“An increasing number of US landowners want to build commune-style villages that are completely self-sufficient and have a low carbon footprint”
Grace LeClair had just finished eating dinner with friends when she got the phone call every parent dreads. The chaplain at the Medical College of Virginia was on the other end. “Your daughter has been in a serious accident. You should come to Richmond right away.” LeClair was in Virginia Beach at the time, a two-hour drive from 20-year-old Bess-Lyn, who was now lying in a coma in a Richmond hospital bed.
The friend who was with Bess-Lyn has since filled in the details of that day in March. The two women were bicycling down a steep hill, headed toward a busy intersection, when Bess-Lyn yelled that her brakes weren’t working and she couldn’t slow down. Her friend screamed for her to turn into an alley just before the intersection. But Bess-Lyn didn’t turn sharply enough and crashed, headfirst, into a concrete wall. She wasn’t wearing a helmet. By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, Bess-Lyn was officially counted among the 1.5 million Americans who will suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI) this year.
Bess-Lyn’s mom was halfway to Richmond when she received a second call, this time from a doctor. “He was telling me that she had a very serious injury, that she had to have surgery to save her life and that if I would give permission, they would use this experimental, not-approved-by-the-FDA drug,” Grace LeClair recalls. “He said that it would increase the oxygen supply to her brain. To me that only made sense, so I said yes.”
Why Plants? Part III – Rise of The Plant Machines by Orlando de Lange.
Everyone talks about the rise of the robots. What about the rise of the “Vegetation/ Plant Machines?”
In part 3 of our series on plant synthetic biology, Orlando de Lange (@SeaGreenODL) of The New Leaf blog introduces how synbio approaches are being used to develop novel disease resistant crops, overcoming some of the challenges faced by monoculture farming.
Continue reading “Musings on Synthetic Biology and Crop Disease Resistance” »
Powered by developments in exponential technologies, the cost of housing, transportation, food, health care, entertainment, clothing, education and so on will fall, eventually approaching, believe it or not, zero.
People are concerned about how AI and robotics are taking jobs, destroying livelihoods, reducing our earning capacity, and subsequently destroying the economy.
In anticipation, countries like Canada, India and Finland are running experiments to pilot the idea of “universal basic income” — the unconditional provision of a regular sum of money from the government to support livelihood independent of employment.
Continue reading “Why the Cost of Living Is Poised to Plummet in the Next 20 Years” »
Large Earth-orbiting greenhouses will someday likely be as commonplace as peanut acreage on Georgia’s coastal plains.
Low-Earth orbit (LEO) would hardly appear to be the best place to take up farming. But both NASA and the burgeoning commercial space industry are already planning for a time when in addition to on-orbit space hotels and new research stations, there will also be Earth-orbiting greenhouses. Such structures will provide a horn of plenty for growing numbers of LEO residents and astronauts venturing beyond Earth orbit to the Moon, Mars or even the Main Asteroid Belt.
The initial case for LEO agriculture would be to feed a growing population of space-dwellers — either using a greenhouse that remained permanently attached to the LEO habitat, or a greenhouse that was free-flying and uncrewed.
