Scientists Wrapped a Phone in Fake Human Skin. Flesh App We’re pretty used to swiping, tapping, and typing on touch screens and touchpads — but what if we swapped them out something more biological? A team of researchers from France and the United Kingdom have developed a human-inspired artificial skin called “Project Skin-On” that claims to be able to “augment” interactive devices, including smartphones and wearables. They’ve wrapped the epidermis, which you can pinch and prod, around a smartphone, a laptop touchpad, and a smartwatch. Feels Real The skin not only looks and feels real, but it can detect a variety of gestures allowing electronic devices to “feel” the user’s touch, distinguishing a tickle from a pet and so on.
“The idea is perhaps a bit surprising, but skin is an interface we are highly familiar with so why not use it and its richness with the devices we use every day?” Human Touch Furthermore, the skin could be used to convey the emotional resonance of the human touch without the limits of a keyboard and mouse. 'Superweeds' choke farms. 1 of 8 Autoplay Show Thumbnails Show Captions Arkansas farmer Tommy Young says Southern growers have lived through nearly a decade of torment, fighting a destructive, fast-growing weed that can carry a million seeds, grow as tall as an NBA player and is unfazed by several herbicides. Now that weed — Palmer amaranth — is in five Iowa counties on the state's border, and agronomists are working to determine whether it is herbicide resistant. It has the power to choke the state's economy and environment — and increase prices for consumers. RELATED: Sides differ on solutions to resistant weeds Here's how: Even a moderate infestation of Palmer amaranth can rob farmers of about two-thirds of their corn and soybean yields, experts say.
That would be about $11 billion gone from last year's total $16 billion corn and soybean receipts. The growth of herbicide resistance means farmers will use more — and potentially more toxic — chemicals to battle the aggressive weed. DATA: Herbicide use over the years. Miracle grow: Indian farmers smash crop yield records without GMOs. What if the agricultural revolution has already happened and we didn’t realize it? Essentially, that’s the idea in this report from the Guardian about a group of poverty-stricken Indian rice and potato farmers who harvested confirmed world-record yields of rice and potatoes. Best of all: They did it completely sans-GMOs or even chemicals of any kind. [Sumant] Kumar, a shy young farmer in Nalanda district of India’s poorest state Bihar, had — using only farmyard manure and without any herbicides — grown an astonishing 22.4 tonnes of rice on one hectare [~2.5 acres] of land. Another Bihar farmer broke India’s wheat-growing record the same year.
They accomplished all this without GMOs or advanced seed hybrids, artificial fertilizer or herbicide. Instead, they used a technique called System of Rice [or root] Intensification (SRI). SRI for rice involves starting with fewer, more widely spaced plants; using less water; actively aerating the soil; and applying lots of organic fertilizer. Conifer genome constant for 100 million years. Vertical Farming: Coming to a City Near You? | Endless Innovation. Finally, we now have a viable proof-of-concept for the vertical farm idea that has excited environmentalists for more than a decade. Last week, Singapore opened the world's first-ever commercial-scale vertical farm, capable of producing 500 kilograms of vegetables every day. That farm, if it proves to be successful, could give much-needed momentum to similar types of vertical farm projects designed for densely-populated urban centers around the world - even in places in like New York City that we don't typically associate with food shortages.
Back in 1999, Columbia University’s Dickson Despommier proposed the idea of the “vertical farm” as an environmentally-friendly, economically-viable way for densely populated areas to feed themselves. Not only would the fruits and vegetables be healthier and fresher, but also these vertical farms would have a much smaller carbon footprint than the current system of importing vegetables into urban centers. Image: Sky Greens Farms. Those Pungent Smells Oozing Out of Marijuana Buds Are Actually Giving You Clues About What Their Effects Will Be Like. Scientists are now formally acknowledging something that Cannabis consumers have long taken for granted: aroma is associated with effect. Shop ▾ Plant cannabinoids —21-carbon molecules found only in Cannabis— are odorless.
It’s the terpenoids —components of the plant’s “essential oils”— that create the fragrance. Terpenoids contain repeating units of a 5-carbon molecule called isoprene and are prevalent in smelly herbs such as mints and sage, citrus peel, some flowers, aromatic barks and woods. The aroma of a given plant depends on which terpenoids predominate. Evidence that “phytocannabinoid-terpenoid interactions” enhance the therapeutic effects of cannabis was presented by Ethan Russo, MD, at a conference in Israel in 2010 and published in the August 2011 British Journal of Pharmacology. Both terpenoids and cannabinoids are secreted inside the Cannabis plant’s glandular trichomes, and they have a parent compound in common (geranyl pyrophosphate).
The “Entourage Effect” 1. 2. 3. The oldest spruce in Northern Europe is 532 years old. It looks ordinary but this tree is the oldest of its kind in Northern Europe. It’s been right here for over 500 years. (Photo: Jørund Rolstad) The old Norway spruce was discovered in a nature reserve in Buskerud County − and is estimated to be 532 years old. So it started as a seedling in 1480 in the late Middle Ages. That was the same year the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was born and three years before Martin Luther saw the light of day. The tree is described in a new article published in Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research, written by Norwegian and Italian researchers. Any Norway spruce that lives this long has had quite a fortuitous life. Somehow it avoided the latter although the woods in this region have indeed been logged for centuries. After hunting for years in the relatively few areas with patches of old-growth forest, the researchers reckoned that this exact tree is the oldest in Northern Europe.
Slow growers The 532-year-old Norway spruce is only 14.5 metres tall. Scientists invent transparent soil to reveal the secret life of plants. Lettuce grown in transparent soil developed by researchers at the James Hutton Institute and the University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland Most people’s image of plants is actually upside down. For most of our photosynthetic friends, the majority of the plant is underground in the form of an intricate system of roots. The bit that sticks up is almost an afterthought. That’s a problem for scientists trying to study plants because growing them in media that allow you to see the roots, such as hydroponics, doesn't mimic real soil very well.
Now, a team of researchers at the James Hutton Institute and the University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland has developed an artificial transparent soil that allows scientists to make detailed studies of root structures and subterranean soil ecology on a microscopic level. It’s made from granules of Nafion, which is a lot easier than calling it a sulfonated tetrafluoroethylene based fluoropolymer-copolymer. Source: James Hutton Institute About the Author. Warmer climate prolongs mushroom season.
Scientists attribute longer mushroom seasons to climate change. (Photo: Strobilomyces/Wikimedia Commons) Researchers from the University of Oslo (UiO) and the Norwegian Forest and Landscape Institute have studied how the mushroom season has varied in the past four decades. Together with European colleagues, they have analysed data from Norway, Great Britain, Austria and Switzerland from 1970 to 2007 and found a clear tendency: the mushroom season starts later and lasts longer. Extensive survey The researchers have studied the most common cap mushrooms in each country, a total of nearly 750,000 individual fungi.
Their results have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “In all four of the countries we studied, the autumn mushroom season has been prolonged. Ways in which the mushroom season have been altered vary from country to country and among different mushroom groups. Effects of climate changes Good news and bad news.