The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.

All of the books are available through a single Web portal of the Universal Library (www.ulib.org), said Gloriana St. Clair, Carnegie Mellon’s dean of libraries.

“Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library,” said Raj Reddy, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language. The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling,” said Reddy, who has spearheaded the Million Book Project.

At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are or eventually will be available free.

The collection includes a large number of rare and orphan books. More than 20 languages are represented among the 1.5 million books, a little more than 1 percent of all of the world’s books.

Many of the books, particularly those in Chinese and English, have been digitized — their text converted by optical character recognition methods into computer readable text. That allows these books to be searched and, eventually, reformatted for access by PDAs and other devices.

Related: UC Berkeley Free Video Courses.

They are six researchers with six ideas that will one day change the world.

• Breaking Down the Firewall

  Internet censorship is the book burning of the modern age. A new brand of activists -- or "hacktivists" -- are using their computer expertise to help people stranded in Web-censored countries abroad (and corporate offices and military bases at home) jump the firewall. The key innovation, developed by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, is a software program called Psiphon.

• Electronic Skin

  In 2002, as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton, Lacour found a way to make metal stretch by embedding it in rubbery silicone. Doing so allowed it to expand to twice its original length without breaking. The next step was building a flexible circuit. Lacour, now heading her own lab at Cambridge University, did this by consolidating all the hard microcomponents of the circuit into tiny rigid "safe zones," which are networked to one another by stretchable metal. The final product is a silicone patch the size of a stick of gum that bends and twists like a rubber band.

  The most obvious application is for prostheses. Imagine a computerized hand that can feel heat from a stove or a lover.

• The Pollution Magnet

  Eighty-two thousand people die from cancer in Bangladesh every year, many due to arsenic poisoning. But building upon her discovery of a way to get rust nanoparticles to bind to arsenic, Vicki Colvin has invented a new, astonishingly easy way to clean the water supply: Sauté a teaspoon of rust in a mixture of oil and lye, which breaks down the rust into nano-sized pieces. Retrieve the rust particles with a household magnet. Then immerse the rust-covered magnet into a pot of contaminated water. Pull out the arsenic. The system is up to a hundred times more efficient than existing methods, and requires no electricity or manufacturing infrastructure, so even the poorest of villagers can use it.

  She sees her method as just the first step toward developing an easy point-of-use water-purification system that would cover virtually every pollutant.

• Machines That Fix Themselves

  For mechanical engineer Hod Lipson, that time is now. And it all starts with his four-legged starfish robot.

  Beginning with no idea of what it looks like, the starfish makes random motions and measures how it tilts. It then generates about a hundred different hypotheses about what its structure might be, moves itself again, collects more data to determine which models are potentially correct, and behaves accordingly. It continues this process of weeding out less-useful models until an accurate one is found and takes hold, a process inspired by Darwinian evolution.

  In the shorter term, a self-modeling robot could be used to explore the planets, repairing and reprogramming itself depending upon conditions on the ground.

• Burying Our CO2

  Kurt Zenz House isn’t the first scientist to suggest sequestering carbon dioxide in the ocean.

  House advocates going much deeper -- at least three thousand meters, or two miles below sea level into the seabed. At that depth, House hypothesizes that the extreme water pressure and low temperature will turn the carbon into a liquid denser than the surrounding water, forming a layer that will prevent it from rising back up into the ocean. "We can store all the CO2 from humanity for centuries, and it wouldn't change sea levels by a centimeter," says House, a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in earth and planetary sciences. "And there isn't any major life at that depth, so the footprint is very light."

• The Next Plastic

  In chemist Geoffrey Coates lab at Cornell University, he's been reinventing plastic. Making it environmentally friendly and biodegradable -- with orange peels.

  The key is limonene, a citrusy-smelling chemical compound made from orange rinds that when oxidized and mixed with carbon dioxide and a catalyst can be turned into a solid plastic. The final product can be made into anything from Saran wrap to medical packaging to beer bottles and naturally biodegrades in just a few months. And because it can be produced using recycled CO2 from carbon-spewing factories, simply making Coates's plastic can help the environment.

1. America’s Army
2. Warsow
3. Wild Metal
4. Afterburner 3D
5. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory
6. Flight of the Amazon Queen
7. King’s Quest 3
8. Maniac Mansion Deluxe
9. Ultima IV
10. Trackmania Nations
11. Swine
12. Xenon 2000
13. Harmotion
14. Retro River Raid
15. SWIV
16. Utawareru Mono
17. One Must Fall
18. Secret Maryo Chronicles
19. Scorched Earth
20. Winigolf

Captured just before midnight on November 13 by fishers in Cambodia, this Mekong giant catfish is 8 feet long (2.4 meters long) ands weighs 450 pounds (204 kilograms).

"This is the only giant catfish that has been caught this year so far, making it the worst year on record for catch of giant fish species," said Zeb Hogan (far right), a fisheries biologist at the University of Reno in Nevada.

After collecting data on the fish, Hogan released it unharmed.

Giant catfish were once plentiful throughout Southeast Asia's Mekong River watershed, including the Tonle Sap River—home of the fish in these exclusive pictures taken near Phnom Penh.

But in the last century the Mekong giant catfish population has declined by 95 to 99 percent, scientists say. Only a few hundred adult giant catfish may remain.

Earlier this year Hogan launched the three-year Megafishes Project to document the world's giant freshwater fish.

Listed as critically endangered by the World Conservation Union, the Mekong giant catfish is big but toothless, as shown in this exclusive photo.

"For the Mekong giant catfish, northern Thailand is a spawning ground, whereas the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia is a rearing area," said U.S. biologist Zeb Hogan, who studied the fish pictured for his Megafishes Project, which is documenting the world's giant freshwater fish.

Related:

Yangtze River Dolphin now Extinct.

The Legendary Hoan Kiem Lake Turtle.

The compound - part boot camp, part rehab center - resembles programs around the world for troubled youths.

Drill instructors drive young men through military-style obstacle courses, counselors lead group sessions, and there are even therapeutic workshops on pottery and drumming.

South Korea boasts of being the most wired nation on earth. In fact, perhaps no other country has so fully embraced the Internet. Ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the "PC bang," dim Internet parlors that sit on virtually every street corner.

But such ready access to the Web has come at a price, as legions of obsessed users find that they cannot tear themselves away from their computers.

It has become a national issue here in recent years as users started dropping dead from exhaustion after playing online games for days on end. A growing number of students have skipped school to stay online, shockingly self-destructive behavior in this intensely competitive society.

Up to 30 percent of South Koreans under 18, or about 2.4 million people, are at risk of Internet addiction, said Ahn Dong Hyun, a child psychiatrist at Hanyang University who just completed a three-year government-financed survey of the problem.

They spend at least two hours a day online, usually playing games or chatting. Of those, up to a quarter million probably show signs of actual addiction, like an inability to stop themselves from using computers, rising levels of tolerance that drive them to seek ever longer sessions online, and withdrawal symptoms like anger and craving when prevented from logging on.

To address the problem, the government has built a network of 140 Internet-addiction counseling centers, in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and, most recently, the Internet Rescue camp, which started this summer. Researchers have developed a checklist for diagnosing the addiction and determining its severity, the K-Scale. (The K is for Korea.)

The rescue camp, in a forested area about an hour south of Seoul, was created to treat the most severe cases. The camp is entirely paid for by the government, making it tuition-free.

During a session, participants live at the camp, where they are denied computer use and allowed only one hour of cellphone calls a day, to prevent them from playing online games via the phone. They also follow a rigorous regimen of physical exercise and group activities, like horseback riding, aimed at building emotional connections to the real world and weakening those with the virtual one. "It is most important to provide them experience of a lifestyle without the Internet," said Lee Yun Hee, a counselor. "Young Koreans don't know what this is like."

South Korea's gaming addicts. (BBC News)

Experts say the definition of an addict is less to do with the number of hours spent online, but more about the central role computers and the internet can play in someone's life.

Symptoms include:

• Preoccupation with the internet
• The inability to perform normal tasks in everyday life
• Losing control over yourself
• The disruption of daily routines and lifestyles
• Feeling nervous and anxious when not online

Visualising their dreams can help addicts wake up to reality and reduce time spent at the computer, counsellors believe.

Related: The Globalization of Hunger.

After years of rumors of a Google phone, the search giant a week ago finally unleashed its mobile play: an alliance of handset makers and an open software platform dubbed Android.

On Monday, Google released the software developer kit, or SDK, for Android and announced that it would set aside $10 million to give out as prizes to developers who create programs for the new platform. (Android Developer Challenge)

Android is based on the work of Andy Rubin and several other founders of Danger. Google acquired their newer venture, Android, in 2005.

Q: What does Android look like?

We've been building it as a mobile mashup platform. That is a new concept for cell phones. So the developer can now stand on the system platform and take advantage of other developers' work for the first time. So, that just creates more flexibility for the developers, less work, faster turnaround, rapid prototyping, and all that stuff, and we're really, really excited about that concept.

..

The platform itself has the ability to be targeted toward all sorts of different screen sizes and input mechanisms--touch devices, trackballs, five-way keypads, portrait displays, landscapes, big displays, small displays, QWERTY keyboards, non-QWERTY keyboards. When the developer writes an app, and that app is on portrait display, the platform also will run that same app on a landscape display.

This platform has been contemplated in different devices, from car navigation systems to set-top boxes to laptop computers and, of course, cell phones.

..

Q: Which is more important to you: the richness of the platform or the affordability of phones the platform runs on?

Rubin: I would say both are equally important, and that is the reason we made this an open-source project. By having a free and open platform, we're reducing the cost of software, which, in turn, reduces the cost of the cell phone. When we built the platform, we didn't go for the really expensive $600 smartphones. We went for the mid-market.

..

Related: Wired’s Interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

China is losing a million acres a year to desertification. In Dunhuang, a former Silk Road oasis in the Gobi, the resulting water shortage has become critical.

Jiang Zhenzhong 's cotton fields are close to the dwindling Crescent Moon lake in north-eastern China. The lake is famous throughout China, attracting a million visitors a year, but now it looks more like a village pond, encircled by railings and fading fast as the desert sucks up more and more water. In the 1960s, the lake used to be 10 metres deep – now it is barely one metre.

The disappearing lake at this point of the Silk Road is the most powerful symbol of an emerging water crisis. The fields around the village are brown and desolate, and it is hard to imagine how anything could grow here. Many of Jiang's friends have already left for the city, joining the ranks of millions of migrant workers leaving poor provinces like Gansu, but Jiang is defiant, saying he's planning to stay until the last drop of water is gone.

However, the pressure to find the money to send his nine-year-old daughter to high school is making life hard.

The government in Beijing acknowledges desertification as the biggest environmental challenge holding back sustainable development, and has pledged to control the country's spreading deserts, which already cover a fifth of its land.

Millions of tons of sand from the Gobi desert are dumped on Beijing by sandstorms every spring, and Chinese dust makes its way into the skies above cities as far away as Los Angeles. China suffers from a shortage of 30 billion cubic metres of water for irrigation every year. And while China has more than 20 per cent of the world's population, it has only 7 per cent of its arable land, precious farmland that the desert is slowly but surely eating its way into. This could result in higher food prices throughout China, a potential disaster given 750 million people live on less than £1 a day and can ill afford more expensive rice and other staples.

In the past few decades, Dunhuang's main rivers have been drying up, its lakes have been disappearing, its underground water supplies have shrunk and its oases have degenerated. The city has also had to withstand stronger and more frequent winds and sandstorms.

The desert also threatens to swallow up the Mogao grottos near Dunhuang, a centuries-old site known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, which house cave-temple murals and manuscripts dating back to ancient times.

Related:

As China Rises, Pollution Soars.

The Globalization of Hunger.

Baby scorpions ride on the back of their mother for the first week or so.

A new species of wild pig previously unknown to science has been discovered in the Brazilian jungle.

The large creature grows to a length of more than four feet and is almost twice as heavy as its nearest relative.

Named the 'giant peccary', (photo) the creature was unknown until the skins and bones of animals killed by local hunters came to the attention of Dutch biologist Marc van Roosmalen.

The animal, only known to live along the remote banks of the Aripuana river, is thought to be endangered by the illegal timber trade and road building.

Local tribes call it "Caitetu Munde", which means "great peccary which lives in pairs" and may have been spotted by an American rubber-cutter, John Yungjohann, who worked in the Amazon from 1906 to 1919.

While other peccaries dig up the ground in search of seeds and roots, this one mostly lives off freshly fallen fruit.

They have recommended that the giant peccary be placed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources' Red List of threatened species.

Photo (National Geographic)

Related:

Rare Smiling Bird.

I witnessed a beautiful scene the other day that epitomizes the way many Japanese approach conflict and relationships. I share this story with you now, hoping it will help you better deal with conflict in your own life.

A rather old man who lives in my Tokyo neighborhood came shuffling along on his way to go shopping. He stopped and talked with a girl of around 5, who was playing by herself in the parking lot of my apartment complex. It was obvious by the animated nature of their conversation that the man and the girl knew each other well. After talking for a few minutes, the old man reached in his pocket and pulled out a candy bar which he offered to the girl. She bowed and accepted the candy with little hesitation. The old man smiled, bowed back to the girl, and continued on down the street.

The interaction between the two led me to understand the girl's mom must have OK'ed receiving a gift from the man in the past. Otherwise the child would have likely said "No thank you" as Japanese people are usually quite hesitant to accept a gift, even from a good friend.

Just as the girl began to eagerly tear off the candy wrapper her older brother and his friend came along.

Upon seeing the candy, the brother quickly decided all three of them should share in the girl's bounty, so he took the candy bar away from his sister and began to think out loud about how to split it up. He and his friend quickly started arguing over who should get what, as the girl stood there and began to cry. I was tempted to somehow intervene, but I thought it might not be wise to do so. Chances are a big foreigner like me might only scare the children, even though I had said hello to them many times in the past.

The noise of the arguing boys and the crying girl drew the mother's attention, and she soon came out of her apartment to see what was going on. It didn't take her but a second to size up the situation, and she took the candy bar from her son and gave it back to her daughter.

The mother gently but sternly scolded her son. She said, "Not only were you treating your sister badly, but you were teaching your friend bad manners as well." The son bowed to his mother, offered his apologies, and then bowed and apologized to his sister as well. The other boy was quite embarrassed and stood there staring down at the ground.

The mother squatted down and drew her daughter to her side. She asked if everything was OK now, and the girl said "Yes."

Next, the mother said, "Even though your brother has been quite naughty, it's still better to share what you have with others, rather than keeping everything all to yourself."

Still a bit teary eyed, the girl slowly nodded her head "yes" as she stood there with the candy bar in her hand. She asked her mom if she should give some candy to both her brother and his friend, and her mom said, "As an act of kindness it would be a very nice thing to do."

The girl divided the candy equally between herself and the two boys, even as the boys once again apologized for their bad behavior.

Such is life in Japan!

To me it was a beautiful example of how to resolve conflict by building relationship.

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Hoops and Harmony: How PeacePlayers is Changing the Middle East.

Brain scientists at Johns Hopkins have discovered how cells in the developing ear make their own noise, long before the ear is able to detect sound around them. The finding, reported in this week’s Nature, helps to explain how the developing auditory system generates brain activity in the absence of sound. It also may explain why people sometimes experience tinnitus and hear sounds that seem to come from nowhere.

The research team made their discovery while studying the properties of non-nerve cells in the ears of young rats. “It’s long been thought that nerve cells that connect auditory organs to the brain need to experience sound or other nerve activity to find their way to the part of the brain responsible for processing sound,” says the study’s lead author, Dwight Bergles, Ph.D., an associate professor of neuroscience at Hopkins. “So when we saw that these supporting cells could generate their own electrical activity, we suspected they might somehow be involved in triggering the activity required for proper nerve wiring.”

The few drugs that are applied to the developing cochlea that altered the electrical output all disabled ATP (adenosine triphosphate), a chemical most often used as a cell’s energy currency but also, as in this case, as a signal to communicate with other cells. They found that ATP was being released near hair cells, the cells that are responsible for transferring sound information to auditory nerves. It was known that hair cells have receptors for ATP, so they might also be affected by the ATP released from the supporting cells (and they are).

“It is as if ATP substitutes for sound when the ear is still immature and physically incapable of detecting sound,” says Bergles, adding that “the cells we have been studying seem to be warming up the machinery that will later be used to transmit sound signals to the brain.”

Bergles acknowledges that his experiments beg the question of why a human or any animal would need to “hear” before birth. He speculates that the ability to hear subtle differences, like the inflection in one’s voice, “requires a lot of fine-tuning based on where in the brain the nerves connect. It could be that brief bursts of electrical activity in just a few nerve cells at a time help do that fine-tuning so the system works well.”

While this activity likely is essential for the auditory system’s proper development, it could be bad in the adult, mature nervous system as it would trigger electrical signals in the absence of sound. However, as the ear matures during the first two weeks of a rat’s life, most of the cells that release ATP disappear so that by the time the rat can hear sound, all the spontaneous electrical activity in its ears has stopped.

Bergles suspects that “if ATP were released by the remaining support cells, it may cause the sensation of sound when there is none,” a condition known as tinnitus or ringing in the ears. Alternatively, he notes that bursts of activity might trigger changes in the connectivity of neurons in the brain, just like it does during development, eventually leading to abnormal activity that is perceived as sound.