When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding.
Thich Nhat Hahn (via perdure)
Frans van Houten, huffingtonpost.com
What if just 20 buildings dedicated to urban farming could provide the entire city of New York with fruits and vegetables year round? It sounds like a fantasy of the future dreamed up on a Hollywood film set. But with breakthrough…
where technology and human needs intersect — we will find meaningful innovation.
(Source: futuramb)
The U.S. needs a critical mass of gigabit communities nationwide so that innovators can develop next-generation applications and services that will drive economic growth and global competitiveness.
3D Print a Fossil With Virtual Palaeontology
Image: The combination of CT scanning and 3D printing is taking the discovery and recreation of ancient fossils into the 21st century Credit: Dave Stock
Sergio Azevedo was prospecting at an old railroad site in São Paulo state, Brazil, when he discovered the fossilised bones of an unknown animal. “Many times when you find a fossil in the field it’s impossible to determine how much of the ancient animal you have,” he says. “Sometimes you have just part of a bone or a tooth.” Azevedo has a solution to this perennial problem, which also acts as a safety net in case a stray hammer blow destroys an ancient fossil during excavation. Just scan it and print it.
His team at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio used a portable CT scanner to determine the orientation of the specimen in the ground, then they cut out a large section of rock to take back to the lab. There the encased fossil was probed using a more powerful scanner - and a 3D replica printed out in resin.
“This gives us safe access to the inner structures usually not accessible to conventional palaeontology,” Azevedo says. Their efforts were rewarded - the animal turned out to be a new species, a 75-million-year-old extinct crocodile. As well as ancient crocs, Azevedo has also produced 3D-printed replicas of dinosaurs.
“3D printing will be a step change in the science of palaeontology once the costs come down,” says Louise Leakey, who runs a virtual fossil museum, AfricanFossils.org, in conjunction with the Turkana Basin Institute and the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi.
The method relies on an updated version of a technique called photogrammetry, which calculates the geometry of an object from photographs. To capture a 2-million-year-old Homo habilis skull, for instance, some 160 photographs of the specimen are taken from all angles. Photogrammetry software converts the images into a 3D mesh model, which can then be printed. With a CT scanner, which uses X-rays, you don’t even need to see the object with your own eyes. Fossils can be scanned while still encased in rock. The image is subjected to “virtual preparation” - software processing that digitally removes the surrounding rock.
“You can now use laser scanners to capture surface detail of delicate fossils in the field in 3D before they are excavated to provide an in situ record of a fossil or a site before it is disturbed,” says Leakey. She is the daughter of the palaeontologist Richard Leakey, and granddaughter of Mary and Louis Leakey, famous for their discoveries of ancient hominids in Olduvai Gorge in northern Kenya. Scanning and excavation on a fossil of a snake skeleton in the ground at Lake Turkana will start in June.
3D printing will be a boon for classrooms too, as accurate digital replicas can be made of the rare and inaccessible specimens that make up the fossil collections in museums, without the expense of traditional casting techniques.
20 Game-Changing Technology Trends That Will Create Both Disruption and Opportunity on a Global Level
Over the next five short years the following game-changing technologies will transform how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, educate, train, innovate, and much more.
Full Story: Big Think
By Dylan Matthews, washingtonpost.com
Many of the world’s most important food-producing regions depend on freshwater from massive underground aquifers that have built up over thousands of years. The Ogallala Aquifer in the midwestern United States. The Upper Ganges,…
(Source: futuramb)
Check out our interview with Josh Hoekstra, a 39-year-old U.S. history teacher from Rosemont High School in Minneapolis, who is revitalizing history education with his Teach with Tournaments method.
Interesting concept! Check out a great article on this idea here!
IV League
An interscholastic league for athletic competition was formed about a century ago, comprising four schools: Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton. This league was known officially as the Four League but, in the academic tradition of the day, the Roman numeral IV was used. This, then, was the origin of the IV league. When referred to vocally, it became the Ivy League.
Walter L. Minto. Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins by William and Mary Morris, 1977.
