Cars and people are seen passing near wind power turbines in Dali, in the China's southwestern Yunnan province. In energy-hungry Yunnan, power is being produced at wind farms, dams and garbage dumps as the Asian giant adopts more "green" technology thanks to carbon trading.
In the mountains above the southwestern Chinese town of Dali, dozens of new wind turbines dot the landscape -- a symbol of the country's sky-high ambitions for clean, green energy.
A MAN lies comatose on an operating table. The enormous spider that hangs above him has plunged four appendages into his belly. The spider, made of white steel, probes around inside the man's abdomen then withdraws one of its arms. Held in the machine's claw is a neatly sealed bag containing a scrap of bloody tissue.
This is a da Vinci robot. It has allowed a surgeon, sitting at a control desk, to remove the patient's prostate gland in a manner that has several advantages over conventional methods. Yet the future of robotic surgery may lie not only with these hulking beasts but also with devices at the other end of the size spectrum. The surgeons of tomorrow will include tiny robots that enter our bodies and do their work from the inside, with no need to open patients up or knock them out. While nanobots that swim through the blood are still in the realm of fantasy, several groups are developing devices a few millimetres in size. The first generation of "mini-medibots" may infiltrate our bodies through our ears, eyes and lungs, to deliver drugs, take tissue samples or install medical devices.
ON THE day a new computer virus hits the internet there is little that antivirus software can do to stop it until security firms get round to writing and distributing a patch that recognises and kills the virus. Now engineers Simon Wiseman and Richard Oak at the defence technology company Qinetiq's security lab in Malvern, Worcestershire, UK, have come up with an answer to the problem.
Their idea, which they are patenting, is to intercept every file that could possibly hide a virus and add a string of computer code to it that will disable any virus it contains. Their system chiefly targets emailed attachments and adds the extra code to them as they pass through a mailserver. A key feature of the scheme is that no knowledge of the virus itself is needed, so it can deal with new, unrecognised "zero day" viruses as well as older ones.
With its deal to buy Revolution Money, American Express is taking aim at the growing market for online and alternative payments, in a challenge to recognized leader PayPal, analysts say
With its deal to buy Revolution Money, American Express is taking aim at the growing market for online and alternative payments, in a challenge to recognized leader PayPal, analysts say.
