Push for 'Great Green Wall of Africa' to halt Sahara
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/10344622.stm
African leaders are meeting in Chad to push the idea of planting a tree belt across Africa from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east.
The Great Green Wall project is backed by the African Union and is aimed at halting the advancing Sahara Desert.
The belt would be 15km (nine miles) wide and 7,000km (4,350 miles) long.
The initiative, conceived five years ago, has not started because of a lack of funding and some experts worry it would not be maintained properly.
The BBC's Tidiane Sy in Senegal says the initiative has the full backing of Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, who is in Chad with 10 other heads of state to discuss desertification.
His government has created the website dedicated to the Great Green Wall.
But our reporter says many other leaders seem ready to forget the project.
At the Copenhagen Climate Change summit last year, for instance, the Senegalese delegation made a presentation on the project.
It is envisaged that the belt would go through 11 countries from east to west.
The trees should be "drought-adapted species", preferably native to the areas planted, the Great Green Wall website says, listing 37 suitable species.
The initiative says it hopes the trees will slow soil erosion; slow wind speeds and help rain water filter into the ground, to stop the desert from growing.
It also says a richer soil content will help communities across the Sahel who depend on land for grazing and agriculture.
Senegal says it has spent about $2m (£1.35m) on it and communities are being encouraged to plant trees.
The BBC's former Chad correspondent Celeste Hicks says older people in N'Djamena - where the conference is being held - talk anecdotally about how the capital city has become a dustbowl over the last 20 years as the Sahara Desert has encroached southwards.
The country has made efforts to plant a green belt of trees around the capital, and tens of thousands of young trees are being grown in nurseries on the outskirts of the city, she says.
But so far little has been done to transplant these trees to the northern desert areas to become part of the Great Green Wall.
We're no strangers to crazy DARPA projects around here, but this one especially strikes our fantastic fancy. The agency's researchers are currently undertaking a project -- called Silent Talk -- to "allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals." That's right: they're talking about telepathy. Using an EEG to read brain waves, DARPA is going to attempt to analyze "pre-speech" thoughts, then transmit them to another person. They first plan to map people's EEG patterns to his / her individual words, then see if those patterns are common to all people. If they are, then the team will move on to developing a way to transmitting those patterns to another person. Dream big, that's what we always say!
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagon-preps-soldier-telepathy-push/
Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds.
At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.
Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of “pre-speech,” analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. It’s a technique they’re also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.
The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a person’s EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable — if everyone has similar patterns. Last, “construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.”
The military has been funding a handful of mind-tapping technology recently, and already have monkeys capable of telepathic limb control. Telepathy may also have advantages beyond covert battlefield chatter. Last year, the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency released a report suggesting that neuroscience might also be useful to “make the enemy obey our commands.” The first step, though, may be getting a grunt to obey his officer’s remotely-transmitted thoughts.
– Katie Drummond and Noah Shachtman
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagon-preps-soldier-telepathy-push/#ixzz0sP4VSyMO
