Earth Wise

By Randy SimonScience Education Self-Improvement Natural Sciences Nature

Earth Wise episodes

January 04, 2019 Speed Breeding Of Crops
A technique pioneered by NASA for the purpose of growing plants extra-terrestrially is now being applied here on earth to fast-track improvements in a range of crops. The technique, known as speed breeding, has been adapted for use by British and Australian researchers on a scale ranging from vast greenhouses to desktop growth chambers.
Speed breeding uses enhanced LED lighting and day-long regimes of up to 22 hours to optimize photosynthesis and promote rapid growth of crops. By speeding up the breeding cycle of plants,it is possible, for example, to grow six generations of wheat in a year compared with two generations using traditional breeding methods.
With shortened breeding cycles, genetic improvements such as yield gain, disease resistance and climate resistance can be fast-tracked in crops such as wheat, barley, chickpeas, various Brassica species, oil seed rape and peas.
The ability to do this in compact desktop chambers permits cutting-edge research to be performed inexpensively before being scaled up to large greenhouses.
Crop development is an increasingly important activity and speed breeding is increasingly attractive in light of the opposition in some quarters to modern gene-editing techniques to create GMO crops. Speed breeding allows crop improvements via anon-GMO route.
The new technique is already being applied in Australia, which is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record. It is being used to rapidly cycle genetic improvements to make crops more drought resilient.
Generation time in most plant species is a major bottleneck in applied research programs and breeding. Speed breeding can greatly reduce this bottleneck, allowing scientists to respond more quickly to emerging diseases, the changing climate and increased demand for specific plant traits.
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JIC joins European scientists to safeguard precision breeding
Photo, posted May 8, 2016, courtesy of Yair Aronshtam via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
January 03, 2019 A Water-Based Battery
https://earthwiseradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/EW-01-03-19-A-Water-Based-Battery.mp3
The transition from fossil fuel-based power plants to clean, renewable energy sources is accelerating as both wind and solar power get cheaper and increasingly become cost-competitive with traditional power sources. The biggest stumbling block both energy sources face is that they cannot always supply power on demand but require the sun to shine and the wind to blow.
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2 min
January 02, 2019 The Problem Of Urban Growth
https://earthwiseradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/EW-01-02-19-The-Problem-of-Urban-Growth.mp3
The rapid expansion of cities around the world has accelerated in recent decades. If current trends continue, the equivalent of a city the size of London could be created every seven weeks by the year 2050, according to a study at Texas A&M University.
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2 min
January 01, 2019 Big Success From A Big Battery
In the fall of 2017, Tesla took on the challenge of installing a 100-megawatt battery storage system in South Australia in under 100 days, promising that the system would be free if it was not built in time. The project was actually completed in 54 days.
The system is located at the Hornsdale Wind Farm, which consists of 99 wind turbines with a generation capacity of 315 MW. The Hornsdale Power Reserve installation is the world’s largest lithium-ion battery system and, after a year of operation,has proven to be a smashing success. Estimates are that the project has reduced costs associated with stabilizing the energy grid by about $29 million. The cost of the system was about $87 million, so it is paying for itself quite rapidly. The wind farm and battery systems are owned and operated by a French renewable energy company.
The battery storage system provides a variety of different services to the electric grid. The primary motivation for it was to achieve system security and reduce the risk of blackouts and load shedding. Having the battery system in place protects the regional interconnection from tripping,which reduces the risk of separation of South Australia from the National Electricity market. The system also provides so-called ancillary services such as frequency control and other forms of electricity supply regulation.
The most significant contribution of the Hornsdale Power Reserve is that it has raised the profile of energy storage technology and demonstrated its unique capabilities. Based on the success of the system, there are now about 2,500 MWh of new storage projects announced by the public and private sectors in Australia.
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Tesla’s Battery Has Already Saved South Australia a Huge Amount of Money
Photo courtesy of Hornsdale Power Reserve.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
December 31, 2018 Australian Plastic Bag Ban
Last summer, the two largest supermarket chains in Australia – Coles and Woolworth’s – decided to stop offering single-use disposable plastic bags to customers. The initial public reaction was decidedly negative.   However, within just three months after the radical change, the country’s National Retail Association reported an 80% drop in the consumption of plastic bags nationwide.
In that three-month period, it is estimated that 1.5 billion bags have been prevented from use.   Some retailers are reporting reduction rates as high as 90% in the use of the bags. The move by the big supermarkets has paved the way for smaller businesses to follow suit. The smaller businesses typically can’t afford to risk the wrath of their customers with a major change like this. Customers have to learn to bring their own bags or buy reusable bags at the store.
In much of Australia, the phase-out of plastic bags has been legislated, but the state of New South Wales, home to Sydney, the country’s largest city, has not enacted such legislation. So, supermarkets themselves are doing the work of getting rid of the bags.
The change has not been without hiccups. For the first couple of months after the plastic bag ban was put in place, Woolworth’s saw poor sales in its stores. However, customers eventually got used to the new way of doing things and sales levels returned.
Disposable plastic bags often find their way into the oceans where they break down into microparticles. Studies have shown that these plastic bits are ingested by a wide variety of marine life. For example, a UK study found that 100% of sea turtles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans as well as the Mediterranean Sea had plastic in their digestive systems.
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Australia-wide ban leads to ’80 per cent drop’ in plastic bag consumption
Photo, posted September 18, 2018, courtesy of Matthew Paul Argall via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
December 28, 2018 Electricity From A Bionic Mushroom
https://earthwiseradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/EW-12-28-18-Electricity-from-a-Bionic-Mushroom.mp3
In an engineering feat straight out of a weird science-fiction story, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey have taken an ordinary white button mushroom and used 3D printing technology to coat it with graphene microribbons and cyanobacteria to produce a device that generates electricity.
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2 min
December 27, 2018 Agroforestry
https://earthwiseradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/EW-12-27-18-Agroforestry.mp3
It has become increasingly evident that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is not happening quickly enough to prevent runaway climate change and that negative emission techniques will need to be utilized as well. Negative emissions means removing carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere.
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2 min
December 26, 2018 New Ocean Energy Technologies
https://earthwiseradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/EW-12-26-18-New-Ocean-Energy-Technologies.mp3
The ocean energy sector is still at an early stage of development. Despite the fact that the ocean is permanently in motion, extracting energy from that motion on a major scale continues to be a challenge. But the potential benefits of ocean technologies are compelling enough that many approaches continue to be pursued.
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2 min
December 25, 2018 A Breakthrough In Animal Identification
Researchers from the University of Wyoming have developed a computer model that can identify wild animals in camera-trap photographs with remarkable accuracy and efficiency.
This breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI), detailed in a paper recently published in the scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, represents a significant advancement in the study and conservation of wildlife. According to the paper’s authors, “the ability to rapidly identify millions of images from camera traps can fundamentally change the way ecologists design and implement wildlife studies.”
This study builds on previous research from the university in which a computer model analyzed 3.2 million images captured by camera traps in Africa. The A-I technique called deep learning categorized animal images at a 96.6% accuracy rate. This was the same accuracy rate as teams of human volunteers achieved, but the computer model worked at a much more rapid pace.
In the latest study, UW researchers trained a deep neural network on a powerful computer cluster to classify wildlife species using 3.37 million camera-trap images of 27 different animal species. The model was tested on nearly 375,000 images at a rate of about 2,000 images per minute. It achieved a 97.6% accuracy rate, which is likely the highest accuracy to date in using machine learning for wildlife image classification.
Artificial intelligence has been used in environmental science in other ways as well. For example, AI has been used to increase agricultural yields in farm fields and to help predict extreme weather.
Maybe artificial intelligence can prove to be a game changer for the environment.

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Web Links
Researchers Successfully Train Computers to Identify Animals in Photos
Photo, posted January 8, 2012, courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
December 24, 2018 Falling Behind On Climate Goals
https://earthwiseradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/EW-12-24-18-Falling-Behind-on-Climate-Goals.mp3
A series of reports from both the US Government and from the United Nations has underlined the dangers presented by the increasing effects of climate change. To date, national commitments to reduce emissions have come up short.
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2 min

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From green business and new environmental legislation to how nature impacts our environment in ways never before considered, Earth Wise offers a look at our changing environment.