Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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“Our study has revealed 64 percent of the world’s arable land is at risk of pesticide pollution. This is important because the wider scientific literature has found that pesticide pollution can have adverse impacts on human health and the environment,” said Dr. Tang.

There is concern that overuse of pesticides will tip the balance, destabilize ecosystems and degrade the quality of water sources that humans and animals rely on to survive.

The future outlook

Global pesticide use is expected to increase as the global population heads towards an expected 8.5 billion by 2030.

Continue reading “64% of Farmland at Risk of Pesticide Pollution – Revealed in Global Map of Agricultural Land Across 168 Countries” | >

Following on from the video last week all about mTOR, this week I have got one on AMPK. This is yet another protein that has an enzymatic role in the cellular energy systems that keeps us all alive and well, and it performs a natural balancing act with mTOR. As with all the systems in our body, a natural balance is essential for harmony, do we feast or fast, do we exercise hard or relax and meditate, do we sleep as many hours as possible or as few as we can get by on, should our body concentrate on growth or repair? It can all seem like a mine field, so it is often good to start with the essentials to make sure you have a good grasp of what they are, before you venture out of your depth. Hopefully this video will help shed some light these areas so you can find the right routine to help you strike a balance.

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New concept delivers continuous electricity with an approach that reduces cost and risk

San Diego, March 29, 2021 – Fusion energy is heating up. In the past few months, both the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC) and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released reports calling for aggressive development of fusion energy in the U.S.

Now, scientists at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have released a new design for a compact fusion reactor that can generate electricity and help define the technology necessary for commercial fusion power. The approach is based on the “Advanced Tokamak” concept pioneered by the DIII-D program, which enables a higher-performance, self-sustaining configuration that holds energy more efficiently than in typical pulsed configurations, allowing it to be built at a reduced scale and cost.

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The renewable energy experts at Jackery are up to their usual tricks and announced a new line of solar generator products on Jackery Day that open up a completely new range of possibilities.

They sent us their Solar Generator 1500 with two of their slick 100 watt folding Solar Saga panels to run through the paces. On paper, the new Jackery Explorer 1500 Portable Power Station battery was impressive, with its massive 1.5kWh capacity and increased power output capabilities.

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Virgin Galactic passengers won’t circle Earth like astronauts aboard the International Space Station do. But they will get to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the curve of Earth against the blackness of space. More than 600 people have booked a ride to date, at a price (most recently) of $250000 per seat, company representatives have said.

VSS Unity has company.

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Space travel nowadays relies on physical ejection of propellants, which is challenged by reachable distance of a vehicle in desirable time. In contrast, electromagnetic propulsion was proposed to be a potential solution without need of carrying bulky mass of propellants, by using force interaction of local magnetic dipoles with the external natural magnetic field. Further development of this technique, however, has been daunted by extremely small magnetic induction that can be obtained.

To generate a significant thrust by a system with a reasonable scale, we propose an alternative concept of design, based on the variation of local magnetic dipole moments that has not been considered.

A magnetic dipole is created by wrapping a solenoid around an iron core. It is varied spatially by changing the cross-sectional area of the solenoid, hence giving a gradient of magnetic dipole moment. The interaction force is measured by an in-house force sensor based on a cantilever, which has a high sensitivity of one micro-Newton. In addition, numerical simulation is used to calculate the magnetic field and created force via the Maxwell stress tensor.

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‘Humans are extraordinarily special’. Not new but well worth remembering.

Either way, their conclusion is that, like stick-shift cars, extraterrestrial civilizations are few and far between. The implication is that our nearest cosmic chums are at least several thousand light-years away.

You may wonder why this story has raised eyebrows. Well, it would make Homo sapiens extraordinarily special, despite the fact that the galaxy is stuffed with planets. It discomfits scientists (including me) because, historically, every time we’ve thought we occupy a privileged position in the universe, we were wrong. Remember that six centuries ago, learned folk would have assured you that Earth was the center of the cosmos.

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