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Norway’s Underwater Road
Norway is building a floating underwater road tunnel – the longest and deepest sub-sea road tunnel in the world.@wef#Norway #tech #innovation #construction #architecture pic.twitter.com/e9XAX9lAWV
— CIS (UK) Ltd (@CISGroupUK) May 27, 2018
(Video, header image courtesy World Economic Forum.)
Sweden’s New Electric Road Charges Your Vehicle While Driving
Header photo: Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
A Trillion Dollar Plan To Save The Planet
Academics Unpack Cuba’s Weekly Internet
A detailed look at Cuba’s ‘offline internet:” the weekly assembly, organisation, and distribution of ‘El Paquete Semenal‘.
Most Cubans have terrible access to the Internet — estimates suggest only 5-25% of the populace can regularly get online. The government made it a bit easier in recent years with paid wifi hotspots, but they require dough, and they’re super slow. So Cubans have instead, in the last decade, evolved a complex, massive sneakernet.
(Courtesy Boing Boing)
Previously on The Bubble:
DIY Inventions from Cuba: Necessity Is A Mother
and
Your Weekly Internet
Photo by Alexander Kunze on Unsplash
It’s not green, it’s ‘Greener Concrete’
Graphene, the “wonder material” composed of a one-atom-thick sheet of linked carbon atoms, is the world’s strongest manmade material. Now, scientists have used it to create a new type of concrete that is much stronger, water-resistant and eco-friendly than what we’re used to.
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite: Monday Launch
NASA launches TESS, to follow up KEPLER’s work:
If a planet-hunting spacecraft sounds familiar, it’s likely because of the rich diversity of worlds found so far by NASA’s venerable Kepler space probe. Since 2009, Kepler has been harvesting planets from the cosmos, spying the footprints of these alien worlds in distant starlight. Kepler alone can claim more than 2,600 discoveries, some of which could be rocky planets quite similar to Earth.
Launched last week, TESS will scan 200,000 close and bright stars, seeking new planets and possibly livable worlds. Here’s a roundtable discussion with 2 scientists on the TESS mission.
A Solarpunk Manifesto
Step aside, Cyberpunk, Steampunk: here comes Solarpunk.
Solarpunk intends to wrench science fiction from both Steampunk’s magical tech fantasies and Cyberpunk’s tech-gone-wrong. If the energy substrate of the Steam era was coal, and that of the Cyber era was oil, Solarpunk foreshadows and aims to anticipate environmental catastrophe by skipping to solar. As Solarpunk manifesto-writer Adam Flynn writes, if “steampunk is ‘here’s yesterday’s future that we wish we had,’” and “cyberpunk was ‘here is this future that we see coming and we don’t like it,’” then “Solarpunk might be ‘here’s a future that we can want and we might actually be able to get.’”
Thx BruceS/Wired; header photo by Andreas Gücklhorn on Unsplash
Indigenous Engineering in Australia
These efforts have been around for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years. Wow.
We (Gunditjmara) were some of the first civil engineers in Australia with farmed eels. Traps have been carbon dated back to 6600, but our connect there goes back further that 30,000 years. The sites are about to be world heritage listed. pic.twitter.com/CU2Sf6Ov6t
— Meriki
(@IndigenousX) April 12, 2018
In the 1840s, the eel traps of Budj Bim were described as the work of ‘civilized men’. But it took another 135 years for more appreciative European eyes to examine the complexity of western Victorias Aboriginal fishery.
Rather than living passively off whatever nature provided, the Gunditjmara actively and deliberately manipulated local water flows and ecologies to engineer a landscape focused on increasing the availability and reliability of eels.
Manipulation of the landscape involved stone structures (such as traps and channels) dating back at least 6,600 years. Eel aquaculture facilities (ponds and dam walls) pre-date contact with Europeans by many hundreds (and possibly thousands) of years.
As Lourandos pointed out more than three decades ago, and Bruce Pascoe reveals in his recent award-winning book Dark Emu, differences between hunter gatherers and cultivators, and foragers and farmers, are far more complex and blurred than we once thought.
And there’s much, much more to explore and celebrate:
Courtesy ‘Merki’ this week on Twitter’s ‘IndigenousX‘ rotating account. (Follow!)
Header photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash
Norway pushes Electric Aircraft research
Norway, flush with oil money, is aware the boom won’t last. And one of the biggest fossil fuel C02 footprints? Commercial aircraft. So this is welcome research.
On the heels of their success pushing sales of electric cars, Norway want to spur the move to electric airplanes
Header image: Gabriela Parra
Space Harpoons to remove orbital debris
A lovely summary from BoingBoing:
There are 500,000 pieces of space junk orbiting the earth, many of which significantly endanger satellites and crewed space missions. to test various techniques of collecting and disposing of space junk: Orbital garbage collection!
Solar Geoengineering To Fight Climate Change
It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: the creation, using balloons or jets, of a manmade atmospheric sunshade to shield the most vulnerable countries in the global south against the worst effects of global warming.
But amid mounting interest in “solar geoengineering” – not least among western universities – a group of scientists from developing countries has issued a forceful call to have a greater say in the direction of research into climate change, arguing that their countries are the ones with most at stake.
Header photo by Artur Dyadchenko on Unsplash