Lifeboat Foundation

Russian firm Aerosmena’s plans to build enormous cargo airships may be more than just hot air.

The European Union today proposed rules governing the use of artificial intelligence that could wind up becoming a de facto standard for how the technology is governed in much of the globe.

Or is it about to consign itself to also-ran status, as the U.S. tech lobby is arguing?

The European Union is finalizing plans for an ambitious “digital twin” of planet Earth that would simulate the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land with unrivaled precision, providing forecasts of floods, droughts, and fires from days to years in advance. Destination Earth, as the effort is called, won’t stop there: It will also attempt to capture human behavior, enabling leaders to see the impacts of weather events and climate change on society and gauge the effects of different climate policies.

“It’s a really bold mission, I like it a lot,” says Ruby Leung, a climate scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. By rendering the planet’s atmosphere in boxes only 1 kilometer across, a scale many times finer than existing climate models, Destination Earth can base its forecasts on far more detailed real-time data than ever before. The project, which will be described in detail in two workshops later this month, will start next year and run on one of the three supercomputers that Europe will deploy in Finland, Italy, and Spain.

Destination Earth rose out of the ashes of Extreme Earth, a proposal led by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for a billion-euro flagship research program. The European Union ultimately canceled the flagship program, but retained interest in the idea. Fears that Europe was falling behind China, Japan, and the United States in supercomputing led to the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, an €8 billion investment to lay the groundwork for eventual “exascale” machines capable of 1 billion billion calculations per second. The dormant Extreme Earth proposal offered a perfect use for such capacity. “This blows a soul into your digital infrastructure,” says Peter Bauer, ECMWF’s deputy director of research, who coordinated Extreme Earth and has been advising the European Union on the new program.

Lost, not forgotten.

Arecibo Observatory’s collapse on Dec. 1, 2020 was a devastating blow for science, but its decades of observations will inform research for years to come.

As the Times reports, researchers have been puzzling over the age of the Shigir sculpture for decades. The debate has major implications for the study of prehistory, which tends to emphasize a Western-centric view of human development.

In 1997, Russian scientists carbon-dated the totem pole to about 9500 years ago. Many in the scientific community rejected these findings as implausible: Reluctant to believe that hunter-gatherer communities in the Urals and Siberia had created art or formed cultures of their own, says Terberger to the Times, researchers instead presented a narrative of human evolution that centered European history, with ancient farming societies in the Fertile Crescent eventually sowing the seeds of Western civilization.

Prevailing views over the past century, adds Terberger, regarded hunter-gatherers as “inferior to early agrarian communities emerging at that time in the Levant. At the same time, the archaeological evidence from the Urals and Siberia was underestimated and neglected.”

Circa 2018

In just a few weeks, NASA is due to launch one of its most ambitious projects yet. The Parker Solar Probe is going to swoop in and ‘touch’ the Sun — coming in closer to the solar surface than any probe has ever done before.

Parker’s three closest orbits will bring it within 6.1 million kilometres (3.8 million miles) of the Sun’s surface and inside its outer atmosphere, or corona, where temperatures reach millions of degrees Kelvin.

Continue reading “Here’s How NASA’s Solar Probe Is Going to Touch The Sun Without Melting” »

Phosphorus, the element critical for life´s origin and life on Earth, may be even Venus.

Scientists studying the origin of life in the universe often focus on a few critical elements, particularly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. But two new papers highlight the importance of phosphorus for biology: an assessment of where things stand with a recent claim about possible life in the clouds of Venus, and a look at how reduced phosphorus compounds produced by lightning might have been critical for life early in our own planet’s history.

First a little biochemistry: Phosphine is a reduced phosphorus compound with one phosphorus atom and three hydrogen atoms. Phosphorus is also found in its reduced form in the phosphide mineral schreibersite, in which the phosphorus atom binds to three metal atoms (either iron or nickel). In its reduced form, phosphorus is much more reactive and useful for life than is phosphate, where the phosphorus atom binds to four oxygen atoms. Phosphorus is also the element that is most enriched in biological molecules as compared to non-biological molecules, so it’s not a bad place to start when you’re hunting for life.

Continue reading “The Fuss Over Phosphorus” »

Pyongyang’s recent ballistic missiles test indicated that the country is once again raising tensions to gain leverage with Washington.

Circa 2020

Nanotechnology development company UbiQD announced an optical fiber-coupled luminescent concentrator technology as a new tool for optimizing light in controlled environments, enabling light-guiding to future UbiGro spectrum-control greenhouse products.