Get your delicious, piping hot robo-cookies here! A robot: Your plastic pal who's fun to be with! Okay, so the future that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy predicted is still far off, but it's coming closer every week: HRP-4C gynoid sings on camera We've seen HPR-4C several times already, but she's always worth revisiting as her skills advance--if only because she's one of the few android (technically a gynoid) that's really venturing into Uncanny Valley, with movements and other attributes that seem human. HRP-4C is the best preview out there of the kind of realistic robots we're likely to encounter fairly soon. Here she is singing as part of this year's Japan Robot Association Jisso Protec 2011 show
Read More »Tag Archives: ocean
Feed SubscriptionAre Biodegradeable Plastics Doing More Harm than Good?
[Audio clip from The Graduate: One word, plastics.]
Read More »Don’t Talk About Fish, Talk About Saving Pristine Oceanfront Property
How to get people to care about ocean conservation: a realtor's perspective. You have to talk to people where they live. So, if people aren't concerned enough about the slow destruction of our oceans and seashores, stop talking about fish and let them know that their beloved ocean view isn't going to be around much longer
Read More »Bahamas|Bahamas: Charter Yacht ENTREPRENEURSHIP is now accepting bookings from mid Feb. through June in the Bahamas.
Catana 50 Ocean Class charter yacht ENTREPRENEURSHIP is participating in the Caribbean 1500 Cruising Rally which begins Nov.
Read More »Watch A Tugboat Drag An Arctic Iceberg To Parched People Half A World Away [Video]
Since he was hired in the '70s by Saudi prince Mohammad al-Faisal, French engineer Georges Mougin has tried to figure out a way to tow freshwater icebergs across the Arctic. Now, with 3-D tech, declassified satellite data, and tugboats, he might have cracked the way to quench the world's thirst
Read More »Why Dow Is Burning Plastic For Energy
Plastic doesn't have to end up in landfills or the ocean.
Read More »The South Pacific Islands Survey–Our First Student Questions!
Ashley Park and Amber Watson, both juniors at Spanish Fort High School in Alabama, sent me an email after reading, "We discover what’s floating in the South Pacific." They wanted to know how trash travels in the ocean and if recycling is really the answer. Since I’m not a plastic pollution expert, I turned to Marcus Eriksen, the co-founder of 5 Gyres, a non-profit studying garbage in the ocean, to provide some answers.
Read More »The South Pacific Islands Survey–We discover what’s floating in the Pacific Ocean!
After seven hours of dragging a metal trawl in the ocean, we pulled the manta ray-looking contraption on board--salt water splashing everywhere--to see what was inside. We reached into the slimy net, flipped it inside out and dumped the contents onto a mesh screen.
Read More »The South Pacific Islands Survey–South Pacific Flotsam
We started trawling! The tide of seasickness has passed and the crew was up early this morning getting ready to deploy the high-speed trawl. The trawl looks like a manta ray and collects samples from the surface of the ocean through a fine mesh net attached to the trawl’s metal "mouth." The sampling net will collect anything in its path, usually plastic fragments and plankton.
Read More »Water waves exhibit negative gravity near a periodic array of buoys
(PhysOrg.com) -- Ocean waves can be incredibly strong and very difficult to block completely. When a wave moving across the ocean interacts with a buoy, the wave can be slightly dampened, but will still pass by if its wavelength is long enough compared to the size of the buoy
Read More »The Japan nuclear crisis at Fukushima: A video summary
On March 11, a powerful earthquake set off a tsunam i that swamped the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant , cutting off power and causing nuclear fuel rods to overheat and melt.
Read More »One Year After The BP Oil Disaster, What Has Changed?
It has been a year since BP helped make the ultimate oil company screw-up: blowing up an offshore oil rig, killing 11 workers, and then unloading 170 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Read More »The Big Thirst: One Water Statistic We Ought To Retire
In this installment of "The Big Thirst," the author and Fast Company writer explains why one oft-used statistic about the scarcity of water is misleading. Fact: We hear all the time that "only" 2% of the water on Earth is fresh and available for human use--only 1% if you exclude glaciers and polar ice caps.
Read More »Can Taxes Be Green?
Pollution is cheap, for the polluter. Releasing sulfurous fumes into the air or dumping radioactive water into the ocean is ostensibly the easiest and cheapest way to deal with unwanted byproducts.
Read More »A year on, Gulf still grapples with BP oil spill
By Anna Driver and Matthew Bigg VENICE, La./WAVELAND, Mississippi (Reuters) - When a BP oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico last April, killing 11 workers, authorities first reported that no crude was leaking into the ocean. [More]
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