Too Interesting for the Newspapers

I'm still reading last week's New Scientist magazine. Here's half a dozen items I found interesting that I haven't seen in any newspaper:

....In their editorial the magazine highlights the evidence about the increasing strength of hurricanes. "The good news is that there is no rising trend in the overall number of hurricanes , nor any sign that the worst storms are getting fiercer. But there is bad news too: [since 1970 ] there has been a near doubling in the number of the strongest categories of hurricanes - the category 4 and 5 storms exemplified by Katrina."

....The first extraterrestrial sea may have been discovered on Saturn's moon Titan - a sea of liquid methane, cooled to below -179 degrees C. May be good news for BP and Shell !

....There was an unprecedented hurricane off southern Brazil in 2004 - the scary thing is that this is the first and only hurricane recorded in the south Atlantic, where the textbooks say hurricanes shouldn't occur. Looks like Global Warming is having an effect.

....The inventor Ray Kurzweil writes about his prediction of a singularity occuring in artificial intelligence: "By the mid 2040s the non-biological portion of our intelligence will be millions of times more capable than the biological portion" (To find out more , have a look at http://www.singinst.org/)

....There is a quote from 1998 from Zbigniew Brzezinski, US National Security Advisor during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:"What is more important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

.....There is an article about Tanzanite. Never heard of Tanzanite? It's the newest of the precious stones, considered fifth in line after diamond, emerald, ruby and sapphire. It was only discovered in 1967 by Masai herdsmen.

Conclusions?

1)That global Warming and the Singularity look like being big issues that will swamp politics - its possibly pointless to come up with policies for more than 10 years ahead.

2) To really understand what's going on, you should read New Scientist. But if we dumb down and run down science in the Uk, fewer people will be able to.

3)That, as Brzezinski shows, it's easy to miss some of the wood for the trees, so that maybe my first conclusion is wrong....