Motherboard: This Giant Vertical Farming Robot Is Coming For Your Crops

In 2011, the number of people on Earth passed 7 billion and by 2050 that number is expected to jump up to almost 10 billion. Aside from trying to feed all these people, we'll still need to feed livestock as well (at least given current dietary needs and preferences). One efficient way to do this is through vertical farming—growing plants on trays indoors, which has the advantage of using far less space than traditional farming. But even this requires lots of human labor and equipment that farmers and ranchers can't always afford.

Enter California agricultural tech company FodderWorks (a division of Simply Country, Inc). FodderWorks has created a fully automated robotic fodder-growing system that can produce daily quantities of fresh, non-genetically-modified food for livestock. It takes a system that already greatly reduces water and land use, and maximizes it even further, by making it faster. You can watch the robot work in a dramatic video posted by Fodder Works on YouTube (above). It’s like Ridley Scott’s take on ag-tech. [...]

The most commonly used grain to make fodder is barley, because of its high nutrient content, and its availability (it’s also the most popular grain for brewing beer). “Really any type of cereal grain can sprout in the system,” FodderWorks General Manager Kyle Chittock told Motherboard in a phone conversation. “But just from a nutritional standpoint, barley works very well for all types of livestock and actually if you look at research on growing sprouts for human consumption, barley is one of the healthiest things out there. A superfood.” [...]

Chittock contends that FodderWorks' robotic system isn’t taking away from any jobs, because this type of feed production simply hasn’t been done before. He also pointed out that not only can many individual farmers not afford to employ a large workforce just to create animal feed, but in fact, the robotic fodder system “allows our customers to be more efficient so they can grow their businesses, which in turn creates even more agricultural jobs,” Chittock said. “We sell a product with a benefit to the consumer,” he continued “which in turn employs a manufacturing team to assemble a product, employs the steel supplier, aluminum suppliers, the irrigation companies we buy parts from, electronics companies, designers, marketers, and numerous others.”

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Motherboard: The Ukrainian Power Grid Was Hacked Again

An investigation into a power outage that left customers in Ukraine without electricity for an hour last month has concluded that the cause was indeed a cyberattack, sources tell Motherboard. This would be the second such known hack of a Ukrainian power facility following a massive December 2015 power outage affecting about 230,000 people, which was later blamed on the Russian government.

The more recent attack occurred at a transmission facility, as opposed to the 2015 attack that affected a distribution facility, and was not as far-reaching (although it could have been much worse—as disruptions to a transmission facility could impact a wider area than distribution facilities). But taken together, the implications of both attacks and a series of other breaches around Ukraine suggest that someone, or various individuals, may be using the country as a testbed for refining attacks on critical infrastructure that could be used across the world. [...]

UkrEnergo, the national power company that oversees the Pivnichna substation and others, told customers after this last outage that it was unclear if it was the result of hackers or equipment failure, but the researchers say there is now no question it was the result of an intrusion. [...]

Krotofil says the latest attack began as part of a massive phishing campaign that occurred last July and targeted many government organizations. Wherever they were successful in getting in, the attackers sat on systems silently for months conducting reconnaissance before making their presence known in a series of events that occurred in December.

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The Conversation: Do art and literature cultivate empathy?

Research by Cambridge University psychologists reveals five dimensions on which our preferences vary. People high on the “dark” dimension enjoy intense and edgy genres such as punk and metal music, horror movies and erotic fiction.

Those whose preferences are captured by the “thrilling” dimension enjoy action movies, adventure fiction and sci-fi. “Cerebral” people are drawn to news and current events, documentaries, educational programming and non-fiction.

And highly empathic people are most likely to have entertainment preferences that match the two remaining dimensions: “communal” and “aesthetic”.

Communal preferences focus on people and relationships, including a fondness for TV talk-shows, dramas and romantic movies, and popular music. Aesthetic preferences are more highbrow, running to classical music, arts and history programs and independent and subtitled movies.

The fact these two quite distinct sorts of cultural genres appeal to empathic individuals speaks to the dual character of empathy. On the one hand it leads people to take an interest in the familiar everyday dramas of social interaction. On the other, it draws us into an imaginative engagement with minds, experiences and worlds that are different from our own. [...]

In each of Kidd and Castano’s studies, people who had just read literary fiction performed better on the empathy measures. The researchers argued that any general empathy-promoting function of fiction could not explain this benefit, as it was restricted to literary rather than popular fiction. Instead, they argued, literary fiction facilitates empathy by inducing readers to take “an active writerly role” in understanding the mental lives of the characters.

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Political Critique: Bauman will stay near

Zygmunt Bauman’s work has always been defined by intellectual courage and audacity. Whether he was writing about the sociology of knowledge in 1960s or about consumption in the 1990s, he always related his analysis to the great themes of social thought: emancipation and alienation, autonomy and domination, identity and otherness. The importance of his books came from his ability to combine sensitivity and focus on concrete things with a talent for building big narratives about freedom, modernity and hopes for gaining control over reality. When one adds to that his lucid and beautiful language, it’s easy to understand why not only was he a renowned academic but also a popular writer to whom people turned for explanation of how their individual problems connect with collective fate.

For me, three things settle the issue of Bauman’s uniqueness in contemporary thought. First, it’s his reflection upon the unintended consequences of social projects. Second, it’s his analysis of postmodernity as a system of exclusions and third, his attempt at founding an ethics of “nonavoidance”. [...]

Although the author of “Legislators and Interpreters” had the label of a postmodern thinker and many thought of his work as affirming modernity as a fulfilled utopia of individualist choice, similar to that found in the work of Anthony Giddens, one has to remember that Bauman was a consistent critic of postmodernity. He noticed that the basic mechanism of reproduction in contemporary societies is consumption and seduction, and not ideology and sanctions, but that at the same time the system produces social exclusion and domination. The homeless, the poor, the “flawed consumers”, the refugees, the illegal migrants. Bauman gave a place in public debate to the outcasts of postmodern times, the people uprooted from their communities by global capitalism and pestered people’s conscience by showing them that their individual welfare has its dark side and a price paid by other people.

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Quartz: The biggest divide between African Muslims and Christians isn’t their religion

In many countries across sub-Saharan Africa, Muslim and Christian communities coexist side by side. But a huge gap exists between them when it comes to educational attainment, with African Christians more than twice as likely to have formal schooling than their Muslim counterparts, a Pew Research Center study shows.

The study, which looked at the number of years of schooling both groups received based on age and gender, showed that 65% of Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa had no formal education—the highest anywhere in the world. By contrast, 30% of Christians in the region had not enrolled or completed any form or level of schooling. [...]

Christianity and Islam are the two dominant religions in sub-Saharan Africa, together accounting for more than 93% of the population. Given the dropping child mortality and high fertility rates in the region, much of the worldwide growth of Islam and Christianity is expected to take place there in the coming decades. By 2050, for instance, four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa. [...]

Overall, achievements among the younger population are growing at a pace better than those from older generations, with those with one or more years of primary schooling doubling from 21% to 43%. The younger generation of Muslim women is also making educational gains, with those with no formal schooling dropping from 87% among the 55-74 year-olds to 65% among those between the ages 25-34. In countries where Muslims are a minority, like Burundi, Rwanda and South Africa, they have also attained more formal education than Christians in relation to their population size.

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Vox: This plane could cross the Atlantic in 3.5 hours. Why did it fail?

Al Jazeera: What does it mean to be literate in the 21st century?

More than 260 million children and adolescents remain out of school, and it is estimated that at least 250 million more are in school but not learning. The challenge of getting all children in school and learning is immense.

To address this, world leaders committed in 2016 to "ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes" by 2030 in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

But what is quality learning in increasingly connected and rapidly evolving information and technology-dominated economy? What is it that children need to be learning now to be literate and ready for the jobs of the future, and how do we build systems designed to deliver this?

First, we must stop undermining the systems we have. This starts with financing. At a global level the retreat of financing for education, particularly in the poorest settings over the past decade, has been staggering. Perhaps most notably, rich country donors underfunded the Global Partnership for Education - which focuses on the poorest and most vulnerable children and youth in developing countries - by more than $1bn in 2014. Since 2010, 13 African countries have had their basic education aid cut, some drastically. [...]

In some countries job loss could be as much as 80 percent. Globally, 40 percent of employers already report difficulty recruiting people with the right skills. The answer to preparing the world for change of this magnitude isn't small-scale innovation classroom by classroom. It's a well-financed systemic revolution prioritising building strong national systems with well-trained and compensated teachers.

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Motherboard: All of Las Vegas’s City-Owned Buildings Now Run on Renewable Energy

Las Vegas’s city-owned buildings and other public infrastructure are now entirely powered by renewable energy as of December, including about 48,000 streetlamps, lights inside City Hall and power at city parks, Las Vegas spokesman Jace Radke said.

“The move to renewable energy has been seamless,” Mayor Carolyn G. Goodman said in a statement. “The city of Las Vegas has long been a leader in sustainability, and becoming the first large city in the country to rely on 100 percent renewable energy [for city-owned buildings] is an incredible accomplishment that sets a great example for our residents and businesses.”

Of course, the restaurants, casinos and homes in Las Vegas still mostly get their power from plants that run on traditional fossil fuels. Nevada as a whole relies heavily on gas and coal for its power generation—63.9 percent of its energy comes from petroleum, and 18.2 percent comes from coal. About 18 percent of the state’s energy comes from renewable sources like geothermal, solar and hydroelectric energy, according to Colorado State University/The Nature Conservancy’s energy tracking tool.

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Atlas Obscura: In Austria, Zoo Elephants Eat Leftover Christmas Trees

Every year at Christmas, a giant tree towers outside of Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, impressing guests and glowing gently in the night.

And every year after Christmas, employees take the lights off the tree, chop it into pieces, and feed it to the local elephants.

This year’s tree officially became a snack yesterday morning, the Local reports. The Schönbrunn Palace pachyderms shuffled out of their enclosure and began happily munching on the remains of the 18-foot spruce.

Used to punier plants, the animals seemed excited at the opportunity to eat something bigger than they are. “It is really something extraordinary for them, because it takes them quite a while to get through such a large portion,” keeper Andreas Buberl said.

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