Lifeboat Foundation

This is not sustainable!

Every summer the U.S. Central Plains go dry, leading farmers to tap into groundwater to irrigate sorghum, soy, cotton, wheat and corn and maintain large herds of cattle and hogs. As the heat rises, anxious irrigators gather to discuss whether and how they should adopt more stringent conservation measures.

They know that if they do not conserve, the Ogallala Aquifer, the source of their prosperity, will go dry. The Ogallala, also known as the High Plains Aquifer, is one of the largest underground freshwater sources in the world. It underlies an estimated 174,000 square miles of the Central Plains and holds as much water as Lake Huron. It irrigates portions of eight states, from Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska in the north to Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas in the south.

Continue reading “Farmers are drawing groundwater from the giant Ogallala Aquifer faster than nature replaces it” »

We could make people less stinky, more resistant to radiation, even less dependent on food and oxygen. But would the new creature be human?

Almost everyone who eats fast food is familiar with the frustration of trying to squeeze every last drop of ketchup out of the small packets that accompany french fries.

What most consumers don’t realize, however, is that food left behind in plastic packaging is not simply a nuisance. It also contributes to the millions of pounds of perfectly edible food that Americans throw out every year. These small, incremental amounts of sticky foods like condiments, dairy products, beverages, and some meat products that remain trapped in their packaging can add up to big numbers over time, even for a single household.

New research from Virginia Tech aims to cut down on that waste – and consumer frustration – with a novel approach to creating super slippery industrial packaging. The study, which was published in Scientific Reports and has yielded a provisional patent, establishes a method for wicking chemically compatible vegetable oils into the surfaces of common extruded plastics.

Continue reading “New approach to super slippery packaging aims to cut down on food waste” »

https://paper.li/e-1437691924…

The term “transhumanism” was coined by Aldous Huxley’s brother, Julian, the evolutionary biologist and First Director-General of UNESCO founded 1954 London, now in Paris, Julian Huxley (1887–1975): “I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.” (“Transhumanism.” Julian Huxley. In New Bottles for New Wine, pp 13–17. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). https://www.newstatesman.com/2017/10/heritage-wars-politics-…out-unesco

The idea was developed by futurist FM 2030 was formerly known as F M Esfandiary, who taught in NY from 1966. “The contemporary meaning of the term “transhumanism” was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught “new concepts of the human” at The New School in the 1960s, when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and worldviews “transitional” to posthumanity as “transhuman”. The Transhuman phase began with the Industrial Revolution, and in the Anthopocene era of today, many of us (especially in the West) have already progressed beyond the human (agricultural) stage, past the ‘transhuman’ Industrial era, to enjoy our current C21st posthuman post-industrial lifestyles.

Continue reading “Welcome to Posthuman wiki” »

“I think we are on the verge of a massive disruption,” Ford told me recently. “We see stagnant wages, and we see an erosion in the quality of the jobs. A lot of solid middle-class jobs are disappearing, and that alone has been remarkably disruptive… This is a big deal and I think it’s going to get get vastly bigger, and I do think that this is a subject everyone should be a bit concerned about.”

To put it bluntly: Once cars and trucks become automated, what will taxi and truck drivers do for work? Same with factory workers, fast food employees, retail clerks, and millions of other low-skill jobs that could theoretically be phased out entirely with robotics. This isn’t some sci-fi future; one report compiled recently by the McKinsey Global Institute says that advances in AI, automation and robotics will displace between 39 and 73 million jobs by 2030.

This robot was designed for harvesting vegetables inside greenhouses.

After tens of thousands of years of being trapped in Siberian permafrost, two female nematodes were successfully defrosted. Researchers say they are showing signs of life, moving and eating.

By providing an ultra-high native resolution chip with built-in binning of pixels, Sony hopes to let smartphone users have their cake and eat it too — both amazing detail and good low-light performance.

A fashion collection made from the remains of grapes from the wine industry and plastic made from chicken feathers are two new twists on the practice of making new products from waste, and a growing demand for sustainability from consumers mean there could be a ready market for this type of innovation.

Food waste isn’t just the result of groceries that have gone off or uneaten meals. As food is processed for consumption, huge amounts of waste are generated. The European poultry industry, for example, generated about 3.1 million tons of discarded feathers in 2014. And during wine production, around 25% of the weight of grapes, such as the skins and seeds, are wasted.

These byproducts could soon be given a second life, as scientists work out how to transform them into new materials.