Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 6978

Video of artificial leather. 😃

This lab-grown leather that leaves animals the fuck alone is ready to wear! About 80% of leather worldwide is tanned in a toxic process resulting in massive amounts of chemical waste flooding the environment. It also poses a serious health risk to industrial tannery workers, not to mention the animals who lose their lives for a pair of shoes. By using nature’s building blocks to create materials designed for functionality, performance AND style, Modern Meadow might just have found a win-win solution!

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Fascinating new episode with NASA planetary geophysicist Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator for the Mars InSight lander which is changing the way scientists now view Mars’ interior dynamics and inner workings. Please have a listen.

I welcome Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator for NASA’s Mars InSight lander, which has been operating on the Martian surface for two years now. Although it’s had some technical issues, it’s offered a sea change in how geophysicists are interpreting the dynamics and makeup of the Martian core. In this episode, we talk about what we currently understand about Mars’ geophysical makeup and, among other things, whether it ever had plate tectonics which was so crucial for the evolution of sentient life here on Earth.

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Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are characterized by impaired learning of social skills and language. Memories of how parents and other social models behave are used to guide behavioral learning. How ASD-linked genes affect the intertwined aspects of observational learning and behavioral imitation is not known. Here, we examine how disrupted expression of the ASD gene FOXP1, which causes severe impairments in speech and language learning, affects the cultural transmission of birdsong between adult and juvenile zebra finches. FoxP1 is widely expressed in striatal-projecting forebrain mirror neurons. Knockdown of FoxP1 in this circuit prevents juvenile birds from forming memories of an adult song model but does not interrupt learning how to vocally imitate a previously memorized song.

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VANCOUVER, CANADA and WEST PERTH, AUSTRALIA – Ballard Power Systems (NASDAQ: BLDP; TSX: BLDP) today announced that it has signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Global Energy Ventures (ASX: GEV; www.gev.com) – a provider of integrated compressed shipping solutions for the transportation of energy to regional markets, headquartered in Australia – for the development of a new fuel cell-powered ship, called C-H2 Ship, designed to transport compressed green hydrogen.

GEV Captioned

The power required for a small-scale demonstration of the C-H2 Ship is expected to be under 10 megawatts (MW). At full scale, the C-H2 Ship will have a propulsion power requirement of approximately 26MW, and a containment system for storage of 2000 tons of compressed green hydrogen.

GEV will be responsible for design approvals, development, financing, and operation of C-H2 Ship, along with integration of the required power system. Ballard will be responsible for design of the fuel cell system for the C-H2 Ship, based on its FCwaveTM technology, and will assist GEV with integration of the fuel cell system into the vessel’s design. Ballard’s FCwaveTM system will obtain its hydrogen fuel from the compressed green hydrogen stored onboard and transported by the vessel.

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In a new report on Science Advances, Mark Elowitz, and a team of scientists in physical sciences, optical physics, planetary science and radiation research in the U.S., U.K., India, and Taiwan, presented the first analysis of far-ultraviolet reflectance spectra of regions on Rhea’s leading and trailing hemispheres—as collected by the Cassini ultraviolet imaging spectrograph during targeted flybys. In this work, they specifically aimed to explain the unidentified broad absorption feature centered near 184 nanometers of the resulting spectra. Using laboratory measurements of the UV spectroscopy of a set of molecules, Elowitz et al. found a good fit to Rhea’s spectra with both hydrazine monohydrate and several chlorine-containing molecules. They showed hydrazine monohydrate to be the most plausible candidate to explain the absorption feature at 184 nm.

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