If the 21st Century is going to be the bioscience century, as I believe it will, then every year will feature significant developments. However, I suspect that 2008 will, in particular, see the dawning comprehension that the tiny genetic differences between one person and another are more important than previously suspected, and are part of the reason why we get so many conflicting reports on issues like drugs and nutrition.

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Last year, I thought that George W. Bush’s weakness would lead to three strong Democratic candidates, Hillary, Obama, and Edwards, plus a designated loser for the Republicans, likely McCain, and it seems it may be turning out that way. I, like everyone else, thought that Hillary was the most likely winner because of her money, her machine, and her husband, the world’s slickest campaigner, but Barack Obama seems to be the most charismatic presidential candidate since JFK, and is upsetting apple carts all along the route. With thousands of political pundits guessing who’s going to win, I don’t think I have much to add to the cacophony. I’m guessing it will be Obama for the Democrats and McCain for the Republicans, and that Obama will win, but that’s only a guess. This is the most fluid election since 1952, which is the last time there was a presidential election without either a sitting president or vice-president running.

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I’ve written and talked about “wearable computers” for more than a decade now, and they are continuing to emerge, although not quite the way I expected. What is happening is that while the original “grey brick” cellphone has morphed into the miniscule smartphone, it is, in fact, a computer that you carry on your person most of your waking hours (if you carry one at all). And this year is going to see this trend extended, with new functionality, including more video capacity, more Internet capacity, impromptu social networks emerging, plus the ability to use a smartphone instead of a laptop for things like running PowerPoint slide presentations.

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I spoke at a transportation conference in Vancouver, Canada, not long ago, and one of the things I said was that some people were still skeptical that climate change was happening. Afterwards, the conference organizer came up to me and told me that the only skeptics were in the south, the temperate zones. Everyone in the Arctic knows that climate change is happening, because it has already dramatically changed their climate. Indeed, last Autumn, I attended an open house at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, and one of the leading oceanographic and geophysical research institutes in the world (and where I grew up, by the way). While there, I heard an oceanographer who specialized in the arctic regions say that they had observed changes in the past year that they hadn’t expected to happen for 30 years. And yet, I still get people who tell me, often quite aggressively, that all this climate change stuff is left-wing crap. (more…)

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The top story of 2008 is likely to be the American economy, plus the potential for a financial market panic that could be enormously destructive, arising out of the credit market crisis. We could be facing a full-blown panic, a run on commercial banks, and even a global recession of significant magnitude. Since no one really wants to read about this, I’ve written a detailed article about it, but have not passed it on to Futuresearch subscribers, preferring to let them access it if they wish. You can find this detailed article on my website. Be warned, though, it’s pretty gloomy reading.

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