Lifeboat Foundation

Deep in the Constellation of Centarus lies a star 50 light-years away from the Earth. This star is so…unique that astronomers nicknamed it “Lucy.” Lucy, also known as V886 Centauri and BPM 37093, is (at first glance) an ordinary white dwarf star. But it seems to hide something rather special.

As many of you may know, a white dwarf is the hot cinder left behind when a star uses up its nuclear fuel and, in essence, dies. It is made mostly of carbon and oxygen and surrounded by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

In 1992 it was discovered that Lucy pulsates as a result of its core temperature dropping below 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit (6,600 Celsius). And in 1995 scientists decided to use Lucy for an experiment. They wanted to see what she was made of. The experiment was to use the pulsation of the star to see if the crystallization theory was true.

The Kardashev Scale has become a standardized way of classifying (hypothetical) advanced civilizations. The lowest rank, Type 1, is still way ahead of us — but by how much? When will we achieve Type 1 status and exactly how could we plausibly do so? In this video, we go through some estimates of when humanity might become Type 1, and in particular what kind of energy sources we could harness to achieve this feat.

You can now support our research program and the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University: https://www.coolworldslab.com/support.

Continue reading “Becoming a Kardashev Type I Civilization” »

Clean energy will reduce dependency on Russia and Arab countries for oil and gas.

What if the weight could instead be distributed between multiple support poles? That’s the design Eolink has in mind; its floating turbine swaps out the single large pole for four thinner ones angled towards each other in a pyramid shape. This not only distributes the weight of the turbine’s pieces, it allows the whole structure to be lighter.

The turbine Eolink plans to build as a proof of concept will have a generating capacity of five megawatts and weigh 1,100 tons. Its base will be a square with each side 171 feet (52 meters) long, and its rotor’s diameter will be 469 feet (143 meters). For reference, that’s about one and a half Big Bens, or four-fifths of the Washington Monument.

Continue reading “This Floating ‘Pyramid’ Wind Turbine Will Produce More Energy at a Lower Cost, Company Says” »

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They say you should always attack from the high ground, and there’s no higher ground than from orbit. Today we’ll examine orbital strikes, asteroid bombardment, kinetic weapons, dropships, and how to defend from them.

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Continue reading “Orbital Bombardment” »

It will be jointly built by a Swedish and a Turkish company.

Eco Wave Power (EWP) has signed a deal with Oren Ordu Eneas to build the world’s largest-ever wave power plant on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, according to a press release by the Swedish company published on Thursday.

The project would start with a 4MW pilot in the port of Ordu. It would then move forward to a 77MW plant which would consist of a fixed, modular array of steel floats hinged to piston-equipped arms.

Continue reading “World’s largest wave power plant to be built in Turkey” »

A s of 1 February 2021, there are about 280 million domestic LPG (liquified petroleum gas) consumers in India, according to Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. By March 2022, the Government of India expects that there will be over 300 million consumers. Indian Oil, the country’s largest fuel refiner, claims that it will import 50% more cooking gas to ensure the supply of LPG remains uninterrupted for its bottling plants.

It’s imperative to find heating solutions that are more efficient.

Moreover, the Government of India has been encouraging wider adoption of LPG to replace coal and firewood to improve air quality as well. But according to researchers at IIT-Guwahati, the thermal efficiencies of conventional domestic LPG cooking stoves available in the market are low (60–68%), and emissions are high (CO: 220–550 ppm, NOx: 5–25 ppm).

And the galaxy from which the GRB came from is also strange. It is young and still forming stars – the opposite of the only other known nearby galaxy that has played host to such an event.

“This event looks unlike anything else we have seen before from a long gamma-ray burst,” said Jillian Rastinejad, from Northwestern University, who led the study. “Its gamma rays resemble those of bursts produced by the collapse of massive stars.

Given that all other confirmed neutron star mergers we have observed have been accompanied by bursts lasting less than two seconds, we had every reason to expect this 50-second GRB was created by the collapse of a massive star. This event represents an exciting paradigm shift for gamma-ray burst astronomy.

Canada’s TC Energy has shut the Keystone pipeline — which connects Alberta to the US — after 14,000 barrels of crude oil spilled into a creek in Kansas.

Pipe operator TC Energy announced the pipeline’s shutdown at 5.35 a.m. CT on Thursday. The Canadian company said it initiated an energy shutdown and response at 8 p.m. CT on Wednesday after alarms went off detecting a pressure drop in the system.

The cause of the leak is not known. It is not immediately clear as of presstime when the pipeline is expected to come back online.

Water and wood may one day be all that’s needed to provide electrical power for a household. At a time when energy is a critical issue for many millions of people worldwide, scientists in Sweden have managed to generate electricity with the help of these two renewable resources.

The method reported by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology focuses on what naturally happens after wood is placed in water, and the water evaporates. Transpiration, a process in which water moves through a plant, is constantly occurring in nature. And it produces small amounts of electricity, known as bioelectricity.

Yuanyuan Li, assistant professor at the Division of Biocomposites at KTH, says that with some nanoengineering of wood—and pH tuning—small but promising amounts of electricity can now be harvested.