Lifeboat Foundation

The Salt Honey bees deal with many stressors: chemicals, climate change and viruses. But this year, a tiny mite has wiped out colonies, causing worry over whether there are enough bees left to do their jobs.

Rutgers and other physicists have discovered an exotic form of electrons that spin like planets and could lead to advances in lighting, solar cells, lasers and electronic displays.

It’s called a “chiral surface exciton,” and it consists of particles and anti-particles bound together and swirling around each other on the surface of solids, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Chiral refers to entities, like your right and left hands, that match but are asymmetrical and can’t be superimposed on their mirror image.

Continue reading “Exotic spiraling electrons discovered” »

An ambitious new analysis of the world’s forests found that there’s space to plant 1.2 trillion new trees — a number that would absorb more carbon than human emissions.

According to the new data, ETH Zurich researcher Thomas Crowther told The Independent, trees are “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change.”

Crowther told The Independent that the new analysis, which he presented at a conference this weekend, suggests that a worldwide tree-planting spree would have a greater impact on the planet’s environment than building wind turbines or vegetarian diets — an effort, he says, that could cancel a decade of greenhouse emissions.

Continue reading “Here’s a Simple Thing We Can Do to Cancel Out Years of CO2 Emissions” »

To make a regular car go faster on the track, you can add go-fast components like a turbocharger or better fuel, or improve handling components like brakes and tires. Carmakers can also make a dizzying amount of software tweaks to everything from the stability and traction control systems to throttle mapping and how much fuel gets into the engine.

But with an electric car, the software is the star of the show. Code controls everything. That’s why Tesla can introduce Track Mode to the Model 3 with a software download, unlocking new features designed to get the electric sports sedan around a track faster than before.

On something like the BMW M5, putting the car in Sport Mode adjusts a dizzying array of settings for throttle response, transmission, chassis, steering, stability control, and whether the car operates in all- or rear-wheel drive.

Continue reading “Tesla is making the Model 3 faster with a software update” »

Electric cars could be charged at any time and any place.

It could reliably supply energy 99 per cent of the time, at six-times the intensity of solar farms on earth, he said.

Chinese scientists first plan to build and launch small to medium-sized solar power stations to be launched into the stratosphere to generate electricity, between 2021 and 2025.

Continue reading “Plans for first Chinese solar power station in space revealed” »

Unlike high tech solutions to climate change like carbon capture systems, Crowther argued, trees are nice because anyone can plant one.

“It’s a beautiful thing because everyone can get involved,” he told The Independent. “Trees literally just make people happier in urban environments, they improve air quality, water quality, food quality, ecosystem service, it’s such an easy, tangible thing.”

READ MORE: Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO₂ emissions, analysis suggests [The Independent].

A new chemical process could turn about 90% of the world’s grocery bags, shrink wrap, and other polypropylene waste into clean fuel.

Grocery bags and other trash could be melted down to yield useful products like oil and gas.

The problem: The world’s landfill sites and oceans are being flooded with plastic. A mere 9% of the 8.3 billion tons of plastic produced over the last 65 years has been recycled, according to the United Nations. Over eight million tons of plastic flow into our oceans every year, harming wildlife.

Continue reading “A new chemical process could turn a quarter of our plastic waste into clean fuel” »

Imagine if we could replace fossil fuels with our very own stars. And no, we’re not talking about solar power: We’re talking nuclear fusion. And recent research is helping us get there. Meet the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, or EAST.

EAST is a fusion reactor based in Hefei, China. And it can now reach temperatures more than six times as hot as the sun. Let’s take a look at what’s happening inside. Fusion occurs when two lightweight atoms combine into a single, larger one, releasing energy in the process. It sounds simple enough, but it’s not easy to pull off. Because those two atoms share a positive charge. And just like two opposing magnets, those positive atoms repel each other.

Stars, like our sun, have a great way of overcoming this repulsion … their massive size, which creates a tremendous amount of pressure in their cores … So the atoms are forced closer together making them more likely to collide. There’s just one problem: We don’t have the technology to recreate that kind of pressure on Earth.

Continue reading “China made an artificial star that’s 6 times as hot as the sun, and it could be the future of energy” »

Over the years, we’ve seen thousands of unique van conversions, but Nissan has taken the van-loving world by storm with its new NV300 concept van — a mobile workshop for woodworking professionals. The amazing design, which was a collaboration between Nissan and UK-based firm Studio Hardie, is fully-functioning mobile woodworking studio that can be taken off grid, letting wood-loving artisans find inspiration anywhere they choose. What’s more, the van runs on solar power and its tools are powered by an emissions-free, weatherproof power pack made out of recycled electric car batteries.