Visualising the future on big televisions

It wasn8217;t built to watch the Premier League football. And you can8217;t tune it to HBO. Yet students and professors at the University of California, Irvine, say they8217;ve spent some scintillating days looking at the human brain, cancer cells and weather maps. The images virtually jump out from what they claim is the world8217;s highest-resolution video screen. 8220;We had to build something big enough to make me look small,8221; said Stephen F. Jenks, the 6-ft-10 assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who helped design the university8217;s 23-by-9-ft Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall. The wall consists of rows of linked monitors, each of which displays a portion of the picture.
And here8217;s a number to chew on: 200 million pixels. That8217;s enough to provide a picture about 100 times more detailed than the best high-definition TV. And it8217;s enough to have made UCI8217;s newest research tool, dubbed the HIPerWall, a hit among scientists. 8220;It8217;s exciting,8221; said Joerg Meyer, a professor of computer graphics and visualisation who helped develop the screen8217;s software. 8220;This display has higher resolution than the human retina can see.8221; Built three years ago with a 300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the HIPerWall has been used to observe changes in the individual brain cells of schizophrenics, predict climate change by analyzing a century8217;s worth of weather models and study the cells of a woman who died of ovarian cancer.

Water for biofuels or for food?
Biofuels, hailed by many as the green solution to offset a coming oil shortage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, are not a cure-all solution, experts at a water conference in Stockholm warned this week. Biofuels, which are made from crops, require huge amounts of water, a resource that is already in short supply in many parts of the world. Bio-energy could thus end up diverting water resources desperately needed for food crops. 8220;Where will the water to grow the food needed to feed a growing population come from if more and more water is diverted to crops for biofuels production?8221; asked Stockholm International Water Institute SIWI spokesman Davi Trouba. According to SIWI, in 2050, the amount of additional water needed for bio-energy producion will be equivalent to the amount required by the agricultural sector to feed the world properly.