team claimed to have successfully regenerated a plant from the samples.
S. stenophylla grows in the Arctic tundra of far eastern Siberia and the mountains of Northern Japan.It is typically 5–25 cm (2.0–9.8 in) tall, has narrow leaves, and a large calyx.It blooms during the summer and has incised petals that are lilac, light pink, or white in color.It is a perennial that grows on stony cliffs and sandy shores.S. stenophylla is one of a few Beringian plant species that did not establish itself in North America.
In 2007, frozen Silene stenophylla seeds were discovered in the Kolyma region of Siberia, in the plant's present day range.Using radiocarbon dating, the age of the seeds was estimated at between 20,000 and 40,000 years, dating the seeds to the Pleistocene epoch.The seeds were thought to have been buried by ground squirrels.The embryos were damaged, possibly by the animals' activity.
In February 2012, a team of scientists from the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences announced they had successfully regenerated specimens from fruit that had been frozen for 31,800 (±300) years according to radiocarbon dating.The accomplishment has not yet been independently verified, and previous claims of ancient regeneration have often not held up under scrutiny.If proven, the accomplishment would represent the oldest plant material brought back to life, surpassing the previous record of 2000 years set by Judean date palm seeds.The team, led by David Gilichensky, used material found in about 70 ancient hibernation burrows made by ground squirrels in the genus Urocitellus and located at Duvanny Yar, near the bank of the lower Kolyma River.The burrows were found 20–40 meters (66–130 ft) below the present-day surface.Usually the rodents would eat the food in their larders, but in this case a flood or other weather event buried the whole area. Since the rodents had placed the larders at the level of the permafrost, the material froze almost immediately, and did not thaw out at any time since.More than 600,000 fruit and seeds were located at the site.

Initially the researchers attempted to germinate mature seeds recovered from the fruit.When these attempts failed, they turned to the fruit itself and were able to culture adult plants from placental tissue.The team grew 36 specimens from the tissue.The plants looked identical to modern specimens until they flowered, at which time the petals were observed to be longer and more widely spaced than modern versions of the plant.Seeds produced by the regenerated plants germinated at a 100% success rate, compared with 90% for modern plants.The reasons for the observed variations are not known.

According to Robin Probert of the Millennium Seed Bank, the demonstration is "by far the most extraordinary example of extreme longevity for material from higher plants" to date.It is not surprising to find living material this old, but is surprising that viable material could be recovered, she added. The Russian scientists speculated that the tissue cells were rich in sucrose which acted as a preservative.They also noted that DNA damage caused by gamma radiation from natural ground radioactivity at the site was unusually low for the plant material's age and is comparable to levels observed in 1300-year-old lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) seeds proven to germinate.Probert hopes that the techniques developed in the resurrection of Silene stenophylla may one day be used to resurrect extinct species.Paleontologist Grant Zazula, who has previously disproven claims of ancient regeneration, said: "This discovery raises the bar incredibly in terms of our understanding in terms of the viability of ancient life in the permafrost."He added that there is "no doubt in [his] mind" that the claim is legitimate.