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Once running at full capacity by the end of next year, its creators say, the facility will be able to generate a ton of food. Produce can be harvested up to 15 times a year without needing any soil or daylight.

Automated robots will be used to both plant seeds and check in on them later as well.

Nordic Harvest envisions that other massive facilities like it could have a major impact on the global fresh food supply. In fact, vertical farms covering an area of 20 soccer fields could grow enough greens for the entirety of Denmark, the startup argues, as reported by Fast Company.

Human civilization wouldn’t be where it is today if we hadn’t domesticated animals to be either loyal and cuddly or dumb and tasty. Now, researchers in Australia have discovered what they claim is the very first example of an animal domesticating another animal – a fish species found to recruit tiny shrimp to help tend their algae farms.

It’s believed that humans first domesticated the wolf around 15,000 years ago to help us hunt, and later for companionship. Over the following millennia, we added goats, pigs, sheep and cattle for food and materials. And almost every plant we eat looks nothing like their original wild counterparts, having been honed for thousands of years at our hands to be bigger, hardier, tastier, more nutritious or easier to grow, harvest and eat.

So far, the only other organisms known to domesticate others have been insects – for example ants farm aphids, protecting them from predators in exchange for the sweet sticky goo they excrete. But the behavior has never been observed in other vertebrate species before.

Watch Elon Musk at the WSJ CEO Council Summit talk about future plans for Tesla and SpaceX. Musk also reveals why he moved to Texas and shares his advice for business leaders.

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It’s the two highly problematic trends, that the study relates here, that are important: The comparatively slow, but long-term, continuous human-induced reduction of the global biomass stock vis-à-vis the exponentially growing anthropogenic (human-made) mass,” Krausmann said by email. “Better knowledge about the dynamics and patterns of anthropogenic mass, and how it is linked to service provision and resource flows is key for sustainable development. The big question is how much anthropogenic mass do we need for a good life.


The year 2020 could be the year when human-made mass surpasses the overall weight of biomass — estimated to be roughly 1,100,000,000,000 tons, or 1.1 teratons — a milestone scientists say speaks to the enormous impact that humans have had on the planet.

The analysis was published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, and was conducted by a group of researchers from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science.