Lifeboat Foundation

To advance his vision, last week EIC launched the OPEN100 project, which Kugelmass says will provide open-source blueprints for the design, construction, and financing of a 100-megawatt nuclear reactor. He claims the reactor can be built for $300 million in less than two years, significantly decreasing the per-kilowatt cost of nuclear power.

“Nuclear power isn’t just part of the solution to addressing climate change; it is the solution,” Kugelmass said in a press release. “OPEN100 will radically change the way we deploy nuclear power plants going forward, offering a substantially less expensive and less complicated solution.”

The logic behind the idea is that the biggest barrier to the widespread use of nuclear is the cost of building reactors, which most experts would agree is a major problem for the industry. Kugelmass thinks that’s because we’ve been focused on large, overly complicated reactors that take far too long to build. His solution is to go back to tried and tested pressurized water reactors from the previous century, and bring their cost down even further through standardization and a focus on speedy construction.

Lithium (Li) batteries, or lithium metal batteries, use metallic lithium as an anode. Over the past few decades, rechargeable Li batteries have been used to power a wide variety of electronic devices, including toys, portable consumer devices and electric vehicles.

While these batteries typically achieve reliable performances at room temperature, their energy efficiency, power and cycle life tend to decrease significantly at temperatures below −10 °C. The inability to function well at low temperatures is a crucial drawback, as it greatly limits their use in regions with particularly cold climates. The main reason for this limitation is that at temperatures below −10 °C the solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) becomes unstable and leads to what is known as the dendritic Li plating of the anode in the batteries.

A team of researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Argonne National Laboratory recently introduced a new design for Li metal batteries that could overcome this well-documented drawback. The resulting batteries, presented in a paper published in Nature Energy, were found to perform remarkably well at low temperatures compared to previously developed Li batteries.

PENSACOLA, Fla. (WKRG) — NASA confirmed on their blog that SpaceX Crew Dragon will splashdown in Pensacola Florida on Sunday, August 2, 2020.

Weather conditions according to NASA are a “Go” but Hurricane Isaias will still be monitored and evaluate any impact the storm may have on the splashdown sight.

SpaceX will monitor weather conditions until 2.5 hours before scheduled undocking when the they will proceed with departure. Splashdown is scheduled for about 1:40PM local time.

Texas researchers from the University of Houston, Baylor University and Texas A&M University have discovered evidence for why the earth cooled dramatically 13,000 years ago, dropping temperatures by about 3 degrees Centigrade.

The evidence is buried in a Central Texas cave, where horizons of sediment have preserved unique geochemical signatures from ancient volcanic eruptions—signatures previously mistaken for extraterrestrial impacts, researchers say.

The resolution to this case of mistaken identity recently was reported in the journal Science Advances.

SpaceX is ready to return its first NASA astronaut crew to Earth, but a potential tropical cyclone brewing in the Atlantic could cause delays.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, called Endeavour, is scheduled to splash down off the Florida coast on Sunday afternoon (Aug. 2). Its crew, NASA’s Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, is wrapping up a historic two-month test flight, the first orbital trip by astronauts on a commercial spacecraft. Their splashdown will also mark the first water landing by American astronauts since the Apollo-Soyuz mission in July 1975.

For decades, scientists have gathered ancient sediment samples from below the seafloor to better understand past climates, plate tectonics and the deep marine ecosystem. In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers reveal that given the right food in the right laboratory conditions, microbes collected from sediment as old as 100 million years can revive and multiply, even after laying dormant since large dinosaurs prowled the planet.

The research team behind the new study, from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the URI Graduate School of Oceanography, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, the Kochi University and Marine Works Japan, gathered the ancient sediment samples ten years ago during an expedition to the South Pacific Gyre, the part of the ocean with the lowest productivity and fewest nutrients available to fuel the marine food web.

“Our main question was whether life could exist in such a nutrient-limited environment or if this was a lifeless zone,” said the paper’s lead author Yuki Morono, senior scientist at JAMSTEC. “And we wanted to know how long the microbes could sustain their life in a near-absence of food.”

In recent interactions on Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk mentioned that he is particularly excited about a new paint option called “deep crimson,” which would be offered on vehicles that are produced in Gigafactory Berlin. A recent photo taken of a Model S at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, may have just revealed what the mysterious shade could look like.

Tesla owner Ryan McCaffrey, who also hosts the Ride the Lightning Podcast, was recently given a rather interesting set of photos by one of his listeners. The images were quite unique since they feature a Model S painted in a shade that’s currently unavailable in Tesla’s current configurator. The paint itself is close to red, and it’s very reminiscent of the “crimson” shade used by other automakers.

@elonmusk Is this the “deep crimson” Tesla paint color you were talking about loving recently that’s planned for Giga Berlin? (I think this is your personal car given who sent me this photo).

Hurricane Douglas is forecast to sweep through Hawaii as a tropical storm or hurricane this weekend, where it could produce flash flooding, strong winds and pounding surf.

The Central Pacific Hurricane Center has issued a hurricane watch for Oahu in addition to the Big Island of Hawaii and for Maui County, including Maui, Lanai, Molokai and Kahoolawe. Hurricane conditions are possible in this area Saturday night into Sunday, with tropical storm conditions possible as soon as Saturday evening.

After peaking at Category 4 intensity, Douglas is now slowly weakening as it churns several hundred miles east-southeast of Hilo, Hawaii, moving quickly west-northwest.

Douglas is currently a Category 3 hurricane with sustained winds of 115 mph that extend 25 miles from the center of the storm. A major hurricane is any storm ranked Category 3 — sustained winds 111 to 129 mph — or stronger.