Agri-Cube grows mass quantities of vegetables in a one-car parking spot. Daiwa House, Japan's largest homebuilder, has introduced a line of prefabricated hydroponic vegetable factories, aimed at housing complexes, hotels, and top-end restaurants.
Called the Agri-Cube, these units are touted by Daiwa as the first step in the industrialization of agriculture, to be located in and amongst the places where people live, work, and play. View all More and more people desire sustainable, organic produce for their own use, and are turning to urban farming in an effort to insure the highest degree of freshness. However, some municipalities, neighborhoods, and homeowners associations have rules that effectively block such endeavors in areas under their sway. Add drought and pest control to the picture, and suddenly urban farming may seem more trouble than it is worth. External view of the 11.7 square meter Agri-Cube E garden factory This is where the Agri-Cube comes in. Community member tending the Agri-Cube's crops. Mysterious Fairy Circles Are 'Alive'
Walter Tschinkel may not have solved the mystery of the fairy circles, but he can tell you that they're alive.
Tens of thousands of the formations—bare patches of soil, 2 to 12 meters in diameter—freckle grasslands from southern Angola to northern South Africa, their perimeters often marked by a tall fringe of grass. Locals say they're the footprints of the gods. Scientists have thrown their hands up in the air. But now Tschinkel, a biologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has discovered something no one else has. Tschinkel first encountered fairy circles in 2005 on a vacation to the NamibRand Nature Reserve, a private nature park dedicated to conserving the local ecology and wildlife in southwestern Namibia, where his local guide introduced him to the strange land forms. So Tschinkel turned to satellite images. To confirm his results, Tschinkel crunched data collected from the NamibRand Nature Reserve.
Fairy circle aficionados are impressed. Back to Eden. Open Tree of Life Project Draws In Every Twig and Leaf. Two decades later Darwin presented a detailed account of the tree of life in “On the Origin of Species.”
And much of evolutionary biology since then has been dedicated to illuminating parts of the tree. Using DNA, fossils and other clues, scientists have been able to work out the relationships of many groups of organisms, making rough sketches of the entire tree of life. “Animals and fungi are in one part of the tree, and plants are far away in another part,” said Laura A. Katz, an evolutionary biologist at Smith College. Now Dr. “I think it is an amazing step forward for our community if it can be pulled off,” said Robert P. Until recently, a complete tree of life would have been inconceivable. Scientists have overcome this problem by developing computer programs that find the most likely relationship among species without having to consider every possible arrangement.
Yet these studies have thrown spotlights on only small portions of the tree of life. Last year, Dr. Stephen A. Lasers used to zap weeds into submission. Weeds are pesky things.
They grow everywhere and, by definition, where they’re not wanted. Whether a large-scale farmer or a weekend gardener, everyone who has tried to raise crops has wished that there was a ray gun that could just blast the wretched things out of existence. Now, thanks in part to researchers from the Laser Zentrum Hannover (LZH) at the Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany, that frustrated daydream is closer to reality. Through the use of low-powered infrared lasers, the team has found a way to inhibit weed growth without harming neighboring plants, providing an alternative to expensive, hazardous and environmentally-damaging chemicals. laser weed killer Where there are crops, there are weeds. The LZH method is to stunt or kill the weeds in place using a laser. LZH took a different approach. According to LZH, the team succeeded in locating the weeds’ growth centers and inhibiting them as well as adapting the method to different plants and plant heights.