Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 35

When astronomers announced last month they might have discovered the most promising hints of alien life yet on a distant planet, the rare good news raised hopes humanity could soon learn we are not alone in the universe.

But several recent studies looking into the same data have found that there is not enough evidence to support such lofty claims, with one scientist accusing the astronomers of “jumping the gun.”

The debate revolves around the planet K2-18b, which is 124 away in the Leo constellation.

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Solar power has long been a beacon of hope in our pursuit of clean energy. However, the road to sustainable, high-efficiency photovoltaics has been riddled with roadblocks such as toxicity and instability in widely used lead halide perovskites. Could we engineer a solar cell that delivers not just high performance, but also durability, stability and environmental safety?

That question led us to (Ca, Ba)ZrS3, a chalcogenide perovskite with immense promise. Unlike its lead-based counterparts, this material boasts strong thermal and chemical stability. More importantly, its bandgap can be finely tuned down to 1.26 eV with less than 2% calcium doping, placing it squarely within the Shockley-Queisser limit for optimal photovoltaic conversion.

For the first time, my research team at the Autonomous University of Querétaro explored an innovative idea of pairing (Ca, Ba)ZrS3 with next-generation inorganic spinel hole transport layers (HTLs). We integrated NiCo2O4, ZnCo2O4, CuCo2O4, and SrFe2O4 into solar cells and simulated their performance using SCAPS-1D.

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Microsoft has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that beats current forecasting methods in tracking air quality, weather patterns, and climate-addled tropical storms, according to findings published Wednesday.

Dubbed Aurora, the new system—which has not been commercialized—generated 10-day weather forecasts and predicted hurricane trajectories more accurately and faster than traditional forecasting, and at lower costs, researchers reported in the journal Nature.

“For the first time, an AI system can outperform all operational centers for hurricane forecasting,” said senior author Paris Perdikaris, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Researchers have identified a type of chemical compound that, when applied to insecticide-treated bed nets, appears to kill the malaria-causing parasite in mosquitoes.

Published in the journal Nature, the multi-site collaborative study represents a breakthrough for a disease that continues to claim more than half a million lives worldwide every year. A lab at Oregon Health & Science University played a key role, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of the National Institutes of Health, supported the research.

Michael Riscoe, Ph.D., professor of molecular microbiology and immunology in the OHSU School of Medicine, designed and synthesized the anti-malarial drugs, termed ELQs, that were then screened in the lab of Flaminia Catteruccia, Ph.D., the study’s senior author and Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at VU Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies, has published an opinion piece about the results of a simple study he conducted involving the possible amount of electricity used by AI companies to generate answers to user queries. In his paper published in the journal Joule, he describes how he calculated past and current global electricity usage by AI data centers and how he made estimates regarding the future.

Recently, the International Energy Agency reported that data centers were responsible for up to 1.5% of in 2024—a number that is rising rapidly. Data centers are used for more things than crunching AI queries, as de Vries-Gao notes. They are also used to process and store cloud data, notably as part of bitcoin mining.

Over the past few years, AI makers have acknowledged that running LLMs such as ChatGPT takes a lot of computing power. So much so, that some of them have begun to generate their own electricity to ensure their needs are met. Over the past year, as de Vries-Gao notes, AI makers have become less forthcoming with details regarding energy use. Because of that, he set about making some estimates of his own.

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Based on the principle of refractive index matching, highly transparent upconversion contact lenses (UCLs) with a high concentration of upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) were developed. These lenses efficiently convert multispectral near-infrared (NIR) light into the three primary visible colors, enabling humans to acquire wearable NIR color vision.

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