Humans have grown plants atop structures since antiquity. The ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia (4th millennium BC–600 BC) had plantings of trees and shrubs on aboveground terraces. An example in Roman times was the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, which had an elevated terrace where plants were grown. A roof garden has also been discovered around an audience hall in Roman-Byzantine Caesarea. The medieval Egyptian city of Fustat had a number of high-rise buildings that Nasir Khusraw in the early 11th century described as rising up to 14 stories, with roof gardens on the top story complete with ox-drawn water wheels for irrigating them.

A study at the National Research Council of Canada showed the differences between roofs with gardens and roofs without gardens against temperature. The study shows temperature effects on different layers of each roof at different times of the day. Roof gardens are obviously very beneficial in reducing the effects of temperature against roofs without gardens. “If widely adopted, rooftop gardens could reduce the urban heat island, which would decrease smog episodes, problems associated with heat stress and further lower energy consumption.”
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Tooling Up for Hydroponics

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“The foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” and so it is today for many of his followers. Despite all the warnings about the snares laid by moneylenders, despite the fact that gage mort is literally translated as a pledge to give up one’s life, millions have lost their homes through mortgage exploits, and their quality of life through the service of debt.

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These hummingbird favorites are easy to plant and they will animate your garden in the most delightful way.

Agastache: Quickly becoming a summer favorite, this perennial has fragrant foliage and spiky flowers of pink, purple, blue, red and orange.

Hollyhock: Plant these and you’ll have sensational spires of flowers. A classic cottage garden plant that’s very easy to grow.

Alstroemeria: A favorite cut flower because they last so long. Lots of colors and plants of different sizes. Leave some for the hummingbirds!

Milkweed: Colorful and easy to grow. Yellow and orange/red are most popular. You’ll get lots of butterfly visitors, too.

Lion’s tail: Tall spikes of orange flowers appear on this shrubby perennial. Easy to grow.

Salvia: Lots of choices — all with colorful flowers. Many with richly fragrant foliage.

Pyrostegia: You’ll have cascades of orange flowers blooming fall through winter. Sometimes called flame vine.

Abutilon: Flowering maples produce beautiful bells of red, yellow, white, salmon and pink. They tolerate some shade.

Butterfly bush: Spectacular spikes of purple, pink, white and lavender. Cut back after blooming to get more blossoms. Of course butterflies love this shrub too. Plant the new dwarf forms if you have a small space.

Hibiscus: A favorite shrub in San Diego. Gorgeous, shiny, evergreen foliage and stunning flowers in warm weather. ‘Tradewinds’ is a new dwarf shrub reaching only 3 feet in height.

Lantana: So many colors, so many forms—from low, trailing types to small rounded shrubs. So easy to grow, too. Cut it back every winter to keep it clean and tidy.

Lavender: Take your pick; they’re all good. Fernleaf, Spanish and French lavenders bloom almost year-round.

Leucophyllum: Texas ranger, an evergreen shrub, has gorgeous silver foliage and violet or magenta flowers. If it begins to look a little rangy, cut it almost to the ground.

Rosemary: Bulletproof plants that trail, mound or grow upright, depending on the variety. You must let them bloom if you want hummingbird visits.

Trumpet vine: Included here are blood-red, vanilla, and royal trumpet vines—three different species of distictis. All have glorious trumpet flowers on beautiful, rich green foliage.

Large, centralized irrigation schemes, often built around big water storage dams, were a major component of the Green Revolution that helped boost food production and reduce famine risks for millions of people, especially in Asia. But they have often proven environmentally destructive and, especially in Africa, expensive.

By contrast, decentralized irrigation – small individual systems designed to serve a single or community farm – can often be better tailored to local conditions, purchased and operated by private farmers, and avoid the environmental and social downsides of big dam-and-canal systems.

The emergence and spread of affordable pumps and other technologies that enable farmers to irrigate their small plots has begun to boost harvests and family incomes in some of the world’s deepest pockets of hunger, including parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

For millions of poor farm families in sub-Saharan Africa, access to water makes the difference between hunger and a full belly, between a well-nourished child and one stunted by malnutrition, and between a productive livelihood or one mired in poverty.

Tooling Up for Hydroponics

According to a new report, Wind Power – Global Market Size, Turbine Market Share, Installation Prices, Regulations and Investment Analysis to 2020, by research firm GlobalData, installed capacity increased at a compound annual growth rate of 25%. This translates into to a jump from 73.6GW in 2006 to 280.6GW in 2012.
There was a 7%, fall in annual additions in 2010 as major wind markets such as the US, Germany and Spain, faced economic problems following the global economic crisis.
China was the global leader in wind power in 2012 with the US coming second. The US lost out on the top spot due to the economic slowdown and uncertainties relating to the future of the industry because of a lack of long-term policies supporting the wind sector.
Offshore wind power installations accounted for 1.9% of the global wind power market in 2012.
GlobalData’s forecasting from 2012 to 2020 sees the share of offshore wind in the global wind power market reaching 8.4% by 2020.
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“The foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” and so it is today for many of his followers. Despite all the warnings about the snares laid by moneylenders, despite the fact that gage mort is literally translated as a pledge to give up one’s life, millions have lost their homes through mortgage exploits, and their quality of life through the service of debt.

Find Out How to Get Your Life Back!

The angle or pitch of your roof actually has less impact on solar panel performance than the direction it faces. In general, optimal production occurs when solar panels face south at a tilt equal to 30°. But what happens if your roof is flat? Lowering the tilt all the way down to 5° only decreases production by about 10%, regardless of where you live. The difference in production for steeper roofs is barely noticeable. Increasing the tilt from 30° to 40°, for example, results in a negligible decrease of about 1%.
Looking at data from six cities- Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., Energy Sage estimated the production levels generated at various tilt angles. They held the azimuth constant at 180° which in laymen’s terms means they always assumed that the roof faced directly south. What they found was consistent with their investigations into the effects of other variables.
Consider the Source

 Consider the First Source!

“The foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” and so it is today for many of his followers. Despite all the warnings about the snares laid by moneylenders, despite the fact that gage mort is literally translated as a pledge to give up one’s life, millions have lost their homes through mortgage exploits, and their quality of life through the service of debt.

Find Out How to Get Your Life Back!

Nuand has employed Lime Microsystems’ programmable RF silicon for its bladeRF, which – the two companies say – takes open-source RF hardware into the mainstream
Lime’s field programmable RF chip, the LMS6002D, has been adopted for Nuand’s bladeRF, a Kickstarter-funded open source software defined radio.
Following Myriad RF and Fairwaves, this is the third open source RF board to have been launched in 2013. Highlighting the importance of such technology, the project received over 500 backers on the social funding platform, KickStarter and raised almost twice the requested funding.
bladeRF is the first open source RF project to bring USB3.0 onto the board and combines the Lime chip with an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA. This combination allows it to create exceptionally complex networks on any mobile communications standard or frequency.
The $420 board has been designed for both the hobbyist and the professional developer and is USB2.0 compatible, allowing it to connect directly to the Raspberry Pi and the Beagleboard.
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Aston Martin only made about 1,200 DB4 cars back in the day, and today some versions can fetch millions at auction. Ivan Sentch of New Zealand has printed about three-quarters of the mold parts for his handmade Aston Martin DB4. The resident of Auckland, New Zealand, has printed nearly three-quarters of the sections for his replica of the classic sports car.
Sentch is recreating a 1961 series II Aston Martin DB4 by 3D-printing plastic plugs for the car’s fiberglass body. The mechanical bits will come from an old Nissan Skyline. He’s using a Solidoodle desktop 3D printer to print out roughly 2,500 pieces to use as plugs for fiberglass molds. The plugs are the basis on which the fiberglass is formed.
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Before 3D printers become as ubiquitous as cellphones, they could form the basis of small-scale manufacturing concerns and have huge potential both here and for developing countries, where access to many products is limited.
Associate Professor Joshua Pearce, a Michigan Technological University researcher posits the following: “Say you are in the camping supply business and you don’t want to keep glow-in-the-dark tent stakes in stock. Just keep glow-in-the-dark plastic on hand, and if somebody needs those tent stakes, you can print them. It would be a different kind of capitalism, where you don’t need a lot of money to create wealth for yourself or even start a business.”
3D printers deposit multiple layers of plastic or other materials to make almost anything, from toys to tools to kitchen gadgets. Free designs that direct the printers are available by the tens of thousands on websites like Thingiverse. Visitors can download designs to make their own products using open-source 3D printers, like the RepRap, which you build yourself from printed parts, or those that come in a box ready to print, from companies like Type-A Machines.
3D printing isn’t quite as simple as 2D printing a document from your home computer — at least not yet.
“But you don’t need to be an engineer or a professional technician to set up a 3D printer,” Pearce said. “Some can be set up in under half an hour, and even the RepRap can be built in a weekend by a reasonably handy do-it-yourselfer.”
It’s not just about the money. 3D printing may herald a new world that offers consumers many more choices as everything can be customized. Cellphone accessories, a garlic press, a shower head, a spoon holder, and the like are as few as three clicks away, and we’re not talking about miles. 3D printers can save consumers even more money on high-end items like customized orthotics and photographic equipment.
It’s not just about the money. 3D printing may herald a new world that offers consumers many more choices as everything can be customized.
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This year, for the first time, respondents to the annual Future of Open Source Survey chose “better software quality” as the No. 1 reason for adopting open source. Is innovation in enterprise software happening anywhere else other than in open source land?
Hadoop is at the center of the big data trend. OpenStack has the momentum in private cloud. Open source frameworks and IDEs absolutely dominate app dev, while all the leading NoSQL databases are open source. Android now powers more smartphones than any other mobile OS. Plus, Microsoft and Salesforce excepted, you’d be hard-pressed to find a cloud provider that uses anything but open source software to deliver its service.
IBM’s public embrace of Cloud Foundry at OSCON provides a telling example of open source’s pole position. As with OpenStack, IBM is providing code contributions, but the Cloud Foundry community will steer development.
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Scientists first discovered viruses in the late 1800s when they were puzzled by a disease that beset tobacco plants. They mashed up wilted tobacco leaves with water and passed the mixture through fine porcelain filters that trapped bacteria and fungi. The clear liquid could still make healthy tobacco leaves sick. The Dutch botanist Martinus Beijerinck dubbed it “a contagious living fluid.”
In the 1930s, the invention of powerful microscopes finally allowed scientists to see viruses. They found that viruses were unlike ordinary cells: they didn’t generate their own fuel; they didn’t grow or divide. Instead, viruses invaded cells, hijacking their biochemistry to make new copies of themselves. Being small and simple seemed like part of the viral way of life, allowing them to replicate fast.
It wasn’t until 2003 that a team of French researchers discovered the first giant virus. They had been puzzling over sphere-shaped objects that were the size of bacteria but contained no bacterial DNA. Eventually they realized that they were looking at a monstrously oversized virus, containing 979 genes.
Those first giant viruses were isolated from amoebae living in the water of a cooling tower. Once scientists realized that viruses could be so large, they changed their search parameters and started finding other species in all manner of places, from swamps to rivers to contact lens fluid.
In a paper published online on July 2 in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, French researchers offered evidence that giant viruses dwell in healthy people. They isolated a new giant virus from blood donated by a healthy volunteer, and then found antibodies and other signs of the virus in four other donors.
Giant viruses may lurk harmlessly in our bodies, invading the amoebae we harbor. Whether they can make us sick is an open question.
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