Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability – Page 220

The loss of pollinators, such as bees, is a huge challenge for global biodiversity and affects humanity by causing problems in food production. At Tampere University, researchers have now developed the first passively flying robot equipped with artificial muscle. Could this artificial fairy be utilized in pollination?

The development of stimuli-responsive polymers has brought about a wealth of material-related opportunities for next-generation small-scale, wirelessly controlled soft-bodied robots. For some time now, engineers have known how to use these materials to make small robots that can walk, swim and jump. So far, no one has been able to make them fly.

Researchers of the Light Robots group at Tampere University are now researching how to make smart material fly. Hao Zeng, Academy Research Fellow and the group leader, and Jianfeng Yang, a doctoral researcher, have come up with a new design for their project called FAIRY – Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly. They have developed a polymer-assembly robot that flies by wind and is controlled by light.

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Food from thin air?

Food production, as we know it, is entirely dependent on land and weather conditions. Protein production is a massively disproportionate squanderer of the Earth’s resources. It’s time to enter the era of sustainable food production to liberate our planet from the burdens of agriculture.

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A jury found Elon Musk not liable for costing investors when he issued a series of tweets saying he had “secured” funding to take the electric car maker private.

The Friday verdict, issued by a nine-person Northern California jury, represents a legal victory for the 51-year-old billionaire, who has seen the value of his Tesla holdings decline some 44% over the past year.

During the trial, Musk personally took the witness stand to defend the tweets, testifying he believed he had a handshake agreement in 2018 with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to convert Tesla, which is a publicly traded company, into a private one. It was the Saudis, he said, who subsequently reneged on the deal.

…however I found that the trial brings up the practice of short selling, which is why since the 2007 financial crisis has been made illegal everywhere but the USA. For shot sellers to actually try to sue someone is bizarre.

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Cyanobacteria are single-celled organisms that derive energy from light, using photosynthesis to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and liquid water (H2O) into breathable oxygen and the carbon-based molecules like proteins that make up their cells. Cyanobacteria were the first organisms to perform photosynthesis in the history of Earth, and were responsible for flooding the early Earth with oxygen, thus significantly influencing how life evolved.

Geological measurements suggest that the atmosphere of the early Earth—over three billion years ago—was likely rich in CO2, far higher than current levels caused by , meaning that ancient had plenty to “eat.”

But over Earth’s multi-billion-year history, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have decreased, and so to survive, these bacteria needed to evolve new strategies to extract CO2. Modern cyanobacteria thus look quite different from their ancient ancestors, and possess a complex, fragile set of structures called a CO2-concentrating mechanism (CCM) to compensate for lower concentrations of CO2.

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WindFloat Atlantic – the world’s first semi-submersible floating offshore wind farm – has been online for two years, and it’s far exceeding power output expectations.

The 25 megawatt (MW) WindFloat Atlantic project ended 2022 with an electricity production of 78 gigawatt hours (GWh) – 5% more output than its first year. It supplies power to more than 25,000 households and avoids 33,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Its annual availability was between 93–94%.

The offshore wind farm sits 20 km off the coast of Portugal in the municipality of Viana do Castelo, north of Porto. It’s made up of three 8.4 MW Vestas wind turbines that sit on semi-submersible, three-column floating platforms anchored by chains to the seabed. A 20 km long (12.4 mile long) cable connects it to an onshore substation.

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The key innovation in this new desalination technology is fluorine, a hydrophobic element that that’s long been prized for its desire to be left alone. It’s no accident that fluorine is a key ingredient in Teflon, which is used on non-stick pans to keep fried eggs from sticking and inside pipes to make fluids flow more efficiently. At the nanoscopic level, fluorine repels negatively charged ions, including the chlorine in salt (NaCl). Its electric properties also break down clumps of water molecules that can keep the liquid from flowing as freely as possible. -(IE)

-Desalination is something people need to consider with rising sea levels and changing weather patterns, like drought.

Oligoamide nanoring-based fluorous nanochannels in bilayer membranes enable ultrafast water permeation and desalination.

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NASA has a massive amount of data and it receives more every day. While some of the data is processed immediately, much of the data is archived to be processed later, sometimes years later. This situation needs to change if researchers are to utilize the data to investigate critical issues with dynamically changing characteristics like global climate change. To increase its ability to process and use this data in a timely manner, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center announced a joint development program with IBM Research to process the NASA data using IBM’s foundation AI technology.

To put this task into perspective, the GPT-3 data set, which led to the development of ChatGPT AI platform that recently passed a Wharton MBA exam, represents about 45TB (terabytes) of data. By comparison, NASA estimates that its data set could be upwards of 250PB (petabytes). With 1PB equal to 1,000TB, the NASA data set is over 5,000 times larger than the GPT-3 data set, making this a monumental task, but the benefits could be ground-breaking.

Previously, IBM estimated that 90% of data collected is never used, and in their press invitation, IBM and NASA noted that “Currently, half of all scientific findings come from archived data, which makes it challenging for researchers to study ever-evolving threats such as climate change.” Efficiently mining the enormous amount of archival data needs the power of AI. IBM Research’s massive cloud resources, the collective experiences of the company’s AI experts, and its AI foundation model technology will help NASA filter and analyze earth-science data in days or months rather than years or even decades.

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