It’s a galaxy-eat-galaxy universe out there.
Astronomers used the motion of stars to reconstruct a galactic collision that happened 2 billion years ago at the nearest neighboring large galaxy.
A new literature review of papers on “common mycorrhizal networks” seems to indicate the science behind them is not as strong as once thought.
Akin to the Ents from “The Lord of the Rings,” there is an idea in modern botany that trees can “talk” to one another through a delicate web of fungus filaments that grows underground. The idea is so alluring that it has gained traction in popular culture and has even been termed the “wood-wide network.”
Continue reading “Can trees talk to each other with fungal networks? Study raises doubts” »
Well that’s one way to make good use of the space.
If we have vertical farms then why not vertical pig farms.
High-rise hog farms have sprung up nationwide as part of Beijing’s drive to enhance its agricultural competitiveness and reduce its dependence on imports.
Continue reading “China’s Bid to Improve Food Production? Giant Towers of Pigs” »
In 2021, Carbon Robotics unveiled the third-generation of its Autonomous Weeder, a smart farming robot that identifies weeds and then destroys them with high-power lasers. The company now has taken the technology from that robot and built a pull-behind LaserWeeder — and it kills twice as many weeds.
The weedkiller challenge: Weeds compete with plants for space, sunlight, and soil nutrients. They can also make it easier for insect pests to harm crops, so weed control is a top concern for farmers.
Continue reading “Farming robot kills 200,000 weeds per hour with lasers” »
Exxon’s green energy stories on the website are gaslighting, REM Tec creates agrivoltaics for farms and Canada builds a mass storage site.
This has been the news lately. This is a good breakdown of info and apparently Katcher wishes to do dog trials.
In this video we provide a quick update on activities at Yuvan Research. It is very exciting to see that Sima, the last remaining rat in the E5 trial is still alive and has surpassed the age of the previous record for lifespan of a Sprague Dawley rat.
For a long time, scientists and engineers have drawn inspiration from the amazing abilities of animals and have sought to reverse engineer or reproduce these in robots and artificial intelligence (AI) agents. One of these behaviors is odor plume tracking, which is the ability of some animals, particularly insects, to home in on the source of specific odors of interest (e.g., food or mates), often over long distances.
A new study by researchers at University of Washington and University of Nevada, Reno has taken an innovative approach using artificial neural networks (ANNs) in understanding this remarkable ability of flying insects. Their work, recently published in Nature Machine Intelligence, exemplifies how artificial intelligence is driving groundbreaking new scientific insights.
“We were motivated to study a complex biological behavior, odor plume-tracking, that flying insects (and other animals) use to find food or mates,” Satpreet H. Singh, the lead author on the study, told Tech Xplore. “Biologists have experimentally studied many aspects of insect plume tracking in great detail, as it is a critical behavior for insect survival and reproduction. ”.
A book entitled “Dinner on Mars” describes how to turn the dry, cold Martian world into a place to grow food for future inhabitants.
The design facilitates efficient land use and can even save water lost to evaporation.
Sunstall, a California-based company, has launched a vertical solar panel, Sunzaun, which can be used in existing fields and arable lands without sacrificing them for clean green energy. The installation is much like conventional solar systems, just that the system uses bifacial solar modules, and the entire array stands like a boundary wall in the field.
As countries look to move away from fossil fuels, the interest in solar energy has increased in recent years. Countries in Europe facing harsh winters are also finding new ways of tapping into solar energy, such as installing solar panels at high altitudes… More.
Continue reading “Vertical solar panels could save farm land and transform agriculture” »
Monkeyflowers glow in a rich assortment of colors, from yellow to pink to deep red-orange. But about 5 million years ago, some of them lost their yellow. In the Feb. 10 issue of Science, UConn botanists explain what happened genetically to jettison the yellow pigment, and the implications for the evolution of species.
Monkeyflowers are famous for growing in harsh, mineral-rich soils where other plants can’t. They are also famously diverse in shape and color. Monkeyflowers also provide a textbook example of how a single-gene change can make a new species. In this case, a monkeyflower species lost the yellow pigments in the petals but gained pink about 5 million years ago, attracting bees for pollination. Later, a descendent species accumulated mutations in a gene called YUP that recovered the yellow pigments and led to production of red flowers. The species stopped attracting bees. Instead, hummingbirds pollinated it, isolating the red flowers genetically and creating a new species.
UConn botanist Yaowu Yuan and postdoctoral researcher Mei Liang (currently a professor at South China Agricultural University), with collaborators from four other institutes, have now shown exactly which gene changed to prevent monkeyflowers from making yellow. Their research, published this week in Science, adds weight to a theory that new genes create phenotypic diversity and even new species.
