Founded in 2010 by three former NASA scientists, Planet Labs has been among the forefront of several companies seeking to provide high-quality, commercially available imagery of planet Earth. As such, it has the capability to look all around the world, in real time.
Source: arstechnica.com
Our team has built the world’s first scalable, real-time detection and alert system for logging and environmental conservation in the rainforest. Building hardware that will survive in the rainforest is challenging, but we’re using what’s already there: the trees. We’ve hidden modified smartphones powered with solar panels—called “Guardian” devices—in trees in threatened areas, and continuously monitor the sounds of the forest, sending all audio up to our cloud-based servers over the standard, local cell-phone network.
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Clues are hard to come by when you’re trying to look back to a time when the continents clumped together like a closed fist. But geologists have found evidence that plants, the most gentle of organisms, may have helped kill most of the life in the oceans 374 million years ago.
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The first time Frank Keutsch heard about solar geoengineering, he thought the idea was terrifying. To the Harvard University atmospheric chemist, schemes such as spraying millions of tons of sulfate particles into the sky to reflect the sun’s rays and cool the planet seemed perilous. Not only might the strategies disrupt the atmosphere in unexpected ways, but they might also dramatically alter the weather and harm the lives of Earth’s inhabitants.
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