Archive for February, 2008
The “Doomsday Seed Vault” opens
The Norwegian government announced the opening of the “Svalbard International Seed Vault”, carved deep into frozen rock on an island not far from the North Pole.
The entrance to the “fail-safe” seed vault will “gleam like a gem in the midnight sun,” signaling a priceless treasure within: seed samples of nearly every food crop of every country. The vault is designed to protect the agricultural heritage of humankind — the seeds essential to agriculture of every nation.
The purpose of the “Agricultural Noah’s Ark” is to conserve the seeds that will allow agriculture to adapt to challenges such as climate change and crop disease. The Arctic seed vault is part of a comprehensive global strategy being implemented by the Global Crop Diversity Trust to protect collections of crop genetic diversity around the world.
Construction is began in March 2007 and to was completed in September 2007.
The site was chosen, in part, because the ground is perpetually frozen, providing natural back-up refrigeration that would preserve the seeds should electricity fail. Yet, even here, project architects had to consider how to offset the potential impacts of climate changes.
The design will accommodate even worst-case scenarios of global warming in two main ways. For one, the vault will be located high above any possible rise in sea level caused by global warming: the vault will be located some 130 metres above current sea level, ensuring that it will not be flooded. This puts it well above a seven metre rise that would accompany the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, or even a 61 metre rise that could accompany an unlikely total meltdown of Antarctica.
Secondly, scientists determined the impact of rising air temperatures on the permafrost, which is normally between -4°C and -6°C (24.8°F and 21.2°F). They found that the permafrost would warm much more slowly than the air. In addition, the deeper into the mountain, the colder it will remain. Therefore, the vault will be located an extraordinary 120 metres into the rock, ensuring that rising external air temperatures will have no influence on the surrounding permafrost.
“Even climate change over the next 200 years will not significantly affect the permafrost temperature,” says project manager Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, with Statsbygg, the Norwegian government’s Directorate of Public Construction and Property.
To accomplish this, the 120-metre entry tunnel will penetrate through the permafrost, opening to two large chambers capable of holding three million seed samples. The tunnel and vaults will be excavated by means of well-known boring and blasting techniques, with the rock walls sprayed with concrete.
In contrast to this utilitarian interior, “the exterior structure shoots out of the mountainside,” Tveiten said. The entrance portal will be a narrow triangular structure of cement and metal, illuminated with artwork which changes according to the special lighting conditions of the Arctic. In the summer months, the entrance “will gleam like a gem in the midnight sun,” Tveiten says. Throughout the dark winter, when the sun never rises, it will glow with gently changing lights.
Security measures include several sets of reinforced doors between the entrance and the chambers, the absence of windows, and a video monitoring system.
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
More info
Video
Footage from the inside of the vault:
More images on the construction work:
Optimus Maximus – It’s a keyboard, not a Roman empror…
After literally years of waiting, the Optimus Maximus keyboard is finally available. Withit’s 101 programmable OLED keys, this must be the fanciest keyboard EVER.
Check out the video on YouTube:
Toys for big boys
HARV gives soldiers a robot’s-eye view
While battlefield robots are certainly plenty capable with their current control systems, the folks at Chatten Associates seem to think they can do things one better, and they’re now touting their so-called HARV (Head-Aimed Remote Viewer) system as a potential alternative. That consists of a gimbal-mounted video system on the robot itself, which gets paired with some gyro-equipped goggles that let the robot to look around wherever the soldier moves his head. Of course, they didn’t stop things there, with the setup also offering a 36x optical zoom, night vision, and other advantages that Chatten says can improve mission performance by 300% to 400%. As if that wasn’t enough, the firm’s also now apparently hard at work on an updated system set for delivery to the military next year that’ll add a thermal imager, a higher resolution, and a laser rangefinder, among other things they’re probably not willing to tell us. Head on over after the break for a video of the system in action.
AIR is in the spring…
Adobe officially released the long-awaited AIR 1.0 and Flex 3.
Check out their Rich Internet Application’s webpage and make sure to take a look at the fancy example applications. The eBay one is especially interesting.
To Doodle or not to Doodle…
Does this sound familiar to you ? You need to schedule a meeting with a few people, and off course you’re the only one using Google Calendar. Fifteen emails later you still haven’t figured out who can join when…
Doodle comes to the rescue! Doodle isn’t a new service but it’s handy, and… very easy to use.
You set up a “poll” with the available times, send the poll link to folks via email, and wait for Doodle to let you know that everyone has filled in their times. Voila! No registration, No passwords.
Forget RoboSapien, trash Pleo the dino-robot… behold Elmo !
Right… First of all: I never, ever imagined that I would be bringing news of a singing and dancing Fisher-Price *Doll*… But hey, I’ve got a 11-year old daughter who’d love to get one AND… there’s plenty of nifty technology under the hum… “skin” (?) of robo-Elmo. Right? Anyway, read on.
Check out the special websiteFisher-Price created for this new Elmo robot: http://www.tmxspecialedition.com
Hold on… did you see THIS ONE ? A *skating* robot ?
Firefox 3 RC 2 released and available for download
Warning: It’s not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download this milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.
Firefox 3 RC is available for download ! There are going to be more releases, check the Firefox 3 Planning Center if you want to know more.
While most reviews focused on the nifty new look and feel, I believe this is not the most important change in Firefox 3 beta 3. After all, it’s a *browser*, not a painting 
…
Flying without THC
It may not be the flying car we’ve been waiting for since the mid 1950s, but the UK based company Hoverit has come up with what may prove to be the next best thing: a “Honey, I can fly” maglev lounge chair.
“The Hoverit Lounger is British designed and built. It is precision engineered from clear acrylic and hovers through the use of powerful magnets, floating up and down on two guide bars to give the feeling of lying in mid-air.”
Hoverit will officially levitate the chair at the Ideal Home’s Centenary Show in March, and reckons it’s expecting “significant interest” in the product.
Prices for the Hoverit are currently on application, but we can reveal that the floating on air experience will set you back about 9.000 EUR (nope, not a typo) – a lot more than an Ikea chair…
Oh, for those who never heard of THC: Check out Wiki on Tetrahydrocannabinol 
)
Robot fills your cars’ fuel tank
Dutch inventors (hey – for once they do something interesting ) ) unveiled car-fuelling robot they say is the first of its kind, working by registering the car on arrival at the filling station and matching it to a database of fuel cap designs and fuel types.
A robotic arm fitted with multiple sensors extends from a regular petrol pump, carefully opens the car’s flap, unscrews the cap, picks up the fuel nozzle and directs it towards the tank opening, much as a human arm would, and as efficiently.
“I was on a farm and I saw a robotic arm milking a cow. If a robot can do that then why can’t it fill a car tank, I thought,” said developer and petrol station operator Nico van Staveren. “Drivers needn’t get dirty hands or smell of petrol again.”
He hopes to introduce the “Tankpitstop” robot in a handful of Dutch stations by the end of the year. It works for any car whose tank can be opened without a key, and whose contours and dimensions have been recorded to avoid scratching.
Asked whether he would trust his car to a robotic garage attendant, Jelger De Kroon, filling his black Alfa Romeo at a nearby petrol station, said: “Why not? I guess I could keep my hands free and clean, but I’d hope they have good insurance.”
Source: Reuters
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