- “I need to talk to you about the bees,” said my fiancee recently, sitting up in bed with a sense of urgency. “There aren't many left, so we need to help them.” Any bees in particular, I asked? “All of them,” she said. “We're running out of time.” The night before, she had attended a lecture by journalist Alison Benjamin, who, with Brian McCallum, has published A World Without Bees (Guardian Books), which outlines how bee populations across the world are dwindling at an alarming rate. Benjamin argues that this is not only bad news for bees, it could be catastrophic for us humans, too: bees play a crucial role in pollinating plants — from food crops to trees — helping them to reproduce. Put simply, no bees means no humans.
- In two years' time, the annual growth of the Web will be equivalent to all the documents ever written in human history. A few years later, that same amount of information is likely to be added in just a matter of days. As Ian Goldin and his colleagues from the James Martin 21st Century School in Oxford rattled through the vertiginous statistics at the “World in 2050” event staged in London by Intelligence Squared last week, a couple of things became clear. First, forget 2050: The future is here, which is to say that the pace of the technological development that we imagine lies in the future is with us now and changes our lives from year to year, sometimes from month to month. But perhaps more important is that we contemplate the problems of the future as never before: severe climate change, population explosion, the pressures on land, food, water and energy preoccupy us like no other generation in history.
- More than half a million US children yearly have bad reactions or side effects from widely used medicines that require medical treatment and sometimes hospitalization, new research shows. Children younger than age five are most commonly affected. Penicillin and other prescription antibiotics are among drugs causing the most problems, including rashes, stomachaches and diarrhea. Parents should pay close attention when their children are started on medicines since “first-time medication exposures may reveal an allergic reaction,” said lead author Florence Bourgeois, a pediatrician with Children's Hospital in Boston.
- The company that added “venti” and “frappuccino” to American vocabularies is making a push throughout North America to convince connoisseurs to sample what many see as a down-market drink — instant coffee. Nearly eight months after Starbucks Corp began selling its Via instant coffee in Seattle and Chicago, the company was yesterday to begin offering the dissolvable drink to the rest of the country and in its Canadian stores.
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