Britain has a long history of deforestation and almost ran out of timber during World War I. A commission was established to make the country more self-reliant after the war, but this still led to a decline in native woods. The Scottish Highlands are a good example as more than 90% of the trees are gone. Many lands were never replanted and today still lay barren. Now they may be reforested by war planes.
Forests are to be created by dropping millions of trees out of aircraft. Equipment installed in the huge C-130 transport aircraft used by the military for laying carpets of landmines across combat zones has been adapted to deposit the trees in remote areas including parts of Scotland.
Flying 1,000 feet above the ground at 130 knots allows 3,000 cones to be planted in one minute. Interesting to read a real-world version of swords-to-plowshares.
Update 2019:
1) The fashion brand Timberland has announced “we’ve made a bold commitment to plant 50 million trees around the world over the next 5 years”.
These drones scout a burned area, mapping it down to as high as centimeter accuracy, including objects and plant species, fumigate it efficiently and autonomously, identify where trees would grow best, then deploy painstakingly designed seed-nutrient packages to those locations. It’s cheaper than people, less wasteful and dangerous than helicopters and smart enough to scale to national forests currently at risk of permanent damage.
Internet Eyes says it offers up to £1,000 to online subscribers who can spot crimes as they happen and click an alert button to notify the business owner.
I can see why people are upset about the privacy implications but I also wonder about crime. Could someone planning a crime hire out the camera for the time when they will attack?
Lufthansa is said to be the only airline to do extensive testing with a decommissioned Airbus A310 to figure out why so many people in flight order tomato juice. The German scientists think cusine research must be able to find the answer.
“The flavor profile of tomato juice changes with pressure,” [Florian Mayer, the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics team leader] said. “So when they taste tomato juice on the ground and give it bad marks and if they do the same test under reduced pressure conditions they give the tomato better marks because tomato juice tastes better under low pressure conditions.”
Blame the altitude for poor flavor, in other words.
The grant, for “trustworthy interaction in the cloud”, was awarded to BU, Brown and UC Irvine
The project supported by the NSF grant will address these [privacy] concerns by examining the feasibility of extending cloud service-level agreements to cover aspects such as integrity of outsourced services, information leakage control, and fair market pricing. The project also will explore mechanisms that verify trust-enhancing service-level agreements are being followed and develop “trustworthiness” guarantees and tradeoffs to cloud customers and system integrators that are both practical and useable.
It looks like an interesting project but I have to scratch my head and wonder about hyperbole in security when the “lead principal investigator” claims “significant benefit to our economy and society”. How will that be measured?
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
