“Misinterpreting signals to make them consistent with a pre-determined outcome is, psychologists tell us, a common phenomenon in human nature. Unfortunately, it is also a frequent dynamic in modern financial markets, particularly when it comes to sustainability.”
“What is the best way to get from A to B by public transit? Google Maps is answering such queries for over 20,000 cities and towns in over 70 countries around the world, including large metro areas like New York, São Paulo or Moscow, and some complete countries, such as Japan or Great Britain.”
“There is a cautionary tale buried in Earth’s past. Some 56 million years ago, about 10 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct, a massive amount of carbon surged into the atmosphere, triggering a rise in temperature of 5°C. Scientists often look to the so-called Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) as an analog for today’s rising temperatures, because the magnitude of that ancient carbon injection is thought to be comparable to what humans will release if fossil fuel emissions continue unabated for a few more centuries.”
“While Nations gathered in Paris to negotiate an international agreement to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, Nature published a special issue “Paris Climate Talk” to cover the run-up to COP21. For this issue, Nature asked Adam Rome, environmental historian at the University of Delaware in Newark, to revisit the classics that first made sustainability a public issue in the 1960s and 1970s.”
I am not an astronomer or astrophysicist. I have never worked for NASA or JPL. But, during my graduate year at Cornell University, I was short on cross-discipline credits, and so I signed up for Carl Sagan’s popular introductory course, Astronomy 101. I was also an amateur photographer, occasionally freelancing for local media—and so the photos shown here, are my own.
Carl Sagan is aware of my camera as he talks to a student in the front row of Uris Hall
By the end of the 70’s, Sagan’s star was high and continuing to rise. He was a staple on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, producer and host of the PBS TV series, Cosmos, and he had just written Dragons of Eden, which won him a Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote Contact, which became a blockbuster movie, starring Jodie Foster.
Sagan died in 1996, after three bone marrow transplants to compensate for an inability to produce blood cells. Two years earlier, Sagan wrote a book and narrated a film based on a photo taken from space.
Continue reading “What has changed since ‘Pale Blue Dot’?” »
Around the world, cities are choking on smog. But a new AI system plans to analyze just how bad the situation is by aggregating data from smartphone pictures captured far and wide across cities.
The project, called AirTick, has been developed by researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, reports New Scientist. The reasoning is pretty simple: Deploying air sensors isn’t cheap and takes a long time, so why not make use of the sensors that everyone has in their pocket?
The result is an app which allows people to report smog levels by uploading an image tagged with time and location. Then, a machine learning algorithm chews through the data and compares it against official air-quality measurements where it can. Over time, the team hopes the software will slowly be able to predict air quality from smartphone images alone.
“[A]rtist Simon Beck (previously) trudges across sand or through knee-high snow to create massive geometric drawings left behind in his footprints. From sandy expanses on the shore of New Zealand to frigid outlooks in the Swiss Alps, any pristine surface that stretches for hundreds of meters can work as a suitable canvas for Beck’s designs.”
**Spanish architect Alberto Villanueva’s Mars Utopia concept would see the planet transformed into an inhabitable environment using towers formed by bacteria**
Villanueva, who works at Idea Architecture Office, created the project while completing a masters in Environment Design at London’s Ravensbourne College. “As an architect I am worried about the overpopulation issue”. “I was studying how the most populated cities around the world are growing non-stop. At the same time I realised that at least 30 per cent of territories are in extreme environments and I wanted to understand how, with my responsibility as an architect, I could think in new ways to build in these areas,” he added.
Continue reading “Mars Utopia towers to terraform red planet into breathable environment” »
