Farming goes Sci-Fi

"The perfect crop field could be inside a windowless building with meticulously controlled light, temperature, humidity, air quality and nutrition. It could be in a New York high-rise, a Siberian bunker, or a sprawling complex in the Saudi desert."

Researchers in the Netherlands are working on perfecting completely artificial growing techniques in buildings that have essentially no contact with natural environments. They use LED lighting with specific UV frequencies and timed to optimal growth periods tailored to individual plant types to boost growth. These buildings take the greenhouse concept (where food is grown in environments that it normally would not, with the help of protection from a building) to whole new heights where sunlight (and the energy that plants waste to combat the destructive, non productive wavelengths there of) is out. 

It's sci-fi farming for the moon folks!

Yet the researchers say yields are up, resource usage and water waste is down, locations are flexible, and that this is the future of food - grown locally in high-rises and warehouses, year round, with near infinite options. Read the entire article here on NPR, and then decide for yourself: is going organic in probably the most unnatural way you can think of good for food, for us, and for the planet?

A new form of public transportation

Now THIS is pretty incredible. I always say that technology alone is not going to solve our environmental issues (wholesale behavior change is really what's going to do it!) but when things like this are invented, it sure does make me reconsider!

Shenzhen Huashi Future Parking Equipment

Check out this humdinger of a public transportation system. It "hovers" over traffic, allowing municipalities to essentially, have their cake and eat it too. You replace buses, you get roads, and you save space. I haven't thought enough about it to really poke holes in the logic - for now, I'm just pretty excited to see this outside of the box thinking actually being produced. That's right, they're going into production already. Read more about it here in the New York Times.

Move over CFLs?

Elisabeth Rosenthal and Felicity Barringer write about the coming of LED lighting in the New York Times. I first heard about commercial applications of LED lighting when doing research for my thesis project on green hotels - some of the hotels I talked to were experimenting with LED lighting. While I've know about LED flashlights and camp lights for a long time, their super bright white light seemed ill-suited to room lighting to me. So it's interesting to know that people are really pushing this technology now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/science/earth/30degrees.html?em

Of course, for good reason though. LED lights are much more energy efficient and material efficient than CFL lights - our current standard for greenness. (Scary fact though - normal CFLs are only about 20% efficient.. meaning, only 1W out of 5W that goes to powering your bulb is actually turned into light. The other 4W become waste heat. This of course is also the reason that CFLs are considered green - relative to traditional incandescents, they're amazing since traditional bulbs typically convert no more than THREE percent to light.)

This will be a trend that will be very interesting to follow as time goes on. Especially, as pointed out in the article) money comes on-line from the government to support new technologies like LEDs. Anyone out there come into contact with LED lightbulbs on a regular basis in a commercial setting?