Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11

A company based in Canada has created the world’s very first plane that’s made mostly from hemp and powered by cannabis oil, giving completely new meaning to the term “sky high”

Designed and built by the weed company Hempearth – who also sell other weed-related items such as food, clothing, and accessories, the plane is claimed to be much stronger, lighter, and much more environmentally friendly than normal planes. Then it physically gets you higher than marijuana, but your plane is made of marijuana, and on marijuana fuel.

But how does it do it, exactly? Almost the entire plane is made from composite hemp fibers that are said to be 10 times stronger than steel, and this includes not only the chassis, but also everything inside of the plane including the seats, walls, and cushions.

When you want to get sky high.

Read more | >

When Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, an underwater volcano near Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean, erupted in 2022, scientists expected that it would spew enough water vapor into the stratosphere to push global temperatures past the 1.5 C threshold set by the Paris Accords. A new UCLA-led study shows that not only did the eruption not warm the planet, but it actually reduced temperatures over the Southern Hemisphere by 0.1 C.

The reason: The eruption formed smaller sulfate aerosols that had an efficient cooling effect that unexpectedly outweighed the warming effect of the water vapor. Meanwhile, the water vapor interacted with sulfur dioxide and other atmospheric components, including ozone, in ways that did not amplify warming.

While that’s good news, the study also suggests that efforts to reverse by loading the atmosphere with substances that react with solar radiation to send heat back out into space, an effort known as geoengineering, are potentially even riskier than previously thought and must take new complications into account.

Read more | >

IN A NUTSHELL 🌿 The Dragonfly Turbine is designed by Renzo Piano and ENEL Green Power, inspired by the flight of dragonflies. 🏙️ It features a compact and eco-friendly design that blends seamlessly into urban landscapes, minimizing visual impact. 💡 The turbine maximizes wind capture efficiency even in low-wind conditions, providing reliable energy output. 🇮🇹

Read more | >

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have tested a quantum computing approach to an old challenge: solving classical fluid dynamics problems.

The work is published in the journal Physics of Fluids. The results highlight avenues for further study of ’s potential to aid scientific discovery.

For the test problem, the research team used the Hele-Shaw flow problem—a scenario of two flat, parallel plates extremely close to each other and the flow of liquids and gases between them. The problem, although idealized, offers important applications in real-world problems such as microfluidics, groundwater flow, porous media flow, oil recovery and bioengineering.

Read more | >

A recent study reveals that the famous Wolf-Rayet 104 “pinwheel star” holds more mystery but is even less likely to be the potential “death star” it was once thought to be.

Research by W. M. Keck Observatory Instrument Scientist and astronomer Grant Hill finally confirms what has been suspected for years: WR 104 has at its heart a pair of massive stars orbiting each other with a period of about 8 months. The collision between their powerful winds gives rise to its rotating pinwheel of dust that glows in the infrared, and spins with the same period.

The pinwheel structure of WR 104 was discovered at Keck Observatory in 1999 and the remarkable images of it turning in the sky astonished astronomers. One of the two stars that were suspected to orbit each other—a Wolf-Rayet star—is a massive, evolved star that produces a powerful wind highly enriched with carbon. The second star—a less evolved but even more massive OB star—has a strong that is still mostly hydrogen.

Read more | >