Category Environment/Geology

The zinnia plants began to exhibit guttation and epinasty, both signs of plant stress. Credit: NASA

When Scott Kelly tweeted a picture of moldy leaves on the current crop of zinnia flowers aboard ISS, it could have looked like the science was doomed. It was in fact an opportunity for scientists back on Earth to better understand how plants grow in microgravity, and for astronauts to practice doing what they’ll be tasked: autonomous gardening.

The Veggie plant growth facility was installed on the orbiting laboratory in early May of 2014, and the first crop – ‘Outredgrous’ red romaine lettuce – was activated for growth. The first growth cycle faced some issues...

A specimen of a Witwatersrand diamond. Credit: Wits University

The 3 diamonds extracted from 3B-yr-old Witwatersrand Supergroup – the rock formation that is host to the famous Johannesburg gold mines to study when modern-style plate tectonics began to operate on planet Earth. “Because diamonds are some of the the hardest, most robust material on Earth, they are perfect little time capsules and have the capacity to tell us what processes were occurring extremely early in Earth’s history,” says Dr Katie Smart.

A cluster of the Witwatersrand diamonds. Credit: Wits University

The Earth is ~4...

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Jason-3 spacecraft onboard is shown at Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex 4 East in Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, January 16, 2016. REUTERS/Gene BlevinsSpace …

A $180 million satellite to study the world’s oceans in a changing climate will blast off Sunday atop a Falcon 9 rocket, which SpaceX will try to land on a floating platform after launch. The satellite, Jason-3 will show how global warming and sea level rise affect wind speeds and currents as close as 1 km from shore, whereas past satellites were limited to ~6.2 miles from the coast. “That is a significant advantage over our predecessors,” said Jim Silva,National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The technology will also monitor global sea surface heights, tropica...

Human computation (HC), which encompasses methods such as crowdsourcing, citizen science, and distributed knowledge collection offers new promise for addressing wicked problems, by enabling participatory sensing, group intelligence, and collective action at unprecedented scales.

The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the “wicked” problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University. They present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.

Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pa...