Month: June 2021

Great Green Wall

The “Great Green Wall”, has helped raise total forest coverage to nearly 25% of China’s total area, up from less than 10% in 1949. In the remote northwest, though, tree planting is not merely about meeting state reforestation targets or protecting Beijing. When it comes to making a living from the most marginal farmland, every tree, bush and blade of grass counts – especially as climate change drives up temperatures and puts water supplies under further pressure.

2022-02-04: Apparently people are really bad at naming, since there’s another Great Green Wall project in Africa:

In the mid-2000s, African leaders envisioned creating a huge swath of green that could help combat desertification and land degradation. The project, called the Great Green Wall, began in 2007 with the aim of planting a 15 km wide belt of trees and shrubs that would extend from the coast of Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. The World Bank has poured over $1b into this endeavor, and the initiative’s scope has grown to include efforts to fight poverty, reduce inequality and build climate-resilient infrastructure. In ecological terms, the program has been a huge success. As of 2020, nearly 4000 km2 of land has been restored to arability in Niger alone.

2023-05-13: As always, projects in developing countries that are declared “huge successes” are not, on closer look

The pace of financing is too slow to achieve this target. As of 2020, 20% of degraded land (200k km2) had been restored and 350k of the promised 10m jobs had been created. That is mainly, although not solely, because just US$2.5b of a required $30b has been spent since the project began. Donors have committed $15b to a pipeline of 150 projects. It’s not clear how much of this is grants, how much is loans and how much is existing funding relabelled as Great Green Wall money. Moreover, coordination between Great Green Wall countries and donors is weak. Trust between the African Union and international donors is in short supply. Donor nations seem to be picking and choosing which countries to invest in, with a preference for those in relatively stable regions.

Homo Nesher

The bones of an early human, unknown to science, who lived in the Levant at least until 130 ka ago, were discovered in excavations near the city of Ramla. Recognizing similarity to other archaic Homo specimens from 400 ka ago, found in Israel and Eurasia, the researchers reached the conclusion that the Nesher Ramla fossils represent a unique Middle Pleistocene population, now identified for the first time.

Put Silk in it

Researchers kept searching for the path to engineered silk. Yet, year after year, they failed. Each ran into scaling issues, production costs, and regulatory due diligence. After all this time, silk-based tech is weaving its way into health care, the food industry, and clothing.

SilkVoice is a gluey mix of hyaluronic acid and microscopic particles of regenerated silkworm silk meant to treat vocal fold disorders. SilkVoice is authorized for human use. The majority of the 40 people who have received the injections have retained their improvements.

Mori has commercialized silk as a way of protecting food. Unlike wax, Mori’s coating can cling to both water-repellent and porous surfaces, like the outside and inside of a zucchini. Mori already has pilots running at farms and food companies around the US, and larger-scale manufacturing is supposed to start later this year.

Kraig Labs claims to have produced the first “nearly pure” spider silk fabricated by silkworms and has scaled up production. It has partnered with a company in Singapore to make luxury street wear and is working with Polartec on performance outerwear. The company is also considering biomedical uses and bullet-resistant protective apparel.

Purdue University engineers have developed a method to transform existing cloth items into battery-free wearables resistant to laundry. These smart clothes are powered wirelessly through a flexible, silk-based coil sewn on the textile. “By spray-coating smart clothes with highly hydrophobic molecules, we are able to render them repellent to water, oil and mud. These clothes are almost impossible to stain and can be used underwater and washed in conventional washing machines without damaging the electronic components sewn on their surface.”

Cookiecutter Castles

Imagine a rolling landscape of towering, pristine castles almost as far as your eyes can see. It sounds breathtaking — and it is — just probably not in the way you’d think. These Disney-esque villas are in a Turkish housing development called Burj al Babas, and it’s completely abandoned.

Construction remains terrible

The Problem
Construction is error-prone, expensive, and suffers delays. The government thinks construction productivity has slightly decreased since 1960. It just needs some clever engineering and solutions, but which ones? This post will focus on the ubiquitous single-family home.

Why Things Aren’t Getting Better
The combination of consumer tastes, low dollar value per volume building components, and the complexity of buildings inhibit efforts to scale.

nevertheless, there’s a constant stream of “innovation” that will supposedly solve this, but that remains unlikely. For example, this lego-like modular construction

Tunnel Detection

The sensors themselves are a mixture of accelerometers, which pick up vibrations, current detectors, which measure the electrical-resistance of rocks and soil, and subsurface radar. The square kilometer they picked contains more than 100 wells, many underground storage tanks and 10s of kilometers of steel pipeline. Resead made short work of this challenge. It produced an accurate map of the area in just 10 minutes. The system could be useful for detecting tunnels on the Mexican border.

see also the opposite:

The University of Arizona College of Engineering is testing an invisible border monitoring system that could revolutionize the way the US conducts homeland security. The border-monitoring system, known as Helios, consists of laser pulses transmitted through fiber-optic cables buried in the ground that respond to movements on the surface above. A detector at one or both ends of the cable analyzes these responses. Helios is sensitive enough to detect a dog and can discriminate between people, horses and trucks. The system can be set to avoid being triggered by small animals, and can also tell if people are running or walking, or digging, and in which direction. The location of a cut cable, or people, or vehicles, can be pinpointed instantly to within one meter along a section of cable up to 50 kilometers long.

Chased by Snack Robots

because of self-checkout, people are doing fewer impulse buys waiting in line, so shoprite designed a robot to accost you with snacks throughout the store. this is the future we want, apparently. can’t wait to have to dodge tiny aggressive sales-robots AND people that aren’t paying attention when i go shopping

Restoring The Night Watch

The missing edges of Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch have been restored using artificial intelligence. The canvas, created in 1642, was trimmed in 1715 to fit between 2 doors at Amsterdam’s city hall.

Rembrandt actually used 4 different colors to paint a miniscule light effect in the eye of one of the many life-sized protagonists featured in this group portrait, which probably wouldn’t be seen by anybody anyway.