Lifeboat Foundation

In the early hours of October 24, 2023, the southern peak of Sakurajima roared, dramatically punctuating the Kagoshima City skyline. The volcanic eruption, Japan’s second-largest this year, sent a plume of smoke spiraling 3,400 meters above the crater. This follows another eruption on October 19, which reached an even greater height of 3,600 meters. A Spectacle of Fire and Lightning The eruption was not just a spectacle of fire and smoke…

NOAA scientists investigating the stratosphere have found that in addition to meteoric ‘space dust,’ the atmosphere more than seven miles above the surface is peppered with particles containing a variety of metals from satellites and spent rocket boosters vaporized by the intense heat of re-entry.

The discovery is one of the initial findings from analysis of data collected by a high-altitude research plane over the Arctic during a NOAA Chemical Science Laboratory mission called SABRE, short for Stratospheric Aerosol processes, Budget and Radiative Effects. It’s the agency’s most ambitious and intensive effort to date to investigate aerosol particles in the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere that moderates Earth’s climate and is home to the protective ozone layer.

Using an extraordinarily sensitive instrument custom-built at NOAA in Boulder, Colorado, and mounted in the nose of a NASA WB-57 research aircraft, scientists found aluminum and exotic metals embedded in about 10 percent of sulfuric acid particles, which comprise the large majority of particles in the stratosphere. They were also able to match the ratio of rare elements they measured to special alloys used in rockets and satellites, confirming their source as metal vaporized from spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere.

A new Tesla Megapack has been installed at a water treatment plant in San Luis Obispo, California, according to a new report.

The City of San Luis Obispo installed a Tesla Megapack energy storage unit at its water treatment facility, as reported by Paso Robles Daily on Monday. The battery is part of the city’s commitment to “leading by example in climate action work” and its initiative to reach carbon neutrality on city operations by 2030.

“The installation of the Tesla battery system at our water treatment plant is a testament to our city’s commitment to sustainability, innovation, and resilience. I’m proud of the work our team has done to make this vision a reality,” said City Utilities Director Aaron Floyd.

There is an urgent need to address climate change, making the development of sustainable energy alternatives more important than ever. While proton-exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) have shown great promise for energy production, particularly in the transportation industry, there is a long-standing problem with their durability and cost.

A Western research team has addressed the issue with a new cobalt-modified nanomaterial making PEMFCs more robust, readily sourced and environmentally sustainable demonstrating just a two percent loss in efficiency rate following 20,000 cycles in a durability test.

The new nanomaterial is used to enhance oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), the process that forms water in the fuel cell allowing a higher current for more efficient power generation. The cobalt-modified nanomaterial also reduces the reliance on platinum to construct these fuel cells. A costly precious metal, and mined primarily in South Africa, only a few hundred tons of platinum are produced annually.

That’s one idea for how the brain organizes itself to support our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. But if the brain’s information processing dynamics are like waves, what happens when there’s turbulence?

In fact, the brain does experience the equivalent of neural “hurricanes.” They bump into one another, and when they do, the resulting computations correlate with cognition.

These findings come from a unique study in Nature Human Behavior that bridges neuroscience and fluid dynamics to unpack the inner workings of the human mind.

An international team of scientists, including from the University of Cambridge, have launched a new research collaboration that will leverage the same technology behind ChatGPT to build an AI-powered tool for scientific discovery.

While ChatGPT deals in words and sentences, the team’s AI will learn from numerical data and physics simulations from across scientific fields to aid scientists in modeling everything from supergiant stars to the Earth’s climate.

The team launched the initiative, called Polymathic AI earlier this week, alongside the publication of a series of related papers on the arXiv open access repository.

For the first time, scientists have managed to deflect lightning, to the relief of anyone afraid of thunder and lightning storms but probably the chagrin of Zeus. They managed to show that lasers can act as virtual lightning rods, redirecting the direction in which bolts jump.

The Franklin lightning rod was a major scientific advance of its day, preventing millions of fires and electrocutions and demonstrating humanity’s capacity to control forces we had long feared as belonging to the gods. Nevertheless, it’s been 270 years, and it remains the basis of our lightning protection: maybe it’s time for an upgrade.

That is what Dr Aurélien Houard of ENSTA Paris and co-authors propose in a paper pubpished in Nature Photonics, demonstrating that laser pulses can change the direction of a lightning strike.

One of the largest ozone holes on record has been observed over Antarctica this year, according to measurements from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite.

A lower concentration of O₃ molecules

The ozone hole is a section of the stratosphere of Earth where there is a markedly lower concentration of ozone (O₃) molecules. The ozone layer is severely diminishing in some parts of the stratosphere, although it is not technically a hole. By absorbing the bulk of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation, the ozone layer, a region of the Earth’s atmosphere with a relatively high concentration of ozone molecules, plays a crucial role in safeguarding life on the planet.

Continue reading “ESA satellite reveals one of the biggest ozone holes ever” »

Although climate change and global warming affect countries all over the world, Iraq has been hit especially hard. Temperatures are rising twice as fast and annual rainfall is decreasing, leaving the country struggling with many severe droughts. However, the lower water levels of the Euphrates River during these droughts allowed the secrets of a forgotten civilization to emerge. Join us as we embark on an extraordinary journey to discover the ancient ruins found under the Euphrates River!

In 2018, a terrible drought in Iraq left the water levels of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers dangerously low. In an effort to help the country, the Mosul Dam Reservoir in the Kurdistan region was drained, providing much-needed water to dying crops. But, as the reservoir’s water receded, the ruins of an ancient city suddenly emerged!

Racing against time, archaeologists diligently worked to explore and map out the newly-exposed ancient ruins before the water covered them once again. They discovered the ruins of a large palace with 22-foot tall walls, some of which were 6 feet thick! Many of the walls were also adorned with well-preserved wall paintings, shining bright with their blue and red hues. The palace, built in two distinct phases, had been used over a long period of time and may hold many of the secrets of the mighty Mitanni Empire. However, before they could evaluate it further, the palace and the rest of the city resubmerged beneath the Euphrates River, leaving their mysteries unresolved for the next four years.