Fire ant rafts

Wired have an amazing story about the phenomenon of ant-rafts forming in the species Solenopsis invicta. Through seemingly arbitrary bonds between indivicual ants, a "ball" of ants dropped into water forms a resilient raft that can stay afloat for weeks. Read more here, or the original article here. 

Posted via email from Open_Sailing

Launch of Protei, oil spill cleaning open hardware sailing robot.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cesarminoru/protei-open-hardware-oil-spill-cleaning-sailing-ro

Dear fellows. We just launch yesterday Protei on Kickstarter. 

Please share the link to our Kickstarter on your facebook, or if you know people in 
- environmental justice

- sailing world

- DIY

- open-source

- engineering

Protei is a fleet of Sailing Drones, developed primarily to collect Oil Spills under Open Hardware licensing. An oil spill drifts down the wind, Protei sails upwind to collect the oil. Everyone is welcome to join, contribute, modify, produce, distribute the design and share their findings.

You can watch the 3 minutes video under to understand the detail of how it works :

The technology is really exciting beyond the fact that it could help for ocean study and cleaning. 
Have a lovely TED2011!

Protei, Oil Spill Collecting Sailing Drones @ TEDxMidAtlantic

A few days ago, I was lucky to be on stage of TEDxMidAtlantic to present Protei, a technology in development I am working on with a bunch of brilliant people (Open_Sailing, randomwalks and V2_ folks). 
Protei would be a Fleet of Oil Spill Collecting Sailing Drones. I just made this 7 minutes video that explains how it would work (also on youtube if you want to share / embed / rate). I am now working on the collaborative website and the documentation to meet Open Hardware standards - long way to go :) The video of the talk may come up sometimes, meanwhile you have my explanation here :) Sorry for my terrible french accent, hehehe

We are currently looking for ways to fund this project, if you have ideas of grants, competitions, Institutions or companies that would be interested in working on this, please comment, thanks !