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The world’s small-scale farmers now can see a path to solving global hunger over the next decade, with solutions—such as adopting climate-resilient crops through improving extension services—all culled rapidly via artificial intelligence from more than 500,000 scientific research articles.

The results are synthesized in 10 new research papers—authored by 77 scientists, researchers and librarians in 23 countries—as part of Ceres2030: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger. The project is headquartered at Cornell University, with partners from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

The papers were published concurrently on Oct. 12 in four journals— Nature Plants, Nature Sustainability, Nature Machine Intelligence and Nature Food —and assembled in a comprehensive package online: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger.

In this brief, at times controversial— even radical—volume. Dr. Ian C. Hale guides us through likely scenarios and gives us life-saving recommendations for effectively dealing with the next waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a must read for public policy makers, medical professionals, and those mapping out their financial future in the post-corona world.

China is pushing ahead with developing a giant Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation competing with SpaceX, Amazon and OneWeb, according to the Washington DC-based analyst Bhavya Lal and California State University’s Professor Larry Press.

Press, professor of information systems at the California State University, mentioned a recent Chinese spectrum filing in a blog of the CircleID website. China “has filed a spectrum application with the International Telecommunication Union for two constellations with the cryptic names GW-A59 and GW-2″ for a total of 12,992 satellites, Press said.

“We heard about an announcement of a constellation with nearly 13,000 satellites,” Bhavya Lal said in SpaceWatchGlobal’s Space Café webtalk last week. Lal is a senior space policy analyst at the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute in Washington DC and was in the lead for IDA’s recently published report “Evaluation of China’s Commercial Space Sector”.

“Out of around 20 Chinese companies engaged in satellite communications, fewer than a half dozen have proposed constellations,” Lal summarized the report’s findings. “Many focus on narrowband communications, targeting markets such as the Internet of Things (IoT).” Companies considering satellite broadband at an early stage include LinkSure and Galaxy Space, Lal said, while state-owned enterprises such as CASIC and CASC “have the deeper pockets needed to more rapidly launch satellite constellations”.

Regarding the not state-owned enterprises (SOE’s) “we found that these broadband companies are all very early-stage, still in the R&D phase, and do not have much in the way of hardware to launch,” Lal said. “However, as in other areas, the Chinese are making fast progress. The best we can tell the current focus of most companies is domestic. But as the Chinese have done in other areas such as high-speed rail, it would be not a stretch of the imagination that once the bugs in the system are worked out domestically, the Chinese will begin to market services internationally.”

TODAY (Oct 4th) the USTP is holding a special pre-RAADFest Enlightenment Salon at 7 a.m. PST / 10 am EST with Gabor Kiss, CEO of ENVIENTA, to discuss ways to empower contributors to open-source projects and accelerate development of practical transhumanist technologies.


Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Dr. Alexandre Kalache, President of the International Longevity Centre-Brazil (ILC-Brazil).

Ira Pastor Comments:

As we continue our virtual road-trip around the globe per the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Age Friendly Cities Global Movement, during the WHO defined “Decade of Healthy Aging”, we are headed down to the southern hemisphere to the country of Brazil.

Dr. Alexandre Kalache:

India is not proposing the same open-access terms for articles that its researchers publish. Instead, the researchers advising the government want authors to archive their accepted manuscripts in public online repositories. This is often described as ‘green’ open access, which differs from the ‘gold’ route of publishing in open-access journals.


Researchers will also recommend an open-access policy that promotes research being shared in online repositories.

Karen Potter, Director of Sustainability Hub and ideaXme sustainability ambassador interviews Christoph Promberger, M.Sc., Executive Director Foundation Conservation Carpathia (FCC). https://www.carpathia.org

Karen Potter comments:

In 2009, the Foundation Conservation Carpathia was founded by a dozen international philanthropists and conservationists with the goal to stop illegal logging and to protect a significant surface of Carpathian forests to form a completely protected area.

The FCC was founded in response to the restitution of formerly nationalised forests to private citizens in Romania. This process triggered massive clear-cuts and thousands of hectares of forests were illegally logged, posing a severe threat to the integrity of the Carpathian ecosystem.

Wilderness is disappearing globally at an alarming rate, less than 2% of Europe’s surface is still in its original state and the Carpathian Mountains form some of the largest contiguous forests on the continent with the highest percentage of still virgin woodlands; they contain an extraordinarily high number of species.

Karen is a passionate environment and sustainability campaigner leading Government and Parliamentary efforts to promote Net Zero policy solutions as well as lead on COP26, business, community and civic action. She is a project development specialist with extensive experience in designing and delivering new initiatives to promote sustainability, social responsibility, smart energy, the Green Recovery and clean tech investment. She is highly experienced in government, NGO and public sector communications, building and managing senior stakeholder relations and media engagement.

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Listen to our extended version of this episode on any podcasting platform: https://link.chtbl.com/type-ii-civilization

How cool would it be if we could one day regulate our atmosphere, control the climate and maybe even blast threatening asteroids into stardust? Well, to do those things would require A LOT of energy. Essentially, we’d have to be able to harness all the power from the Sun. According to the Kardashev scale that ranks planets according to their ability to harness the energy from their star and even their galaxy, that would make Earth a Type II civilization. What does that mean and how far away are we from achieving that level of uber energy capacity? You’ll have to tune in to find out as Peter and Richard welcome back Michio Kaku, physicist and science communicator extraordinaire to help us better understand “What If we became a type II civilization?”

Time codes:
0:00 What the episode is going to be about?
1:45 Are we a Type I civilization?
3:20 Who is Pr. Michio Kaku?
4:35 What is the Kardashev scale?
8:20 What does Type II mean?
9:45 How to expedite our evolution to advanced energy?
13:00 What if we were a Type II civilization?
15:50 Enjoy more from Pr. Kaku
18:20 Do you have life insurance?
20:50 Final thoughts

Can you translate this episode into another language? Add subtitles and we will link your YouTube channel in the description: https://www.youtube.com/timedtext_video?v=1JcDKNblGTs

Historically, human space exploration was initiated by the Soviet Union with the Sputnik launch into the Earth orbit in 1957. Humankind’s space endeavors grew with more determination after the first animal’s launch, a dog called “Laika”. Marked by the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin trip in the Vostok 1 in 1961 and his compatriot Valentina Tereshkiva’s three-day space orbiting mission in the Vostok 6 in 1963, humankind succeeded to make the giant leap beyond Earth’s boundaries.

Nonetheless, the Yuri Gagarin’s spacewalk and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon remain the spark to ignite ambitious human prospects on space travel, which unleashed unlimited possibilities on the humankind’s expansion into outer space. The achieved milestones in space endeavors created a shift from a mere inspirational driver and curiosity feeder on existential questions [3] to a space race which grew from a bipolar race between the United States and the former Soviet Union to a different space race in which new actors, particularly private actors, have become essential players [4].

The most prominent ongoing transformation of the global space sector is the race to commercialize space driven by private enterprises and induced by governmental agencies who rewarded these enterprises billions of dollars in governmental space contracts. The evolution of space commercialization could be illustrated through the U.S. space economic emergence from the National Aeronautics and Space administration’s (NASA) monopoly to a more liberalized space sector. Such an emergence came as a consequence of NASA’s struggle to improve its military-based technologies to achieve cost-effective and safe space access [5] in addition to budget reductions and various costly accidents, which led NASA to outsource its spaceship manufacturing.

NASA’s outsourcing mechanisms were organized through public procurement contracts accorded through bidding mechanisms to a few private space giants. Under these procurement contracts, private entities undertook rockets and spaceships manufacturing supervised by NASA, who provided the launching facility. From 1982, private actors’ access to the space sector became less costly due to reduced entry barriers to the space sector [6].

Sparked by President Barak Obama’s policy in 2010, the space industry witnessed an unprecedented disruption characterized by decentralizing space activities from governmental entities to private sectors. As a consequence, the U.S. space sector has undergone a shift that impacted the global space sector. This shift was propelled by complex dynamics due to the interaction between various forces beyond simple market forces and driven by various factors. The combination of these factors, including the reduction of public entities’ involvement and the substantial private investment injection into the global space sector, created a diverse space sector [7]. The global space sector’s evolution created a revolutionary New Space market structure; thanks to its related complex geopolitics and complex forces, a new race started: the race to commercialize space.

#SpaceWatchGL

References

[1] Cousins, Norman, Philip Morrison, James Michener, Jacques Cousteau, Ray Bradbury, Why Man Explores, California Institute of Technology Symposium, Pasadena, July 2, 1976, California, NASA Educational Publication 123, Government Printing Office: Washington D. C., 1977.

Summary: Lessons from other historic pandemics show social tension accumulated throughout epidemics lead to significant episodes of rebellion.

Source: Bocconi University

If you have not been hearing much of the French Gilets Jaunes or of the Italian Sardines in the last few months, it’s because “the social and psychological unrest arising from the epidemic tends to crowd-out the conflicts of the pre-epidemic period, but, at the same time it constitutes the fertile ground on which global protest may return more aggressively once the epidemic is over,” writes Massimo Morelli, Professor of Political Science at Bocconi, in a paper recently published in Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy.

This course is for students wishing to explore blockchain technology’s potential use—by entrepreneurs and incumbents—to change the world of money and finance. The course begins with a review of Bitcoin and an understanding of the commercial, technical, and public policy fundamentals of blockchain technology, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts. The class then continues on to current and potential blockchain applications in the financial sector.