Lifeboat Foundation

Tesla’s extreme Australian makeover continues with a new “virtual power plant,” part of the continent’s overall program to encourage these collections of renewable resources. Tesla is just the first to make and report on a virtual power plant for the program.

Like the large energy storage facility Tesla operates in South Australia, the goal of the virtual power plant is to both collect energy and store it to be fed back into the grid. The pilot virtual plant is distributed across the rooftops of 1,000 low-income homes in South Australia, and Tesla says its goal is to eventually have 50,000 solar rooftops there. That number might sound small, but South Australia only has about 1.6 million residents.

The farm, the first in the world to commercially grow tomatoes solely under artificial light, is one part of a push to transform food production in the United Arab Emirates, where 80% of food is imported.

With little water, scorching temperatures, and not much arable land, the UAE currently imports 80% of its food. Can it go local?

Even before the coronavirus, air pollution killed seven million people a year. Will today’s cleaner air inspire us to do better?

Germany has broken another renewable energy record but officials say there’s still room for improvement. The German Renewable Energy Federation (BEE) reported Sunday that the combined share of renewable energy in the electricity, transport and heating sectors was 15.2 percent in the first half of 2017, up from 14.8 percent during the same period last year.

For the electricity sector alone, renewables supplied a record 35 percent of the country’s power in the first six months of 2017, about a 2 percent increase from 2016’s numbers. To compare, renewables accounted for only 15 percent of the United States’ total electricity generation in 2016.

Despite the new benchmark, BEE acting managing director Harald Uphoff told DW that Germany’s transition to clean energy across all sectors is not happening fast enough. The BEE report showed that renewables provided only 5.1 percent of energy consumed in the transport sector and 13.6 percent in heating.

NASA’s new 3-dimensional portrait of methane concentrations shows the world’s second largest contributor to greenhouse warming, the diversity of sources on the ground, and the behavior of the gas as it moves through the atmosphere. Combining multiple data sets from emissions inventories, including fossil fuel, agricultural, biomass burning and biofuels, and simulations of wetland sources into a high-resolution computer model, researchers now have an additional tool for understanding this complex gas and its role in Earth’s carbon cycle, atmospheric composition, and climate system.

Since the Industrial Revolution, methane concentrations in the atmosphere have more than doubled. After carbon dioxide, methane is the second most influential greenhouse gas, responsible for 20 to 30% of Earth’s rising temperatures to date.

“There’s an urgency in understanding where the sources are coming from so that we can be better prepared to mitigate methane emissions where there are opportunities to do so,” said research scientist Ben Poulter at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

FUTURE AFRICA: SUSTAINING THE SOURCE.

Let’s discuss on the theme: COMPLIANCE TO GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY.

💥Register for this Online/Virtual Reality Conference — https://conference.taffds.org/

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FUTURE AFRICA: SUSTAINING THE SOURCE. Let’s discuss on the theme: COMPLIANCE TO GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY.

💥Register for this Online/Virtual Reality Conference https://conference.taffds.org/

AGILE MINDSET THAT EMPOWERS YOUR LIFE with Annick Bleyen.

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In what seems to be the automotive equivalent of a brazen act intended to show dominance, Elon Musk has announced on Twitter that Tesla will be releasing a “Plaid” version of the Cybertruck. Musk did not provide further details in his tweet, though there is little doubt that the feature will make the already daunting Tri-Motor pickup into something downright scary for its fossil fuel-powered rivals like the Ford F-150 Raptor.

Elon Musk’s Plaid Cybertruck revelation was shared on Twitter late Wednesday. While responding to Tesla owner-enthusiast and Third Row Podcast member Sofiaan Fraval, Musk stated that he would be driving a Plaid version of the all-electric pickup truck for personal use. This came as a pleasant surprise to the EV community, especially since this is the first time that such a version of the Cybertruck has been mentioned.

Elon Musk has mentioned in the past that the Tesla Cybertruck will have the handling and performance of a sports car, and this was highlighted during the vehicle’s unveiling event. Apart from showcasing its strength by having the hulking all-electric pickup pull a Ford F-150 like a rag doll, Tesla also featured the Cybertruck drag racing a Porsche 911, and crushing the iconic sports car in the process. These are bold demonstrations, and each was met with equal parts excitement and skepticism from the auto community.

In an effort to make highly sensitive sensors to measure sugar and other vital signs of human health, Iowa State University’s Sonal Padalkar figured out how to deposit nanomaterials on cloth and paper.

Feedback from a peer-reviewed paper published by ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering describing her new fabrication technology mentioned the metal-oxide nanomaterials the assistant professor of mechanical engineering was working with—including zinc oxide, cerium oxide and copper oxide, all at scales down to billionths of a meter—also have antimicrobial properties.

“I might as well see if I can do something else with this technology,” Padalkar said. “And that’s how I started studying antimicrobial uses.”