Can An Army Of Voluntary "mappers" (like You) Help End Child Slavery On Lake Volta, Ghana?

The astonishing story of Xavier Plassat, a French friar who has fought slavery for decades in the Brazilian Amazon, via Vanity Fair.

READ the abolitionist’s compelling tale here that brought him to the frontlines of 21st century slavery.

Africa, still covered in large swathes of pristine wilderness, is likely to lose much of its biological wealth if dozens of new massive development projects—from highways to railroads to pipelines—get the green light, according to a new study. Most of the projects are designed to increase agricultural production and ease the transport of minerals such as iron and coal. Yet if all are built, they’ll create a spider web of some 53,000 kilometers of corridors through deserts, forests, and savannas—and a host of environmental disasters, scientists say. Even worse, they contend, most won’t help the continent feed its people, even though this is the primary justification behind many of the projects.

“Africa is undergoing the most dramatic era of development it’s ever experienced,” says William Laurance, an ecologist at James Cook University, Cairns, in Australia, and the study’s lead author. “No one disputes its need for food and economic development. But these corridors need to be built without creating environmental crises.”

The scientists’ study is a follow-up to aprevious one they published last year inNature warning about the unprecedented number of road and transportation projects being planned globally. 

Power-pylons that look like looming giants

Choi + Shine, an architecture firm, has proposed modifying Iceland’s existing power-transmission pylons to turn them into looming giants whose arms are poised to reflect their positions – pylons ascending a hill will be posed as though they were scaling its slopes.

The designers claim that it can be made cost-effective through clever engineering, and that the resulting aesthetic experience will be monumental. I agree with the latter statement and am unqualified to assess the former, though Iceland has a weird and cool relationship with power, as it is ia carbon-neutral country whose electricity comes from geothermal sources.

Read the rest

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Is Able to Drill Holes Into Rocks Again

“The team used tremendous ingenuity to devise a new drilling technique and implement it on another planet,” said Steve Lee, Curiosity Deputy Project Manager of JPL, in a statement. “Those are two vital inches of innovation from 60 million miles away. We’re thrilled that the result was so successful.”

That’s one small hole for a probe, but one giant leap for NASA. This past weekend, the space agency jerry-rigged Curiosity’s malfunctioning drill, allowing the rover to bore into Martian rock for the first time in over a year.

Continue Reading.

Meet Hannah Herbst, a 15-year-old from Boca Raton, Florida, who just might be the nation’s top young scientist. Earlier this month, Herbst won a $25,000 prize with a very cheap invention: a prototype probe that converts the movement of the ocean’s currents into energy and costs just $12 to make. Out of nine other middle-school finalists, Herbst was awarded first place in the 2015 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge.

This 15-Year-Old’s Invention Converts Ocean Currents Into Energy—for Cheap | GOOD

Trident is a remote-controlled, camera-equipped underwater drone – and it’s the fastest machine yet from underwater robotics startup OpenROV. It can go as fast as Michael Phelps. 

The underwater drone can stream live video to a monitor during explorations and the team at OpenROV is currently exploring VR so those playing with one of these drones can feel like they are right there in the depths with their vehicle.

Check out the video here! 

A look inside the world's first underground park, the Lowline

Over the weekend a test lab for the world’s first underground park opened its doors to visitors in New York. Housed in the former Essex Street Market building in Manhattan, it is the first step toward making former NASA engineer James Ramsey's idea for the Lowline a reality. His plans for the Lowline propose transforming a disused trolley terminal into a subterranean park using innovative solar technology.

I think it’s a cool engineering experiment but if he really is pursuing this to give green spaces to under served urban communities, then proposing it to be built in LES is fallacy. That area already has parks close by and is inhabited by at least the upper 30% (economically) of the city. What would be spectacular is if the technology they’ve developed for channelling sunlight could be used in subway stations that people already use. Plants and sunlight there would make the lives of millions of commuters across the subway network so much better. This disused trolley place should be made into an urban farm me thinks :)

Fly to Mars without leaving home!

A couple people asked me about this little clip from my “Why Do We Go To Space” video (<- requisite plug for my YouTube show). What you’re seeing on my iPhone screen there is a 360-degree panorama of the Martian surface as captured by the Curiosity rover.

You can view it here. It works great on your computer, but the real magic is when you view it on your phone or tablet.

Congratulations. You’re a space traveler!

Artificial optical materials could allow cheaper, flatter, more efficient detectors for night vision and other uses

A new way of taking images in the mid-infrared part of the spectrum, developed by researchers at MIT and elsewhere, could enable a wide variety of applications, including thermal imaging, biomedical sensing, and free-space communication.

The mid-infrared (mid-IR) band of electromagnetic radiation is a particularly useful part of the spectrum; it can provide imaging in the dark, trace heat signatures, and provide sensitive detection of many biomolecular and chemical signals. But optical systems for this band of frequencies have been hard to make, and devices using them are highly specialized and expensive. Now, the researchers say they have found a highly efficient and mass-manufacturable approach to controlling and detecting these waves.

The findings are reported in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by MIT researchers Tian Gu and Juejun Hu, University of Massachusetts at Lowell researcher Hualiang Zhang, and 13 others at MIT, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and the East China Normal University.

The new approach uses a flat, artificial material composed of nanostructured optical elements, instead of the usual thick, curved-glass lenses used in conventional optics. These elements provide on-demand electromagnetic responses and are made using techniques similar to those used for computer chips. “This kind of metasurface can be made using standard microfabrication techniques,” Gu says. “The manufacturing is scalable.”

Read more.

Arctic Warming Produces Mosquito Swarms Large Enough to Kill Baby Caribou

Lauren Culler's study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that Arctic warming is producing larger and larger mosquito swarms, which can kill caribou.

Apparently, because of the earlier thawing of the permafrost, and the increasing amount of permafrost that is melting each, each because of climate change, the Alaska state bird, aka the mosquito, is swarming in unprecedented numbers. The article tells us that mosquitos can kill a baby caribou calf by draining its blood, because the calf is already weakened by the scarcity of food sources also attributable to climate change.

Here’s a video, showing mosquitos swarming in Alaska and annoying a baby owl and a herd of caribou.

Check out these photos, taken by scientists in Alaska. If mosquitos make you squirm, close your eyes: