So stay tuned.

Worldwide, in 1996 agriculture employed 42%, industry 21%, and services 37%. In 2006, the numbers are 36%, 22%, and 42%. So in the period, services has overtaken farming on a global scale.

Magnusson draws attention to the fact that the number of people working in manufacturing has remained steady. Workers in growing economies are skipping the manufacturing stage and going straight to services. In order for people to move out of agriculture and into something else, you need two things:

1. Some means of making sure that you still get the food

2. Something else for these people to do

Improved farming techniques (technologically improved, that is) takes care of the first point. A growing economy takes care of the second. The familiar pattern throughout history has been one of workers going from farming to producing some other goods. Services comes later. However, the world economy doesn't seem to need any more people working in manufacturing than it already has, at least on a percentage basis. So workers are going straight into services.

So worldwide we have more food with fewer people working to produce food, and apparently more wealth overall with fewer people working to produce stuff. Automation is driving these changes. It will be very interesting to see where these numbers are in another 10 years. Will agriculture continue to drop? Will industry hold steady at about 21-22%?

We shall see.

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.

By contrast, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their cars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 50 miles of gasoline-free commute. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuels.

"It's a paradigm shift," said Ian Clifford, chief executive of Toronto-based ZENN Motor Co., which has licensed EEStor's invention. "The Achilles' heel to the electric car industry has been energy storage. By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary."

So what's the trick? ZENN is replacing battery technology with ultracapacitor technology. This sounds great, but if they are truly able to do what they claim, it means they've mad an unprecedented leap forward in capacitor technology. We shall see.

Meanwhile, if you need that electric car now, you still have the option of the one powered by laptop batteries.

Want Yet Another Reason to Have Sex?

A study shows that men who have three or more orgasms a week are 50 percent less likely to die from coronary heart disease.

These findings suggest that sex can be used to help prevent heart attacks and strokes as one means of fulfilling physicians' recommendation for sustained physical activity for at least 20 minutes, three times a week. Conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Bristol and Queen's University of Belfast, the researchers studied 2,500 men aged 45 to 59 for 10 years.

"The relationship found between frequency of sexual intercourse and mortality is of considerable public interest," says study co-author Shah Ebrahim, Ph.D., a University of Bristol professor of epidemiology and aging, who presented the study results at the fourth World Stroke Congress. "It may however be a confounding [relationship] due to other aspects of a healthy lifestyle." Ebrahim cautions that further research is necessary.

Right. More research is needed! Let's not just assume that men who have orgasms three times a week are in better physical condition than men who don't, and that being in shape is what really makes the difference here. That would be jumping to conclusions...

Look, the study says that having sex prevents heart attacks and that's that. Thank you.

NASA astronomers held a press conference announcing that a new ultraviolet mosaic from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows a speeding star named Mira that's leaving an enormous trail of "seeds" for new solar systems. Mira is traveling faster than a speeding bullet, and has a tail that's 13 light-years long and over 30,000 years old. The website has images and a replay of the teleconference.

Here's an artist's conception of Mira doing her stuff:

It's a real shooting star. It's a super-comet! How wonderful that our universe still has so many amazing new things to show us.

"Galactic Suite," the first hotel planned in space, expects to open for business in 2012 and would allow guests to travel around the world in 80 minutes.

Its Barcelona-based architects say the space hotel will be the most expensive in the galaxy, costing $4 million for a three-day stay.

During that time guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and use Velcro suits to crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman.

Company director Xavier Claramunt says the three-bedroom boutique hotel's joined up pod structure, which makes it look like a model of molecules, was dictated by the fact that each pod room had to fit inside a rocket to be taken into space.

"It's the bathrooms in zero gravity that are the biggest challenge," says Claramunt. "How to accommodate the more intimate activities of the guests is not easy."

But they may have solved the issue of how to take a shower in weightlessness -- the guests will enter a spa room in which bubbles of water will float around.

One tiny quibble: we don't really know that this is the most expensive hotel in the galaxy. Assuming there are are others out there, I'm not even sure how we would do the currency exchange. But otherwise, this is very cool news.

And speaking of those "more intimate activities of the guests," how long after this place opens until we hear about the first baby conceived in space?

Via Geekpress.

Brain-Injured Man Speaks After 6 Years

A brain-damaged man who could communicate only with slight eye or thumb movements for six years can speak again, after stimulating electrodes were placed in his brain, researchers report.

The 38-year-old also regained the ability to chew and swallow, which allows him to be spoon-fed, rather than relying on nourishment through a tube in his belly.

The man's brain was injured during an assault, he spent six years with only occasional signs of consciousness and no useful movement of his limbs. In an experiment, researchers implanted electrodes in his brain for a procedure called deep brain stimulation, which is routinely done for Parkinson's disease and some other illnesses.

The article goes on to explain that the man was in a minimally conscious state, as distinct from a permanent vegetative state (who show no signs of awareness of their surroundings whatever.) This method of treatment has proved ineffective for those in a persistent vegetative state, but may offer hope to many of the more than the estimated 100,000 patients currently in a minimally conscious state.

Kind of reminds me of this:

Maybe we'll see real robot boxing matches before too long. Could robot players be the new frontier in spectator sports? It would certainly do away with any controversy about enhancement drugs...

(via GeekPress)

Heinlein fans might remember this book, which starts out with a kid trying to win a free trip to the moon sponsored by a soap company:

Just another "it" we've lived to see. (Keeping in mind that the prize for this particular contest is a sub-orbital flight.) But, hey, we're getting there!

UPDATE: Only for Canadians? Paul Hsieh's thoughts on that: "Bummer."

Indeed.

Visible light pulses knock out viruses in blood

Viruses lurking in biological samples could be killed off with an intense pulse of visible light, new research shows.

Scientists in the US say the technique seems to have significant advantages over alternative methods, including use of UV irradiation or microwaves, as it kills viruses more effectively and safely.

The technique destroys a virus with a pulse of light from a low-power laser. The pulse produces mechanical vibrations in the virus shell, or capsid, irreversibly damaging and disintegrating it, and so "deactivating" the virus for good. The technique might be used to kill HIV, as well as hepatitis C, say the researchers involved.

This approach is a big improvement over other forms of radiation, which can cause a virus to mutate into even nastier forms, or which can damage nearby healthy cells. The laser light is purple in color, and the blast lasts only 100 femtoseconds. Amazing.

At some point when I was a child, it became apparent that I was a bit different from the other kids. Namely, I couldn’t hear the things they heard.

You'll want to read the rest at the source.

Glenn Reynolds comments:

And yet there are people who think that technology is dehumanizing. They're basically idiots.

Technology is one of the means by which we translate things we have imagined into real aspects of the world around us. There is no more fundamentally human function than that -- turning ideas into reality. For all we know, in the entire universe, that capability is unique to human beings.

Stephen Gordon adds:

Imagine what we - with our normal senses - still miss. Imagine what it will be like when we "wake up."

Not only is technology not dehumanizing, it provides the possibility for us to be more human than we were before -- or at least for "being human" to mean something more than it did before.

Interesting energy developments in California:

In a move sure to impress environmentalists and further cement his Earth friendly image, Governor Schwarzenegger is set to launch a multimillion dollar research effort into a revolutionary new source of clean non-polluting power.

The reactor works by using Quasi-spherical magnetic fields that trap injected energetic electrons to form a spherical negative potential well. Fusion ions trapped in this spherical well focused through central region oscillate across the "core" until they are reacted.

The project is focused on the Inertial Electrostatic Fusion reactor invented by the award winning American physicist Dr. Robert W. Bussard. The Radiation Free Fusion Reactor has the potential to change the whole landscape of energy generation, which is usually a choice between bad and worse options that include Nuclear, Coal and Natural Gas systems.

Way to go, Governor. Although nuclear fission might not be that bad (given developments in reactor technology) and coal is a great fuel if you can just do something about the emissions, we're kind of partial to this idea of waste-free, IEC fusion. Here's hoping there's something there.