great pacific garbage patch – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "great pacific garbage patch"

DailyDirt: Changing Our Environment

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

One of the properties of life itself is that it changes its environment. All life does it, not just us humans. But we might be the only animals that might care about our legacy on the world. We haven’t completely figured out what mark we’ve left on the Earth (or if it’s permanent), but we’ve definitely changed some things, for better or worse.

• Have we created a new era? The anthropocene isn’t exactly a well-defined era just yet, but some folks are narrowing down the characteristics of a new geological epoch. We’ve made lots of concrete, plastic, atmospheric carbon dioxide and radioactive isotopes, but will anyone be around to care about these technofossils in a few thousand years? [url]
• Maybe we’ll figure out how to clean up some of our mess in the ocean — and start to get rid of all the plastic junk in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. There’s still plenty of pollution in lakes and other bodies of water, so we won’t be able to get rid of all the evidence of our hydrocarbon-based economy. [url]
• We could also just learn to embrace the new world we’ve created — and get accustomed to the vast Alaskan farmlands. Farming in the subarctic is getting a bit easier now that the ground isn’t a frozen tundra all year long anymore. [url]

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Filed Under: anthropocene, earth, environment, geological epoch, great pacific garbage patch, plastics, pollution, subarctic farming, technofossil

DailyDirt: Underwater Robots For Fooling Fish & Finding Foul Waters

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The term “drone” usually refers to a robotic plane, but some robot researchers are developing underwater drones for exploring the oceans and going to some hard-to-reach underwater destinations. A few of these robotic fish projects also mimic real fish locomotion and appearance, so that the robots blend into their environment. Maybe someday these fake fish will replace the real ones in aquariums, and no one will notice….

• Get your own open source underwater robot capable of diving down to 100 meter depths for just $775 on Kickstarter. OpenROV runs on eight C batteries and runs for about an hour at 1m/s. [url]
• A fish-like robot inspired by notemigonus crysoleucas (a species of the Golden shiner) has been accepted into schools of the real fish. The creators of this robot envision the possibility of using remote-controlled fish robots to steer real schools of fish away from pollution (or maybe directly into fishing nets). [url]
• An ocean-going drone could help clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Marine Drone is a concept design for an autonomous robot that can collect plastic debris and other garbage floating around in the oceans. [url]
• The SHOAL project has developed a robotic fish that can detect pollution and monitor water quality. These autonomous robots can work together to cover a square kilometer area to a depth of 30 meters, running on rechargeable batteries that last about 8 hours, and the prototype robots cost about $32,000 each. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: autonomous, biomimicry, drones, fish, great pacific garbage patch, locomotion, openrov, pollution, robots, underwater
Companies: kickstarter