Olive trees don’t just dot the landscape in Puglia, Italy; they define it. They are so important here, in the heel of Italy’s boot, that locals use words like “patrimony” and “cultural heritage” when describing them. But what is worrying olive growers here is a disease that’s killing olive trees by the millions.
Paul Cappelli, who’d been an advertising executive in New York City until a few years ago, left his job and moved to a home on the ancient Appian Way surrounded by olive trees, and entered the oil business. “Not the Texas oil business; I’m in the real oil business!” he said.
Today, Villa Cappelli produces about 10,000 liters of olive oil, 95 percent of it sold in the U.S.
Eric Kilhstrom (Director of Aging Analytics Agency and former Interim Director of the £98 million Healthy Ageing Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund) is interviewed about the agency’s recent “Longevity Industry in Israel Landscape Overview 2019” report.
New report shows that Israel’s academic and business ecosystem is the optimal base for an internationally recognized longevity industry hub.
Glaciers are set to disappear completely from almost half of World Heritage sites if business-as-usual emissions continue, according to the first-ever global study of World Heritage glaciers.
The sites are home to some of the world’s most iconic glaciers, such as the Grosser Aletschgletscher in the Swiss Alps, Khumbu Glacier in the Himalayas and Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae.
The study in the AGU journal Earth’s Future and co-authored by scientists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) combines data from a global glacier inventory, a review of existing literature and sophisticated computer modeling to analyze the current state of World Heritage glaciers, their recent evolution, and their projected mass change over the 21st century.
Tesla plans to sell its solar panels at a price that’s 38 percent lower than the national average in an attempt to halt the decline of its solar business. The New York Times notes that the head of Tesla’s solar department, Sanjay Shah, wants to sell panels for between $1.75 and $1.99 a watt, compared to the national average of $2.85.
A fully-contained near-Earth asteroid retrieved to cislunar space can be used as a Research and Development destination for resource extraction and engineering tests as space-native material, unaltered by a radical change in environment, in industrial quantity, and in an accessible orbit.
As a geologist and data manager working in petroleum exploration, I’m not qualified to analyze an all-encompassing view of asteroid mining…but maybe I’m qualified to share what I see from my perspective. Rather than looking at all the reasons why asteroid mining is not currently happening, I’d like to dive deep into how changing decision-making perspectives may make a mission possible.
As human activity and accessibility to do business in space broadens, potential demand for resources delivered to space will also increase. Now is the time to start looking at alternative sources of materials to fuel this expansion. Rather than launching everything from Earth, some materials could be sourced from near-Earth asteroids that are energetically easier to reach than our Moon. While mining asteroids for bulk materials like water might be theoretically profitable compared to launch from Earth, the upfront costs so far have been prohibitive. We’ve already seen the first wave of asteroid mining startups come and go. The high cost of technology development and long timescales for return-on-investment have kept commercial asteroid mining missions grounded.
It’s been 15 years since “The Facebook” was launched, and we first had Mark Zuckerberg on-air to discuss the future of the social media business. In 2004, his social networking site had 100,000 users. Today, Facebook has more than 2,000,000,000 users.
“The traditional model of U.S. military power is being disrupted, the way Blockbuster’s business model was amid the rise of Amazon and Netflix,” Brose writes. “A military made up of small numbers of large, expensive, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace systems will not survive on future battlefields, where swarms of intelligent machines will deliver violence at a greater volume and higher velocity than ever before.”
America risks a catastrophic defeat if it doesn’t radically change the way it thinks about war.
