Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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New data predicts an “empty planet.”

But a new book examines the data and comes to a radically different conclusion: instead of continuing to rise, the population will level out in about 30 years — and then start to decline, possibly forever.

Stand on Zanzibar

The book is called “Empty Planet,” and it was written by journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker. Their key argument: access to information is changing people’s outlook on reproduction around the world and rapidly shifting the old norms around families and fertility.

Continue reading “New Projection: World Population Will Level off, Then Fall Forever” | >

New York: Researchers say they have developed an innovative new system for delivering a malaria vaccine that shows promise in its effectiveness. By developing a vaccine that targets specific cells in the immune system, researchers from the University of Chicago in the US saw a much greater immune and antibody response to the vaccine.

Though a vaccine for malaria exists, it is only effective in 30 to 50 per cent of patients, and malaria is still responsible for nearly 500,000 deaths annually, according to the US Centers for Disease Control. “When compared to the current malaria vaccine option, our results are extremely exciting,” said Jeffrey Hubbell, a professor at the University of Chicago.

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Researchers at the University of South Carolina in Columbia have demonstrated an experimental plasma device capable of cleaning gas samples of D4, one of the most common siloxanes. Drawing on a technique for creating plasma called dielectric barrier discharge, the group was able to significantly reduce the amount of D4 samples after treating it with a helium-based plasma.

The findings point to a new potential solution for accommodating landfill gas rich in siloxanes. They will be presented at the American Physical Society 71st Annual Gaseous Electronics Conference and 60th Annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, which takes place Nov. 5–9 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

“This is the first time dielectric barrier discharge has been used to remove volatile organic silicate compounds,” said Malik Tahiyat, one of the researchers involved with the study. “In our case, there’s no wait for removing it or material that has to be thrown out after a certain amount of time.”

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The most powerful laser beam ever created has been recently fired at Osaka University in Japan, where the Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments (LFEX) has been boosted to produce a beam with a peak power of 2,000 trillion watts—two petawatts—for an incredibly short duration, approximately a trillionth of a second or one picosecond.

Values this large are difficult to grasp, but we can think of it as a billion times more powerful than a typical stadium floodlight or as the overall power of all of the sun’s solar energy that falls on London. Imagine focusing all that solar power onto a surface as wide as a human hair for the duration of a trillionth of a second: that’s essentially the LFEX laser.

LFEX is only one of a series of ultra-high power lasers that are being built across the world, ranging from the gigantic 192-beam National Ignition Facility in California, to the CoReLS laser in South Korea, and the Vulcan laser at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory outside Oxford, UK, to mention but a few.

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