Lifeboat Foundation

Current severe heatwaves that will likely increase in severity and frequency in the future are driving a rise in the use of air conditioners, threatening the environment with their high energy consumption and refrigerants with high warming potential. A new study finds that switching to propane as a refrigerant could lessen the global temperature increase from space cooling.

We spend enormous amounts of energy on fighting off the heat in the summer, or throughout the whole year at lower latitudes—about one-tenth of the total worldwide electricity supply. If current temperature trends continue, the energy demands of space-coolers will more than triple by 2050. Apart from the rise in energy consumption, space-coolers also threaten the environment in different ways: by using halogenated refrigerants with high global warming potential.

Split-air conditioners (Split ACs) that use an indoor and an outdoor air unit connected by pipes are the most common appliances used for space-cooling. They mostly utilize HCFC-22 and HFC-410 as refrigerants, both of them characterized by a very high global warming potential score, up to 2,256—meaning that they trap up to 2,256 times more heat than carbon dioxide over 100 years. Urged by the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, many manufacturers are looking for alternative refrigerants with lower global warming potential scores, such as HFC-32. However, with a global warming potential score of 771, HFC-32 still poses a significant climate hazard.

Our podcast on science and technology. This week, we explore whether artificial intelligence could become sentient—and the legal and ethical implications if it did | Podcasts.

It does not matter if intelligent life exists elsewhere. We will never find each other.

We cannot deduce laws about a higher level of complexity by starting with a lower level of complexity. Here, reductionism meets a brick wall.

There’s still plenty of room at the bottom to generate piezoelectricity. Engineers at Rice University and their colleagues are showing the way.

A new study describes the discovery of piezoelectricity—the phenomenon by which mechanical energy turns into electrical energy —across phase boundaries of two-dimensional materials.

The work led by Rice materials scientists Pulickel Ajayan and Hanyu Zhu and their colleagues at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering, the University of Southern California, the University of Houston, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Research Laboratory and Pennsylvania State University appears in Advanced Materials.

Iron could massively boost ocean algae populations.

Scientists suggest we could fertilize the world’s oceans with iron to fight climate change. Iron would lead to phytoplankton blooms, which would help to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Continue reading “Scientists Want to Block Out the Sun. Should We? Is it Even Possible?” »

We might all starve.

Researchers from Rutgers University calculated the possible effects of nuclear wars. The result shows that a nuclear war between countries such as Russia and USA could kill billions and cause starvation within two years.

It also demonstrates that large deficits would arise in imports due to the depletion of crops.

Continue reading “Nuclear War Would Cause a Global Famine and Kill Billions, Rutgers-Led Study Finds” »

Experts behind the project claim the technology for “de-extinction” already exists, but others are sceptical.

The Space Launch System will start rolling out to its launchpad a few days ahead of schedule. It is headed to space for the first time as early as August 29th.