Environment

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Agrivoltaics: combining solar panel farms with agricultural farms

“Many of us want more renewable energy, but where do you put all of those panels? As solar installations grow, they tend to be out on the edges of cities, and this is historically where we have already been growing our food,”

“We started to ask, ‘Why not do both in the same place?’ And we have been growing crops like tomatoes, peppers, chard, kale, and herbs in the shade of solar panels ever since.”

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Plastic Bag Found at the Bottom of World’s Deepest Ocean Trench

A recent study revealed that a plastic bag, like the kind given away at grocery stores, is now the deepest known piece of plastic trash, found at a depth of 36,000 feet inside the Mariana Trench. Scientists found it by looking through the Deep-Sea Debris Database, a collection of photos and videos taken from 5,010 dives over the past 30 years that was recently made public.

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The fate of the banana

And since the fungus can’t be killed, it’s likely only a matter of time before it lands in Latin America, where some more than three-fifths of the planet’s exported bananas are grown. In other words, the days of the iconic yellow fruit are numbered.

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Giant squid babies.

“The fisherman who caught it and the aquarium staff didn’t know they were looking at a giant squid baby,” Wada, a cephalopod expert at the Institute of Natural and Environmental Sciences at the University of Hyogo in Japan, told me.

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Want to take a North American 365-day road trip where the average temp will always be 21c?

Imagine that you really like days where the high temperature is 70°F and you wanted to plan a road trip where the temperature always hovers around 70°F. Well, I have done the planning for you. Since you cannot know what the temperature will be more than a week in advance (the current limit of decent forecasts), you have to go with Plan B; that is, look in a climate almanac. The go-to climate almanac for United States data is published by the National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI). The daily normal high temperature is computed for over 8,000 stations all across the United States. In addition, Environment Canada publishes monthly normals for stations across the great north. (Note: “normal” is a technical term that refers to a smoothed average for a 30-year period. It is close to an arithmetic average but not exactly the same.)