Svalbard Global Seed Vault | Hacker News Reader

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

en.wikipedia.org

>In Norway, government-funded construction projects exceeding a certain cost must include artwork.

I'm a swede and I am constantly pleasantly surprised by public policy in our scandinavian countries.

It's not only in Scandinavian countries. Many countries, such as Germany and the US adopted that policy at the end of the 1920s or beginning of 1930s. In the former it's still in place and Wikipedia tells me that more than half of the US states have a "Percent for Art" program which is essentially that.

Veritasium made a great video about the Svalbard Seed Vault: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_OEsf-1qgY

I was about to post the same link. Very informative video and enjoyable to watch. I love how they say that North Korea is just next to America.

Anyone interested in Svalbard, which focuses on crop seeds, might also be interested in the less glamorous Millennium Seed Bank which focuses on wild plant seeds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Seed_Bank_Partnersh...

But which is more important?

Hard to tell.

The seed vault seems focused on plants that are in productive use at this moment, while the seed bank seems to cover wild plants.

The latter may be interesting for the future if we discover that a certain plant have some kind of useful property.

Here a really nice Ted Talk about it: https://www.ted.com/talks/cary_fowler_one_seed_at_a_time_pro...

Mankind's Plan B, protected by polar bears :)

This is a Wikipedia article and as such not "news," in my opinion. Reddit is a better place to post this type of content.

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Nothing in there about content having to be "news".

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