Category Environment/Geology

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...

Fans hail the smooth new velo routes as the answer to urban traffic jams and air pollution, and a way to safely get nine-to-fivers outdoors

It’s every cyclist’s dream: no red lights, no trucks, just a clear, smooth lane to zoom down with the wind in your face. Welcome to Germany’s first bicycle Autobahn. Fans hail the smooth new velo routes as the answer to urban traffic jams and air pollution, and a way to safely get nine-to-fivers outdoors. As a glimpse of a greener urban transport future, Germany has just opened the first 5km stretch of a bicycle highway that is set to span over 100 kilometres.

It will connect 10 western cities including Duisburg, Bochum and Hamm and 4 universities, running largely along disused railroad tracks in the crumbling Ruhr industrial region...

Raman micro-spectroscopy. A, B: Thin section photomicrographs (left) and corresponding Raman intensity maps (right) of the silicified cavities showing the downward-oriented accretion and the kerogenous composition of the dark laminae. Red colors indicate kerogen-rich areas. C: Representative first-order Raman spectrum of the kerogen with the characteristic disordered peaks for amorphous carbon (D and D’) and the graphite peak (G). Credit: Geology (2016). DOI: 10.1130/G37272.1

A team of researchers from Germany and Switzerland has found examples of microbial life from >3B yrs ago, that appeared to have evaded UV radiation hiding in subsurface cavities. Scientists believe that life first came to exist on planet Earth ~3...