It has changed politics, entertainment

We can't be sure where the next smallpox will emerge, but we can be sure that it will take an effort larger than any single person or organization to defeat it.Today there are some real heroes working to check off two more diseases from the list. The World Health Organization has led the charge against the highly infectious disease of polio. Along with UNICEF and dozens of NGOs, and millions of national moncler alpes jacket white
and local health workers, members of Rotary International and volunteers from moms to Mullahs have stepped up to the plate and contained polio so that hundreds, not millions, of kids are paralyzed annually, but we cannot consider the case closed until we erase the last case, in the last country. The Carter Center has also accomplished a tremendous feat by leading the effort to shrink the cases of Guinea worm to the tens of thousands from the millions. Just as it took 150,000 health workers -- the world's unsung heroes -- to make one billion house calls in India searching for hidden cases of smallpox, it will take collaboration on a global scale to track and eliminate the next pandemic.There is no Nobel Prize for "Preventing a Pandemic," and the hardest part about working in this field is imagining the unimaginable. What will be the next SARS, the next ebola, the next H5N1 bird flu? Epidemiologists try to "out think" the massive numbers of permutations and combinations that may give rise to the newest threat to our lives. Chances are a microbe capable of sweeping the globe will emerge in the next decade or two, and chances are it will cross to humans from an animal host (as did SARS, the Spanish flu, and HIV/AIDS). We need new ways to find these emerging threats earlier moncler jacket green in the process, before thousands are infected and the epidemic spirals out of control.Google.org's Predict and Prevent initiative is working with partners to use digital, genomic and IT technology to identify "hot spots" of emerging threats and provide early warning before they become global crises. When you're fighting a pandemic, early detection and early response can be the difference between dozens and hundreds of millions infected. What better birthday present could we offer the world after our 20th year, than to say we joined hands with a global movement and helped prevent the next smallpox?Posted by Dr. Larry Brilliant, Google.orgThe Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding., culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting their responses. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editorsAt Grist.org they have a saying about climate change: "A frog in water doesn't feel it boil in time. Dude, we are that frog."It isn't very Googley to stand on the sidelines whether the challenge involves search, apps, or clean energy. So we're working to be part of the solution. Specifically, we have embraced the challenge of developing a gigawatt of renewable electricity that is cheaper than electricity from coal in years, not decades.(We call it RE<C. Not only is it a cool, nerdy name for the project, it breaks HTML pages everywhere.)In ten years, we envision a cleaner, greener world -- running on wind, solar, and steam - with clean cars plugged into a clean grid. But for that vision to become real, the technologies to power it will have to be economically competitive -- otherwise they won't scale. So we are focusing much of our effort on technology innovation to drive down the costs of key renewable technologies. We are fundamentally optimists -- we believe that when innovative people focus on the right problems, they can find solutions. moncler bady jacket blue nd when renewable energy is cheaper than fossil-based alternatives, and when plug-in hybrids are as cheap as traditional cars, they will take off in the marketplace.Our company founders, Larry and Sergey, are engineers and when they encouraged our team to tackle this issue we knew they would prefer a technological approach. This summer, we welcomed at our Mountain View headquarters the first Google engineers dedicated exclusively to exploring the development of utility-scale clean energy at a price cheaper than coal.But we need a thousand groups of engineers focused on developing renewable energy - not just the team we're building at Google. That means we need government to set the right incentives and regulatory environment to foster clean energy innovation and R&D. Our team is also working to advance a policy agenda that stimulates clean energy projects.We're getting the word out about tax credits, government research funding, renewable portfolio standards, and the limitations of our current transmission grid. Our philanthropic arm is doing its part too. The climate team at Google.org is working to complement the work of our engineering team with grants and investments in clean energy projects. To date, we've invested over $45 million in breakthrough technologies like solar thermal, advanced wind, and enhanced geothermal systems.It will take the concerted efforts of many -- but dude, we don't need to be that frog.Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy CzarToday we announced that we're joining forces (PDF file) with GE to use technology, information and corporate resources to drive the changes necessary to empower consumers with better energy choices. We will focus on improving power generation, transmission and distribution a combination of technologies that could be known as the "smart grid." (It would be fair to refer to electricity technologies in common use today as a "grid of only average intelligence.