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Just look at that photo. It was 1935 and a leviathan of dust advanced on a parched and decimated land. Families fled. Farms fell into ruin. The Dust Bowl terrorized the prairie lands of North America and threatened to turn the entire region into desert.
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Julie an I travel back to the ruined farms and black blizzards of the Great Depression. What agricultural practices led to this near-apocalypse and how did we plant trees to combat the ecological damage?
I don’t really have much to add to the post that was published on the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog, but the study they wrote about bears more than just simply passing along the link, I think. The post, “How walking through a doorway increases forgetting,” concerns a study out of Notre Dame that sought to get to the bottom of how the mind carves experience up into episodic memory.
Not everyone relishes a freshly-microwaved plate of leftovers — but, if you had to guess, how much food would you say is lost or wasted across the world, each year? Hundreds of millions of tons, surely. Maybe billions? The actual number is 1.3 billion tons. According to a recent report from the UN’s Food and [...]
Leaf-cutter Ants and the Future of Space Agriculture
by Robert Lamb | March 21, 2011
An ancient race has come to dominate a single agricultural crop, one in which they’ve invested everything to sustain their massive population. They’re one vicious blight away from starvation, but at this point there’s no returning to the source. Their precious crop is a million years extinct in the natural world and there’s no going home. It sounds like an ideal plight for a futuristic generation ship, adrift among the stars with a belly full of space crops, but this is of course the story of the leaf-cutter ant.
The following video shows a tractor at a “tractor pull” event. It is running a large inline-6 diesel engine with a large supercharger and burning methanol. Unfortunately, it has run afoul of the laws of physics for some reason and pays the price: The driver is very lucky that the block flew forwards rather than [...]
You Asked:
Will there be enough food to feed people in 2050? — Garry, Bristol, United Kingdom
Marshall Brain Answers:
Are there plants on board the International Space Station?
by Marshall Brain | January 21, 2011
You Asked: Are there plants on board the International Space Station? — Mark, Corona, Calif. Marshall Brain Answers: There are some plants on the ISS, as part of different experiment packages. Here is a description of the APEX-Cambium experiment, which grew tree seedlings on the space station: Why aren’t there more plants on the ISS, [...]
The big trend in fish farming today is doing it indoors. Indoor fish farming saves water, eliminates weather concerns and leads to a very pure and reliable product. Here is an example of how advanced indoor fish farming has become: See also: Virginia Farm Bureau – Indoor Aquaculture Farm The big trend in produce farming [...]
Proving that, eventually, every task will be roboticized, there is this video. It shows a robot that automatically milks cows: But if you really want your mind blown, there is this – 80 cows at once: I am not a dairy farmer, but I have spent a fair amount of time on dairy farms. If [...]
In this video, Dr. Michio Kaku explains what would happen to civilization and our world after a nuclear war: Backup: The science of Fallout The movie “The Day After” tried to paint a scientifically accurate picture of a large-scale nuclear attack on the United States. Here is what the actual attack might look like: The [...]
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