How Crips Edges Can Make A Huge Difference
One of the best ideas to improve how your yard or garden looks is also the simplest:
Make sure the edges around your yard are crisp.
If the edges look good, you can get away with a multitude of sins. Plus, it doesn’t even have to be any kind of traditional edge.
One of the primary structural aspects of almost any garden is the shape of its beds and borders, and nothing better defines those shapes than the lines that give them a sense of order. They are, so to speak, the border’s border.
So, to tweak those lines is to reinforce those fundamental forms. And using some kind of consistent edge throughout the garden helps to impose a sense of unity to the overall garden.
New Mission Will Provide Global Maps Of Soil Moisture And Ocean Salinity
ESA’s next Earth Explorer, SMOS, has just passed the all-important Flight Acceptance Review, signifying that all the elements that make up the mission are in place for launch later this year.
After being in storage for around a year, the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) satellite can now be prepared for its long journey from Thales Alenia Space’s faciities in Cannes in the south of France to the launch site in Russia.
SMOS, also known as ESA’s Water Mission will make global observations of soil moisture over Earth’s landmasses and salinity over the oceans. Through the use of a novel instrument called MIRAS (Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis), SMOS will provide global information on surface soil moisture every three days within an accuracy of 4% at a spatial resolution of 50 km – that’s comparable to being able to detect one teaspoonful of water mixed into a handful of soil.
In parallel, SMOS will also observe ocean salinity down to 0.1 psu (practical salinity unit) for a 30-day average over an area of 200×200 km, which is about the same as detecting 0.1 g of salt in a litre of water.
Data from SMOS will result in a better understanding of the water cycle and, in particular, the exchange processes between Earth’s surfaces and the atmosphere.
This data will help improve weather and climate models, and also have practical applications in areas such as agriculture and water resource management, bringing our understanding of Earth’s water cycle one step closer.
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