Lifeboat Foundation

The floor of California’s arid Central Valley is sinking as groundwater pumping for agriculture and drinking water depletes aquifers. A new remote sensing study from Stanford University shows land sinking—or subsidence—will likely continue for decades to centuries if underground water levels merely stop declining. To stop the sinking, water levels will need to rise.

“If you don’t get these water levels to come back up, then the land is going to sink, potentially tens of centimeters per year, for decades. But if they go up, you can get rewarded very quickly. You almost immediately improve the situation,” said Matthew Lees, a geophysics Ph.D. student and lead author of the study, which appears June 2 in Water Resources Research.

The research comes amid worsening drought in a state where climate change is tipping the odds toward hot conditions with more precipitation extremes. The first four months of 2022 marked California’s driest start to a year since 1895. Reservoir levels are so low that, for a second year in a row, many irrigation districts are poised to receive none of their usual allocations of water from the Central Valley Project, the federally managed network of reservoirs and canals that conveys water to some 3 million acres of farmland.

A total of 21 oil wells have been found to be leaking methane in or near two Bakersfield neighborhoods, and more than two dozen are being tested by state and regional air regulators.

California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, said in an update on its website that state and regional air regulators are in the area again today to interview residents and take additional methane readings.

Repairs are at various stages for the nearly two dozen wells, several of which were found to be leaking at least 50,000 parts per million of methane — a level at which the colorless, odorless gas can explode if ignited.

Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine.

Posted on Big Think.

Our cells perform a marvel of engineering when it comes to packing information into small spaces. Every time a cell divides, it bundles up an amazing 4 meters of DNA into 46 tiny packages, each of which is only several millionths of a meter in length. Researchers from EMBL Heidelberg and the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg have now discovered how a family of DNA motor proteins succeeds in packaging loosely arranged strands of DNA into compact individual chromosomes during cell division.

The researchers studied condensin, a protein complex critical to the process of chromosome formation. Although this complex was discovered more than three decades ago, its mode of action remained largely unexplored. In 2018, researchers from the Häring group at EMBL Heidelberg and their collaborators showed that condensin molecules create loops of DNA, which may explain how chromosomes are formed. However, the inner workings by which the protein complex achieves this feat remained unknown.

Continue reading “Uncovering the inner workings of the molecular machinery that shapes chromosomes during cell division” »

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) capture the most important aspects of brain information processing. They are considered a promising approach for next-generation artificial intelligence. However, the biggest problem restricting the development of SNNs is the training algorithm.

To solve this problem, a research team led by Prof. Zeng Yi from the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has proposed backpropagation (BP) with biologically plausible spatiotemporal adjustment for training deep spiking neural networks.

The associated study was published in Patterns on June 2.

One of the myriad issues with hydrogen as a clean energy source is infrastructure, as it’s very expensive to move around and store an extremely explosive gas. Toyota and its subsidiary Woven Planet believe they may have a solution with a new portable hydrogen cartridge prototype. The idea is that they can be filled up at a dedicated facility, transported where needed, then returned when you receive your next shipment.

The cartridges would be relatively small at 16 inches long, 7 inches in diameter and about 11 pounds in weight. Toyota calls them “portable, affordable, and convenient energy that makes it possible to bring hydrogen to where people live, work, and play without the use of pipes… [and] swappable for easy replacement and quick charging.”

They could be useful for “mobility [i.e. hydrogen cars], household applications, and many future possibilities we have yet to imagine,” Toyota said. It didn’t mention any specific uses, but it said that “one hydrogen cartridge is assumed to generate enough electricity to operate a typical household microwave for approximately 3–4 hours.”

Remotely operated, non-lethal drones key in long-term plan to detect and stop mass shootings in less than 60 seconds

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. 0, June 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Axon (NASDAQ: AXON), the global leader in connected public safety technologies, today announced it has formally begun development of a non-lethal, remotely-operated TASER drone system as part of a long-term plan to stop mass shootings, and reaffirmed it is committed to public engagement and dialogue during the development process. This includes accelerating detection and improving real-time situational awareness of active shooter events, enhancing first responder effectiveness through VR training, and deploying remotely operated non-lethal drones capable of incapacitating an active shooter in less than 60 seconds.

A new technique locates stellar objects that change brightness.