Lifeboat Foundation

New research suggests that Darwinian evolution could be happening up to four times faster than previously thought, based on an analysis of genetic variation.

The more genetic differences there are in a species, the faster evolution can happen, as certain traits die off and stronger ones get established. The team behind this latest study calls it the “fuel of evolution”, and they looked at data on 19 different wild animal groups around the world.

That data analysis revealed this raw material for evolution is more abundant than earlier estimates, and as a result we may have to adjust our expectations for how quickly animals evolve – a pertinent question in our age of climate change.

Chopping down trees and processing the wood isn’t the most efficient or environmentally friendly way to make furniture or building materials. Scientists at MIT have now made breakthroughs in a process that could one day let us 3D print and grow wood directly into the shape of furniture and other objects.

Wood may be a renewable resource, but we’re using it up much faster than we’re replenishing it. Deforestation is having a drastic impact on wildlife and exacerbating the effects of climate change. Since our appetite for wooden products isn’t likely to change, our methods for obtaining it will have to.

In recent years, researchers have turned to growing wood in the lab. Not trees – just the wood itself, not unlike the ongoing work into cultivating animal cells for lab-grown meat, rather than raising live animals and slaughtering them. And now, a team of MIT scientists has demonstrated a new technique that can grow wood-like plant material in the lab, allowing for easy tuning of properties like weight and strength as needed.

Climate change is already had a serious impact on global food production — from making food less nutritious to messing with the growing season of plants, to even pushing some crop species towards extinction. On top of that, the world’s oceans are already stressed by overfishing, with over 70 percent of the world’s fish stocks fully exploited, over-exploited, or depleted.

The combination of overuse and climate change could prove deadly for global food security. And by the time 2,300 rolls around, it will be too late to mitigate the impact of human activity on our food sources, both those on land and those under the sea.

Loki has just announced a new version of its Basecamp adventure pod—or camper shell, if you’re old fashioned—for the EV maker’s much-anticipated electric pickup. Although we’ll have to wait until the Cybertruck’s arrival to see it in action, the high-end accessory looks like it could turn the EV into the ultimate go-anywhere vehicle.

The $135,000 camper shell includes solar panels and a climate control system.

A gold miner in Canada discovered a near complete mummified baby woolly mammoth Tuesday, according to the Yukon government and Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin, a local traditional territory. The female baby was named Nun cho ga, which means “big baby animal” in the Hän language.

The miner found the baby, which retained its skin and hair, while excavating through the permafrost at Eureka Creek in the Klondike gold fields within Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Traditional Territory, the government’s press release said. She’s estimated to have frozen during the Ice Age, over 30,000 years ago. While alive, she likely roamed the Yukon with wild horses, cave lions and giant steppe bison.

It added that the discovery was “significant” and rare, even for an area like Yukon, which has “a world-renowned fossil record of ice age animals.”

The researchers also optimized their electrolyzer to produce the highest levels of acetate ever produced in an electrolyzer to date. What’s more, they found that crop plants, including cowpea, tomato, rice, green pea, and tobacco, all have the potential to be grown in the dark using the carbon from acetate. There’s even a possibility that acetate could improve crop yields, though more research is required.

The researchers believe that by reducing the reliance on direct sunlight, artificial photosynthesis could provide an important alternative for food growth in the coming years, as the world adapts to the worst effects of climate change — including droughts, floods, and reduced land availability. “Using artificial photosynthesis approaches to produce food could be a paradigm shift for how we feed people. By increasing the efficiency of food production, less land is needed, lessening the impact agriculture has on the environment. And for agriculture in non-traditional environments, like outer space, the increased energy efficiency could help feed more crew members with less inputs,” Jinkerson explained.

From there, they ran flight tests using a specially designed motion-tracking system. Each electroluminescent actuator served as an active marker that could be tracked using iPhone cameras. The cameras detect each light color, and a computer program they developed tracks the position and attitude of the robots to within 2 millimeters of state-of-the-art infrared motion capture systems.

“We are very proud of how good the tracking result is, compared to the state-of-the-art. We were using cheap hardware, compared to the tens of thousands of dollars these large motion-tracking systems cost, and the tracking results were very close,” Kevin Chen says.

In the future, they plan to enhance that motion tracking system so it can track robots in real-time. The team is working to incorporate control signals so the robots could turn their light on and off during flight and communicate more like real fireflies. They are also studying how electroluminescence could even improve some properties of these soft artificial muscles, Kevin Chen says.

Circa 2019

Researchers at Heriot-Watt University use “balls of lightning” to connect glass to metal.

Why we need to adopt an abundance mindset.

Peter Diamandis shared an email blast about dire headlines that keep us on edge: the war in Ukraine, food and gasoline prices, climate change, and the neverending pandemic. Getting away from bad news is difficult, it appears, because of the way we are wired. Mass media feeds the bad far more than the good.

In his missive, Peter talks about Matt Ridley, a zoologist, who wrote and published The Rational Optimist in 2010. The book takes a profoundly optimistic view of human progress, a counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our day. Ridley coined the phrase “moaning pessimism” to describe the current state.

Continue reading “From Pessimism to Optimism Despite the Headlines” »