Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 10.

20 - September 24, 2011

ISSN: 1712-9834

Selected news items from postings to Innovation Watch in the last two weeks... scientists reverse aging in human stem cells... an artificial chromosome has been used to create yeast version 2.0... researchers implant a computer chip to mimic the cerebellum in a rat's brain... new malware modifies the software on PC motherboards... China's labor costs increase by 40 per cent a year... risks to the supply of rare earth elements have been detailed by the British Geological Survey... highschool graduates are more likely to live in poverty... Generation X has been hit hard by an unwelcoming economy... land purchases by foreign investors harm poor farmers... a massive urban migration in Africa is creating infrastructure challenges... car companies are moving into the market for electronic bicycles... humans take less than nine months to consume a year's worth of the Earth's resources... we are living in the 'most dangerous decade' since 1950, a global strategist says... a new wave of startup companies are using technology to rapidly analyze huge volumes of data and predict trends... More great resources ... a new book by Don Peck, Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It ... a link to The Future of Innovation website... the audio clip of a show by Kojo Nnamdi on 'big data' and the future of the information economy... a blog post by Venessa Miemis on the future of money, and why it matters more than ever now... David Forrest Innovation Watch

David Forrest advises organizations on emerging trends, and helps to develop strategies for a radically different future

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SCIENCE
Top Stories: Scientists Turn Back the Clock on Adult Stem Cells Aging (Medical Xpress) - Researchers have shown they can reverse the aging process for human adult stem cells, which are responsible for helping old or damaged tissues regenerate. The findings could lead to medical treatments that may repair a host of ailments that occur because of tissue damage as people age. 'Synthetic' Chromosome Permits Rapid, On-Demand 'Evolution' of Yeast (PhysOrg) - Using the already known full genetic code -- or DNA sequences -- of the yeast genome as a starting point, Johns Hopkins graduate student Sarah Richardson wrote a software program for making a series of systematic changes to the DNA sequence. The changes were planned to subtly change the code and remove some of the repetitive and less used regions of DNA between genes, and to generate a mutated "version 2.0" of a yeast cell's original 9R chromosome. The smallest chromosome arm in the yeast genome, 9R contains about 100,000 base pairs of DNA and represents about one percent of the single-celled organism's genome. Forward Know someone who might be interested in this newsletter? Forward it Unsubscribe Don't want to receive the newsletter? Unsubscribe

TECHNOLOGY
Top Stories: Chip 'Restores' Brain Function in Rodent -- And Could Save Humans (Daily Mail) - Scientists have used a computer chip to restore cognitive function in a rat's brain sparking hopes the technology could one day help humans. The chip mimics the cerebellum, a small region of the brain which plays an important role in motor control and movement. Scientists used it to make a laboratory rat learn a conditioned motor reflex -- blinking. The development is another step forward in a process which could one day be used in humans to repair the effects of dementia, strokes and other brain injuries. It could also be used to improve healthy brain function. Malware Burrows Deep into Computer BIOS to Escape AV (The Register) - Researchers have discovered one of the first pieces of malware ever used in the wild that modifies the software on the motherboard of infected computers to ensure the infection can't be easily eradicated. Known as Trojan.Mebromi, the rootkit reflashes the BIOS of computers it attacks to add malicious instructions that are executed early in a computer's boot-up sequence. The instructions, in turn, alter a computer's MBR, or master boot record, another system component that gets executed prior to the loading of the operating system of an infected machine. By corrupting the processes that run immediately after a PC starts, the malware stands a better chance of surviving attempts by antivirus programs to remove it.

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BUSINESS
Top Stories: China's Soaring Costs Could Help American Jobs (MSNBC) Labor costs are soaring by 40 percent a year, as migrant workers are becoming pickier, since there are more job opportunities at home. Also China's one-child policy means there is no longer such a huge pool of young, dexterous workers. Bank lending is tightening and China's currency is also appreciating by around 6 percent a year against the U.S. dollar, not quickly enough for US and European policymakers, but sufficient for factories on low margins to feel the pain. Earth's Rarest Metals Ranked in a New 'Risk List' (BBC) - The relative risks to the supply of some of Earth's rarest elements have been detailed in a new list published by the British Geological Survey (BGS). So-called "technology metals" like indium and niobium are extracted from the Earth and are used in a wide range of modern digital devices and green technologies. They are therefore increasingly in demand from global industries.

SOCIETY
Top Stories: What the Lost Decade of Wages Means for Colleges and Their Graduates (Huffington Post) While the poverty rate for those in their 20s with a bachelor's degree has increased by two percentage points since 2002, it jumped by six points for those with a high-school diploma during the same time period. For both groups, the poverty rate has improved as they moved into their 30s, but those with a high-school diploma are still much more likely to live in poverty even 10+ years after high-school graduation. Generation X Stymied by Baby Boomers Refusing to Give Up Jobs (Businessweek) - While their experiences and complaints are shared by other generations, the report says that for this group, trends such as the rising cost of higher education have hit particularly hard. It says those entering college in 1996 had average expenses more than four times higher than boomers 20 years earlier. Many began their careers as companies started cutting back on pensions and health care benefits, and while people in Generation X are more educated and more diverse than boomers, they have had "no welcome in the economy," says Neil Howe, a demographer and coauthor of six books on generations in the U.S., including 2010's Millennials in the Workplace.

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GLOBAL POLITICS
Top Stories: Foreign Investor 'Land Grabs' Harm Poor Farmers, Oxfam Says (Businessweek) - Foreign-investor purchases of farmland in poorer nations are displacing local populations and adding little to a country's wealth, even as agricultural prices increase, according to Oxfam International. As many as 227 million hectares (561 million acres) -- an area one and a half times the size of Alaska -- have been sold or leased since 2001, with most of the "land grabs" occurring in the past two years, Oxfam said in a report released today. With the consent of governments, weak legal codes allow the purchase of large tracts with no regard for residents or the environment, said Oxfam, which is based in Oxford, U.K. IBM: The African Revolution No One Should Ignore (CNN) Today there are 37 cities on the African continent with more than one million people. An estimated 41% of the people in Africa live in cities and, by 2020 more than half will, according to estimates done for the United Nations. Those people are moving to the continent's cities because they expect more security and better opportunities than they have in rural villages and farms. But often they find that cities aren't prepared to provide basic needs like clean water and fuel for cooking. Establishing an infrastructure that will allow newly arrived settlers to thrive and become more productive is a key responsibility for the leaders of those cities and nations.

ENVIRONMENT
Top Stories: Any Colour You Like, as Long as It's Green: Ford Pedals into Lucrative e-Bike Market (Daily Mail) - Electronic bikes -bicycles with electric motors clipped to the frame which allow the unfit to race past race-ready bikers on steep hills -- sold 30 million last year. Suddenly, the technology -- previously the preserve of obscure customising companies -- has become big money. Current e-bikes sell for between GBP 500 and GBP 3,000. And car companies such as Ford are racing in, using hi-tech magnetic sensors from F1 vehicles to provide a motor that responds in 1/100th of a second -- and batteries 'inside' the bikes. Humanity Falls Deeper into Ecological Debt: Study (PhysOrg) - Humankind will slip next week into ecological debt, having gobbled up in less then nine months more natural resources than the planet can replenish in a year, researchers said. The most dominant species in Earth's history, in other words, is living beyond the planet's threshold of sustainability, trashing the house it lives in. At its current pace of consumption

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humankind will need, by 2030, a second globe to satisfy its voracious appetites and absorb all its waste, the report calculated. Earth's seven billion denizens -- nine billion by mid-century -- are using more water, cutting down more forests and eating more fish than Nature can replace, it said.

THE FUTURE
Top Stories: 'Most Dangerous Decade Since the 1950s': Strategist (CNBC) - Over the 100 years from 1950 to 2050, this decade will be seen as the "inflection decade" as both the developed and emerging economies make radical changes to adapt to a more dominant Asia, Anil Gupta, professor of strategy at University of Maryland told CNBC. Gupta added that significant adjustments in the US and Europe would need to be made to adjust -- as well as in the BRIC countries -- as the world shifts from reliance on the developed to the emerging economies. Data Analytics: Crunching the Future (Businessweek) - In the early 2000s a wave of startups made it possible to gather huge volumes of data and analyze it in record speed. Now a second wave of startups is finding ways to use cheap but powerful servers to analyze new categories of data such as blog posts, videos, photos, tweets, DNA sequences, and medical images. "The old days were about asking, 'What is the biggest, smallest, and average?'" says Michael Olson, CEO of startup Cloudera. "Today it's, 'What do you like? Who do you know?' It's answering these complex questions."

Just in from the publisher...

Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It
by Don Peck
Read more...

A Web Resource... The Future of Innovation - Over 350 leading thinkers from business, government, consulting and academia from around the globe share their thoughts, experiences, dreams, visions, hopes, concerns, and passions around The Future of Innovation, providing you with insights into tomorrows innovation agenda so that you can start acting on it now.

Multimedia... "Big Data" and the Future of the Information Economy -- Windows Media | Real Audio ... It's a mountain of raw data, growing bigger every time a credit card

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is swiped or a photo uploaded to the web. Last year, more than 13 exabytes of data -thats 13 quintillion bytes (a 13, followed by 18 zeros) -- was saved on servers, computers, and mobile devices around the world. We explore how innovative organizations are beginning to harness the power of "Big Data" and whether the IT sector can help drive a broader economic recovery in the United States. (52m 54s) [Kojo Nnamdi]

The Blogosphere... Why the Future of Money Matters Is the Current System Obsolete? (Emergent by Design) - Venessa Miemis "There's a larger discussion to be had about the nature and design of currency itself, its inherent biases towards certain types of behavior, and its impact on living systems. There's also a story about the human desire to redefine what wealth means and to be empowered to create local economies that are biased towards cooperation and abundance. It would seem, based on many of the things I've been reading, that allowing a variety of parallel currency systems to emerge would help meet the needs of people in these rough economic times, provide jobs, and create options for how value is created and exchanged."

Email: mail@innovationwatch.com

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