Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The idea of deploying enzymes to break down plastic waste is gaining momentum through a string of breakthroughs demonstrating how they can do so with increasing efficiency, and even reduce the material to simple molecules. A new study marks yet another step forward, with scientists leveraging machine learning to engineer an enzyme that degrades some forms of plastic in just 24 hours, with a stability that makes it well-suited to large-scale adoption.

Scientists have been exploring the potential of enzymes to aid in plastics recycling for more than a decade, but the last six years or so has seen some significant advances. In 2016, researchers in Japan unearthed a bacterium that used enzymes to break down PET plastics in a matter of weeks. An engineered version of these enzymes, dubbed PETase, improved the performance further, and in 2020 we saw scientists develop an even more powerful version that digested PET plastics at six times the speed.

A team at the University of Texas set out to address some of the shortcomings of these enzymes so far. According to the scientists, the application of the technology has been held back by an inability to function well at low temperatures and different pH ranges, lack of effectiveness directly tackling untreated plastic waste, and slow reaction rates.

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WASHINGTON — Sierra Space says it is making good progress on its first Dream Chaser spaceplane as the company looks ahead to versions of the vehicle that can carry crews and perform national security missions.

The company provided SpaceNews with images of the first Dream Chaser, named Tenacity, being assembled at its Colorado headquarters. The vehicle’s structure is now largely complete, but there is still more work to install its thermal protection system and other components.

“We have the wings on now. It really looks like a spaceplane,” said Janet Kavandi, president of Sierra Space, during a panel at the AIAA ASCENDx Texas conference in Houston April 28, where she played a video showing work building the vehicle.

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Abstract

As a sensate infrastructure, the body conveys information to and from the brain to complete a perceptual concordance with consciousness. This system of reciprocal communication both positions consciousness in spacetime, and allows that consciousness is dependent upon the body to roam. Through movement we comprehend. The corporeal occupation of spacetime permits human consciousness access to the phenomena of its physical environment, whereby it uses language (utterance) to both construct and describe this existence. This mediated transmission evolved into story and narrative in an attempt to apprehend, control and more importantly convey what is perceived. It is precisely the components of space and time, critical elements to our own existence that play such a paramount role in our ability to generate meaning and narrative comprehension. As our dimensional understanding has evolved and extended, so too has our understanding that space and time are crucial components of narrative. With the emergence of auxiliary narrative spaces, this movement of consciousness affords opportunities to create new narrative imperatives. In the theoretical realm of physics, the tesseract makes it possible to overcome the restraints of time. The tesseract is a gravitational wormhole that represents the physical compression of space that circumvents time in order to move from one location in spacetime to another. The index, as part of the body, but also the mechanism for applying a collapsed signification, requires both utterance (mediation) and event (temporal-frame) in order to create cognitive meaning. The indexical functions as a linguistic tesseract that collapses language creating a bridge over the semantic divide between utterance and meaning. This paper places the function and potential of the tesseract within the paradigm of cognitive narratology through the argument that compression is the mechanism for narrative construction of story, autopoiesis, and the locality of self.

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“The Earth has entered a radically new era, understood by scientists as the Anthropocene: a time when humanity reckons with massive geologic and biospheric forces we, as anthropos, have set in motion. The agency of Nature and the reality of humanity as a collective geologic force is becoming understood differently, even within the Western paradigm. It is a new world our children will inherit, for if humanity is to survive, we must come into new realizations of our place within the planetary life-support systems. To lay a path for future generations through the evolutionary steps that humanity must now take to learn to live in balance with the planet, science must come to balance with Spirit.” ―Oberon Zell, GaeaGenesis.

#OberonZell #GaeaGenesis #GaiaHypothesis #SyntellectHypothesis #GlobalMind #theosophy #consciousness

In the early 1970s, celebrated philosopher and mystic Oberon Zell was the first to propose the radical idea that the biosphere of Earth was a single living superorganism. His initial article on the subject electrified the emerging modern movement of Earth-based spirituality, generating volumes of correspondence, lecture tours, and further articles in various journals and books.

The excitement was the result of a simple yet profound idea. Imagine for a moment that Earth is alive. Not just teeming with living things, but a living, vital organism encompassing the whole of the planet. This is how Oberon Zell imagines it in GaeaGenesis 0, but it is more than imagination or mere metaphor. GaeaGenesis is the first work to fully integrate the mythological, spiritual, biological, and social history of what has become known as the Gaea Thesis. It builds upon this history by exploring the profound implications of the thesis, which is as significant to our understanding of the world and our place in it as the heliocentric theory of the solar system and Darwin’s theory of evolution once were.

Continue reading “Gaia-Based Theosophy: Conception and Birth of the Living Earth” | >

Crypto’s biggest skeptics see plenty of reasons to criticize the industry, but generally at the heart of most complaints is a belief that crypto is contributing very little to society while burning massive amounts of energy.

While crypto’s believers could squabble over the former point until they’re blue in the face, the latter is a little harder to deny. Bitcoin uses an estimated 204.50 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year at current rates according to the oft-cited tracker built by Digiconomist, this number is equal to the power consumption of Thailand. Meanwhile Ethereum’s energy footprint is half the size but still comparable to the power consumption of Kazakhstan. In 2018 the United States reported its total consumption of electricity as 4,222.5 TWh.

For some legislators, those numbers are hard to swallow. This week, the New York State Assembly passed a bill that had team crypto up in arms. The bill blocks the formation of crypto mining firms in the state that rely on non-renewable power. It notably doesn’t apply to existing facilities. A corresponding bill is currently making its way through the Democrat-controlled state senate. everyone, and welcome back to Chain Reaction.

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