Lifeboat Foundation

The now-familiar sight of traditional propeller wind turbines could be replaced in the future with wind farms containing more compact and efficient vertical turbines.

New research from Oxford Brookes University has found that the vertical turbine design is far more efficient than traditional turbines in large-scale wind farms, and when set in pairs the vertical turbines increase each other’s performance by up to 15%.

A research team from the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics (ECM) at Oxford Brookes led by Professor Iakovos Tzanakis conducted an in-depth study using more than 11500 hours of computer simulation to show that wind farms can perform more efficiently by substituting the traditional propeller-type Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWTs), for compact Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs).

Scientists develop a low-cost, highly efficient technique that uses solar energy to remove salt from seawater, producing safe drinking water.

Despite the vast amount of water on Earth, most of it is nonpotable seawater. Freshwater accounts for only about 2.5% of the total, so much of the world experiences serious water shortages.

In AIP Advances, by AIP Publishing, scientists in China report the development of a highly efficient desalination device powered by solar energy. The device consists of a titanium-containing layer, TiNO, or titanium nitride oxide, capable of absorbing solar energy. The TiNO is deposited on a special type of paper and foam that allows the solar absorber to float on seawater.

A power-beaming experiment is scheduled to launch in 2024.

Space-based solar power won’t be just a sci-fi dream forever, if things go according to the U.S. Air Force’s plans.

Perseverance has performed a test of its MOXIE instrument to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen for the first time on Mars.

According to the university, the system focuses on the “thermal recovery and post-treatment of glass fibres” from glass-reinforced polymer composite scrap, with the end result “near-virgin quality glass fibres.” The idea is that, using this system, the composite waste could be re-used.

The aim is to scale-up and commercialize a process developed by team at the University of Strathclyde, in Scotland.

While biodegradable plastics have been touted as a solution to plastic pollution, in practice they don’t work as advertised.

“Biodegradability does not equal compostability,” Ting Xu, study coauthor and UC Berkeley polymer scientist, told Science News.

But by studying nature, Xu and her team have developed a process that actually breaks down biodegradable plastics with just heat and water in a period of weeks. The results, published in Nature on Wednesday, could be game-changing for the plastic pollution problem.

OEC promoting STEM education in Africa.

Remember the project where Bill Gates wanted to cover the sun to cool the Earth? Well, this summer, the tests will begin. According to The Times, a large balloon will soon be launched in Sweden that will spew out of calcium carbonate, which is essentially “chalk dust.”

The Controlled Stratospheric Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) wants to prove that the release of this dust into the stratosphere could eventually divert some of the sun’s energy and lower the temperatures of our planet.

Continue reading “A Project Supported by Bill Gates Is Set to Temporarily Dim the Sun” »

The European Union is finalizing plans for an ambitious “digital twin” of planet Earth that would simulate the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land with unrivaled precision, providing forecasts of floods, droughts, and fires from days to years in advance. Destination Earth, as the effort is called, won’t stop there: It will also attempt to capture human behavior, enabling leaders to see the impacts of weather events and climate change on society and gauge the effects of different climate policies.

“It’s a really bold mission, I like it a lot,” says Ruby Leung, a climate scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. By rendering the planet’s atmosphere in boxes only 1 kilometer across, a scale many times finer than existing climate models, Destination Earth can base its forecasts on far more detailed real-time data than ever before. The project, which will be described in detail in two workshops later this month, will start next year and run on one of the three supercomputers that Europe will deploy in Finland, Italy, and Spain.

Destination Earth rose out of the ashes of Extreme Earth, a proposal led by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for a billion-euro flagship research program. The European Union ultimately canceled the flagship program, but retained interest in the idea. Fears that Europe was falling behind China, Japan, and the United States in supercomputing led to the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, an €8 billion investment to lay the groundwork for eventual “exascale” machines capable of 1 billion billion calculations per second. The dormant Extreme Earth proposal offered a perfect use for such capacity. “This blows a soul into your digital infrastructure,” says Peter Bauer, ECMWF’s deputy director of research, who coordinated Extreme Earth and has been advising the European Union on the new program.

NASA has logged another extraterrestrial first on its latest mission to Mars: converting carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into pure, breathable oxygen, the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday.

The unprecedented extraction of oxygen, literally out of thin air on Mars, was achieved Tuesday by an experimental device aboard Perseverance, a six-wheeled science rover that landed on the Red Planet Feb. 18 after a seven-month journey from Earth. read more

In its first activation, the toaster-sized instrument dubbed MOXIE, short for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, produced about 5 grams of oxygen, equivalent to roughly 10 minutes’ worth of breathing for an astronaut, NASA said.