Group items tagged

To follow up our discussio at breakfast

For all your statistics needs. The "Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans Report - UNEP" www.unep.org/regionalseas/marinelitter/.../docs/plastic_ocean_report.pdf‎ "Densities of plastic debris (Moore et al. 2001). Using nets to collect debris, the abundance of floating plastic averaged 334,271 pieces/km2" More worrying maybe is (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22610295) "Our oceans eventually serve as a sink for these small plastic particles ("UV degraded surface plastic") and in one estimate, it is thought that 200,000 microplastics per km(2) of the ocean's surface commonly exist."

Plastic needs a timescale of millenia to dissolve in the ocean and in the meantime it is accumulated in the water due to systematic dumping of garbage in the ocean since decades. Deploying buoyant devices at the location of the gyres (permanent circular currents in the ocean) is proposed for collecting the thin particles. The ambitious concept was developped by a Delft student, presented at a TEDx (see link), made a feasibility study through crowdfunding and now announces a public contest for developing mechanical parts of the harvesting system.

Vortices in the South Atlantic are mathematically equivalent to black holes, say physicists, an idea that could lead to new ways of understanding how currents transport oil and garbage across oceans Black holes are regions of spacetime in which gravity is strong enough to prevent anything escaping, even light.

that Prof. Klinkrad that gave the space debris lecture here was there as far as I know (at the conference/meeting mentioned)

is this really worth a nature paper??

Funny to read this question exactly from you, the all and ever fan of anything linked to bio :-) I have read worse papers in nature and in addition it's just "Nature physics", viz. "Nature garbage." Could be that they don't find enough really good stuff to publish in all their topical clones of Nature.

francesco already posted this below

"Currently a single containerized unit can crank out several hundred heads of lettuce per day."

right ....... ok .......... so whats your point?

Point?? As a professional bullshitter I don't have a point. Just grouch, never critizise (freely translated from the Austrian principle "Nur raunzen, nie kritisieren!") :-) If I have sort of a point: I'd rather not try the vegetable they produce in this "vertical farming", Dutch experience was by far enough.

Some juicy sound bites from the former Google CIO.