There’s a revolution happening in the way that food is grown around the world. Vertical farming piles crops on top of one another in a climate controlled, indoor facility, and uses advanced technology to produce food in the most environmentally friendly way the world has ever seen.

At AeroFarms in Newark, New Jersey, crops are piled more than 30 feet high in a 30,000 square foot space. They use aeroponic(气雾栽培) technology, involving misting the roots of the plants, using an astonishing 95% less water than conventional farming methods. David Rosenberg, CEO of AeroFarms told Seeker, “Typically, in indoor growing, the roots sit in water. If we mist nutrition to the root structure, the roots have a better oxygenation(氧合作用).”

AeroFarms uses no pesticides. The plants are grown in a reusable cloth made from recycled plastic, so no soil is needed to grow them. They also use a system of specialized LED lighting instead of natural sunlight, reducing their energy footprint even further. “Many people say ‘Sunless? Wait. Plants need sun.’ Actually the plants don’t need yellow spectrum(光谱). So we reduce our energy footprint by doing things like reducing certain types of spectrum to make it function as sunlight,” Rosenberg said.

Dickson Despommier, an ecologist from Columbia University, was one of the first advocates of vertical farming. In 1999, he proposed that vertical farming could help feed our ever-growing, overpopulated cities, while using less water than current farming methods and reducing the need to transport food long-distances. Despommier likely imagined his idea would be taking shape on a global level, just 18 years later.

There are now vertical farms in Canada, Panama, Britain, and throughout America. AeroFarms is currently building another vertical farm facility in an old steel factory that’s larger than a football field. They expect it will grow up to 2 million pounds of greens every year.

Rosenberg believes that vertical farming is truly the way of the future. “It’s a tough business, but it’s one that’ll stay with a bigger and bigger impact.”

SYDNEY —Australian scientists have designed a system which uses microwaves to break down plastic into an environmentally friendly by-product.

Head of Electrical Engineering at Australia’s James Cook University, Prof. Mohan Jacob revealed on Thursday that by using microwaves, plastic waste can be converted into biochar(生物炭), charcoal that can be used as a soil conditioner.

“We are developing a processing room, which could process many kinds of plastic materials, up to 5 kilograms of waste,” Jacob said. “It will be a typical example system for the development of biochars from different types of plastics under various conditions.” Jacob explained that microwave energy is used to heat the plastic waste above 600 degrees centigrade within the custom-made room, where it ends up as a biochar, which can then be used to improve the properties of soil.

Currently underway is step one of the project, testing the room, after which, step two will involve improving the energy efficiency of the system and maximizing the yield of by-products. If all goes to plan, step three will be to construct a medium scale waste processing system which is customizable and can be installed remotely.

Jacob said that with the average person using 130 kg of plastic every year, there is an urgent need for developing better ways of processing it.

“Perhaps contrary to popular opinion, plastic is an indispensable material in modern life. It is cheap, competent, lightweight, and has many benefits like maintaining food quality and safety and preventing waste,” he said.

However, “abandoned plastics endanger our marine wildlife, and have begun to enter the food chain. There is an urgent need for developing technologies to recover plastic waste.”

Industrial emissions (排放) of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming greenhouse gases have raised the global average temperature by about 0.8°C since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But studies have disagreed about what impact the rise is having on the world’s species, says Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Some have estimated that as many as 54% of species could eventually become extinct as a result of the climate change, but others have suggested no significant impact.①

Such disparate result might originate from the limited nature of some individual studies, possibly because they focused only on a few species or a relatively small geographical region, says Urban.② To address these limits, Urban used statistical methods to help blend the results of previous studies into an apples-to-apples comparison that estimates the risk of extinction of species worldwide.

③He chose to analyze only the results of studies that had assessed extinction risks of more than one species. Then he researched into the details, such as the regions in which species considered, whether those species were limited to one small region or were widely spread, and whether the species were free to move as climate changed or were blocked by barriers such as mountain ranges or urban development.④

Effects of climate change aren’t always immediate, Urban says, and the risks of extinction he’s estimated are the long-term results of species not being able to find a suitable habitat. Maybe the habitat will merely shrink to a size that can’t support the species, or maybe it will disappear entirely. In some cases, he notes, a species might not be able to outpace the shift in its range, dying out before it can reach a new homeland. For over the generations that rapid warming might kill them off before they can spread to a suitable new habitat.