Lifeboat Foundation

The financial costs of flooding in Canada’s maritime region could spike by 300 per cent by the end of the century if steps are not taken to address the impacts of climate change.

A study done by researchers at the University of Waterloo looked at the Halifax, Nova Scotia area, a region hard hit by recent riverine flooding. The team, made up economists, geographers and political scientists, merged data on flood probability, climate change and financial payout information from the insurance/re-insurance market and used the information to develop a forecast.

“Until recently there hasn’t been a lot of work exploring what increased flooding will cost, and who will get stuck with the bill,” says Andrea Minano, coordinator of the Canadian Coastal Resilience Forum (CCRF) and a researcher at Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment. “The increases in flood losses put into question the long term insurability in the Halifax area, and highlight a broader problem facing many other areas in Canada if no actions are taken to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

A new study carried out by an international team of researchers, using the chemistry of ocean sediments has highlighted a widespread picture of Atlantic circulation changes associated with rapid climate change in the past.

The new integrated dataset, published today in the journal Nature Communications, provides new insights into the interactions of melting ice, ocean circulation and climate change, with potential implications for future long-term changes in the Earth systems with global climate change.

Dr. Hong Chin Ng from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, is the study’s lead author.

Continue reading “Deglacial changes in western Atlantic Ocean circulation” »

It’s almost the weekend and what better way to celebrate than a nice long interview with one of the Heroes of aging research? Today we bring you a mega-interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey.

Today we have an interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey from the SENS Research Foundation. This interview conducted by Yuri Deigin was originally published in Russian language and he has kindly translated it into English so our audience can enjoy it too.

Yuri: Aubrey, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Why don’t we dive right in? I am sure everybody asks you this: how and when did you become interested in aging, and when did you decide to make it your life’s mission to defeat it?

Continue reading “Dr. Aubrey de Grey – SENS Research Foundation” »

BEIJING — Next time when your kids ask you to bring them a star from the sky, you don’t have to shrug and walk away. Tell them to wait, instead.

A group of Chinese scientists are mulling a bold idea to capture a small near-Earth asteroid, which might be a potential threat, and bring it back to Earth to exploit its resources.

“Sounds like science-fiction, but I believe it can be realized,” said Li Mingtao, a researcher at the National Space Science Center under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Continue reading “Capture an asteroid, bring it back to Earth?” »

Watch the official trailer for Cosmos: Possible Worlds.

Subscribe now for more Cosmos: Possible Worlds clips: http://fox.tv/SubscribeFOX

Continue reading “COSMOS: POSSIBLE WORLDS | Official Trailer | FOX BROADCASTING” »

Or is it ‘suntok sa sa buwan?’ 🌕 #LunarEclipse #BloodMoon

Read: http://bit.ly/2LJDxr6

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For more than 20 years, a team of astronomers has tracked a single star whipping around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy at up to 25 million kilometers per hour, or 3% of the speed of light. Now, the team says the close encounter has put Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to its most rigorous test yet for massive objects, with the light from the star stretched in a way not prescribed by Newtonian gravity. In a study announced today, the team says it has detected a distinctive indicator of Einstein’s general theory of relativity called “gravitational redshift,” in which the star’s light loses energy because of the black hole’s intense gravity.

“It’s really exciting. This is such an amazing observation,” says astronomer Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who heads a rival group that is also tracking the star. “This is a direct test [of relativity] that we’ve both been preparing for for years.”

The star, called S2, is unremarkable apart from a highly elliptical orbit that takes it within 20 billion kilometers, or 17 light-hours, of the Milky Way’s central black hole—closer than any other known star. A team led by Reinhard Genzel at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany, has been tracking S2 since the 1990s, first with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) 3.6-meter New Technology Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert and later with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), made up of four 8-meter instruments. Ghez’s team at UCLA also began to observe the star around the same time with the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

Continue reading “Star’s black hole encounter puts Einstein’s theory of gravity to the test” »

Seminal research reveals that sperm change their cargo as they travel the reproductive tract—and the differences can have consequences for fertility.