Lifeboat Foundation

Investment in U.S. offshore wind projects are set to hit $78 billion (€69 billion) this decade, in contrast with an estimated $82 billion for U.S. offshore oil and gasoline projects, Wood Mackenzie data shows. This would be a remarkable feat only four years after the first offshore wind plant — the 30 megawatt (MW) Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island — started operating in U.S. waters.

According to the Department of Energy (DOE), there are 28 US offshore wind projects in the planning stage, with the biggest clusters along the East Coast, from Massachusetts to Virginia. There are also 15 active commercial leases for offshore wind development in the U.S. and if they are fully built, there is the potential to support approximately 25 GW of offshore wind capacity.

As Fifi the llama munches on grass on a pasture in Reading, her immune system has provided the template for a coronavirus treatment breakthrough.

Scientists from the UK’s Rosalind Franklin Institute have used Fifi’s specially evolved antibodies to make an immune-boosting therapy.

The resulting llama-based, Covid-specific “antibody cocktail” could enter clinical trials within months.

Japanese start-up SkyDrive is preparing to fly its electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) test aircraft in public for the first time in August, as it sets its sights on building a thriving air taxi and urban air mobility market in the country on the back the developmental battery-powered design.

SkyDrive says it began flight testing a proof of concept model at its test centre in Toyota in December 2019, and the aircraft” completed its technical verification phase” in March.

People in Wales are alarmed as the invasive and ‘extremely smelly’ beasts have been spotted roaming the wild. The creatures previously placed a village in England ‘under siege’, terrorising locals and attacking their animals.

That in turn enables a massive software upgrade known as the “autonomy module,” a playbook of algorithms that tell the weapon how to respond to specific changes on the battlefield, whether that means the sighting of a new threat or the destruction of some of the collaborative weapons.

Quantum radar can find it.

The hunt for the ever-elusive “Planet Nine” has taken scientists down some very strange roads. The idea that a planet exists in the outer reaches of our solar system and can’t be easily seen has been floating around for some time, and observations of other objects in the area suggest that there’s something big generating a gravitational pull. The easiest explanation would be a planet, but it’s not the only possibility.

On January 2, 2020, the state of New South Wales declared a state of emergency as Australia’s bushfires continued their deadly rampage. The next day the Australian state’s former fire commissioner urged the prime minister to call in back-up. The country needed more fire bombers from North America and Europe.

But one machine already hard at work was the S-64E Air Crane, operated by Oregon-based Erickson Inc. Six of its huge helicopters had been already been dousing the fires that put Australians—and the continent’s indigenous wildlife—at risk.

Continue reading “A Vietnam Helo’s New Robot Brain Will Help Fight a Different Kind of Enemy” »

Circa 2011

It’s certainly an established fact that electricity can cause fires, but today a group of Harvard scientists presented their research on the use of electricity for fighting fires. In a presentation at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, Dr. Ludovico Cademartiri told of how they used a unique device to shoot beams of electricity at an open flame over one foot tall. Almost immediately, he said, the flame was extinguished. On a larger scale, such a system would minimize the amount of water that needed to be sprayed into burning buildings, both saving water and limiting water damage to those buildings.

Apparently, it has been known for over 200 years that electricity affects fire – it can cause flames to change in character, or even stop burning altogether. According to Cademartiri, a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. George M. Whitesides at Harvard University, what hasn’t been looked into much is the science behind the relationship. It turns out that soot particles within flames can easily become charged, and therefore can cause flames to lose stability when the local electrical fields are altered.

Continue reading “Fires could be extinguished using beams of electricity” »

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