The Mushroom Hunters

Every fall, Chemult, Ore., swells with pickers and buyers who flock to the forests to look for the prized matsutake mushroom.



For source go here.

Salmonella in Spices Prompts Changes in Farming

IDUKKI, India — Spices grown in the mist-shrouded Western Ghats here have fueled wars, fortunes and even the discovery of continents, and for thousands of years farmers harvested them in the same traditional ways. Until now. 

Science has revealed what ancient kings and sultans never knew: instead of improving health, spices sometimes make people very sick, so Indian government officials are quietly pushing some of the most far-reaching changes ever in the way farmers here pick, dry and thresh their rich bounty. 

"Lost every day"

Meet a Colorado woman with a rare neurological disorder who has no sense of direction, even in her own home.


Many people, myself included, have a gnawing primeval fear of becoming hopelessly lost. This Op-Doc video examines that fear in a most extreme form. My subject is Sharon Roseman of Denver, who gets lost every day — in the streets she’s lived in for 20 years, even in her own house. When she wakes, her walls seem to have moved overnight. Her world can be transformed in the blink of an eye.

Angelina Jolie: My Medical Choice

Angelina Jolie, 38, an actress and director, has published an article in today's NY Times telling the story about a preventive double mastectomy she has recently undergone. The actress' decision resulted from learning that she carries a gene that made it extremely likely she would get breast cancer. 

Here is the full article followed by BBC video coverage below.

My Medical Choice
By ANGELINA JOLIE 
Published: May 14, 2013 
My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

Calorie Detective

With the help of a science lab, the filmmaker Casey Neistat finds that calorie listings on food labels can be highly inaccurate.


For source go here.

Finding the Visible in the Invisible

A team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a computer program that reveals colors and motions in video that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye.



For source go here.

News headlines used to predict future events

Researchers have developed software which could predict future events such as disease outbreak.

The prototype software uses a combination of archive material from the New York Times and data from other websites, including Wikipedia.

The experts focused on predicting riots, deaths and disease outbreaks and say their accuracy was between 70%-90%.

The work is a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

In their research paper, the two scientists say that using a mixture of archived news reports and real-time data, they were able to see links between droughts and storms in parts of Africa and cholera outbreaks.

What the CIA thinks the world will look like in 2030

USA has been forecast as the second world economy, but energy independent.

A new intelligence assessment of global trends projects that China will outstrip the United States as the leading economic power before 2030, but that America will remain an indispensable world leader, bolstered in part by an era of energy independence. 

 Russia’s clout will wane, as will the economic strength of other countries reliant on oil for revenues, the assessment says.

Full article here.