“Ornithologists and conservationists assume birds provide ecological services, and that farmers want them on their farms,” says Olivia Smith, lead author of the paper.

Which means that you can usually find used versions of most gear you want on sites like eBay that still work great and are compatible with each other.If you’re recording from farther away, you might want a shotgun mic like the Audio-Technica AT875R.

Amazon’s new health tracker, the Halo, is a small, display-free device fitted into a fabric band that you wear on your wrist.Also, the Halo's microphone records snippets of your conversations to interpret the emotions conveyed in the tone of your speaking voice.

The Alexa voice assistant that lives inside will help you do all kinds of things like play games, take you through a 20-minute workout, tell you how to mix a perfect Manhattan, and of course, control any internet-connected appliances, speakers, or lighting fixtures you have around the house.

Back in January, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicted the worst was still to come, and that by June, the size of the swarms could grow by a factor of 500.And now, at the worst time, a second wave of locusts 20 times bigger than the first has descended on the region, thanks to heavy rains late last month, according to the FAO.

The next step, says Bakkers, will be to use the technique they’ve developed to create a tiny laser made from the silicon alloy.

Farmers known as Sempre-vivas flower gatherers from Espinhaço Mountain Range won recognition for their crucial role in enhancing biodiversity and preserving traditional knowledge.

Latimer / TNC A new study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology finds that birds were generally less stressed and in better condition on more locally-diverse farms and on farms embedded in more natural landscapes .

“We've been looking for more technical solutions, whether in terms of better varieties of seeds or breeds of cattle, but we're not really looking at the way social institutions are affecting people's abilities to adapt,” says University of East Anglia gender analyst Nitya Rao, lead author on the study.

Video: The University of Electro-Communications; The University of Michigan When they used a 60 milliwatt laser to "speak" commands to 16 different smart speakers, smartphones, and other voice activated devices, they found that almost all of the smart speakers registered the commands from 164 feet away, the maximum distance they tested.

Iowa State University researcher Matt Liebman has shown on his demonstration farm that adding a third rotation of alfalfa or native grass to the predominant corn-soybean cropping system in the state could produce dramatic environmental benefits at no cost to farmers, including an 85 percent reduction in fertilizer use, a 97 percent drop in pesticide use, an elimination of soil erosion and water pollution from run-off, and a dramatic increase in carbon sequestration.

Crispr Can Help Solve Our Looming Food Crisis—Here's How. The potential for gene editing to make every acre of land more productive in the face of climate change has captured the imagination of plant scientists, the agtech industry, and governments alike.

Although a Louroe spokesman said the detector doesn’t intrude on student privacy because it only captures sound patterns deemed aggressive, its microphones allow administrators to record, replay and store those snippets of conversation indefinitely.“It’s not clear it’s solving the right problem.

But, according to a report that DeLucia coauthored appearing in the journal Ecosphere today, if you’re a farmer trying to grow corn it means something very different: You need more water.

"The negative impacts of soil erosion are ever more evident and the need to work jointly ever more urgent," FAO Deputy Director-General, Climate and Natural Resources, Maria Helena Semedo, said today while opening a three-day symposium focusing on enhancing how the world measures and manages soil erosion as well as its economic costs.

How the Atari 2600 Led Videogaming's Home Invasion. Atari's console wasn't the first to commandeer TV screens, but in the late '70s the VCS skyrocketed in popularity because it was so versatile. The company let outside publishers build games for the VCS too.

In early April, says from the Pingtang County government website, officials held meetings with local residents and workers to “internalize the sense of responsibility and responsibility of protecting the [telescope].” The rules and outreach efforts come just after the announcement of a new television show about FAST, which state-run Zhongxin reported in late February.

Although he'd tested the color scheme in a variety of applications, Schoonover initially released themes for only a few tools he used in his own work, like the code editor Vim and the text-based email client Mutt.

Security News This Week: Google Forgot To Mention the Nest Secure's Hidden Mic Nest The Mueller investigation has lasted so long, it's easy to forget that it'll end at some point.

“I certainly had no idea when we started that one day we’d be acquiring a satellite company to bring it into operations in a much bigger way.”Indigo AgTellus’s chief product is Kernel, a forecasting tool that combines satellite images with weather reports and crop data from the US Department of Agriculture to predict how much food different countries are on track to grow each season.

Reclaiming and bringing into production some of India’s wastelands could partially offset some of the projected crop production declines expected because of climate change.

Overall, the event underscored how governments and health authorities in many developing countries face the dilemma of how to feed their growing population while ensuring their food is nutritious and discussed relevant strategies to transform nutrition security challenges into opportunities. As rice prices increase, relative to nutrient-rich foods, people will diversify their diets away from rice.

Worldwide, insect pests consume up to 20 percent of the plants that humans grow for food, and that amount will increase as global warming makes bugs hungrier, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.That could encourage farmers to use more pesticides, which could cause further environmental harm, scientists said.For every degree Celsius (two degrees Fahrenheit) that temperatures rise above the global historical average, the amount of wheat, corn, and rice lost to insects will increase by 10 to 25 percent, the study says.

For the country’s 300,000 coffee producers, these extreme weather threats – coupled with the increasingly unpredictable seasons, crop disease and invasive insects associated with climate change – endanger their livelihoods.

Bad news is, the solar shading that would come with geoengineering would negatively affect crops, likely wiping out the gains from lower temperatures.“If we imagine geoengineering as an experimental surgery, our findings suggest that the damages or side effects from the surgery are just as bad as the original disease,” says UC Berkeley agricultural economist Jonathan Proctor, lead author of the new study.A funny thing happens to light when it hits a volcano’s sulfate aerosols in the air.

“Presumably, agricultural systems have been motivated by the need to feed more people and to remain profitable,” says Davis, “and this suggests that environmental impacts of food production – like water use for irrigation – only receive secondary consideration in a farmer’s decision of what crop to plant.