Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 10.

06 - March 12, 2011 ISSN: 1712-9834

Selected news items from postings to Innovation Watch

in the last two weeks...

brain enzyme enhances or erases memory in rats... US chemist

engineers bacteria to produce a gasoline-like biofuel... plasma beam
keeps fruit mould-free for a week... professor proposes an internet for
robots to connect and share knowledge... the current outsourcing
David Forrest model is expected to disappear in five years... Google invests in a
advises weather insurance start-up... the number of under-employed workers
organizations is growing... in tough times, the salaries and benefits of government
on emerging workers are under siege... Africa builds railways to move untapped
trends, and resources to world markets... half of the world's new billionaires come
helps to develop from BRIC countries... dramatic images show the expected effect of
strategies rising sea levels in Britain... researcher maps the impact of climate
for a radically change on human populations... the changing world of work: new
different future jobs... technology leaders imagine the future...

More great resources ...

the book, Guerrilla Social Marketing: 100+ Weapons to Grow Your

Online Influence, Attract Customers, and Drive Profits, by Jay Conrad
Levinsohn and Shane Gibson... a link to the Forum of Young Global
Leaders, a community of more than 700 exceptional young leaders
committed to shaping the global future... a TED talk on printing human
organs using living cells... a post by Stephan Scholtissek on the decline
of arbitrage and the role of innovation as the only real differentiator in
a global world...

David Forrest
Innovation Watch
SCIENCE
Top Stories: Forward

Enzyme Enhances, Erases Long-Term Memories in Rats Know someone who

(PhysOrg) - Even long after it is formed, a memory in rats might be interested
can be enhanced or erased by increasing or decreasing the in this newsletter?
activity of a brain enzyme, say researchers supported, in Forward it
part, by the National Institutes of Health. "This pivotal
mechanism could become a target for treatments to help Unsubscribe
manage debilitating emotional memories in anxiety disorders
and for enhancing faltering memories in disorders of aging," Don't want to
said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. receive the
newsletter?
Turning Bacteria into Butanol Biofuel Factories (PhysOrg) -
Unsubscribe
While ethanol is today's major biofuel, researchers aim to
produce fuels more like gasoline. Butanol is the primary
candidate, now produced primarily by Clostridium bacteria.
UC Berkeley chemist Michelle Chang has transplanted the
enzyme pathway from Clostridium into E. coli and gotten the
bacteria to churn out 10 times more n-butanol than
competing microbes, close to the level needed for industrial
scale production.

TECHNOLOGY
Top Stories:

Fed Up with Mouldy Fruit? Here’s a 'Star Wars' Plasma Beam

That Will Stop Spores in Their Tracks (Daily Mail) - A 'Star
Wars' style plasma beam which can stop fruit going mouldy
has been created by scientists. Researchers have discovered
that concentrating a 'cold plasma' beam on soft fruit kills off
the spores which cause mould. It can keep it away for up to
a week. Cold plasma, a combination of oxygen and helium
gas concentrated into a lightening-like beam, has previously
been used by medics to clean bacteria off wounds.

Robots With Their Heads in the Clouds (IEEE Spectrum) -

James Kuffner, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University,
currently working at Google, described the possibilities of
cloud robotics at the IEEE International Conference on
Humanoid Robots, in Nashville, this past December.
Embracing the cloud could make robots "lighter, cheaper, and
smarter," he told the assembled engineers. According to
Kuffner, cloud-enabled robots could offload CPU-heavy tasks
to remote servers, relying on smaller and less power-hungry
onboard computers. Even more promising, the robots could
turn to cloud-based services to improve such capabilities as
recognizing people and objects, navigating environments, and
operating tools.

BUSINESS
Top Stories:

The End of Outsourcing (As We Know It) (Businessweek) - In

the next five years outsourcing as we know it will disappear.
The legion of Indian service providers will be sidelined or
absorbed. U.S. and European companies that pioneered this
corner of the high tech industry will suffer similar fates if they
don't wake up. Who will emerge as the new leaders? Google
and Amazon.com, brands that we associate with search and
retail, will become better known for outsourcing.

Google Backs Climate-Change Weather Insurance Startup

(PhysOrg) - Google was among investors pumping $42 million
into a climate change inspired technology startup that
calculates the chances of crops being ruined by weather.
WeatherBill continuously aggregates weather data and runs
large-scale weather simulations on its computers. The
automated system lets farmers or others customize insurance
policies to the amount of rain or seasonal temperatures they
need for fields to flourish.

SOCIETY
Top Stories:

The Underemployed — Increasing and Overlooked (PhysOrg)

- While unemployment has been a frequent topic of
discussion during the recession, underemployment and its
effects have not, even though the number of underemployed
workers has also increased. A study published online last
week in the Journal of Management, "'I Have a Job, But...' A
Review of Underemployment," by University of Nevada, Reno  
Assistant Professor Frances M. McKee-Ryan and University of
Alabama Assistant Professor Jaron Harvey brings attention to
the topic and its potentially detrimental effects to individuals,
organizations and society.

Government Worker Benefits See Political Battles Playing Out

In State Capitals (Huffington Post) - A half century ago,
industrial jobs at car and steel plants provided high salaries
and rich benefits. But as manufacturing moved overseas,
many formerly well-paid workers had to take lower-paying
jobs. By the end of the Great Recession, the economic order
was undeniably changed. "It's the government sector worker
who's the new elite, the highest-paid worker on the block,"
said David Gregory, who teaches labor and employment law
at New York's St. John's University.

GLOBAL POLITICS
Top Stories:
Africa Gets $35 Billion Rail Led by China: Freight Markets
(Businessweek) - Record commodity prices are driving
Africa's biggest railway boom since the 19th century as the
world's largest untapped mineral reserves prompt miners
from Brazil to China to ignore a history of war and economic
chaos. China Railway Construction Corp., Vale SA, the world's
second-largest miner, and other companies are pumping at
least $35 billion into rail projects over the next five years to
transport copper and coal out of Africa and into the power
plants of China and India.

Forbes List: BRICs Produce Half of World’s New Billionaires

(Reuters) - Rising global commodities prices and Asia's
economic boom led to a big increase in the number of
billionaires in Russia, China and Brazil in 2011. China nearly
doubled its number of billionaires to 115, while Russia and
Brazil posted two-third jumps to 101 and 30, respectively,
Forbes said in its annual list of the world's richest people.

ENVIRONMENT
Top Stories:

Our Future Under Water (Daily Mail) - These dramatic images

show how floods could devastate major cities across Britain
leaving thousands of homes underwater if no flood defences
were put in place. The centres of London, Birmingham,
Cardiff and Liverpool would be completely submerged with
properties wrecked and businesses shutdown in the event of
major flooding. Extraordinary photographs of the devastation
flooding could cause were released by the Environment
Agency today to warn of the dangers of natural disasters.

Mapping Human Vulnerability to Climate Change (PhysOrg) -

Researchers already study how various species of plants and
animals migrate in response to climate change. Now, Jason
Samson, a PhD candidate in McGill University's Department
of Natural Resource Sciences, has taken the innovative step
of using the same analytic tools to measure the impact of
climate change on human populations. Samson and fellow
researchers combined climate change data with censuses
covering close to 97 per-cent of the world's population in
order to forecast potential changes in local populations for
2050.

THE FUTURE
Top Stories:

10 Jobs of the Future (Fox) - We know where the jobs are

today -- and we definitely know where they aren't. But what
about in 10 or even 20 years? As things like technology,
medicine, science and environmentalism continue to advance
 in the coming years, several occupations are bound to
emerge. By understanding these trends, job seekers can play
a more active role in planning for their careers.

SciFoo: Imagining the Future (Scientific American) - Which

technology will have the greatest impact in the next 10
years: the Internet, genomics or geoengineering? Are you
optimistic about the future, or pessimistic? Find out how
some of the sharpest thinkers imagine the world in the next
decade and in 2050. This second of four videos about Science
Foo Camp 2010 was filmed at Google's headquarters in
California during the event.

Just in from the publisher...

Guerrilla Social Media Marketing: 100+ Weapons

to Grow Your Online Influence, Attract Customers,
and Drive Profits
by Jay Conrad Levinsohn and Shane Gibson

Read more...

A web resource... The Forum of Young Global Leaders (World Economic Forum) - A
unique, multistakeholder community of more than 700 exceptional young leaders who share
a commitment to shaping the global future. Young Global Leaders represent the future of
leadership, coming from all regions of the world and representing business, government,
civil society, arts and culture, academia and media, as well as social enterpreneurs.

Multimedia... Anthony Atala: Printing a Human Kidney (TED Talks) - Surgeon

Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the
organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney.
Using similar technology, Dr. Atala's young patient Luke Massella received an engineered
bladder 10 years ago; we meet him onstage. (17m 25s)

Ideas and opinions... Arbitrage Will Soon Be Futile and Innovation Essential
(CNBC)- Stephan Scholtissek - "For years, businesses exploited international differences in
the price of labor and other factors of production to secure competitive advantage. But
within the foreseeable future, globalization itself will all but wipe awaysome of the very
advantages it once created. In a world where costs are harmonized, innovation will be the
only differentiator. And businesses must ask themselves whether they are ready to
compete on these new terms."

 
Email: mail@innovationwatch.com