Category Science & Technology

This Japanese firm, Spread, is to open the world’s first automated farm with robots handling almost every step of the process, from watering seedlings to harvesting crops. The only part of the process that would require human inputs is seeding.

The farm, measuring about 4,400 square metres, will have floor-to-ceiling shelves where the produce is grown. The robots will also monitor levels of carbon dioxide in the air and adjust lighting and temperature to optimize growth. The use of LED lighting means energy costs will be slashed by almost a third, and about 98% per cent of the water need to grow the crops will be recycled.

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.

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Last recorded in the wild in 1870, Jerdon’s tree frog was feared extinct. But an expedition led by Indian biologist S. D. Biju found the elusive Frankixaius jerdonii in the East Khasi district of Meghalaya. They observed the frog hiding in hollow bamboo stems and tree holes around 19 feet above ground, where it carries out the remarkable breeding antics. Females attach their eggs to the insides of tree hollows which hold pools of water. When the tadpoles hatch, they fall in the water, where the females feed them unfertilized eggs until they turn into froglets.

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The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a branch of the U.S. Department of Defence, s developing self-destructing electronic components as part of its Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) programme. Its recent ICARUS project is dedicated to the development of air vehicles that disappear upon mission completion. The programme is named for the Icarus of Greek mythology, whose waxy wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.

The VAPR team developed electronic-infused glass strips that can be triggered to shatter into dust and small polymer panels that disappear when they convert from a solid to a gas phase. The team found it was theoretically possible to build larger structures that could be engineered to self-combust.

Self-destructing systems are useful for a range of situations, e.g., destroying sophisticated technologies that are used on battlefields and then left behind. Discarded electronics also pose a threat to the environment as they rust and decompose. The flying vehicles could also be used to deliver food, water and vaccines to people living in remote areas, or to transport supplies to people stranded by natural disasters.

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Creators of Living Ink Technologies have created an eco-friendly “timelapse” ink that magically appears after exposure to sunlight.

The plant pens contain cyanobacteria, algae and chlorophyll in tiny amounts that are invisible to the naked eye at first. But when exposed to sunlight, the organisms reproduce at astonishing rates, bolstering their numbers to the point where they finally appear dense and green, thanks to the chlorophyll that harvests light energy and reflects light.

There are two types of ink: pink or “fast ink” which grows in 1-2 days, and blue or “slow ink” that takes 3-4 days to appear. This allows you to create a two-stage secret reveal over the course of a week which could find use in greeting cards or even a proposal!

The creation is housed inside a compact ‘greenhouse’ (which doubles as a picture frame) filled with a nutrient-dense material called agar that promotes the ink’s growth. When removed from the frame the algae and bacteria will eventually die, but the resulting image stains the paper so that it won’t fade away.

Besides being fun, Living Ink is also nontoxic. “Carbon black is the most common pigment used in black inks. It’s most commonly made from the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products such as tar,” says the company, who sidestepped this by making its product out of the ultimate organic material – living organisms.

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Research has identified the tiny chameleon Rhampholeon spinosus as having the ultimate high-speed tongue. When it flicks its tongue at a fly, it reaches peak acceleration 264 times the force of gravity. In comparison, NASA’s shuttle delivered astronauts into orbit with a peak acceleration of only 3g. The F-16 jet fighter only reaches 7 g in pulling out of a dive. The acceleration of a chameleon’s tongue is the equivalent of getting from 0 to 60 mph in a hundredth of a second. But in the course of sticking out its tongue to 2.5 times its own body length, at a peak acceleration of 486 m/sec2, it generates the highest yet measured acceleration and power output per kilogram of muscle mass of any reptile, bird or mammal: 14,040 watts per kilo, making it second only to the most powerful vertebrate tongue of all, that of the salamander.

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A tiny mollusc in Borneo is the new record holder for the world’s smallest known snail. It is so small that the researchers couldn’t see it in the wild without a microscope! Its shiny, translucent, white shell has an average height of 0.027 inches. The former champion – the Chinese snail Angustopila dominikae – is the world’s second-smallest snail, with an average shell height of 0.033 inches. Dutch and Malaysian researchers have named the snail Acmella nana; its species name (nana) is a reference to the Latin nanus, or “dwarf”.

But the researchers knew exactly where to hunt for unknown mollusks: Snails tend to live on Borneo’s limestone hills, likely because their shells are made of calcium carbonate, the main component of limestone, said study co-researcher Menno Schilthuizen, a professor of evolution at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

“When we go to a limestone hill, we just bring some strong plastic bags, and we collect a lot of soil and litter and dirt from underneath the limestone cliffs,” Schilthuizen told Live Science.

They sieve the contents, and dump the larger objects (including the snail shells) into a bucket of water. “We stir it around a lot so that the sand and clay sinks to the bottom, but the shells- which contain a bubble of air – float,” Schilthuizen said.

Then, they scoop out the floating shells and sort them under a microscope.

“You can sometimes get thousands or tens of thousands of shells from a few liters of soil, including these very tiny ones,” he said.

It’s unclear what Acmella nana eats, because the researchers have never seen it alive in the wild. But the researchers have observed a related snail species from Borneo, Acmella polita, foraging on thin films of bacteria and fungi that grow on wet limestone surfaces in caves.

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