Ben Fox
@ben-fox.bsky.social
Agriculture science engineering soil water mycology cybernetics !Canberra Australia! He/Him
To carry 50,000 people per hour in each direction, a city needs a 175m wide road for cars. Even if those cars are electric. And then there’s all the parking. OR a city can move A LOT MORE people in a lot less space, with A LOT LESS public money, emissions, pollution, noise etc. Choices. Simple.
Pornainen, Finland (pop 5,000) is now heated by a silo of crushed soapstone. I spoke to CNBC about it. 100 MWh, charged when power is cheap, emissions down ~70%. Days to weeks of storage, no critical minerals. www.cnbc.com/2026/07/25/f...
Finland’s radical answer to renewable energy’s biggest headache: The world’s largest sand battery
A small Finnish town has turned to the world's largest commercial sand battery to tackle a major hurdle in the energy transition: intermittency.
cnbc.com
#Switzerland is installing #solarpanels on the sides of mountains — and the results are rewriting everything engineers thought they knew about alpine energy production. Switzerland is not fighting its mountains. It is turning them into power stations. #renewables #solarpower #ActOnClimate
What they don't teach you about heatwaves: It's not just heat. It's: • Your crops dying • Your river drying (Rhine is low again, disrupting shipping) • Your lungs burning from wildfire smoke • Your power grid collapsing It's everything at once.
Japan has perfected a revolutionary process to extract lithium from dead batteries with 90% recovery rate. This brilliant technological leap guarantees Japan's absolute economic security.
No need to seed: restoring former arable land to species‐rich grassland by mowing & natural regeneration over 18 years. Paper published today by myself, with my amazing 86 year old father & farmer Derek Sayer. A visit to the meadow is like stepping back through time. doi.org/10.1111/rec.70487
There is a LOT of attention for soil health, especially in agricultural systems, but there is very little awareness of the value of intact, undisturbed, native soils. Here, I argue that applying the old-growth concept to soils will help their protection. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A company that makes a no-tech, repairable tractor is having trouble keeping up with demand from farmers sick of John Deere's repair monopoly and simply want a tractor that turns on and works: www.404media.co/demand-is-bo...
Demand Is Booming for New No Tech, Repairable Tractor
"There is consumer pressure to back away from technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks."
404media.co
As global (electric) energy generation looks to become decentralised and regionalised, can we reimagine? - human-soil-ecology landscape scale energy systems - hyperlocal bio weather optimisation - new paradigms of primary production www.canarymedia.com/articles/bat...
The world is installing grid batteries at a blistering pace
A total of 112 gigawatts of batteries were deployed around the world in 2025 — 10 times the amount added just four years prior.
canarymedia.com
"the dramatic cost declines in batteries have now made 'firm renewables' — solar or wind paired with batteries — cheaper than fossil fuels in many parts of the world." This is game changing.
Solar plus batteries cheaper than gas — IRENA report - Gas Outlook
A new IRENA report finds that 24/7 “firm” clean energy is cheaper than coal and gas in many parts of the world.
gasoutlook.com
"'vegan models' - LLMs that are trained entirely on licensed or out-of-copyright data" #jargon *Talking to "Talkie" feels like reading an obsessively detailed historical novel where the author doesn't know that history exists talkie1930.click
Talkie 1930 - Vintage AI Chat From Pre-1931 Knowledge
Chat with Talkie 1930, a vintage AI model shaped by books, newspapers, patents, journals, and reference works published before 1931.
talkie1930.click
Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · 3mo agoSome notes on talkie, a new "vintage language model" from a team including Alec Radford (yes, that Alec Radford) "trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text" simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/28/...
This robot installs 80 panels/hour. One every 45 sec. 1,920/day ≈ 0.0008 GW/day per line. Sounds small. It’s not. Scale this across thousands of lines and #solar becomes manufacturing, not construction. 👉 10,000 lines = 8 GW/day. That’s HOW China is winning the energy game.
Norwegian fish farms polluting fjords with waste likened to ‘raw sewage of millions of people’
Norwegian fish farms polluting fjords with waste likened to ‘raw sewage of millions of people’
Exclusive: ‘Fish sludge’ in coastal waters now has nutrient levels equivalent to those in untreated effluent of country the size of Australia, report finds Norwegian fish farms are filling fjords and other coastal waters with nutrient pollution equivalent to the raw sewage of tens of millions of people each year, a report has found. Norway is the largest farmed salmon producer in the world, and nutrients in fish feed are excreted directly into coastal waters. Analysis from the Sunstone Institute found that Norwegian aquaculture released 75,000 tonnes of nitrogen, 13,000 tonnes of phosphorus and 360,000 tonnes of organic carbon in 2025. Continue reading...
theguardian.com
"When I use cocaine, I'm convinced that all my dumb ideas are genius" Yup, it works!
Sure, cocaine has a few downsides but people experience increased productivity when they start with it and the number of repeat users is expanding so fast!
Greg Pak@gregpak.net · 3mo agoTrying out a new metaphor: "A.i." = cocaine. Cocaine is inevitable! Cocaine can enhance your creativity! Cocaine can make us all faster and more efficient! If your kid doesn't learn how to use cocaine, they'll get left behind!
Chinese researchers have created a bamboo-based plastic as strong as petroleum-based plastics, which can fully biodegrade in soil in just 2 months phys.org/news/2025-10...
Bamboo-based plastic can be made to biodegrade quickly, but still holds up in tough conditions
A new method to produce strong, biodegradable plastic from bamboo is reported in Nature Communications this week. The bioplastic resembles oil-based plastics in strength, shapability, and thermal stab...
phys.org
Santiago theory of cognition: the simplest radical claim in biology. Living systems are cognitive systems. Period. No brain required. Cognition is what an organism does when it maintains itself in relation to its environment. Every cell cognizes. What's the objection that holds up?
Rewilding Britain’s monitoring guidance for rewilding projects is now published Covering ecological, social & economic aspects & reflecting the dynamic, open-ended nature of rewilding I’m pleased to have helped develop this www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/about-us/wha...
The Rewilding Monitoring Framework
We’ve developed Britain’s first framework for monitoring rewilding progress, demonstrating its vital role in creating ecological, social and economic…
rewildingbritain.org.uk
Oh my God this is amazing
Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D.@sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 5mo agoReady to supply ~100 cyclists w/seed bombs for our city's abandoned lots at tonight's @wednightrides.org! They contain 6-7 species of native plant seeds to juice up the biodiversity of our city, incl. Ironweed Echinacea Partidge Pea Bee Balm Blue Vervain Blackeyed Susan Swamp Milkweed (sometimes)
STUDY: Despite conventional wisdom that increases in vehicle fuel efficiency results in decreased gasoline consumption, Jevons’ Paradox holds. For every 1 mile per gallon of increased fuel efficiency there’s an associated 1.2 mile increase in vehicle miles travelled. Better cars = higher emissions.
Vehicle fuel economy and vehicle miles traveled: An empirical investigation of Jevon’s Paradox
There has been, in recent decades, a concerted effort to promote energy efficiency as a means to reduce energy consumption. The general thesis is that…
sciencedirect.com
I agree, but surely other species can also have ideas about species abundance? Ants like lots of aphids for symbiosis for example. Seems like all the practice of cognition and worlding
James Bullock@jmbecologist.bsky.social · 5mo agoToo many deer, pigeons or badgers? There is not a natural abundance any species should have & the idea of too many (or too few) is a human one, based on our values & needs
Restored Peatlands Could Become Carbon Sinks Within Decades eos.org/articles/res...
Restored Peatlands Could Become Carbon Sinks Within Decades - Eos
That’s much faster than what most scientists thought.
eos.org
The new political focus on nature security Looks a lot like Survival Ecology, in essence Although Government still needs to make the leap in their thinking to the acknowledge the radical action needed www.frontiersin.org/journals/con...
Frontiers | In the Climate Emergency, Conservation Must Become Survival Ecology
•Earth faces a climate emergency which renders conservation goals largely obsolete.•Current conservation actions are inadequate because they i) underplay bio...
frontiersin.org
Huh, who would have thought? “the role of small-scale farmers in national food consumption has been substantially underestimated, particularly in high-income nations, where small farms account for about a third of consumption.”
Thank you for your resilience, your persistent brilliance...it transformed how the world navigates & understands our planet. Your work touches nearly every modern device & journey and more people should know your name. Goodnight and godspeed, Gladys West.🕯️ thezebra.org/2026/01/18/d... #WomenInSTEM
Dr. Gladys West, Mathematician Whose Work Made GPS Possible, Dies at 95
ALEXANDRIA, VA — Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She passed away
thezebra.org
