Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7,768

Karen Potter, Director of Sustainability Hub and ideaXme sustainability ambassador interviews Christoph Promberger, M.Sc., Executive Director Foundation Conservation Carpathia (FCC). https://www.carpathia.org

Karen Potter comments:

In 2009, the Foundation Conservation Carpathia was founded by a dozen international philanthropists and conservationists with the goal to stop illegal logging and to protect a significant surface of Carpathian forests to form a completely protected area.

The FCC was founded in response to the restitution of formerly nationalised forests to private citizens in Romania. This process triggered massive clear-cuts and thousands of hectares of forests were illegally logged, posing a severe threat to the integrity of the Carpathian ecosystem.

Wilderness is disappearing globally at an alarming rate, less than 2% of Europe’s surface is still in its original state and the Carpathian Mountains form some of the largest contiguous forests on the continent with the highest percentage of still virgin woodlands; they contain an extraordinarily high number of species.

Karen is a passionate environment and sustainability campaigner leading Government and Parliamentary efforts to promote Net Zero policy solutions as well as lead on COP26, business, community and civic action. She is a project development specialist with extensive experience in designing and delivering new initiatives to promote sustainability, social responsibility, smart energy, the Green Recovery and clean tech investment. She is highly experienced in government, NGO and public sector communications, building and managing senior stakeholder relations and media engagement.

Continue reading “Saving Carpathia, The Vast Wilderness in the Heart of Europe” | >

Introduction: In recent years a futurist aesthetic movement has emerged in response to renewed public concern for the environment and a seeming lack of reflection of that concern in much contemporary art and design. Deriving its name from similar aesthetic movements such as Cyberpunk and Steampunk, its roots lay in various eco/climate science fiction and Post-Industrial futurist literature and is considered ‘punk’ in the sense that it is reactionary, and in opposition, to both the naive corporate utopianism that dominated the 20th century and the dystopianism that emerged in its wake by the end of that century, persisting to the present. We now live in an era where pragmatism is a radical stance. Thus Solarpunk seeks to cultivate a positive, hopeful, vision of a future rooted in technologies and culture of sustainability, yet in the context of what it acknowledges will be dramatic changes in our way of life due to Global Warming and the environmental malfeasance of the past, the transition to a renewables-based infrastructure, and the collapse of Industrial Age paradigms. A culture that has weathered the dramatic disruptions coming with the end of the Industrial Age, taken its sometimes bitter lessons from that, and found a way forward.

What makes Solarpunk ‘punk’ is an underlying activist/revolutionary narrative it shares with the earlier punk movements tracing its origins to the narrative of one of Science Fiction’s earliest ‘antiheroes’; Captain Nemo of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Long mischaracterized in film, the original character of Nemo is an Indian victim of European colonialism who is radicalized by the murder of his family by colonialists. He then appropriates and improves upon the technology of the colonialist powers not just to fight against them but to create a model egalitarian society of the future in the secret haven of the underwater underworld, beyond the reach of those colonial powers. Thus he becomes the prototype tech-hero, turning the oppressors/dominators technology against them and repurposing it for the benefit of the rest of society.

Read more | >

Space robotics startup GITAI and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are teaming up to produce the world’s first robotics demonstration in space by a private company. The new agreement under the JAXA Space Innovation through Partnership and Co-creation (J-SPARC) initiative aims to demonstrate the potential for robots to automate of the processing of specific tasks aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Robotics is altering many aspects of our lives in many fields and one where it is particularly attractive is in the exploration and exploitation of space. Ironically, the great strides made in manned spaceflight since the first Vostok mission lifted off in 1961 have shown that not only is supporting astronauts in orbit challenging and expensive, there are also many tasks, like microgravity experiments, where the human touch isn’t the best choice.

These tasks often require complex, precise, and subtle movements that demand either a highly specialized and expensive bespoke apparatus or a robot. The GITAI/JAXA agreement will work on ways that robots can handle maintenance, scientific experiments, and other specific tasks aboard the ISS.

Read more | >

Software bugs are a tale as old as time — which, in the case of programming, means about 75 years. In 1947, programmer Grace Murray Hopper was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University when she noticed a moth that was stuck in the relay, preventing the computer program from running. It was the first “bug”, and countless others have followed since then.

In the history of programming, bugs have ranged from harmless to absolutely catastrophic. In 1986 and 1987, several patients were killed after a Therac-25 radiation therapy device malfunctioned due to an error by an inexperienced programmer, and a software bug might have also triggered one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, at a Soviet trans-Siberian gas pipeline.

While events such as this are rare, it’s safe to say that software bugs can do a lot of damage and waste a lot of time (and resources). According to recent analysis, the average programmer produces 70 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, with each bug demanding 30 times more time to fix than it took to write the code in the first place. In the US alone, an estimated $113 billion is spent identifying and fixing code bugs…

Read more | >

Zurich-based DeepCode claims that their system — essentially a tool for analyzing and improving code — is like Grammarly for programmers. The system, which uses a corpus of 250,000 rules, reads your public and private GitHub repositories and tells you how to fix problems, remain compatible and generally improve your programs.

Founded by Veselin Raychev, advisor Martin Vechev and Boris Paskalev, the team has extensive experience in machine learning and AI research. This project is a spin-off from ETH in Switzerland and is a standalone research project turned programming utility.

Read more | >

Summary: Metformin, a drug commonly used to treat diabetes, slows cognitive decline and reduces dementia risk in older people with diabetes.

Source: garvan institute of medical research.

Metformin is the first-line treatment for most cases of type 2 diabetes and one of the most commonly prescribed medications worldwide, with millions of individuals using it to optimise their blood glucose levels.

Read more | >

Toronto scientists have mapped the genes allowing cancer cells to avoid getting killed by the immune system in a finding that paves the way for the development of immunotherapies that would be effective for larger patient populations and across different tumour types.

“Over the last decade, different forms of immunotherapy have emerged as really potent cancer treatments but the reality is that they only generate durable responses in a fraction of patients and not for all tumour types,” says Jason Moffat, a professor of molecular genetics in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at the University of Toronto who led the work.

The study also revealed the need for to take into account the genetic composition of tumours because of mutations in the cancer cells that can potentially make the disease worse in response to treatment, often referred to as cancer resistance mutations.

Read more | >

Mushroom-munching bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have introduced scientists to a new species of truffle.

Commonly used by Congolese communities to bait traps for , Hysterangium is also savored by bonobos, an endangered species of great ape. Scientists say the hints at vast reserves of undescribed fungal diversity in the region.

“Truffles aren’t just for gourmet chefs—they’re also for our closest relatives,” said Matthew Smith, an associate professor in the University of Florida department of plant pathology and curator of the UF fungal herbarium. “There’s so much to learn about this system, and we’re just scratching the surface.”

Read more | >