Lifeboat Foundation

Members of Congress from Western states are pushing for $750 million to turn wastewater into pure water. Here’s how that works.

Alfred Anzaldúa talks about inevitability of human expansion into space and the proposal to add an 18th SDG, focused on space development, to the U.N. 2030 Agenda for sustainable development.

A team of researchers has now been able to show that there is an incredibly high biodiversity of environmentally relevant microorganisms in nature. This diversity is at least 4.5 times greater than previously known. The researchers recently published their findings in the journals Nature Communications and FEMS Microbiology Reviews.

The hidden world of microorganisms is often overlooked, even though many climate-relevant processes are influenced by microorganisms, often associated with an incredible diversity of species within the groups of bacteria and archaea (“primitive bacteria”).

For example, sulfate-reducing microorganisms convert a third of the organic carbon in marine sediments into carbon dioxide. This produces toxic hydrogen sulfide. On the positive side, sulfur-oxidizing microorganisms quickly use this as an energy source and render it harmless.

Plants are not just able to survive in low gravity such as on the Moon, two new papers suggest – they may prefer it, at least based on the only species to sprout.

When Chang’e 4 landed on the Moon in January 2019 it carried with it a payload that could dictate the future of space exploration: seeds of four plant species it sought to grow on the lunar surface. The germination of a single cotton seed attracted plenty of attention at the time, but there’s more to growth than just sprouting. If crops grown on the Moon are less productive or more fragile than those on Earth, it’s going to be a big problem.

It’s taken more than four years, but important results from the experiment have now been released and they suggest that for all the obstacles to establishing colonies on the Moon and Mars, growing food might not be one. Then again, it’s still very early days.

Contrary to what we all learned in elementary school science class, it turns out that heat may not be necessary to make water evaporate. Scientists at MIT have made the surprising discovery that light alone can evaporate water, and is even more efficient at it than heat. The finding could improve our understanding of natural phenomena or boost desalination systems.

Evaporation occurs when water molecules near the surface of the liquid absorb enough energy to escape into the air above as a gas – water vapor. Generally, heat is the energy source, and in the case of Earth’s water cycle, that heat comes primarily from sunlight.

But in the last few years, different teams of scientists have noticed discrepancies in their experiments concerning water held in hydrogels. Water appeared to be evaporating at much higher rates than should be possible based on the amount of heat it was exposed to, sometimes tripling the theoretical maximum rate.

Indian start-up Green Robot Machinery (GRoboMac) has developed a cotton picker with autonomous robotic arms, mounted on a semi-autonomous electric farm vehicle.

The robotic arms of the battery-operated machine are each capable of picking about 50 kgs cotton per day. That means that four arms, mounted on the vehicle, can pick about 200 kgs per day. High yielding farms can use additional arms, the company says.

When someone dies in the US, the vast majority of the time, their body is either embalmed, placed in a coffin, and buried in a cemetery, or cremated and the ashes returned to their loved ones in an urn — but those aren’t the only options.

A growing number of funeral directors, startups, and nonprofits are providing people with alternative ways to have their bodies honored after death — suggesting that the funeral landscape of tomorrow won’t be so binary.

Traditional burial and cremation has a cost for the environment, releasing chemicals into the ground or greenhouse gasses into the air, but a number of other funeral options are showing that death can be green.

The search is on worldwide to find ways to extract carbon dioxide from the air or from power plant exhaust and then make it into something useful. One of the more promising ideas is to make it into a stable fuel that can replace fossil fuels in some applications. But most such conversion processes have had problems with low carbon efficiency, or they produce fuels that can be hard to handle, toxic, or flammable.

Now, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed an efficient process that can convert carbon dioxide into formate, a liquid or solid material that can be used like hydrogen or methanol to power a fuel cell and generate electricity. Potassium or sodium formate, already produced at industrial scales and commonly used as a de-icer for roads and sidewalks, is nontoxic, nonflammable, easy to store and transport, and can remain stable in ordinary steel tanks to be used months, or even years, after its production.

“This is significant because it creates the opportunity for greater renewable energy storage.”

Through the use of solar collectors, concentrated solar thermal technology (CST) harnesses solar energy to produce heat or electricity. The process is simple although difficult to execute successfully: large mirrors or lenses focus sunlight onto a narrow region known as the receiver.

These mirrors are what are known as solar collectors and they come in a variety of formats each with a distinct design and focusing technique, such as dish systems, solar power towers, and parabolic troughs.