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Tag: planet earth

  • How future food domes could change the way you eat

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    A futuristic food dome at Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai offered a surprising look at how cities may grow fresh food close to home.

    Inspired by a classic greenhouse, the Inochi no Izumi or Source of Life dome showed how a compact closed-loop ecosystem could sit on rooftops or in small urban spaces. It looked like a tiny house full of produce powered by nature.

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    LIVING IN GIANT MOON GLASS SPHERES COULD BE OUR FUTURE

    This dome creates a full food ecosystem by recycling water and nutrients in a closed loop. (VikingDome)

    Inside the Source of Life dome

    The 21-foot structure sits on a base with four water zones that support marine fish, brackish species and freshwater species. Their waste creates the nutrients that feed the plant layers above. Microbes convert ammonia into nitrates that plants love.

    Above the tanks are four hydroponic tiers. Salt-tolerant greens grow over the seawater tank. Tomatoes and semi-salt-tolerant veggies thrive in the brackish zone. Herbs and lettuce sit above freshwater species like sturgeon. Edible flowers fill the top layer where sunlight hits strongest. The layout functions like an ecological slice from ocean to land instead of floors.

    Transparent ETFE panels pull in light and help the dome keep a stable climate. Water pumps send nutrients upward and then return clean water to each tank. The loop creates almost no waste and keeps cycling with little input.

    BEEF INDUSTRY SLAMS LAB-GROWN HYBRID MEAT AS SCIENTISTS PROMISE GREENER STEAKS

    A food dome being built

    Plants grow in stacked hydroponic layers that match the salinity zones of the aquatic life below. (VikingDome)

    How cities may use systems like this

    If these domes scale, cities could spread food production across many rooftops instead of one large farm. That shift boosts resilience and reduces shipping. It also lets people see where their food comes from because it grows within reach.

    Why this Dome matters

    The dome shows how biodiversity can improve food production. With more plant and aquatic species working together, the system stays stable and feeds itself. It does not rely on soil, open land or predictable weather. Cities with tight spaces can use this kind of setup to grow food right where people live.

    Researchers from Osaka Metropolitan University and the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology designed the system to copy nature. It follows the same recycling found in healthy wetlands. By letting biology do the work, the system reduces strain on land and water.

    A food dome

    The system shows how cities may produce fresh food on rooftops and small urban spaces. (VikingDome)

    What this means for you

    This model hints at a future where fresh food sits closer to your kitchen. A dome like this could sit on an apartment building or a school and provide herbs, produce and edible flowers. It cuts travel time from farm to table and gives communities more control over their food supply.

    If a storm or disaster blocks access to farms, a closed-loop dome can keep growing. For people with tiny yards or no soil, it offers a realistic way to produce clean food in small spaces.

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    Kurt’s key takeaways

    The Source of Life dome may be a prototype, but it delivers a vivid preview of urban food production. It combines architecture, ecology and aquaculture in a compact package that uses every drop of water. If future cities adopt systems like this, access to fresh food could improve for millions.

    Would you trust a rooftop food dome to supply part of your meals each week? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.

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    Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on “FOX & Friends.” Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

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  • A Planet Inside a Planet? Traces of Pre-Moon Earth Found Deep Below

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    If proto-Earth had all its parts and chemistry replaced to become the Earth we know today, can the two still be considered the same planet? That’s the planetary version of Theseus’s Paradox, an old philosophical puzzle about identity and perception. The popular consensus until recently was that Earth’s chemistry changed completely after a giant meteorite impact, leaving nothing behind from its proto-Earth days.

    A new finding suggests that conception may be wrong. In a Nature Geoscience paper published earlier this week, researchers report detecting a chemical signature that appears to have miraculously resisted change for billions of years. Specifically, the team—an international collaboration between the U.S., China, and Switzerland—found an odd imbalance of potassium isotopes in ancient rock samples. Chemical analyses revealed the anomaly couldn’t have emerged from any known geological processes on modern Earth.

    Theseus’s planet?

    Planetary scientists have long suspected that a Mars-sized meteorite slammed into Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. The impact triggered a literal, astronomical makeover, transforming what was once a rocky, lava-filled environment into the Earth we know today.

    The general understanding was that, over time, whatever materials or processes formed proto-Earth either transformed or were replaced by ones more familiar to researchers today. It was, of course, a reasonable explanation: that the “resetting” of Earth’s chemistry miraculously created the conditions that eventually led to life.

    A potassium anomaly

    Naturally, scientists are still hoping to learn more about our planet’s earliest days. For the new paper, the authors zoomed in on potassium. On Earth, the common element normally exists in a specific combination of potassium-39 and potassium-41, with a tiny portion of potassium-40.

    Previous work by the study’s lead authors, however, showed that extraterrestrial objects—such as meteorites—have distinct potassium profiles, typically with a slightly higher proportion of potassium-40.

    Building on this knowledge, the team dug deep into the oldest available rocks on Earth, such as powdered rocks from Greenland and Canada and lava deposits in Hawaii. At the lab, they ran the samples through various techniques in analytical chemistry.

    Surprisingly, the potassium profile they ended up with was unlike anything researchers had ever seen—neither on Earth nor in cosmic objects. In fact, the “deficit” of potassium-41 was so bizarre that spotting it was “like spotting a single grain of brown sand in a bucket rather than a scoop full of yellow sand,” the researchers told MIT News.

    An ongoing mystery

    Was there really no feasible, natural way for this chemistry to have emerged? Multiple simulations and follow-up investigations of all known meteorites and geological processes seemed to point to the same answer: no. According to the paper, the most viable explanation for this material’s existence is that it was left over from proto-Earth.

    “This is maybe the first direct evidence that we’ve preserved the proto-Earth materials,” Nicole Nie, study co-lead author and a planetary scientist at MIT, explained to MIT News. “We see a piece of the very ancient Earth, even before the giant impact. This is amazing because we would expect this very early signature to be slowly erased through Earth’s evolution.”

    That said, we may as well end up finding something, like an odd meteorite, with the same potassium anomaly, in which case the signature wouldn’t necessarily be the surviving remnants of proto-Earth.

    Either way, the findings demonstrate that there’s still a lot for us to learn about our own Earth—lessons that, perhaps, may guide us away from any missteps we’re making while studying things beyond Earth.

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  • Massive comet zooming through solar system could be alien technology, Harvard astrophysicist says

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    A comet traveling outside the solar system and heading toward the Earth is much larger than scientists first believed, a scientist has detailed in a new report.

    Avi Loeb claims the comet could even be an artifact of alien technology rather than a natural body because it weighs more than 33 billion tons and spans at least 3.1 miles across.

    The object, named 3I/ATLAS, is only the third interstellar visitor ever detected, after Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. 

    SCIENTISTS DISCOVER ANCIENT RADIO SIGNALS FROM DISTANT GALAXY CLUSTER

    Astronomers discovered an unusual object entered our solar system earlier this month, but a Harvard physicist is sounding alarms that the object could be an alien probe. (NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))

    The astrophysicist also revealed in a Medium blog post that new data and measurements indicate the comet’s nucleus is more massive than first estimated.

    3I/ATLAS was spotted in July with observations showing the comet is shedding huge amounts of carbon dioxide and dust as it races toward the Sun. 

    Loeb and his colleagues calculated a slight “non-gravitational acceleration” in its movement caused by “outgassing” which suggests the object must be far heavier than early models assumed.

    ASTRONOMERS MAKE GROUNDBREAKING DISCOVERY ABOUT LARGEST COMET EVER OBSERVED FLYING THROUGH DEEP SPACE

    Astronomers discovered an unusual object entered our solar system earlier this month, but a Harvard physicist is sounding alarms that the object could be an alien probe.

    Astronomers discovered an unusual object entered our solar system earlier this month, but a Harvard physicist is sounding alarms that the object could be an alien probe. (ATLAS/University of Hawaii/NASA)

    The comet dwarfs Oumuamua, just a quarter-mile long, and Borisov, about 0.6 miles across. 

    “This makes 3I/ATLAS three to five orders of magnitude more massive than the previous two interstellar objects we’ve observed,” Loeb wrote in his post.

    ANCIENT ‘STICK FIGURES’ ON BEACH ONCE AGAIN VISIBLE AT TOURIST DESTINATION

    Comet

    Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) appears in the sky over Molfetta, Italy, on September 28, 2024. (Getty  Images)

    Next week the comet will pass within 1.67 million miles of Mars’ orbit while also coming close to both Jupiter and Venus. 

    Loeb has urged NASA to turn the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter towards the object and said that even a single bright pixel could fine tune estimates of its true dimensions.

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    “We should not decide about the nature of 3I/ATLAS based on the chemical composition of its skin,” Loeb wrote. 

    “For the same reason, we should not judge a book by its cover,” he added.

    Emma Bussey is a breaking news writer for Fox News Digital. Before joining Fox, she worked at The Telegraph with the U.S. overnight team, across desks including foreign, politics, news, sport and culture. 

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