Boston already has the hippest school of music.  It’s the Boston Berklee College of Music. 

That's the in place to be.  But if you have a child who may be interested in a career in music arts...or you yourself are planning for a future in music, you've got to check out the future home of Berklee's ARTeria Valencia.

It's a state-of-the-art, 25-story building in Valencia Spain.  And if you want to study music abroad, this is where you will want to be.


 

"Valencia, Spain will soon be home to a $145 million school of rock (and pop and jazz) from the Boston-based Berklee College of Music, which hopes to extend its successful contemporary music training program to European shores.

"ARTeria Valencia" will be a state-of-the-art, 25-story building (see artist's renderings) featuring faculty and student housing, a high-speed data network, a 1,000-seat outdoor amphitheater and several smaller performance spaces. Construction will be largely bankrolled by the SGAE Spanish performing rights organization, which is apparently eager to bring Berklee's approach to contemporary music education to Valencia -- already a popular "semester abroad" destination.

You might think the music industry's heavily-publicized woes would scare kids into more financially stable lines of work -- say, brokering stocks or managing hedge funds. Those aren't the greatest examples these days, but still, given shrinking labels and dwindling sales, the music industry seems like a hard place to get a foothold.

Nonetheless, budding musicians continue to be drawn like moths to the flame of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where applications for Fall '09 matriculation are up 40 percent according, to Larry Monroe, the school's vice president of international programs, and popular subjects include music theory, composition, performance, music management, music education and even music therapy.  The Boston location turns out 800 graduates each year, while the Valencia location will produce smaller classes of 250."

Read the complete article HERE

 Berklee Valencia

Workers spray concrete on the walls of the Svalbard Global Seed
Vault in Longyearbyen, Norway, during the construction phase in August.

In announcing it would create a global seed bank on the Svalbard Islands,
Norway did not say exactly where but the archipelago includes a few
existing settlements like this one at Alesund

Have you ever wondered what would happen to the world's supply of seeds in case
of a global catastrophe? 

Something such as plant epidemics, natural disasters like flooding, the dreaded climate change, or war?

Are you aware of the  Svalbard Global Seed Vault  in Oslo, Norway? 

It is called the "Doomday Vault."

The vault is blasted into the permafrost of the Arctic, 300 miles from the mainland.  The temperature of the vault will be kept at zero degrees Fahrenheit.  It's like a safe-deposit box.  Each country owns what they deposit in the vault and can take it out at their own will 

The vault is due to open February 26, 2008.

"It's very satisfying to see the vault evolve from a bold concept to an impressive facility that has everything we need to protect crop biodiversity," said Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen.

Norway first proposed building what it called a "Noah's Ark" for the world's seeds in June 2005, and started construction a year later, blasting a nearly 400-foot (120-meter) tunnel into a frozen mountain and placing the vault for foil-wrapped seeds deep inside. Each sample holds about 500 seeds."


There already are about 14,000 seed banks in the world run by individual countries.  But some of these have already been wiped out, such as in the Philippines, destroyed by a typhoon, South Asia, destroyed by tsunami, or in Iraq (looters) and Afghanistan (by Taliban), destroyed by war.  The Svalbard vault is intended as a final backup for all other seed banks.  

"The vast collection is intended as a hedge against disaster so that food production can be restarted anywhere on the planet should it be threatened by a regional or global catastrophe."

Click on the icon below for information about the complete history of the Doomsday Vault, including frequently asked questions:

Were you aware we even had "seed banks" around the world? 

Do you think this is a cool idea?

Are you "unglued" when you realize the seed banks of some countries have already been destroyed and it took until 2008 to get a "Doomsday Vault?"  I mean, come on ....