Monthly Archives: December 2017

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The building materials of the future might be mushrooms and bacteria

[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ]

The Cities of the Future Could Be Built From Mushrooms

A block made out of decomposed straw fused together with mycelium: the rootlike tendrils of mushrooms. [Credit: moi]

For Earther:

Nearly everything about the small block says “wood”: its texture, appearance, sturdiness, and color are like an especially high-quality piece of particle board. But it’s just a bit too dense for wood, which gives it away. The block is made of straw bound together by mycelium, the root-like tendrils of mushrooms.

While many types of fungi would serve, this block was produced using edible mushrooms as a proof-of-principle experiment by architect Chris Maurer and his collaborators at Redhouse Architecture in Cleveland, Ohio. They envision building whole communities from mushroom “wood” and its byproducts, providing housing, food security, and even water filtration for regions destabilized by climate change-related disasters.

[read the rest at Earther…]

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Discovering new planets with artificial intelligence

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Thanks to Google AI, Astronomers Have Found New Planets

They’re not habitable, but the dual discoveries change how we’re going to hunt for the next Earth.

For The Daily Beast:

For the first time, NASA has used machine learning to identify two new planets in distant star systems. One of those worlds is the eighth in its system, making that planetary system the largest-known yet discovered.

We know stars can have eight planets already (hello, Solar System!), so that’s no surprise. The excitement comes in how this new world was found: using an artificial intelligence machine learning method known as “neural networks.”

On Thursday afternoon, Christopher Shallue, a senior software engineer at Google Brain, and Andrew Vanderburg, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin, announced the new worlds in a press conference. It’s the eighth planet orbiting the 90th star in the Kepler observatory’s catalog, so it carries the name Kepler-90i. It’s a smallish, rocky planet orbiting very close to its host star. This method also identified a fifth planet in the Kepler-80 system, described in the same research paper.

[Read the rest at The Daily Beast…]

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Using NASA science to count the world’s biggest fish

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A NASA Algorithm Can Save Endangered Whale Sharks

Constellations of spots on these school bus-sized animals were hard to track, until now

For The Daily Beast:

Like too many other species, the world’s largest fish is in trouble.

Despite being listed as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), whale sharks are threatened by overfishing and human-caused damage to the ocean environment.

What makes the race against extinction even harder is the fact that scientists don’t have a precise idea of how many whale sharks are actually out there.

That may seem odd, because adult whale sharks can reach 10 meters (33 feet) in length, making them roughly the size of a school bus. However, they live much of their lives in open water; very few scientists had even seen one before the 1980s. Even with technological improvements over the last 30 years, it’s a difficult species to study, thanks to their lifestyle.

To get some idea about their numbers, researchers need to tell them apart. Each whale shark, has a unique pattern of lines and spots behind its gills, a sort of shark fingerprint.

[Read the rest at The Daily Beast…]