Lifeboat Foundation

It’s shocking that climate affects our health.

Report that natural gas is just as bad as coal due to rampant methane leaks which cause global heating.

Millions of solar panels clustered together to form an island could convert carbon dioxide in seawater into methanol, which can fuel airplanes and trucks, according to new research from Norway and Switzerland and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, PNAS, as NBC News reported. The floating islands could drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels.

Mm 🤔🤔

Why are the biggest and most influential tech companies making deals with oil companies that exacerbate one of the biggest threats to human civilisation?

For the first time, scientists have clearly linked together two types of gamma-ray phenomena in thunderclouds, suggesting that weak bursts of gamma-ray activity might precede lightning flashes in certain conditions.

The two phenomena in question are weak emissions called gamma-ray glows, which last about a minute, and much shorter and more intense terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs).

Both are known to happen inside thunderclouds, depending on the various positive and negative electrical charges around them, brought on by accelerating electrons. But scientists have never fully understood how the two gamma ray phenomena work together or their link to lightning.

The U.N. predicts climate change will push 120 million people into poverty by 2030.

A formerly little-known molecule created in labs by scientists could help future buildings withstand even the most ferocious of storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes by making walls that are virtually indestructible, according to new research from a team of British scientists at the University of Exeter.

The substance is known to researchers and construction experts as graphene, a combination of the prefix graphite and the suffix –ene, coined by the German scientist who pioneered it. The product has a wide array of potential applications including anti-corrosive coatings, lubricants, and motor oils. But in the last two decades, a radical new application has become apparent to those who study this innovative new product. The application of graphene in construction became apparent when researchers established that the inclusion of graphene oxide significantly increases both tensile and compressive strength in concrete composites—in other words, the world’s most common construction material can be fortified to become a kind of “super-concrete.”

The oldest plant ever to be regenerated has been grown from 32,000-year-old seeds—beating the previous recordholder by some 30,000 years. (Related: “‘Methuselah’ Tree Grew From 2,000-Year-Old Seed.”)

A Russian team discovered a seed cache of Silene stenophylla, a flowering plant native to Siberia, that had been buried by an Ice Age squirrel near the banks of the Kolyma River (map). Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the seeds were 32,000 years old.

The mature and immature seeds, which had been entirely encased in ice, were unearthed from 124 feet (38 meters) below the permafrost, surrounded by layers that included mammoth, bison, and woolly rhinoceros bones.

Electrochemical cells help recycle CO₂. However, the catalytic surfaces get worn down in the process. Researchers at the Collaborative Research Centre 1316 “Transient atmospheric plasmas: from plasmas to liquids to solids” at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) are exploring how they might be regenerated at the push of a button using extreme plasmas in water. In a first, they deployed optical spectroscopy and modelling to analyse such underwater plasmas in detail, which exist only for a few nanoseconds, and to theoretically describe the conditions during plasma ignition. They published their report in the journal Plasma Sources Science and Technology on 4 June 2019.

Plasmas are ionised gases: they are formed when a gas is energised that then contains free electrons. In nature, plasmas occur inside stars or take the shape of polar lights on Earth. In engineering, plasmas are utilised for example to generate light in fluorescent lamps, or to manufacture new materials in the field of microelectronics. “Typically, plasmas are generated in the gas phase, for example in the air or in noble gases,” explains Katharina Grosse from the Institute for Experimental Physics II at RUB.