Researchers plan to revive unusable agricultural lands

Words Nicole Batac

Acres upon acres of once-arable agricultural lands around the world are being rendered unproductive due to lands being too salty to support plant growth after decades of repeated irrigation and decreasing water quality. However, Ceres—a biotechnology company in Thousand Oaks, California—has developed a plant trait that could bring new life to these crop lands.

Ceres researchers have tested the trait on rice, Arabidopsis thaliana (a flowering plant usually used to understand the molecular biology of many plant traits), and switchgrass (a perennial grass used as feedstock when making ethanol and other biofuels) and have been successful so far.

“The fact that we’ve seen this very high-level salt tolerance in three di_erent plant species gives us a high degree of confidence that this trait will recapitulate itself in other energy grasses as well,” says Ceres CEO Richard Hamilton.

MIT creates fibers that can speak, hear

Words Kimberly U. Go

In the future, sweaters may have dual purposes: keep you warm during cold nights and act as your portable music player.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a new type of fiber (through piezoelectric technology) that can convert sound waves into an electrical signal and vice versa.

The study, published in the August issue of Nature Materials, explains how assistant professor Yoel Fink and his colleagues achieved the breakthrough: by developing fibers that are active where most are passive.

China’s conceptual bus drives over cars

Words Marvi Torres

In yet another attempt to stomp the rest of the world with their bizarre genius, China announces the “3D Express Coach” or “three-dimensional fast bus” (a.k.a. Godzilla of all buses)—a humongous bus that can drive over cars. This flying bus on training wheels aims to reduce traffic concentration at bus stops, as cars drive under the fast bus uninterrupted.

The universal bus stop traffic problem can, of course, be solved by widening roads or building light rail trains or subways. But the 3D Express Coach and its 40-kilometer path costs only about 500 million yuan (US$73 million) to make, a mere 10% of the cost of building an equivalent subway. In charge of this feat is the Shenzhen Huashi Future Parking Equipment Company.