A Japanese firm said Monday it would open the world’s first fully automated farm with robots handling almost every step of the process, from watering seedlings to harvesting crops.
Kyoto-based Spread said the indoor grow house will start operating by the middle of 2017 and produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day.
It hopes to boost that figure to half a million lettuce heads daily within five years.
As solar power becomes a bigger and bigger part of the overall energy landscape, engineers around the world are busy working out how to build plants that are large and efficient enough to keep up with demand. Now Japanese electronics giant Kyocera is starting construction on what it says will be the largest floating solar power plant (in terms of overall capacity) in the world.
It’s the fourth such floating plant Kyocera has worked on so far, but this one promises to be the most impressive yet: the facility is going to be built on the Yamakura Dam reservoir to the south-east of Tokyo in Japan, and will pump out 13.7 megawatts (MW) of power once it’s completed in March 2018. Some 51,000 photovoltaic panels will be stitched together to cover around 180,000 square metres (about 44.5 acres) of space.
That’s roughly the same area as 18 soccer pitches, so you get a sense of the sort of scale we’re talking about here. Kyocera says the new plant will provide enough power for 4,970 average households and offset around 7,411 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year that it’s in operation (equivalent to 19,000 barrels of oil).
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Posted in futurism
Posted in space
Do we owe our existence to Jupiter? That used to be the standard paradigm in planetary theory, but now theorists routinely debate the merits of such a gas giant planet parked out at a 12 year orbit in our own solar system. However, one thing is clear; solar systems like ours with Jupiter analogs are pretty scarce.
Solar systems like ours, in which Jupiter-like planets orbit their parent stars at Jupiter-like distances, remain scarce in the local stellar neighborhood, says an Australian-led team of astronomers.
The team who report their findings in The Astrophysical Journal, analyzed the latest results from an ongoing planet detection survey of more than 200 solar-type stars mostly within some 300 light years of Earth.
They confirms that 17 years of data taken with the 3.9-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia, indicates that only some 6.2 percent of 202 nearby solar type harbor Jupiter analogs. That is, gas giant planets that would circle their stars on Jupiter-like orbits of 3 to 5 astronomical units (AU), or Earth-Sun distances. Our own Jupiter lies at 5.2 AU, which means it orbits our Sun roughly once every 12 years.
War on drugs has a new friend.
The football-sized robots are designed to work in packs, programmed for various tasks from locating wreckage to detecting contraband through a ship’s hull.
My parents love their farm life, etc. However, as they are get older, and they need a way to maintain their land, etc. Maybe robots are the perfect solution. Certainly worth looking into.
Japan plans to open the first farm run completely by robots growing vegetables.
So, space fans, without further ado, here, for the first time in a format easily accessible to the public, are hundreds and hundreds of science-quality images from the Chang’e 3 lander and Yutu rover. I don’t usually host entire data sets (PDS-formatted and all) but I made an exception in this case because the Chinese website is a bit challenging to use.
