Endangered Languages Project: Studies suggest that nearly fifty percent of the 6,000-plus languages spoken globally today are in danger of disappearing by the turn of the century. In an effort to preserve them, Google has launched the
Endangered Languages Project, an online archive that puts technology and social media to use to revitalize these threatened tongues. The site provides tools to enable high-quality recordings of speakers, connect endangered-language communities, and promote language learning. Users can share audio and video files, documents, and research in a collaborative attempt to raise awareness of those languages at risk of being lost, and ultimately keep them from going
the way of Latin.
Terra-i Habitat Tracker: Whether one relies on tactics that are
minimal or
militant, efforts to save the earth require a base level of awareness. A new system for monitoring land change has thus been launched in Latin America, to raise awareness of deforestation through the proliferation of coherent, visual data. The Terra-i habitat tracker uses
NASA satellites to monitor changes to the region’s land cover, capturing aerial imagery every sixteen days for every 250 square meters of land. Preliminary data from Terra-i shows that, in some areas, tree-felling has increased by a shocking 340% since 2004—suggesting that the initiative couldn’t have begun at a more crucial point in the
fight for forest preservation.
Floating Plastic Map: Floating bits of plastic are a
major contributor to the adulteration of the aquatic environment. To quantify the dangers of this unseen but fatal pollutant,
University of Western Australia doctoral candidate
Julia Reisser is attempting to map the placement and concentration of the ocean’s plastic debris. Reisser’s research focuses on the passageways of sea turtle hatchlings, which are particularly vulnerable to plastic pollution; floating plastic bits closely resemble small, translucent jellyfish that make up much of the
sea turtle diet. The map would be the
first of its kind, and could do wonders to direct
resources of all kinds to the oceanic locations most in need of a cleaning.
