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Can High-Tech Indoor Agriculture Transform Local Food?

CONTENT SOURCED FROM EDIBLEBROOKLYN

On one of those unseasonable 40-degree days this April when there was soaking ice-cold rain followed by umbrella-wrecking wind, the weather inside a miniature indoor farm near Manhattan’s City Hall was balmy.

The conception of Moss FM.

The result of our research and experimentation is Moss FM - the World’s first plant-powered radio. It is also the first time Photo-MFCs have been used to run an object higher powered than an LCD screen. 

Moss FM consists of ten Photo Microbial Fuel Cells, which can be connected in parallel, series, or combination thereof, depending on the performance of each single cell. 

Designed by Fabienne Felder, 2013 in collaboration with Dr. Paolo Bombelli and Ross Dennis of the University of Cambridge.

Cool. Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes

parent is good for doing this because parent is basically saying “yes the behaviours you were born with are great!”

As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Geneticists, Alexei Sharov at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore and Richard Gordon at the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by the measure of Moore’s Law, life is older than the Earth itself.

The team takes Moore’s Law back to zero complexity and the origin of life, by measuring the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish, amphibians and eventually mammals. The result is an exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law with the doubling time, however, expanding to 376 million years rather than every two years.

The application of Linear regression of genetic complexity on a log scale extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life 9.7 billion years ago. This cosmic time scale for the evolution of life has important consequences: life took ca. 5 billion years to reach the complexity of bacteria; the environments in which life originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on Earth. Therefore they suggest that if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with homo sapiens, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilisation in the Milky Way, negating Drakes Equation.

On the semilog plot above , the complexity of organisms, as measured by the length of functional non-redundant DNA per genome counted by nucleotide base pairs (bp), increases linearly with time (Sharov, 2012). Time is counted backwards in billions of years before the present (time 0). Credit: arXiv:1304.3381 [physics.gen-ph]

Read More via Daily Galaxy via MIT Technology Review

The FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP) is a naval research station designed in 1962. It is towed horizontally to open water then flips vertically to provide a stable platform mostly immune to wave action. The tilting is actioned by directing water into ballast tanks. The position is reversed by sending compressed air in the tanks. Because the bulkhead becomes the deck, the FLIP has rooms with doors mounted on the floor, portholes in the ceiling, and sinks and toilets mounted for both configurations.

Developed during the cold war, it continues to provide a uniquely stable platform for research missions that include ocean acoustics, marine mammal studies, geophysics, meteorology, physical oceanography, and laser propagation experiments.