World Ocean Radio - Technology
This week we are discussing two technological innovations—both bright ideas that could have huge impacts for useful, sustainable change for the future. The first is WaterCube, a machine that pulls vapor from the air and condenses it into liquid form for household use and disaster relief; the second is Sway Seaweed Packaging, a farmed seaweed application designed to create a compostable packaging that is biodegradable and chemical free.
Seafood is a world staple, under siege by increased consumption and over-fishing. Aquaculture is the necessary alternative, yet is a polarizing issue in coastal communities. What are we to do? This week we explore two Maine-based successes in aquaculture that are building local supply chains, increasing resilience in rural communities, promoting environmentally responsible solutions, and integrating indigenous and cultural knowledge and skills for an emerging industry.
The sun is the greatest energy source available for our needs, thought we view it more today as an enemy than a resource and friend. If we are to accept the sun as the solution rather than the problem, how do we capture its enormous energy potential at scale? This week on World Ocean Radio we explore some encouraging progress, from individual to collaborative to collective, to public and private and political, as a means to design a practical response to enable the possibility of accelerated change.
Over the next few editions of World Ocean Radio we will be discussing a recent publication entitled “A Forgotten Element in the Blue Economy: Marine Biomimetics and Inspiration from the Deep Sea,” authored by Robert Blasiak from the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden. The article identifies seven broad categories of biomimetic design: adhesion, anti-fouling, armor, buoyancy, movement, sensory, and stealth. In this 3-part series we'll discuss each with examples of application, technological invention, and as effective solution models for response to negative human intervention and climate change, and for ocean protection and conservation.
This week the multi-part RESCUE series continues with an examination of familiar products derived from the ocean that we use to support our ways of life, our well-being and our health: from vitamins and supplements to pain and cancer treatments. And we discuss the future of exploration and exploitation of resources as the bio-prospecting rush heats up. How are we regulating extraction from the ocean and seafloor? Who owns the proprietary rights to marine resources, and what criteria are applied to protect biodiversity, ocean ecosystems and future resource potential to revolutionize medicine and treat disease?
RESCUE as an acronym offers a plan for specific action and public participation: Renewal, Environment, Society, Collaboration, Understanding, and Engagement.
This week the multi-part RESCUE series continues with an advancement of the sub-theme of technology. We're talking about the pitfalls of modern agriculture, examples of sustainable fisheries, and the innovative ways that we might farm the marine environment that positively impact human health and have a regenerative, sustainable response to our harvest and use. RESCUE as an acronym offers a plan for specific action and public participation: Renewal, Environment, Society, Collaboration, Understanding, and Engagement.
This week we continue the multi-part RESCUE series with the topic of seafood consumption. While more than 3 billion people worldwide rely on wild-caught and farmed seafood as a significant source of animal protein, unsustainable and illegally caught seafood harvest threatens a major health crisis if we do not confront the issue through regulation and enforcement of best practice, change in social behavior and consumption, and new technological innovations toward a sustainable future.
This week we continue the multi-part RESCUE series with defined programs and relationships that apply technologies toward public good, such as a universal grid system, battery generation and storage, desalination, and better understanding of natural systems and our relationship to them. RESCUE as an acronym offers a plan for specific action and public participation: Renewal, Environment, Society, Collaboration, Understanding, and Engagement.
This week we continue the multi-part RESCUE series with a discussion of alternative energy solutions, battery technology, geothermal energy production, and the adaptation of existing at-sea platforms and rigs to capture energy from the ocean as a less-polluting, renewed, refit utility, taking an old technology and transforming it into a new solution for our energy future. RESCUE as an acronym offers a plan for specific action and public participation: Renewal, Environment, Society, Collaboration, Understanding, and Engagement.
This week on World Ocean Radio we're talking about the circulation of water worldwide, and the importance of canals and waterways to bring us together and sustain us into the future.
Sea level rise is changing the agricultural landscape around the world. Fortunately, saltwater irrigation has been studied for decades, and experiments and research have grown and demonstrated the viability of some plants such as halophytes that have the potential to change our conventional food landscape. In this episode we explore questions related to salt-water irrigation such as: what types of new crops can be developed for sustainable harvest, and what techniques can be invented to succeed without additional environmental damage?
Visualization is a powerful tool for understanding beyond data, opening our minds and enabling transformative change through a new way of seeing. This week we're discussing the Spilhaus World Ocean Map, a projection of earth centered on Antarctica that makes the ocean the focus of an astonishing worldview, pushing the land to the outer edges of the square and re-organizing our global geography around the true natural systems of the world ocean.
This week on World Ocean Radio: part twelve of the multi-part BLUEprint series. As we embark on our collective quest for a sustainable future, we argue that we must embrace science and technology as the essential tools for defining problems and imagining the multiple possibilities for solutions, innovations and alternatives that will provide us with a new way forward.
Ships have long been used for exploration and trade, as well as for colonial expansion and conflicts at sea. We are using technological achievement to advance global influence, and the rules of engagement are ever-changing. In this week's episode of World Ocean Radio we share new technologies that accelerate sub-sea activities, some of the new technological achievements now being deployed, and the ways that the underwater zone is being used for offensive and defensive strategies in the modern age.
Ocean technologies and exploration are expanding at a remarkable pace, giving scientists and casual observers more data by which to learn more about ocean systems, fish migrations, fisheries management, physics, biochemistry, weather, climate, ecosystems, and much more. In this week's episode of World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill examines sail drones, an emerging technology that offers ocean data collection that is flexible, cost effective, easily recoverable, easy to maintain, and re-programmable at sea.
This week on World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill introduces podcast listeners to WORLD OCEAN EXPLORER: an ambitious new project to create a free virtual aquarium and ocean exploration experience centered around STEM-based ocean literacy for students ages 10 and up. And he invites all listeners to share in the construction of this project by investing in its future today.
In this week's episode of World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill outlines some of the various applications of the oft-times controversial artificial intelligence technologies employed at sea. And he asserts that since the ocean is a place of connection, we should be thinking of digital platforms as a way to design and integrate global systems for a successful and sustainable future.
In this episode of World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill shares a technology first developed by a team of scientists from MIT and UC Berkeley that could radically change the world by mitigating the global water crisis.
