Lifeboat Foundation

The world’s oceans soak up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans pump into the air each year—a powerful brake on the greenhouse effect. In addition to purely physical and chemical processes, a large part of this is taken up by photosynthetic plankton as they incorporate carbon into their bodies. When plankton die, they sink, taking the carbon with them. Some part of this organic rain will end up locked into the deep ocean, insulated from the atmosphere for centuries or more. But what the ocean takes, the ocean also gives back. Before many of the remains get very far, they are consumed by aerobic bacteria. And, just like us, those bacteria respire by taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. Much of that regenerated CO₂ thus ends up back in the air.

A new study suggests that CO₂ regeneration may become faster in many regions of the world as the oceans warm with changing climate. This, in turn, may reduce the deep oceans’ ability to keep carbon locked up. The study shows that in many cases, bacteria are consuming more plankton at shallower depths than previously believed, and that the conditions under which they do this will spread as water temperatures rise. The study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The results are telling us that warming will cause faster recycling of carbon in many areas, and that means less carbon will reach the deep ocean and get stored there,” said study coauthor Robert Anderson, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Continue reading “As oceans warm, microbes could pump more CO2 back into air, study warns” »

To understand them well, look to the past.

The spoken word is a powerful tool, but not all of us have the ability to use it, either due to biology or circumstances. In such cases, technology can bridge the gap — and now that gap is looking shorter than ever, with a new algorithm that turns messages meant for your muscles into legible sounds.

Converting the complex mix of information sent from the brain to the orchestra of body parts required to transform a puff of air into meaningful sound is by no means a simple feat.

Continue reading “Scientists Unveil a ‘Brain Decoder’ That Turns Neural Activity Into Speech” »

Two years ago a team of scientists visited Costa Rica’s subduction zone, where the ocean floor sinks beneath the continent and volcanoes tower above the surface. They wanted to find out if microbes can affect the cycle of carbon moving from Earth’s surface into the deep interior. According to their new study in Nature, the answer is affirmatively—yes they can.

This groundbreaking study shows that microbes consume and—crucially—help trap a small amount of sinking carbon in this zone. This finding has important implications for understanding Earth’s fundamental processes and for revealing how nature can potentially help mitigate climate change.

Continue reading “Microbes may act as gatekeepers of Earth’s Deep Carbon” »

Ecstadelic Media Group releases a new non-fiction book The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov as a Kindle ebook (Press Release, San Francisco, CA, USA, April 22, 2019 01.00 PM PST)

The Science and Philosophy of Information book series is adapted for general audience and based on the previously published grand volume titled “ The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” by digital philosopher Alex Vikoulov on the ultimate nature of reality, consciousness, the physics of time, and philosophy of mind. In this book one of the series, the author addresses some of the most flaming questions in science and philosophy: Where do we come from? What are the origins of us? What is our role in the grand scheme of things?

“# 1 Hot New Release” in Amazon charts in Cosmology and Evolution, the book starts with a story that happened almost exactly 400 years ago that has had a tremendous “butterfly” effect on us modern humans.

Continue reading “The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology — A New Book That Makes You Question The Nature of Reality but Provides You with Surprising Answers | Press Release” »

Maxwell’s demon is a machine proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1897. The hypothetical machine would use thermal fluctuations to obtain energy, apparently violating the second principle of thermodynamics. Now, researchers at the University of Barcelona have presented the first theoretical and experimental solution of a continuous version of Maxwell’s demon in a single molecule system. The results, published in the journal Nature Physics, have applications in other fields, such as biological and quantum systems.

“Despite its simplicity and the large amount of work in the field, this new variant of the classical Maxwell demon has remained unexplored until now,” notes F\xE8lix Ritort, professor from the Department of Fundamental Physics of the UB. “In this study, we introduced a system able to extract large amounts of work arbitrarily per cycle through repeated measurements of the state of a system.”

Scientists have used the tiny distortions imprinted on the cosmic microwave background by the gravity of matter throughout the universe, recorded by ESA’s Planck satellite, to uncover the connection between the luminosity of quasars – the bright cores of active galaxies – and the mass of the much larger ‘halos’ of dark matter in which they sit. The result is an important confirmation for our understanding of how galaxies evolve across cosmic history.

Most galaxies in the universe are known to host supermassive black holes, with masses of millions to billions of times the Sun’s mass, at their cores. The majority of these cosmic monsters are ‘dormant’, with little or no activity going on near them, but about one percent are classified as ‘active’, accreting matter from their surroundings at very intense rates. This accretion process causes material in the black hole’s vicinity to shine brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum, making these active galaxies, or quasars, some of the brightest sources in the cosmos.

While it is still unclear what activates these black holes, switching on and off their phase of intense accretion, it is likely that quasars play an important role in regulating the evolution of galaxies across cosmic history. For this reason, it is crucial to understand the relationship between quasars, their host galaxies, and their environment on even larger scales.

Continue reading “Planck reveals link between active galaxies and their dark matter environment” »

A new story on my latest article from #transhumanism critic Wesley J. Smith:

Oh my. Two of contemporary society’s most prominent anti-human utopian movements — radical environmentalism and materialistic transhumanism — appear on the verge of a bitter showdown.

When you think about it, that makes sense. Both movements see themselves as the future’s only hope. But their core purposes are incompatible. Radical environmentalists — “nature rights” activists, deep ecologists, Gaia theorists, and their fellow travelers that elevate nature above humanity — hijacked and refashioned traditional environmentalism into a mystical neo-earth religion that disdains homo Sapiens as a parasitical species afflicting the earth. These radicals hope to thwart our thriving off the land in order to “save the planet.” Indeed, I sometimes believe that if they could, they would forcibly revert our species to hunter/gatherers — without the hunting part.

Continue reading “Radical Environmentalism and Transhumanism: Symptoms of the Same Disease” »