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For the first time, RIPE researchers have proven that multigene bioengineering of photosynthesis increases the yield of a major food crop in field trials. After more than a decade of working toward this goal, a collaborative team led by the University of Illinois has transgenically altered soybean plants to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis, resulting in greater yields without loss of quality.

Results of this magnitude couldn’t come at a more crucial time. The most recent UN report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022, found that in 2021 nearly 10% of the world population was hungry, a situation that has been steadily worsening over the last few years and eclipsing all other threats to global health in scale. According to UNICEF, by 2030, more than 660 million people are expected to face food scarcity and malnutrition. Two of the major causes of this are inefficient food supply chains (access to food) and harsher growing conditions for crops due to climate change. Improving access to food and improving the sustainability of food crops in impoverished areas are the key goals of this study and the RIPE project.

Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency, or RIPE, is an international research project that aims to increase global food production by improving photosynthetic efficiency in food crops for smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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A private space company called Redwire Corporation has announced plans for what it’s calling the “first-ever commercially owned greenhouse” in space.

Redwire is hoping to install the facility on the International Space Station no earlier than spring 2023. The startup was awarded a contract with the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which manages US lab operations on board the ISS.

The greenhouse is meant to serve as a testing bed for growing sustenance in a microgravity environment, which will be important as humans start to embark on longer trips through deep space.

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Circa 2020

The idea of humans living underwater may not be as crazy as you think. An idea once reserved for video games or science fiction, underwater cities may be a viable solution for humanity in the distant future.

Would you pack up your bags, clear out your apartment, and move to an underwater paradise? Perhaps you might even dream of living like the fictional city of Atlantis. If i t makes sense to go out and colonize Mars, the ocean is just as livable and is far closer to home. As you probably already know, the earth is 71% water. This could be prime real estate for future generations.

Continue reading “7 Things You Should Know About the Future of Underwater Cities” | >

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently did some things to advance EV charging tech that are way over my head to make a battery that could theoretically charge an electric car in only one minute.

That might seem silly to people with a decent EV, but I recently found something that could eventually make EV charging so fast that even the owner of a Porsche Taycan might be shocked and amazed— and, as the owner of a Nissan LEAF, I’m lucky to get a 50 kW charge rate, but that’s only on the first charge. If I try to go anywhere on the highway, I quickly find that the second and third charges are a lot slower. If I keep going, I can expect to get charging rates as low as 14 kW on the second or third session, which is more like DC slow charging than DC fast charging. When I get a chance to test and review better EVs, it seems like witchcraft when getting charging over 100 kW, and faster 250 and 350 kW charging sessions look like alien technology.

“The hybrid lithium-ion battery, which has a high energy density (285 Wh/kg) and can be rapidly charged with a high-power density (22,600 W/kg), is overcoming the limitations of the current energy storage system,” Professor Jung-Goo Kang of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering said. “It will be a breakthrough.”

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Researchers have developed a new chip-based beam steering technology that provides a promising route to small, cost-effective, and high-performance lidar systems. Lidar, or light detection and ranging, uses laser pulses to acquire 3D information about a scene or object. It is used in a wide range of applications such as autonomous driving, 3D holography, biomedical sensing, free-space optical communications, and virtual reality.

“Optical beam steering is a key technology for lidar systems, but conventional mechanical-based beam steering systems are bulky, expensive, sensitive to vibration, and limited in speed,” said research team leader Hao Hu from the Technical University of Denmark. “Although devices known as chip-based optical phased arrays (OPAs) can quickly and precisely steer light in a non-mechanical way, so far, these devices have had poor beam quality and a field of view typically below 100 degrees.”

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The area surveyed represents two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef.

Almost half of the reefs studied had between 10% and 30% hard coral cover, while about a third of the reefs had hard coral cover levels between 30% and 50%, the report said.

While higher water temperatures led to a coral bleaching event in some areas in March, the temperatures did not climb high enough to kill the coral, the agency said.

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face_with_colon_three circa 2018.

Gold is amazingly weird. For one thing, it’s now thought that much of it came from aftermaths of the collisions of two super-dense neutron stars. Some of this atomic gold, sprayed across the cosmos, managed to coalesce under gravity, get trapped in a newly-formed Earth, undergo a suite of geological processes, and ultimately pop up at the surface.

Its considerably epic cosmic journey is certainly something to marvel at, as is the fact that it’s useful for so many things besides jewelry. Now, as spotted by New Scientist, we’ve made a new form of gold that’s golder than ever before, and it’s bonkers. Related StoriesCosmic Tug-Of-War Leaves Merging Galaxies Gasping For Fuel “How Do You Handle Menstruation In Space?”: An Astronaut ExplainsEinstein Is Right Again – Gravity Has Not Changed Across The Universe.

Continue reading “New Form Of Lab-Made Gold Is Better And Golder Than Nature’s Pathetic Version” | >

Engineers have repaired an issue affecting data from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft. Earlier this year, the probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS), which keeps Voyager 1’s antenna pointed at Earth, began sending garbled information about its health and activities to mission controllers, despite operating normally. The rest of the probe also appeared healthy as it continued to gather and return science data.

The team has since located the source of the garbled information: The AACS had started sending the data through an onboard computer known to have stopped working years ago, and the computer corrupted the information.

Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager, said that when they suspected this was the issue, they opted to try a low-risk solution: commanding the AACS to resume sending the data to the right computer.

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