A San Francisco agritech start-up has created a vertical farm that is run by AI and robots. Plenty’s upright facility grows as much produce as 720 acres of typical farmland, but with a footprint of just two acres. AI monitors water usage, light, and environmental conditions and it learns how to grow crops faster and … Read more
How can insect farming contribute to food security? One British firm believes it has the answer. With the global population set to top nine billion by 2050, it’s estimated that food production needs to increase by around 70 per cent to meet demand, and do so sustainably. Some 820 million people go hungry globally, yet a … Read more
Renewables may actually keep carbon fuels going for decades to come, but a new group of energy-rich countries will emerge. The outlook for the oil sheikhs of the Middle East or the gas oligarchs of Russia looks increasingly bleak. The value of their underground resources looks poised to fall away permanently as they struggle to … Read more
When ‘There is No Planet B’ first hit our bookshops, this companion to saving the planet became an instant classic. We talk to its author, Mike Berners-Lee. “Humans have quite suddenly become the biggest thing to affect the ecosystem,” says Mike Berners-Lee. What this new-found influence over the health of the planet means, says the … Read more
The Royal Society has published a report which identifies how the UK can play a leading role in tackling climate change through a data-led transition supported by the adoption of digital technologies. While data-enabled technologies such as machine learning have boosted efficiency in some sectors, contributing to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, they also have … Read more
An Australian research voyage is under way to investigate how life in the Southern Ocean captures and stores carbon from the atmosphere. A fleet of new-generation, deep-diving ocean robots will be deployed in the Southern Ocean in a major study of how marine life acts as a handbrake on global warming. The automated probes will … Read more
The manufacturing industry can play a significant role in the vision of making India self reliant or ‘Atma Nirbhar Bharat’. This can happen if manufacturing units raise the bar of production and make products for both the local and global markets. The pandemic has nudged us from the familiar world of the physical to that … Read more
The manufacturing industry can play a significant role in the vision of making India self reliant or ‘Atma Nirbhar Bharat’. This can happen if manufacturing units raise the bar of production and make products for both the local and global markets. The pandemic has nudged us from the familiar world of the physical to that … Read more
A new type of soil created by engineers at The University of Texas at Austin can pull water from the air and distribute it to plants, potentially expanding the map of farmable land around the globe to previously inhospitable places and reducing water use in agriculture at a time of growing droughts. The team’s atmospheric … Read more
Tesco has joined a group of large businesses including Dixons Carphone, E.ON, Heathrow, Lime and SSE that have called on the Government to bring forward the date for when new petrol and diesel vehicles should be banned from sale to 2030. The original 2040 date for the ban was announced in 2017, although some MPs … Read more