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High-tech advances in weapons technologies and a return of ‘great power nuclear politics’, risk the world ‘sleepwalking’ into a nuclear age vastly different from the established order of the Cold War, according to new research undertaken at the University of Leicester.

Andrew Futter, Professor of International Politics at the University of Leicester, makes the warning in a for the Hiroshima Organization for Global Peace (HOPe), published today (Friday).

While stockpiles are much reduced from the peak of up to 70,000 nuclear weapons seen in the 1980s, progress in a number of new or ‘disruptive’ technologies threatens to fundamentally change the central pillars on which nuclear order, stability and risk reduction are based.

Continue reading “Nuclear expert cautions against unfamiliar new nuclear age” | >

Please welcome a second posting here at 21st Century Tech Blog, from Katie Brenneman. Katie’s previous contribution looked at how individuals can practice sustainability to mitigate the threat of climate change. Her many interests include writing on lifestyle, mental health, and sustainability. You can follow her on Twitter.

In this contribution, Katie has chosen a timely topic: the increasing consumer interest in electric vehicles (EVs). The recent stratospheric rise in gasoline and diesel prices because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made EVs far more attractive. That plus more announcements about new EV models, i.e., The Ford Lightning (an EV version of the F-150) may prove to be the moment when North Americans begin a rapid move away from fossil-fuel-powered vehicles?

As fuel prices continue to rise around the world, many consumers are taking another look at EVs as a potential solution for their transportation needs. This follows historical trends that show whenever there is a spike in gas and diesel costs it is accompanied by an increase in EV sales. Online searches for EVs continue to double with many in the renewable energy sector wondering if this is the watershed moment that will finally move us to take zero-emission actions seriously.

Continue reading “Will Rising Gas Prices Speed Up the Transition To A Zero-Emission Future?” | >

The study was done by the international Jefferson Lab Angular Momentum (JAM) collaboration using data from the MARATHON experiment, which is at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in the US. The team’s results could help physicists better understand how quarks are distributed inside protons and neutrons and why these distributions are different when protons and neutrons are incorporated within nuclei.

After reaching a historic low, the population of monarch butterflies overwintering in California has increased a hundredfold, according to the annual Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count. More than 247,000 butterflies were counted in 2021, up from 2,000 butterflies in 2020.

“We’re ecstatic with the results and hope this trend continues,” said Emma Pelton, the western monarch lead with Xerces Society, the organization that manages the annual count.

Each year, volunteers and scientists count the orange-winged wonders in their overwintering locations, 283 sites this year. The highest number of monarchs (95,000) was reported from Santa Barbara County, including a single site on private property with 25,000 butterflies. Very few butterflies were seen in the San Francisco Bay area, with only 600 counted at overwintering sites from Mendocino to San Mateo counties.

Continue reading “Western monarchs make a spectacular comeback in California” | >

This is a 10-minute version with my picks on an hour-and-a-half interview on the longevity science made by Rhonda Patrick to Morgan Levine.

The link to the entire interview, which took place on April 12, 2022, is in the description of the video.

Continue reading “Morgan Levine is interviewed by Rhonda Patrick on Longevity. My picks on it” | >

Amid the chaotic chains of events that ensue when protons smash together at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, one particle has popped up that appears to go to pieces in a peculiar way.

All eyes are on the B meson, a yoked pair of quark particles. Having caught whiffs of unexpected B meson behavior before, researchers with the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) have spent years documenting rare collision events featuring the particles, in hopes of conclusively proving that some novel fundamental particle or effect is meddling with them.

In their latest analysis, first presented at a seminar in March, the LHCb physicists found that several measurements involving the decay of B mesons conflict slightly with the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics — the reigning set of equations describing the subatomic world. Taken alone, each oddity looks like a statistical fluctuation, and they may all evaporate with additional data, as has happened before. But their collective drift suggests that the aberrations may be breadcrumbs leading beyond the Standard Model to a more complete theory.

Continue reading “Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes” | >

Making positive impacts on human longevity — sonia arrison, author, analyst, investor, entrepreneur.

Sonia Arrison (https://soniaarrison.com/) is a best-selling author, analyst, entrepreneur, and investor.

Sonia is founder of 100 Plus Capital (https://100pluscap.com/ — Investing in companies positively impacting human longevity), Chair of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (https://a4li.org/ — The first and only 501©(4) nonprofit organization founded with the goal of creating social and political action around the issues of combating age-related chronic conditions and increasing our number of healthy, disease-free years), co-founder of Unsugarcoat Media (acquired by Medium), and was an associate founder of Singularity University.

Continue reading “Sonia Arrison — Author, Analyst, Investor, Entrepreneur — Positively Impacting Human Longevity” | >