Lifeboat Foundation

In 1999 the United Nations acknowledged that the development gap between rich and poor countries was widening: about three-fifths of the world’s population lacked access to basic sanitation and one-third did not have access to safe drinking water. In spite of many initiatives and efforts, the sanitation issue is still largely unresolved; it is estimated that 2.3 billion people — primarily in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean — still lack access to basic sanitation (toilet). To address this challenge, in 2015, the global community adopted a Sustainable Development Goal dedicated to clean water and sanitation (SDG 6). Target 6.2 under this Goal calls for, “by 2030, achieving access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and ending open defecation.”

ESA business applications in cooperation with Toilet Board Coalition (http://www.toiletboard.org/) will be launching a new Invitation to Tender in Q3 2018 to assess the technical feasibility and viability of space-based services in support of sanitation for developing economies, and will establish the roadmap for service implementation through potential follow-on demonstration projects.

Toilet Board Coalition is a business-led partnership addressing the global sanitation crisis by accelerating the Sanitation Economy; it brings a network of business partners and sanitation development stakeholders, as well as experts from the global sanitation community. The Toilet Board Coalition will provide specific use cases and requirements derived from its two funded pilot projects, each assessing scalability of the Sanitation Economy.

Drivers considering plug-in hybrid vehicles with a gasoline backup are most interested in economic benefits while those gravitating toward battery-electric vehicles have stronger environmental concerns, according to a study led by a University of Kansas transportation policy scholar.

The research has identified distinct profiles of people considering newer electric vehicle technologies showing the two types of vehicles—one that offers gasoline as a safety net and another that relies solely on battery charging—are very different in the eyes of consumers.

“Our findings inform the misconception and show that electric vehicles are not a homogeneous entity,” said the study’s lead author Bradley Lane, associate professor in the KU School of Public Affairs & Administration. “There are distinctive profiles of potential users for whom a plug-in hybrid is attractive and another for whom a battery electric is attractive. And these are two very distinct groups, similar to how there is a group of users who are attracted to a sport-utility vehicle and a separate group attracted to an economy car. We have shed more light on what factors influence how people make these decisions.”

An ambitious proposal to create an Alaska-style social wealth fund that could transform the global economy.

The World Economic Forum suggests we are on the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by ‘ubiquitous automation, big data and artificial intelligence’. The Institute for Public Policy Research, however, says that “despite the growing capability of robots and artificial intelligence (AI), we are not on the cusp of a ‘post-human’ economy.”

IPPR suggests that an estimated 60 percent of occupations have at least 30 percent of activities which could be automated with already-proven technologies. As tasks are automated, work is likely to be redefined, focusing on areas of human comparative advantage over machines.

The CIPD point out that “new technology has changed many more jobs than it has destroyed, and it does not destroy work. Overall, the biggest advanced industrialized economies have between them created over 50 million jobs, a rise of nearly 20 percent, over the past 20 years despite huge economic and technological disruptions.”

NASA is partnering with U.S. companies and small businesses to develop technologies that have the potential to significantly benefit the economy and future NASA missions.

Recent announcements of selections for the agency’s Tipping Point solicitation and Phase II of NASA’s competitive Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program include several proposals with NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

NASA selected 10 Tipping Point proposals totaling approximately $44 million and Langley is a partner on one $3 million proposal. The agency also selected 20 research and technology proposals — valued at $15 million — from 19 American small businesses for STTR Phase II and Langley will manage three of the selected proposals totaling $2.25 million.

Continue reading “NASA Langley collaborates with industry to develop space technologies” »

What could possibly go wrong? Does anyone remember Fukushima?

Floating nuclear power plants offer several economic advantages.

Continue reading “China and Russia looking at 27 floating nuclear reactors but ThorCon and Indonesia could scale to 100 per year” »

“The big problem is that hospitals don’t buy new devices, and they keep using really dangerous ones ad infinitum — until they just stop working,” Corman said.

Corman wants these old, unsecured devices gone from hospitals. The fear is that, beyond freezing systems or hijacking medical records as they did during WannaCry, hackers could also actively manipulate medical equipment to harm patients by, say, administering a lethal dose of medication via an infusion pump. While newer devices aren’t ironclad, they are typically built with more robust security features. So Corman and others are urging health-care providers to scrap old, or “legacy,” equipment and replace it with newer models.

To nudge health-care providers to trade up, he’s put forth an idea for an incentive program akin to “Cash for Clunkers,” the 2009 federal auto-rebate plan that aimed to run gas-guzzling cars off the road. Under that program, which was formally called the Car Allowance Rebate System, people received cash in exchange for turning in fuel-inefficient vehicles, which they could then put toward new, more efficient ones. (The program fizzled after a few months, when it depleted its allotted budget.) Similarly, in this version, health-care providers would be compensated for junking old equipment, and could use the rebates toward the purchase of new devices. Corman said he hasn’t fully worked out the economics, but he believes device makers might be willing to subsidize the program in part, since it would help them move inventory.

Continue reading “Insecure Medical Devices Are Low-Hanging Fruit for Hackers” »

The Pentagon’s research arm is looking for teams to build an artificial intelligence tool that can automatically generate, test and refine its own scientific hypotheses.

By essentially automating steps of the scientific process, the tool would let top decision-makers take discoveries from the lab and rapidly apply them to the real world, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

“Automation of model-based inference procedures could increase the speed and accuracy with which these models can be used to address key questions of national security by orders of magnitude,” officials wrote in a request for information published Aug. 17. They said the system could be used to verify the results of scientific studies and monitor “fragile economic, political, social or environmental” events.

Continue reading “The Pentagon Wants AI to Take Over the Scientific Process” »

The hydrogen economy has been touted for decades as a way to navigate the clean energy transition. Now a new CSIRO roadmap sets out how hydrogen power can become a major energy player.