“Ocean Battery resolves a societal challenge to provide access to renewable power generation without destabilizing the power grid and meet our climate goals. The Dutch Water engineers resolved this problem in a brilliant yet simple way with a tremendous amount of creativity, innovation power and Dutch entrepreneurship,” the press release continues.
Keep reading for more on this exciting new piece of technology, that could be revolutionary for the transition to cleaner means of energy.
Rutgers professor Jason Barr has proposed adding 1,760-acres of reclaimed land, named New Mannahatta, to the tip of Manhattan to provide housing and combat climate change.
Called New Mannahatta in reference to the indigenous name for the island in New York, the plan would extend Manhattan Island into New York Harbor beyond the Statue of Liberty.
Barr, a professor of economics at Rutgers University, outlined his plan in an opinion piece directed at the city’s mayor Eric Adams, which was recently published in the New York Times.
Posted in climatology, Elon Musk, space travel, sustainability
Tesla asks for help… SpaceX stacks… Elon Musk pays in Doge. It’s the free edition of Musk Reads #286.
And for our premium members — last week, you learned about Moon Bikes. This week, you will hear from author Jimmy Soni about what Musk’s earliest success reveals about his management style.
“They will be fine” — Elon Musk tweeted in response to a user wondering “How can I feel good about bringing kids into the world given climate change?” The real answer is much more complicated; the next few decades are fraught, and some children are already experiencing the worst of what climate change has to offer. Read more on Inverse.
The discovery may be the strongest evidence yet that people reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than many archaeologists thought.
Between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago, people squished through the mud along a lakeshore in what is now New Mexico, alone and in small groups, leaving behind their footprints. Or at least that’s the conclusion of a new paper that Oregon State University, Corvallis, archaeologist Loren Davis calls “potentially groundbreaking.” If the dates are right, the discovery would be the strongest evidence yet that people reached the Americas during the middle of the last ice age, thousands of years earlier than many archaeologists thought.
“If that’s true … it’s going to be a revolution in the way that we think about archaeology in the Americas,” says Davis, who wasn’t involved with the work. It might reignite debates about how people first reached the continent from Asia. But Davis and others would like corroboration of the surprising dates before they rewrite their understanding of when and how people arrived.
During the maximum extent of the last ice age, from about 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, land connected Russia and Alaska, allowing people to settle the now mostly submerged region archaeologists call Beringia. But glaciers covered much of Canada, blocking the way south into what’s now the continental United States and beyond. Archaeologists once thought the first people arrived in the Americas by walking through a corridor that opened between the glaciers by about 13,500 years ago. In recent decades, however, data from multiple sites have suggested people were in the Americas at least 16,000 years ago, leading many researchers to suspect that the first arrivals skirted the ice by traveling down the Pacific coast by boat.
In a way, it could mean climate change is linked to an “immature technosphere”.
It’s called an epiphenomenon.
The idea is that the ordinary function of one thing can generate a secondary effect that seems unrelated and beyond its scope of influence. And when it comes to the interconnected systems of the Earth, we see it all the time.
Plants, for example, found their way via evolution to photosynthesis, which greatly improved their survival. But it also led to them releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, and that changed everything: One form of life seeded a planet-wide transformation, just by pursuing its own nature.
But, if the totality of life (called a biosphere) can radically reshape the Earth, some scientists speculate that cognition — and cognition-related actions — might exhibit the same effect.
This is the “thought experiment” of a group of scientists who blended empirical knowledge of the Earth with more generic ideas about how life changes worlds. And, in the * International Journal of Astrobiology*, they explored the possibility of a “planetary intelligence\.
Turlock Irrigation District (TID) has announced Project Nexus, a pilot project to build solar panel canopies over a portion of TID’s existing canals to operate and research how water-plus-energy can meet California’s needs for climate resiliency.
The Project Nexus could contribute to a more water resilient future for California and position the State to meet its ambitious clean energy goals. The Project will assess the reduction of water evaporation resulting from mid-day shade and wind mitigation; improvements to water quality through reduced vegetative growth; reduction in canal maintenance through reduced vegetative growth; and generation of renewable electricity.
The inspiration for Project Nexus comes from the concept presented in a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Merced, and UC Santa Cruz, which found many advantages to mounting solar panels over open water canals. The study showed that covering the approximately 4,000 miles of California canals could save 63 billion gallons of water annually. This amount of water could be used to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or meet the residential water needs of more than 2 million people.
Unleashed cosmic ray bombardment may have eaten up ozone, driving short-term climate swings.
There is a whole range of possibilities when it comes to prefabricated modular housing—some might be as simple as a prefab cabin in the woods or a home office in the backyard; others are designed as stackable and programmable smart homes, perhaps strong enough to withstand natural disasters or for seniors looking to age in place affordably.
Whatever it may be, the prefab industry continues to evolve. Singapore-based Nestron is yet another contender in this ever-expanding field, now offering the Nestron Cube Two X (C2X). This rather futuristic-looking smart living pod measures a relatively generous 377 square feet (35 square meters)—a sizable increase in floor area compared to the company’s 280-square-foot (26-square-meter) Cube Two of the same series, which was launched back in 2020, and is designed for three to four inhabitants. Additionally, the Cube Two X comes in two versions: either a one-bedroom or two-bedroom unit with different floor layouts within the same footprint.
Similar to the preceding Cube Two, the 18,000-pound (8,000-kilogram) Cube Two X sports an ultra-sleek exterior that features an insulated, FRP-paneled, galvanized steel frame, which the company says was designed to weather out natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, and typhoons. However, the company notes that further fortifications can be done for clients looking for something even more resistant.
U.S. startup Geoship have created ‘dome homes’ which last up to 500 years and are resistant to fire, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes.
Made of earth-friendly bioceramic, Geoship’s geodesic domes envision a new future for humanity.
Although no images of the built domes have been released yet, Geoship has shared these renders of what the dwellings could look like.
Ooooops!!
A rocket stage set to smash into the moon on March 4 is no longer believed to be a piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but rather a booster from a Chinese rocket sent to the moon in 2014, experts say.
Bill Gray, an astronomer and the developer of the asteroid tracking software Project Pluto, initially identified the errant space junk (which had been given the temporary name WE0913A) as the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, predicting that the debris would collide with the moon after hurtling through space for seven years.
Gray now believes his initial assessment was wrong, and he has updated his blog post with a correction. The doomed object isn’t the SpaceX upper stage — launched in February 2015 to send the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite, or DSCOVR, 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth — but is actually a rocket booster from China’s 2014 Chang’e 5-T1 mission, which launched on October 2014, he said.
The object is set to hit the moon traveling at roughly 5,771 mph (9,288 km/h) on March 4.
