A new method of growing food tackles large-scale problems like hunger, malnutrition and global warming.
Even though humans have grown food for 12,000 years, there is still a lot of room for improvement. One hundred thousand people die of malnutrition every day, and the United Nations estimates the world will have another 2.4 billion mouths to feed by 2050.
Roughly 80 percent of land suitable for farming is already in use and large-scale agriculture contributes to deforestation, pollution, aquifer depletion and climate change. Plants are surprisingly inefficient, using just 3 to 6 percent of sunlight for photosynthesis.
According to a small but growing cadre of greenhouse geeks, the solution is to start using high-tech facilities called vertical farms. In these tall indoor greenhouses, farmers grow crops in stacked beds, often hydroponically (using water instead of soil), and control every possible variable — light, water, temperature, nutrients — to minute degrees.
The idea of vertical farming crystallized in 1999 at Columbia University in New York, where ecologist Dickson Despommier challenged a class of graduate students to solve the inherent dilemma of agriculture: How to reduce the heavy carbon footprint involved in transporting countryside farm crops to growing cities.
“Making [vertical farming] happen could require the kind of technical expertise needed for, say, rocket science or brain surgery,” Despommier wrote in the resulting book, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century. “Then again, human beings do rocket science and brain surgery quite well.”
To function effectively, facilities need to be several stories tall and use natural or artificial light, or a combination of the two. In these sealed buildings, farmers don’t need to use pesticides or herbicides to protect the crops.
The outcome is a locavore’s dream: Professionals growing organic crops year-round in the heart of urban centers. With every detail über-optimized, yields can be extraordinarily high – as much as 30 times those of traditional farms.
Sky Greens, the world’s first commercial vertical farm, opened in Singapore in 2012. The facility’s 30-foot-tall towers produce lettuce, spinach and Chinese cabbage using rotating tiers of growing troughs.
The following year, FarmedHere opened in a 90,000-square-foot abandoned warehouse outside of Chicago. The farm reuses 97 percent of fresh water to grow arugula, kale, basil and mint, sold in more than 400 nearby grocery stores.
In Japan, Mirai operates the world’s largest vertical farm in a giant semiconductor factory that was abandoned after the 2011 earthquake. Compared to outdoor fields, Mirai produces 100 times more vegetables per square foot and uses 99 percent less water.
Thousands of vertical farms are already in operation, primarily in crowded countries such as South Korea, Japan, China and the Netherlands. In the U.S., new facilities are planned for Newark, New Jersey and Jackson, Wyoming.
“From a technical sense there’s no question the idea works,” said Caleb Harper of MIT’s CityFARM Lab, which conducts research in a vertical farm the size of a shipping container.
“There’s no plant on earth that couldn’t be grown on a vertical farm, even the biggest fruit trees or root crops,” he said, adding that the technology is still in its infancy.
Farmers and companies are still working to solve a number of challenges.
Vertical farms eat more energy than traditional greenhouses thanks to more elaborate lighting, heating and power systems.

Vertical farms located in urban areas cut down on CO₂ use because farmers don’t need to transport the food from faraway rural lands, but some designs require additional CO₂ to be pumped in to stimulate plant growth.
Plus, urban real estate is expensive.
There’s also the question of whether consumers who cringe at GMO foods will eat plants grown in what are essentially laboratories.
“You would think, if it doesn’t have sunlight, it can’t possibly be nutritious, but the reality [is that] plants only harvest 10% of the sun’s rays, which we can recreate in the lab,” Harper told Fast Company.
“There is absolutely no nutritional difference between plants grown in sunlight and under an LED,” he said.
One of the greatest technical challenges facing the industry is the high cost of artificial lighting. The fluorescent lights that many vertical farms currently use, while relatively inexpensive, require lots of electricity.
That’s why some facilities, such as FarmedHere, have been converting to more efficient LED lights.
Prices for LEDs are dropping steadily, and companies such as General Electric and Philips have entered the game.
Mirai contracted GE to develop a custom lighting system using 17,500 LED bulbs that provide the exact wavelengths its crops need to thrive. The setup reduced power consumption by 40 percent and increased yields by 50 percent.
Researchers hope that organic LEDs, in which a film of organic compound provides the glow, will eventually become an even more economical and efficient option.

The idea of increasing agricultural efficiency applies to traditional greenhouses as well, said Adam Burns of Intel’s Intelligent Solutions Division. His group uses off-the-shelf Intel technology to help make greenhouses in China more productive.
Monitoring systems collect data and help managers make on-the-spot decisions to optimize things such as temperature and humidity levels.
“They can keep honing in and produce better and better results,” Burns said. He believes that using the Internet of Things (IoT) can help solve big problems like the fact that 25 to 40 percent of food produced worldwide is wasted.
Meanwhile, American farmers are using real-time data analysis to improve the efficiency of their own farms, and private companies and investors are buying up farmland around the world.
Despommier said when he first started talking about vertical farming, he had no idea it would catch on the way it has. Now, as an industry leader, he is pushing for more crop diversity: root vegetables, grains, more fruits and herbs.
Does he think vertical farming has the potential to change the world?
“Man, I hope so,” he said.

Australia’s lead scientific research agency joins forces with Intel to unravel a mystery that threatens global food security.
Imagine a world without honey bees. While that would be an environmental tragedy and a serious hit to honey lovers, what many people don’t realize is that it would also be a major threat to the world’s food supply.
Bees are responsible for much more than producing honey.
The United Nations estimates that of the 100 crop species responsible for providing 90 percent of food worldwide, 71 depend on bee pollination. Those foods include fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.
Honey bees, however, are dying at an unprecedented rate — and no one is quite sure why. What will it take to save the honey bees?

To unravel the mystery surrounding this rapid decline, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) partnered with Intel to launch the Global Initiative for Honey bee Health (GIHH).
“In the US alone, honey bee hives are now declining by about 25 percent a year. There’s been a steady decline in hives since the 1940s but it’s getting worse,” said Professor Paulo de Souza, science leader at CSIRO.

“Even wild bee species, particularly bumblebees, which are also responsible for many of the fruits and vegetables we eat, are in peril,” he said.
GIHH was founded to combat these troubling statistics. The project’s top priority? Unite research efforts globally by using a common technology platform.
To accomplish this, CSIRO and GIHH participants are taking Internet of Things (IoT) technology provided by Intel and applying it to living things, in this case, bees. The aim is to capture and analyze data, but this data is gathered from bees rather than machines or appliances.

Collapsing Colonies
The ultimate goal is to identify — and then solve — the problems causing the honey bees’ population decline.
One thing researchers know is that honey bees are afflicted by what’s known as colony collapse disorder.
“We’re not exactly sure which key factors, or what combination of factors, cause colony collapse disorder,” de Souza said. “But what we do know is that from one day to the next, a viable working hive could all of a sudden have no bees left in it, or they could all be found dead.”
While de Souza explained that researchers know what individual stressors affect bee health, it would be overwhelming for an individual group to research them all.
“It needs to be a global initiative, and we need to use technology and data to help find a solution,” he said. “And we have to do it before it’s too late.”

The Intel Edison Solution
That’s precisely why GIHH is uniting researchers, beekeepers, farmers and private companies from around the world.
GIHH members receive bee micro-sensor kits, which include an Intel Edison board — a, customizable compute platform that’s just slightly larger than a postage stamp.
The bee micro-sensor kits are placed inside hives to monitor the bees’ activity via tiny Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that are placed on the bees’ backs.
“The RFID tags attached to the bees relay data to the Edison in each hive,” explained de Souza, who compared the sensors to an airplane’s flight recorder or black box. “They provide us with vital information about what happened to the bees before the hive collapsed.”

Some of that information is environmental, such as the temperature and humidity surrounding the hive. But the digital readers can also help researchers understand honey bee movement, behavior and responses to stressors like pesticides, water pollution, diet and other factors that affect bee health and pollination ability.
“A benefit of the Edison board is that scientists from around the world are able to add environmental sensors based on what they want to test, for example wind velocity, or even the weight of the hive,” de Souza explained.
”The scientists can determine the number of bees in a hive at any one time, and how much honey it contains.”

All About Data
After the data is gathered from the Edison boards, it is transmitted to the CSIRO’s cloud platform for analysis and modelling.
While de Souza said the researchers tried other platforms, Edison technology was an ideal fit for the project.
“It had the low power consumption benefit, which was crucial considering the remote locations some researchers would be using the kit,” he said. “Its small size, reliability, wireless support and programming flexibility were other major factors in its selection.”
CSIRO’s research initiative has been up and running for approximately 18 months.
“Data captured by the Edison and RFID tags help us better understand why honey bees are on the decline, and provide valuable information to beekeepers, primary producers, industry groups and governments on how best to protect the honey bee population,” de Souza said.
Securing Global Food Supply
The platform has also enabled the researchers to accelerate their work. To date, de Souza says 10,000 bees in Tasmania have been tagged.
“We’re currently putting together a paper on the discoveries we have made thus far,” he said, noting that the same technologies are being used to monitor bee activity in the Amazon.
A key part of the initiative is sharing findings with scientists globally. Researchers in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Costa Rica are already participating in the project, with others in Europe, the United States and many other countries to follow.
“What we’re creating is an environment where researchers around the world can collaborate using the same technology and the same data methodologies,” de Souza said. “Together we can help solve one of the biggest threats to global food security.”


Nick Jacobs contributed this story. Additional reporting by Stephanie L. Ryan.


In this series, iQ explores new ways we use information to empower ourselves, the environment and people around us. We look at how data collected by everything from smartwatches to smart cities is leading to Better Living Through Big Data.

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Superior cameras, lenses and hard drives help Bryant Austin take high-resolution close-ups and create one-to-one composites.
In 2006, Bryant Austin was an aspiring nature photographer, shooting humpback whales off the coast of California with a 600-millimeter super telephoto lens.
He’d spent his life savings on camera equipment, yet he didn’t feel like his pictures were any different from the wildlife spreads in most magazines.
Until a surreal experience, upgraded cameras and improved processing power changed his life — and his life’s work.
When Austin traveled to Tonga, the South Pacific island kingdom, he thought it would be his last trip as a whale photographer. But while snorkeling, a mother and calf humpback whale approached him.
Afraid of being squashed, he lowered his camera. The calf’s belly button went past him, inches from his eyes.
Austin felt a tap on his shoulder. The mother’s 15-foot pectoral fin was inches from him. Their eyes locked. “We just studied each other,” he said.
The detail, the tonal range, and the colors he saw inspired his future work: to make life-size, one-to-one photo composites of the creatures.
Putting in the Time
Using a medium-format 50-megapixel Hasselblad H3DII-50 DSLR camera with an 80-millimeter portrait lens, Austin took ultrahigh-resolution close-ups. Because they are so detailed, these photos help realistically convey the experience of interacting with a whale. Traditional wide-angle whale photographs fail to do this, Austin said.
To get his portraits, Austin regularly spends months at a time with single pods of whales — days with some, minutes with others.
He gets to know them individually and waits for them to approach. When a whale is less than six feet from him, he starts photographing it from the surface of the water.
If every person could encounter a giant whale eye to eye, Austin said, “I think it would give us pause in how we define consciousness and intelligence.”
Jeremy Goldbogen, a marine biologist at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, Calif., also noted that Austin’s photo composites are important contributions to science.

“Despite being the largest animals of all-time, whales still remain one of the mostly poorly understood groups of animals,” he said.
“One aspect in particular is anatomy, and these life-size photos bring to light the amazing anatomical specializations that whales need to survive in a physically challenging aquatic environment.”
Ella, a dwarf minke Austin encountered at the Great Barrier Reef, stayed with him and his boat for five days, allowing him to capture 300 photographs of her.
In the eastern Caribbean, Austin had an encounter with a 26-foot sperm whale that lasted just four minutes. Nonetheless, he managed to take enough photographs to create a life-size composite.
Austin then spent two years piecing the images together on his computer, stitching together the many smaller photos he took and retouching the water so it looks cohesive.

The Tech of Taking Photos
The composite’s digital images are huge.
Even with 12 solid-state hard drives daisy-chained together to serve as virtual RAM, Austin’s computer takes 20 minutes to save changes to the 60-gigabyte Adobe Photoshop file.
Austin printed the sperm whale image composite in sections measuring 6 feet by 8 feet, then mounted it in a custom aluminum frame measuring 8 feet by 36 feet.
He coated it with resin and a UV protectant to prepare it for the touches that inevitably followed at museums.
Despite Austin’s involved process, new technology is making it easier to take and alter digital images in less time. There are options for Mac and PC users alike.
Matthew Vaughan from Intel’s Client Computing Group says photographers with a Mac Pro workstation should use three high-speed PCle SSD drives to attach three Thunderbolt controllers in a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) setup.
Mac users can expect speeds above 3 GBps.
Vaughan also gave the example of someone working on an HP Z820 workstation. By connecting equally fast internal PCle SSD drives, PC users can achieve similar speeds. Improvement is on the horizon with Thunderbolt 3’s launch on the horizon.
“Thunderbolt 3 is twice the speed of the current Thunderbolt 2, which will enable a new class of PCIe SSDs,” Vaughan explained. “It’s interesting to note that what takes two hours to do with USB3 only takes 10 minutes with Thunderbolt 2.”
On a recent trip to Alaska, Vaughan used a Dell mobile workstation with an external PCle SSD to transfer and back up hundreds of photos and Go Pro videos. Lexar multi-bay readers also allowed him to download multiple SD and CF camera cards at the same time.
“All of this worked flawlessly to back up more than 5,000 files and 110 GBs of data,” he said.
Photos for Thought
In 2009, Austin exhibited at a gallery in Norway, where commercial whaling is still legal. He’d been told to prepare for hostility.
A TV news station brought a group of former whalers to his exhibit in the hopes of creating drama. Instead, they were met with silence.
Some whalers were moved to tears. “They probably thought I was crazy,” Austin said. “They just couldn’t believe what they were seeing.”
Austin is preparing for his next project: making life-size photographs and full-body photo-mosaics of blue whales off the California coast.
Austin doesn’t plan to get in the water with these creatures, which can reach about 100 feet in length and weigh 200 tons. Instead, he plans to lower an array of digital cameras into the water.
They will act like scanners, photographing a whale as it swims by. He foresees the resulting composite measuring 12 feet by 90 feet.
“If I don’t do this, it’s never going to happen,” Austin said. “I’ve been sharing my photos with people for over 12 years now, and no one else has picked up a camera and tried to do this.”


Performance means many things in our lives. It’s the competitive drive to outdo our personal best, the passionate desire to dazzle a live audience, or the rigorous demands we put on our technologies. This series looks at our relentless Pursuit of Performance.


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New policies are indicating that for years many drivers have likely overpaid on their car insurance.
This is the 1 simple truth your car insurance company doesn't want you to know. If you drive less than 35 miles/day and live in a qualified zip code you can get an extremely high discount. Additionally, if you have no DUI's, you can get even more discounts. But do you think your auto insurance company will tell you that?
When drivers enter their zip code and driver information at US-Quote™ official site many are shocked at the results they find. Most just cannot believe that the available rates are in fact real, but the truth is rates have dropped significantly over the past 12 months and thanks to new program policies it's now easy to save up to 50% with rates as low as $29/month.
Jessica Wagner, the authority on everything related to insurance, set out to do some research and determine whether these types of services live up to their reputations. After several weeks Jessica was able to report back on her findings, with her most exciting of which being that she is now going to save $296.28 on her own insurance premiums over the next year, and there are many other people who have done the same and better.
So, what is the "One New Rule?" NEVER buy insurance without comparing all of the discounts online first.
Does this mean Jessica was being overcharged by her former insurance agent? She would not say one way or the other, but the truth is most agents are paid on commission which means the higher your insurance premiums, the more money your agent makes. You can be sure, however, that your insurance company is not going to call you up to offer you a discount.

Note: You're NEVER LOCKED into your current policy. If you've already paid your current policy, you can very easily cancel and the balance will be refunded.

With average savings of 32%, these online services are gaining massive popularity. One of the most trusted, secure and effective free online service that provides drivers with lower insurance rates is US-Quote™. Over 1,000,000 U.S. drivers have already trusted US-Quote to get significant discounts.

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Everyone is busy and no one has spare time. That’s the story we tell ourselves and others. Between work, family life, listening to podcasts, and more work, we hardly have time to sleep, let alone exercise. But we need it now more than ever. Our jobs have us sitting at our desks hours a day, and our commutes mean we’re in a car or on the bus for another hour. So how do you find time for fitness?The answer is simply to make it a priority—and look for small windows to squeeze it in. You don’t stop eating because you’re too busy (at least not for long), so why stop working out? The good news is that it’s not that hard to fit in more exercise, you just need to set yourself up to make it easy. Here are a few ideas.
Run or bike to work
This one’s a no-brainer. It hardly adds any time to your schedule, since you’re simply substituting running or biking for a car or bus commute. If you live within six miles (10 kilometres) of your office, why not try running home, or biking both ways, one day a week? If you’re a jogger, just bring your shoes and running clothes on Monday and pick the first day that works. Don’t think you can run the whole way? Try taking the bus halfway, then jog the rest. Each week, get off the bus a bit further from home. You’ll get home energized and ready for a hearty, healthy meal.
Walk to get your groceries
How far do you live from a grocery store? If it’s within a mile or two, why not walk there and back? You’ll get some fresh air, exercise from the walk and from carrying groceries, and you’ll probably spend less money, since you won’t want to carry too much.
Try body weight exercises
You don’t need a lot of expensive equipment to work out, you just need yourself. There is a lot of science around the benefits of high-intensity circuit training using only your body’s weight as resistance, doing exercises such as pushups, planks, squats and lunges. If you can carve out 20 minutes at a time, you can put together a serious workout that costs nothing and can be done from your living room.
Join a team
Can’t do it alone? No sweat. Joining a team or a club that gets together on a regular schedule is a great way to motivate you to prioritize exercise. Maybe it’s a pickup soccer game on weekends, or a badminton group at a community centre at lunchtime during the week. Most cities have running clubs for people of all levels. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you commit to being there. Putting a bit of money on the table to join will probably help keep you motivated to keep at it.
There are so many ways to fit in more fitness. Other tactics include keeping a spare set of workout gear in your car or at your desk. And get a fitness app to track your sessions—it’ll inspire you to keep at it. Above all, stop telling yourself that you don’t have time to exercise. You may have to dig for it a bit, but it’s there.

Diving in with Natalie Coughlin

Posted by Kevin Day | August 10, 2015

It’s only been three months since I first met Natalie in her hometown of Lafayette, CA and in this short time, she’s managed to break a new American Record in swimming and land the cover of ESPN’s coveted 2015 Body Issue. She was also in Toronto competing in the Pan Am Games, where she broke a Pan Am Games record in 100 free. I can’t wait to see what’s next for Natalie.

With a competitive swimming career that spans 26 years, she’s a 12-time Olympic and 20-time World Championship medalist, and is one medal shy of becoming the most decorated American female Olympic athlete in history. Not afraid to try new things like being a contestant on Dancing with the Stars, Natalie is a go-getter in every aspect of her life and “mediocre” just doesn’t exist for her. So when we heard that Natalie was impressed by our enchiladas and burritos and that she wanted to be a part of Luvo, we knew she was going to be all in. Within days, our team was on a flight to California to meet her at one of her favorite local restaurants, Gather.
“Growing up in a family where we always had home-cooked meals together, food is a big part of who I am,” Natalie tells us. “I really started focusing on nutrition at the age of 13, when I began eating at the cafeteria of the Olympic Training Center. Everything was so healthy but still tasty, and I could feel it was making a difference in how I felt and performed in the pool.”

Today, at the age of 33, Natalie’s training is more intense than ever as she aims for the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics and pushes through a diagnosis of scoliosis – she says good nutrition is what fuels every stroke.
Before her 6 AM start, she has a big breakfast including steel cut oats, eggs and toast. Then, she re-energizes and recovers with a green smoothie, hard-boiled egg and toast before her second practice that starts around noon.
“The most transformational change in my diet was when I started focusing on recovery food in college. With the right protein, carbs and good fats, my body was able to recover so much faster.” Natalie says she’s currently in a ‘Cherry-Almond phase’ for her recovery smoothies, which includes frozen dark cherries, almond milk, half a frozen banana, chia seeds and vanilla protein.
At home, Natalie lives with her husband, Ethan, and her two dogs – a Border Terrier and an American Bulldog. Just like her mom, Natalie nurtures a food culture in the home.
“I first started growing my own herb garden on the fire escape!” Natalie laughs as she remembers her college days at University of California-Berkeley. “It started out as a way to save money, because herbs can get expensive and you can never use it all up – but I fell in love with the process of growing.”
Natalie’s now created an urban farm just outside her home with six vegetable beds, a dozen citrus and fig trees, as well as eight chickens for fresh eggs. In true Slow Food fashion, she even makes pasta and sausages from scratch. Her long-term goal is to publish her own cooking and lifestyle book.
Though food and swimming are totally different in nature, I’m starting to notice that Natalie approaches them in a similar way – with passion, commitment and patience, which she describes as ‘innate stubbornness.’
“I’ve always been strong-willed, competitive and confident…even when I don’t think I should’ve been,” Natalie admits. “Luckily, my parents pushed me into sports!”

The message she wants to send out to athletes and non-athletes alike is to ‘trust in the process.’ “The obstacles and challenges you face along the way are just as, or more important than the successes,” she explains. “Now looking back at my injuries and other setbacks, I know it’s what made me a stronger, more well-rounded person.”
“Taking care of my body with the right nutrition, training and recovery has allowed me to have a long and competitive career. I’m so excited to join Luvo to help educate and inspire the next generation of athletes and youth to respect their bodies, so they can reach their full potential.

A vulnerable group