Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk reacted to Secretary Blinken’s statement “to advance internet freedom to Iranians”

Elon Musk, the SpaceX CEO, and CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla said on Friday that he would be activating the firm’s satellite internet service Starlink in Iran. This is a response to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement that the United States took action “to advance internet freedom and the free flow of information” to Iranians.

Despite sanctions imposed on Iran, the U.S. Treasury Department on Friday issued guidance on expanding internet services available to Iranians. Following the death of 22-year-old Masha Amini’s suspicious death in the custody of Iranian authorities.

It is scheduled to be completed by 2050.

Tokyo’s Metropolitan Government plans to build a high-tech, sustainable city on reclaimed land in its bay area — Tokyo Bay eSG. Announced in April 2021, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is clearing the decks for action to make the city carbon-neutral and better able to withstand future climate and health crises.

Continue reading “Tokyo builds an eco-friendly high-end technology city on the bay” »

New light has been shed on the formation of increasingly precious rare earth elements (REEs) by researchers from Trinity College Dublin. They accomplished this by creating synthetic rocks and testing their responses to varying environmental conditions. REEs are used in many electronic devices and green energy technologies, including everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.

The findings, just published on September 19 in the journal Global Challenges, have implications for recycling REEs from electronic waste, designing materials with advanced functional properties, and even for finding new REE deposits hidden around the globe.

Dr. Juan Diego Rodriguez-Blanco, Associate Professor in Nanomineralogy at Trinity and an iCRAG (SFI Research Centre in Applied Geosciences) Funded Investigator, was the principal investigator of the work. He said:

A new photodetector design borrows its light-gathering architecture from plants, offering a potential path to more efficient solar cells.

These wind turbines have the potential to produce more energy at lower cost.

A Norwegian company is revolutionizing wind power at sea with its novel array of small turbines.

Each array has a small footprint, stands 324 metres tall, contains 126 wind turbines, and can generate up to 126 Megawatts of electricity.

This novel technology can be built in many ways, even like a snake.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has revealed a breakthrough technology with wave energy. The lab claims that with this new technology, electricity can be produced from waves and even from clothes, and cars.

NREL — which specializes in the research and development of renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy systems integration, and sustainable transportation — has already taken out the patent of its unique distributed embedded energy converter technologies (DEEC-Tec).

Continue reading “NREL’s newly patented technology will generate electricity from ocean waves, lab claims” »

Engineers at EPFL have found a way to insert carbon nanotubes into photosynthetic bacteria, which greatly improves their electrical output. They even pass these nanotubes down to their offspring when they divide, through what the team calls “inherited nanobionics.”

Solar cells are the leading source of renewable energy, but their production has a large environmental footprint. As with many things, we can take cues from nature about how to improve our own devices, and in this case photosynthetic bacteria, which get their energy from sunlight, could be used in microbial fuel cells.

In the new study, the EPFL team gave these bacteria a boost by inserting carbon nanotubes – tiny rolled-up sheets of graphene, a material that’s famously conductive. The nanotube-loaded bugs were able to produce up to 15 times more electricity than their non-edited counterparts from the same amount of sunlight.

How do we reduce the distrust in the face of climate change and other existential threats? Teaching scientific reasoning skills is proposed.