Articles by Todd Hymas Samkara

National Geographic describes future tech, and we are frightened

A feature aimed at kids in the online edition of National Geographic called What will life be like in 2035? has a few interesting insights. The magazine first details the technological marvel that'll be all the rage in 2035, the self-driving car:

Relax, play a video game, watch a DVD, or catch up on your reading while you're driving downtown. What? While you're driving? Yep, because you're in your self-driving car. This car makes smart, safe driving decisions by communicating with other vehicles, joining car caravans, and navigating around construction and road debris. All you have to do is tell your smart car where you want to go and it gets you there.

No way! Really? It's just like public transport ... but not. I so can't wait for the future.

And as if that wasn't cool enough, National Geographic also profiles a real kick-ass technology sure to foil the alibis of many a future criminal with science: "brain fingerprinting."

The world is safer for law-abiding citizens, thanks to Brain Fingerprinting (BF), a way to peek into a suspect's mind to verify if he was at the scene of a crime. How? Sort of like a lie detector test, but BF reads a person's involuntary response to a memory. It measures and records specific brain waves that are only active when a person has memories of an event or place. If those brain waves don't register, the person doesn't know about the crime. If memories of the crime do show up, the criminal is busted, and the streets are safer."

I especially like how in the future criminal justice is far simpler. If your brain says you were there, you obviously committed the crime. Busted!

Mountaineering teams organize to clean up the world’s highest mountain peaks

A few months ago, gutsy French test pilot Didier Delsalle landed a helicopter on top of Mount Everest in 75 mph hour winds -- no, not crashed -- quite obviously the highest landing place on earth. He was the first to successfully summit Everest by copter.

And just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, he did it twice.

The previous highest helicopter landing was some 9,035 feet lower, at about 20,000 feet, the record set in 1996 by Nepalese pilot Madan Khatri Chhetri while rescuing climbers. And that's one of the great things about this: the tangible -- though still amazingly dangerous -- possibility of being able to rescue mountaineers on some of the world's highest, harshest peaks.

Delsalle's feat also raises the prospect (and could significantly lower the cost) of cleaning up what many call the "world's highest garbage dump."

In recent years, international teams of eco-conscious mountaineers have organized enormously expensive expeditions to clean up some of Everest's over-50-year legacy of trash, augmenting infrequent government Sherpa-led garbage-retrieval expeditions.

But now another team aims to clean up, at the very least, parts of the Himalayas' 14 peaks above 8,000 meters (about 26,200 feet). This week it's off to the earth's 10th highest mountain, Mt. Annapurna. The high-altitude sanitation engineers also have plans in place to launch a cleanup of their own on Mt. Everest next spring.

If there was ever a job in the trash business I envied, it's this one.

Massive planned Vegas complex claims to be sustainable

If you're going to build a gigantically humongous casino/hotel/condo/shopping center megaplex in the middle of Las Vegas, you may as well do it green ... or as green as a project of this size could be in the middle of the desert during a drought.

Brought to you by MGM Mirage, the 18-million-square-foot, $5 billion project will reportedly seek an unspecified level of LEED certification and, The Globe and Mail reports, will be bigger than Times Square, Soho, and Rockefeller Center -- combined.

MGM's claims of "sustainability" are likely more hype than reality, at least in the classic sense of the word, but designers, I suppose, do deserve some measure of credit for going greener than the average megaplex.

Eco-design features are said to include use of reclaimed water, planting of green roofs, and construction of a central power plant to be located on-site (presumably powered by something cleaner than, say, coal). One of the least-hailed features of the complex, though, will be an attempt at some kind of urban density, as well as the creation of a multi-use area amid the sprawl of Las Vegas' strip.

So way to go, MGM! May you and your big-name architects inspire other developers large and small to aim for at least some shade of green.

Bush hopes to send Americans to the moon … again

So, many enviros are familiar with The New Apollo Project, based on Prez Kennedy's original Apollo moon missions but instead aiming to harness that good ol' 'Merican ingenuity and know-how to jumpstart a massive clean-energy program in the U.S. while simultaneously creating a whole slew of new jobs. Good idea? Sure it is. But like most good ideas in the U.S., it's going exactly nowhere in the halls of government.

But now, sensing the public's urgent, even palpable need for space travel (oh, it's there!), the ever with-it Bush admin has a plan that takes the new Apollo Project in an entirely different direction: to the moon. That's right, they've got a plan to go retro and couple that fabled American ingenuity with high-tech spending to boldly go where, uh ... we've already been. But hey, the moon worked for Kennedy, right, so why couldn't it be a rallying point more than 40 years later? (We're in the middle of a curiously similar war, after all, and maybe that's all the reason anyone needs.) Of course, some might be quick to mock the administration, saying they're just trying to divert attention away from other issues. But what could they possibly want to distract attention away from? I really have no idea.

Seriously though, this is great. Given the massive budget trauma in the wake of Katrina and, um, the enormously expensive and still ongoing occupation of Iraq (donation, please?), and, uh, that stuff in Afghanistan, and all those tax breaks (am I missing anything?) -- amid the shifting of funds away from NASA and the likely cut of about 600 NASA employees from their Washington headquarters, nevermind the fact that the agency still can't clear the stratosphere without its shuttle falling apart -- I think a big ol' Space Odyssey 2005 is exactly what this country needs. Or at least a big ol' press conference about it.

Ooh, the moon!