Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: climatology – Page 53

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The skies above where I reside near New York City were noticeably apocalyptic last week. But to some in Silicon Valley, the fact that we wimpy East Coasters were dealing with a sepia hue and a scent profile that mixed cigar bar, campfire and old-school happy hour was nothing to worry about. After all, it is AI, not climate change, that appears to be top of mind to this cohort, who believe future superintelligence is either going to kill us all, save us all, or almost kill us all if we don’t save ourselves first.

Whether they predict the “existential risks” of runaway AGI that could lead to human “extinction” or foretell an AI-powered utopia, this group seems to have equally strong, fixed opinions (for now, anyway — perhaps they are “loosely held”) that easily tip into biblical prophet territory.

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The characteristics of the “egress complex” found in termite mounds can be replicated to enhance the optimize interior climate of buildings.

Of the approximately 2,000 recognized termite species.

A species is a group of living organisms that share a set of common characteristics and are able to breed and produce fertile offspring. The concept of a species is important in biology as it is used to classify and organize the diversity of life. There are different ways to define a species, but the most widely accepted one is the biological species concept, which defines a species as a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce viable offspring in nature. This definition is widely used in evolutionary biology and ecology to identify and classify living organisms.

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The mounds that certain species of termites build above their nests have long been considered to be a kind of built-in natural climate control—an approach that has intrigued architects and engineers keen to design greener, more energy-efficient buildings mimicking those principles. There have been decades of research devoted to modeling just how these mounds function. A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Materials offers new evidence favoring an integrated-system model in which the mound, the nest, and its tunnels function together much like a lung.

Perhaps the most famous example of the influence of termite mounds in architecture is the Eastgate Building in Harare, Zimbabwe. It is the country’s largest commercial and shopping complex, and yet it uses less than 10 percent of the energy consumed by a conventional building of its size because there is no central air conditioning and only a minimal heating system. Architect Mick Pearce famously based his design in the 1990s on the cooling and heating principles used in the region’s termite mounds, which serve as fungus farms for the termites. Fungus is their primary food source.

Conditions have to be just right for the fungus to flourish. So the termites must maintain a constant temperature of 87° F in an environment where the outdoor temperatures range from 35° F at night to 104° F during the day. Biologists have long suggested that they do this by constructing a series of heating and cooling vents throughout their mounds, which can be opened and closed during the day to keep the temperature inside constant. The Eastgate Building relies on a similar system of well-placed vents and solar panels.

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Global oceans were warmer last month than any other May in records stretching back to the 19th century, the European Union’s climate monitoring unit reported Wednesday.

Sea temperatures at a depth of about 10 meters were a quarter of a degree Celsius higher than ice-free oceans in May averaged across 1991 to 2020, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Year-round, long-term trends have added 0.6C to the ’s surface waters in 40 years, said C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess, noting that April had also seen a new record for heat.

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Human influences have the potential to reduce the effectivity of communication in bees, adding further stress to struggling colonies, according to new analysis.

Scientists at the University of Bristol studying honeybees, bumblebees and stingless bees found that variations in communication strategies are explained by differences in the habitats that bees inhabit and differences in the social lifestyle such colony size and nesting habits.

The findings, published today in PNAS, reveal that anthropogenic changes, such as habitat conversion, climate change and the use of agrochemicals, are altering the world bees occupy, and it is becoming increasingly clearer that this affects communication both directly and indirectly; for example, by affecting food source availability, social interactions among nestmates and their cognitive functions.

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A pair of food tech startups have teamed up to create what they say are the world’s first lab-grown fish filets — and they used a 3D printer to serve them.

The challenge: Demand for seafood is expected to nearly double by 2050 due to a growing population and increasing incomes, but overfishing, climate change, ocean pollution, and other factors pressure the seafood industry’s ability to satisfy the world’s hunger for fish.

Even if industry can source all the seafood we need from the ocean and fish farms, current fishing practices can harm the environment, via greenhouse gasses and marine ecosystem destruction, problems only likely to increase as the industry grows.

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WASHINGTON, May 30 (Reuters) — Former U.S. State Department and nuclear regulatory officials on Tuesday urged the U.S. Energy Department to reconsider a plan to use bomb-grade uranium in a nuclear power experiment, saying that its use could encourage such tests in other countries.

The Energy Department and two companies aim to share costs on the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment (MCRE) at the Idaho National Laboratory and use more than 1,322 pounds (600 kg) of fuel containing 93% enriched uranium.

Bill Gates-backed company TerraPower LLC, the utility Southern Co (SO.N) and the department hope the six-month experiment will lead to breakthroughs in reactors that could help reduce pollution linked to climate change.

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A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter. The research appeared in the journal Advanced Materials.

“This is very exciting,” says Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering in UMass Amherst’s College of Engineering and the paper’s lead author. “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean from thin air.”

“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt—but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”

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