Lifeboat Foundation

The future of cities as seen by architects and urban planners. Future cities: Urban planners get creative | DW DocumentaryYOUTUBE.COMFuture cities: Urban planners get creative | DW Documentary.

Will the cities of the future be climate neutral? Might they also be able to actively filter carbon dioxide out of the air? Futurologist Vincente Guallarte thinks so. In fact, he says, our cities will soon be able to absorb CO₂, just like trees do.

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Is the Ira Rubinoff Director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI https://www.si.edu/about/bios/joshua-tewksbury), part of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. He oversees more than 400 employees, with an annual budget of $35 million. Headquartered in Panama City, Panama, with field sites around the world, STRI furthers the understanding and public awareness of tropical biodiversity and its importance to human welfare. In addition to its resident scientists and support staff, STRI’s facilities are used annually by some 1,400 visiting scientists, pre-and postdoctoral fellows and interns from around the world.

Dr. Tewksbury is an ecologist with more than two decades of research in conservation and biodiversity, as well as nearly a decade of executive leadership experience at international research institutes.

Continue reading “Dr. Joshua Tewksbury, Ph.D. — Director, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI)” »

The island, which has set a goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, has made some progress deploying technologies like district cooling, floating solar and energy-efficient water desalination.

Breaking into the 31st week of 2023, from July 31 to Aug. 6, not much is held in store in terms of launches. Up first this week — following an aborted launch attempt last week — Rocket Lab will launch Capella Space’s Acadia satellite to a mid-inclination low-earth orbit. Later, a momentous flight will take place, when the last Antares 230+ will fly to low-Earth orbit (LEO) during the NG-19 resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

Following slightly more than a day later, a Chang Zheng 4C carrying the Fengyun-3F meteorological satellite will take to the skies from Jiuquan, China. Shortly after that, it will be the turn of a Falcon 9 transporting Maxar-built Galaxy 37 inside its fairing. It will be deployed into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), with the satellite reaching a geostationary orbit (GEO) by itself.

Continue reading “Launch Roundup: SpaceX to launch Galaxy 37; China to launch FY-3F” »

In a high-tech laboratory, somewhere in San Francisco, sits a comma-shaped piece of metal that aims to change how the world sees the weather. The structure dominates the room. The horizontal part softly curves upwards until it’s taller than a person, with ridges that stretch from top to bottom. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a piece of modern art.

In fact, it is art, but it’s also much more than that. It’s an AI-powered, data-processing powerhouse from a startup called Atmo, and it could democratize weather forecasting, putting every country on a level meteorological playing field for the first time.

The Wallops Range forecast issued today for the Tuesday, Aug. 1, launch of Northrop Grumman’s 19th resupply mission to the International Space Station puts weather at 80% favorable.

A weak area of high pressure will move off the coast Sunday evening, as a weak upper-level disturbance tracks toward the Wallops region with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms Monday morning through late Monday evening. The upper-level trough will remain over the Wallops Region Tuesday with a chance of an afternoon, sea breeze, pop-up shower or thunderstorms during the countdown. At this time, the primary concern for launch is a slight chance of cumulus clouds.

NASA commercial cargo provider Northrop Grumman is targeting 8:31 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 1, for the launch.

“O poplar tree, O poplar tree, how carbon-dense are thy branches …”

Trees are a major tool in our fight against climate change by sucking up carbon dioxide, but one company is taking them a step further: genetically engineering trees to sequester even more carbon. U.S. climate technology startup Living Carbon is developing genetically engineered seedlings of a hybrid poplar that it says can accumulate up to 53% more biomass than control plants and thereby absorb 27% more carbon.

Plants use sunlight to turn water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugar, a process known as photosynthesis. Living Carbon says its trees, a hybrid of the common aspen (Populus tremula) and white poplar (P. alba), can do it better with genetic changes to boost its photosynthetic performance.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the climate system. Here, data-driven estimators for the time of tipping predict a potential AMOC collapse mid-century under the current emission scenario.

Abstract: I do not share the feeling that consciousness (whatever this means) cannot be understood in the context of the known physical laws. So far we do not understand it well, but neither do we fully understand thunderstorms, for that matter. I offer three small contributions in the direction of a direct naturalistic account of consciousness: (i) a purely physical account of agency and the openness of the future, which traces the source of information to past low entropy; (ii) a purely physical basis for a simple notion of “meaning”; and (iii) a suggestion that current understanding of quantum matter (without need of panpsychism) weakens the apparent hiatus between the mental and the physical.