Friday, December 11. 2009
FEATURE, FIBER — BY Blaine Brownell on December 11, 2009 AT 9:00 AM
Mycobond is a mycological bio-composite that can be used in a wide variety of applications. Instead of conventional manufacturing processes, Mycobond uses mycelium—which is essentially the root system of a mushroom—to transform loose aggregates into strong composites. This process can be varied by using different species of fungus and mixtures of aggregates in order to make a composite with an optimal density, strength, appearance, and performance for the specific application.
Additionally, Mycobond represents a low-embodied-energy manufacturing process as the material self assembles at room temperature and pressure in the dark. Furthermore, Mycobond upcycles resources like rice hulls, cotton burrs, and buckwheat hulls that are otherwise thrown away, transforming them into valuable products, including rigid board insulation and protective packaging buffers.
Click here for more information.
This product appears in Transmaterial 3.
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Via Transmaterial
Personal comment:
And can you also eat it after, if the material finally doesn't suits you? ...
Today, at the International Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, we demonstrated a new technology prototype that enables online, global-scale observation and measurement of changes in the earth's forests. We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests. Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide. According to the Stern Review, protecting the world's standing forests is a highly cost-effective way to cut carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to rainforest nations to protect their forests, in an effort to make forests worth "more alive than dead." Implementing a global REDD system will require that each nation have the ability to accurately monitor and report the state of their forests over time, in a manner that is independently verifiable. However, many of these tropical nations of the world lack the technological resources to do this, so we're working with scientists, governments and non-profits to change this. Here's what we've done with this prototype to help nations monitor their forests:
Start with satellite imagery
Satellite imagery data can provide the foundation for measurement and monitoring of the world's forests. For example, in Google Earth today, you can fly to Rondonia, Brazil and easily observe the advancement of deforestation over time, from 1975 to 2001:
(Landsat images courtesy USGS)
This type of imagery data — past, present and future — is available all over the globe. Even so, while today you can view deforestation in Google Earth, until now there hasn't been a way to measure it.
Then add science
With this technology, it's now possible for scientists to analyze raw satellite imagery data and extract meaningful information about the world's forests, such as locations and measurements of deforestation or even regeneration of a forest. In developing this prototype, we've collaborated with Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza of Imazon. Greg and Carlos are both at the cutting edge of forest science and have developed software that creates forest cover and deforestation maps from satellite imagery. Organizations across Latin America use Greg's program, Carnegie Landsat Analysis System ( CLASlite), and Carlos' program, Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation ( SAD), to analyze forest cover change. However, widespread use of this analysis has been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing.
Handle computation in the cloud
What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the “Google cloud”? And what if we could gather together all of the earth’s raw satellite imagery data — petabytes of historical, present and future data — and make it easily available on this platform? We decided to find out, by working with Greg and Carlos to re-implement their software online, on top of a prototype platform we've built that gives them easy access to terabytes of satellite imagery and thousands of computers in our data centers.
Here are the results of running CLASlite on the satellite imagery sequence shown above:
CLASlite online: This shows deforestation and degradation in Rondonia, Brazil
from 1986-2008, with the red indicating recent activity
Here's the result of running SAD in a region of recent deforestation pressure in Mato Grosso, Brazil:
SAD online: The red "hotspots" indicate deforestation
that has happened within the last 30 days
Combining science with massive data and technology resources in this way offers the following advantages:
- Unprecedented speed: On a top-of-the-line desktop computer, it can take days or weeks to analyze deforestation over the Amazon. Using our cloud-based computing power, we can reduce that time to seconds. Being able to detect illegal logging activities faster can help support local law enforcement and prevent further deforestation from happening.
- Ease of use and lower costs: An online platform that offers easy access to data, scientific algorithms and computation horsepower from any web browser can dramatically lower the cost and complexity for tropical nations to monitor their forests.
- Security, privacy and transparency: Governments and researchers don't want to share sensitive data and results before they are ready. Our cloud-based platform allows users to control access to their data and results. At the same time, because the data, analysis and results reside online, they can also be easily shared, made available for collaboration, presented to the public and independently verified — when appropriate.
- Climate change impact: We think that a suitably scaled-up and enhanced version of this platform could be a promising as a tool for forest monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) in support of efforts such as REDD.
As a Google.org product, this technology will be provided to the world as a not-for-profit service. This technology prototype is currently available to a small set of partners for testing purposes — it's not yet available to the general public but we expect to make it more broadly available over the next year. We are grateful to a host of individuals and organizations ( find full list here) who have advised us on developing this technology. In particular, we would like to thank the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for their close partnership since the initial inception of this project. We're also working with the Group on Earth Observations ( GEO), a consortium of national government bodies, inter-governmental organizations, space agencies and research institutions through GEO's Forest Carbon Tracking (FCT) task force. Last month together we launched the GEO FCT portal and are now exploring how we can also together bring the power of this new technology to tropical nations.
We're excited to be able to share this early prototype and look forward to seeing what's possible.
Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google.org and Dr. Amy Luers, Environment Manager, Google.org
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Via The Official Google Blog
Personal comment:
Sustainability, de- or re-forestation quatification, satellite imagery, cloud computing and Google!
Thursday, December 10. 2009
It is a well known secret that plastic hardly breaks down and almost all of the plastic ever made still floats around somewhere. With the great pacific garbage patch now twice the size of Texas and over 500 billion plastic bags produced a year – which take about a 1000 years to decompose – plastic is well on its way of becoming a basic material in the Earths ecosystem.
Earlier, we’ve discussed some of the dramatic effects of this nextnature material and suggested how a future-evolving microbe able to digest plastic, could thrive on the vast amount of plastic ‘food’ available in the biosphere. It might take a million years, however, for such a plastic eating microbe to evolve.
(more…)
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Via NextNature
They say the soul weighs 21 grams, and now we have a measurement of the American mind on any given day: 34 gigabytes. According to a University of California, San Diego, study highlighted by The New York Times, the average American consumes 34 GB worth of content a day, including a whopping 100,000 words of information.
The report clarifies that we don’t necessarily parse a full 100,000 words per day, but that that rather astounding figure does cross our eyes and ears each 24-hour interval via multiple channels: the Web, TV, text messaging, radio, video games and more.
The study goes on to break down which of those media tend to occupy most of our time. The big winner is still television at almost 45 percent of our daily allowance, but the computer is a not-too-distant second at about 27 percent. In all, we spend about 11.8 hours per day absorbing mass quantities of information, sometimes multitasking in front of multiple screens simultaneously.
Video games saw the biggest leap in recent years; we now spend 2.5 percent of the day on computers, consoles, and on an increasingly popular selection of social networking games like FarmVille and Pet Society. And although pundits and sociologists have been quick to decry the decline of print as a corresponding decline in literacy, the increase in time spent on the Web actually means people are “reading more than ever,” according to co-author of the study Roger Bohn.
Do the results of the study seem realistic to you? Would you classify yourself as above or below the American average in your data consumption diet?
[via Lifehacker]
[img credit: iStockphoto, enot-poloskun]
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Via Mashable
David McCandles is a London-based author, writer and designer who’s website is called Information Is Beautiful. I’ve never heard of an ‘independent visual and data journalist, but I have now, and think I like them. Tons of great information graphics and a weighty client-base to boot.
“My pet-hate is pie charts. Love pie. Hate pie-charts.”
www.informationisbeautiful.net
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Via It's Nice That
Personal comment:
Just a resource and a blog about well designed information design... project.
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