This is incredible. Unlike the shark attracting light suits of Tron surfing or the glowing outline of night skiers, seeing a wakeboarder with a light board is like seeing Picasso with a paintbrush. The tricks the wakeboarders pull makes for a visually magnetic picture. It’s like painting rainbows! More »
Here’s a wonderfully colorful photo project by photographer Robert Weingarten that shows how psychedelic our world can get. Weingarten took a photo at 6:30 in the morning of the same view of Santa Monica Bay from his home in Malibu for an entire year. Even with all that sameness, each photo captures something completely different than before. More »
The BP oil spill that occurred back in 2010 has left a huge mark on not only the environment, but also history books. But even though billions of gallons of oil was essentially dumped into the ocean, the amount of pollution that is found in it is still staggering, especially plastic. 19-year-old Boyan Slat may have come up with a solution that could remove over 7 million tons of plastic from the world’s oceans.
Slat unveiled his plans to help create an Ocean Cleanup Array that would consist of an anchored network of floating booms with processing platforms attached to them that can be sent to discovered garbage patches in the ocean around the world.The array would act as a giant funnel as it spans the radius of the garbage patch, forcing plastic into the direction of the attached platforms that would separate plankton from the waste and store them to be recycled.
The process of cleaning the world’s oceans with Slat’s array would take an estimated five years, which is relatively quick when you consider how many years we’ve probably been polluting our oceans with plastic.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Solar Panel Cleaner Robot, Detroit Electric Intends To Roll Out A Battery Powered Sports Car, 
Ballmer an Co. have loaded up Bing Maps with yet another batch of images, and though they’re staying quiet about the update’s file size this time, they say it includes 13,799,276 square kilometers of fresh high-res satellite shots and a better view of the ocean floor. Brand-new “straight down” photos give the base map a resolution of 15 meters per pixel, and the introduction of bathymetric imagery changes the ocean’s hue depending on its depth. The refresh even contains fewer clouds, giving users a less obstructed view of Earth. Thanks to additional aerial photos covering 203,271 square kilometers, Microsoft’s map service now covers the entirety of the US and 90 percent of Western Europe with pictures taken from aircraft. Armchair cartographers ready to explore the world remotely can find the revamped visuals already baked into Bing Maps online and within the service’s Windows 8 app.
Filed under: Internet, Software, Microsoft
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Bing Maps Blog
Toy maker, Takara Tomy, releases nationwide on March 7th, a line up of four independent swimming robot fish. About the size of your average goldfish, these water activated fish swim around quite realistically as soon as they hit the water. Robofish comes in red or grey shark color. The Aulonocara comes in a blue straight out of Lake Malawi in East Africa. And the bright orange Clownfish looks like it could be swimming directly out of a group of soft coral. For a retail price of ¥1,500 grab a …
When humanity’s not trying to destroy itself, its steadily redefining its boundaries. Every passing year, we create further-flung outposts in places nature never intended to us to inhabit. Here are the loneliest places mankind has made its bed in search of the unknown, the overwhelming, and the great. More »
OK, so maybe ‘underwater gliding’ is the technical term, but to me, it looks like this robot fish is swimming. As Grace (short for Gliding Robot ACE), the robot fish glides through the water, it strives to conserve energy.
Developed by Associate Professor Xiaobo Tan and a team of engineers at Michigan State University, Grace can flap its tail to swim, but this could deplete its batteries in a few hours. To increase travel time, Grace relies on pumping water out of its body, as well as rhythmically moving its battery to control its direction.
There are apparently plenty of underwater gliders already in the oceans, but this robotic fish is about a tenth of their size and weight, and it also has an energetic swimming mode. It’s hoped that robots such as these can help monitor the quality of our seas. On its maiden voyage, Grace’s crude oil sensor was able to detect increased oil levels in the Kalamazoo River, presumably linked to a spill back in 2010.
[via New Scientist]
DARPA already intends to set a drone ship out to sea, and now it’s revealed plans for undersea payloads that lie dormant for years and launch themselves to the surface when remotely commanded. Dubbed Upward Falling Payloads, the containers will carry non-lethal cargo such as small UAVs or networking hardware, and take advantage of the “cheap stealth” their position underwater grants them. Since the vision is to have a fleet of UFPs spread throughout ocean floors, it’ll help the Navy “get close to the areas we need to affect, or become widely distributed without delay,” according to DARPA Program Manager Andy Coon. DARPA is aiming to tap engineering talent from telecom companies to the oil exploration industry in order to solve challenges such as communications used to wake up payload nodes and launching them to the surface. There’s no word on when UFPs will begin lurking sea floors, but DARPA is already looking for proposals to help build them.
[Image credit: Alwbutler, Flickr]
Continue reading DARPA unveils plans for undersea payloads that surface on command
Via: Gizmag
Source: Darpa
It’s been said that we know more about space than we do about our own ocean, and now a group of scientists have quantified what sea creatures we may still not know of. After compiling an open access, online database of known marine species with the help of more than 270 experts, researchers estimate that the briny depths may be home to a total of one million species, with one third of them potentially remaining entirely unknown. Of the grand total, humans have described roughly 226,000 — more than 20,00 of which in the past decade — with another 65,000 tucked away in collections awaiting a write-up. Since previous estimates have been based on rates of species identification and other factors, these latest figures are considered more accurate. The effort’s researchers hope that this data will be used as a reference for extinction rates and conservation. Hit the first source link below to dig through the compendium, aptly-named the World Register of Marine Species, for yourself.
[Image credit: NOAA’s National Ocean Service, Flickr]
Continue reading Scientists estimate at least one third of marine species remain unknown to humans
Scientists estimate at least one third of marine species remain unknown to humans originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Nov 2012 03:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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GoPros are well-known for being robust. I mean, we’ve seen one fall out of a plane and land intact. This GoPro was keen on going on its own adventure as well, except in the water instead of the air. More »
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