On current form, she warns, the world is on track for warming of 6C by the end of the century – a level that would create catastrophe, wiping out agriculture in many areas and rendering swathes of the globe uninhabitable, as well as raising sea levels and causing mass migration, according to scientists.

In contrast to green technologies like solar power and biofuels, which take decades of research and massive funds to scale, big data tools offer a relatively capital-efficient way to use proven technology to better manage resources, fight climate change and get ready for the 9 billion people on the planet by 2050. If there’s no Moore’s Law delivering rapid and exponential progress for things like batteries, and solar panels, why not try to leverage Moore’s Law in a more indirect way for greentech via big data? Here are 5 companies that are leveraging big data to help the planet:

"(..) This shows where the real money is. Not in quality reporting, but more in a product for a massive audience that translates into eyeballs (what a term) that, in turn, will be monetized — especially if you add a good layer of software algorithms to the product. (..)"

Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates.

Living Stories are a new format for presenting and consuming online news. The basic idea of a living story is to combine all of the news coverage on a running story on a single page. Every day, instead of writing a new article on the story that sits at a new URL and contains some new developments and some old background, a living story resides at a permanent URL, that is updated regularly with new developments. This makes it easier for readers to get the latest updates on the stories that interest them, as well as to review deeper background materials that are relevant for a story's context.

A reader can read full articles and browse multimedia without ever leaving the Living Story page. By expanding and minimizing various levels of details on various developments in the story according to the context, a lot of information is presented to the user on one page in an organized manner. Whether it's just a short update, or a deep analysis, or a feature story, a video, or an important quotes, everything related to the story is on the Living Story page.

Living Stories also automatically track the reader's interaction with the story, so that the new material on the page since their last visit can be highlighted. This enables users to quickly see what's new since they last read the story.

To see Living Stories in action, go to http://livingstories.googlelabs.com and click on one of the listed stories. These stories were created for a Labs experiment that ran from Dec 2009 - Feb 2010 by a partnership between Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. This open source package lets you create similar living stories on your own website.

The new BBC science portal.

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

Exclusive: Watchdog's estimates of reserves inflated says top official

Threat Level had no idea the iPhone was so dangerous. We’re gratified that Apple locked down this potential weapon of mass disruption before hackers could unleash cybarmageddon. This also explains why Apple rejected the official Google Voice App for the iPhone this week. We thought it was because Google Voice posed a threat to AT&T’s exclusivity deal with Apple. Now we know it threatened national security.

Embedded in everything from cellphone bills to car-rental contracts, ''hidden fees" are hiding in plain sight. Two economists explain why they're likely to stay that way.

While attitudes toward privacy can appear paradoxical, the seeming contradiction is really about something else: control. When people bare their bodies on Facebook or their souls in the digital confessional of Google’s search engine, they feel as if they are in charge. Not so, when the private embarrassments come to light unexpectedly. The subtle relationship between privacy and control has complicated things for marketers, too. Advertisers talk about having to move away from analog-era “push” tactics and embracing digital-age “pull” strategies, in which consumers are enticed into seeking information about a product or brand, rather than having ads foisted on them.

Today, at the Semantic Technology Conference, Rob Larson and Evan Sandhaus of the New York Times announced together that the Times will soon be publishing its copious index as Linked Data.

A new sequencing service aims to take whole-genome sequencing mainstream.

Two years ago, a dozen of the country’s major corporations, including Caterpillar, Duke Energy, and Dow Chemical, banded together with several of the nation’s leading environmental groups to form a group called the United States Climate Action Partnership. According to the group’s Web site, USCAP’s mission is to encourage “the federal government to enact legislation requiring significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.” That’s a nice thought and by signing onto it USCAP’s members got a lot of nice press (including in The New Yorker). But a recent analysis of campaign giving by the non-profit group Clean Air Watch suggests that USCAP’s corporate members do not take USCAP’s goals terribly seriously. In fact, they seem to be devoting considerable resources to undermining them.

The Open Platform is the suite of services that make it possible for our partners to build applications with the Guardian. We've opened up our platform so that everyone can benefit from our journalism, our brand, and the technologies that power guardian.co.uk.

Simon Rogers gathers some of the key figures driving the political agenda in the United States. Download the data or access the API to build your own charts and visualizations.

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Jim Lobe is best known for his coverage of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration. The Washington Bureau Chief of the international news agency Inter Press Service (IPS), Lobe has also written for Foreign Policy In Focus, Alternet, Tompaine.com, and was featured in BBC and ABC television documentaries about motivations for the US invasion of Iraq.

In a nod toward privacy, Yahoo today said it would only keep personal data on searchers and portal users for 90 days (double that in cases of fraud or suspicious activity). This ups the ante for search firms Google, which halved its data retention time to nine months in September, and Microsoft, which has said it would drop its data retention times to six months if its competitors did.

2008 has been an eventful year to say the least - it is difficult to sum up the thousands of stories in just a handful of photographs. That said, I will try to do what I've done with other photo narratives here, and tell a story of 2008 in photographs. It's not the story of 2008, it's certainly not all stories, but as a collection it does show a good portion of what life has been like over the past 12 months. This is a multi-entry story, 120 photographs over three days. Watch for part 2 and part 3 tomorrow and the next day.

A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

It turns out that about 8 percent of the human genome is made up of viruses that once attacked our ancestors. The viruses lost. What remains are the molecular equivalents of mounted trophies, insects preserved in genomic amber, DNA fossils.

The web based version of FlickrFan, a river of news of photos.

Contagious is a quarterly intelligence briefing in magazine, DVD and online format. It identifies the ideas, trends and innovations behind the world’s most revolutionary marketing strategies.

Any picture can speak 1,000 words, but only a select few say something poignant enough to galvanize an entire society. The following photographs screamed so loudly that the entire world stopped to take notice.

News, tips and howto's for Ubuntu Linux

Latest news about new sustainable or eco-ideas

Henk Blanken vervolgt zijn blogserie over de transitie van massamedia-consument naar infoclan-consument. We maken deel uit van netwerken, en zijn minder makkelijk te bereiken door de steeds bredere media-markt.

Sure, Yahoo signed China’s “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry,” a voluntary agreement to monitor and restrict information deemed “harmful” by Beijing, but did it have to take it quite so seriously? Was it really

Bedrijven willen graag weten wat er over hen gezegd wordt op het internet. Webcare-teams moeten gesignaleerde problemen oplossen.

As the only member of his clan, Jeffrey Lee controls the fate of Koongarra. But Jeffrey Lee is not interested in the soaring price of uranium, which could make him one of the world's richest men.

Ask.com announced that they will be launching "AskEraser" in the near future, a feature to allow you to erase your search history. Ask also said it will be implementing a new 18 month data retention policy, where searches will be disassociated from IP add

"No, not to be funny and snarky, but to be bold and to do a better job of cutting through the fog."

Actuele informatie over inschakeling van hulpdiensten, op een Google Maps mashup.

Open source accounts for between 25 and 70 percent of all software in Australian, Chinese, Indian and Korean companies, according to a recent IDC survey.

A blog that discusses the N800 extensively.

Wom WOrld's category on the Nokia N800

"It's a bad privacy day for Google, with Privacy International first accusing the company of having the worst privacy performance of any internet service company in a study it has just released and then accusing Google of conducting a smear campaign again

The story behind why Derek and Heather, JPG mag's founders, are not working on the magazine anymore.

Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users. Users like you, maybe.

AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. It is a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats and different sources.

"Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen has suggested deliberately spreading a layer of particulate matter in the upper atmosphere to help reflect some of the sun's energy in an effort to combat global warming. He reminds us that the eruption of the v