Lifeboat Foundation

The production of wild and farm-raised fish, shellfish and algae reached record levels in 2020, and future increases could be vital to fighting world hunger, the Food and Agriculture Organization said Wednesday.

Driven by sustained growth in aquaculture, global fisheries and aquatic farming together hauled in 214 million tonnes, the UN agency said in a report.

The total first-sale value of 2020 production topped $400 million, with $265 million coming from aquaculture, a sector poised for further expansion.

Alex SharpThe world really needs to prioritise getting heat pumps to people. They also help keep people warm in winter.

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Continue reading “Snow Plows Won’t Have Passes At Glacier National Park Open Before July 4; Sunshine Village Offers Summer Skiing For First Time In 31 Years; Antarctica —5.1C Below 1979-2000 Base; + Proposed Biofuels Cap Rejected At G7” »

Elon Musk may be an oddball online, but he helped bring a lot of technology to the world. Happy Birthday Elon Musk! Here’s a Look on the Tech CEO’s Significance in the World.

Elon Musk talked about the advantages of Tesla ads in an interview with Tesla supporters, including the President of Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, the President of My Tesla Adventure, and the Kilowatts founder.

Musk noted that public support for Tesla is appreciated, and the Tesla community’s efforts to shoot down FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) for the company have also been helpful. Musk has opposed the idea of Tesla ads in the past. However, during the interview, he acknowledged that Tesla ads might have some advantages.

Continue reading “Elon Musk acknowledges the advantage of Tesla ads” »

Photosynthesis has evolved in plants for millions of years to turn water, carbon dioxide, and the energy from sunlight into plant biomass and the foods we eat. This process, however, is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant. Scientists at UC Riverside and the University of Delaware have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis.

The research, published in Nature Food, uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar. Food-producing organisms then consume acetate in the dark to grow. Combined with solar panels to generate the electricity to power the electrocatalysis, this hybrid organic-inorganic system could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient for some foods.

“With our approach we sought to identify a new way of producing food that could break through the limits normally imposed by biological photosynthesis,” said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering.

Ever considered the notion that everything around you was cooked up by aliens in a lab? Theoretical physicist and former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, Abraham ‘Avi’ Loeb, has proposed a wild – if unsettling – theory that our universe was intentionally created by a more advanced class of lifeform.

In an op-ed for Scientific American, “Was Our Universe Created In A Laboratory?”, Loeb suggested that aliens could have created a ‘baby universe’ using ‘quantum tunneling’, which would explain our universe’s ‘flat geometry’ with zero net energy. If this discovery were proven true, then the universe humans live in would be shown to be “like a biological system that maintains the longevity of its genetic material through multiple generations,” Loeb wrote.

Loeb put forward the idea of a scale of developed civilisations (A, B, etc.) and, due to that fact that on Earth we currently don’t have the ability to reproduce the astrophysical conditions that led to our existence, “we are a low-level technological civilisation, graded class C on the cosmic scale” (essentially: dumb). We would be higher up, he added, if we possessed the ability to recreate the habitable conditions on our planet for when the sun will die. But, due to our tendency to “carelessly destroy the natural habitat” on Earth through climate change, we should really be downgraded to class D.

WASHINGTON — Artificial intelligence and related digital tools can help warn of natural disasters, combat global warming and fast-track humanitarian aid, according to retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a onetime Trump administration national security adviser.

It can also help preempt fights, highlight incoming attacks and expose weaknesses the world over, he said May 17 at the Nexus 22 symposium.

The U.S. must “identify aggression early to deter it,” McMaster told attendees of the daylong event focused on autonomy, AI and the defense policy that underpins it. “This applies to our inability to deter conflict in Ukraine, but also the need to deter conflict in other areas, like Taiwan. And, of course, we have to be able to respond to it quickly and to maintain situational understanding, identify patterns of adversary and enemy activity, and perhaps more importantly, to anticipate pattern breaks.”

Earthly space travelers have been trying to perfect orbital botany for a while now. Stable, sustainable off world agricultural practices are needed to make longer term exploration missions possible, and though the International Space Station (ISS) has seen a few successful low-orbit gardening endeavors, all have used some sort of soil or soil-replacing growth media.

Now, thanks to NASA Flight Engineer Jessica Watkins, that could be starting to change. According to a NASA blog published last week, Watkins has begun to harvest radishes and mizuna greens aboard the ISS — grown without any soil whatsoever.

Growing any edible plants in space is always exciting, but using dirt-like growth materials presents potential resource, mess, and sanitation problems. And that’s why Watkins’ triumphant soilless crop could be a thrilling step towards a new age of interstellar discovery.

The differences? The new Mayflower—logically dubbed the Mayflower 400—is a 50-foot-long trimaran (that’s a boat that has one main hull with a smaller hull attached on either side), can go up to 10 knots or 18.5 kilometers an hour, is powered by electric motors that run on solar energy (with diesel as a backup if needed), and required a crew of… zero.

That’s because the ship was navigated by an on-board AI. Like a self-driving car, the ship was tricked out with multiple cameras (6 of them) and sensors (45 of them) to feed the AI information about its surroundings and help it make wise navigation decisions, such as re-routing around spots with bad weather. There’s also onboard radar and GPS, as well as altitude and water-depth detectors.

The ship and its voyage were a collaboration between IBM and a marine research non-profit called ProMare. Engineers trained the Mayflower 400’s “AI Captain” on petabytes of data; according to an IBM overview about the ship, its decisions are based on if/then rules and machine learning models for pattern recognition, but also go beyond these standards. The algorithm “learns from the outcomes of its decisions, makes predictions about the future, manages risks, and refines its knowledge through experience.” It’s also able to integrat e far more inputs in real time than a human is capable of.

Stacking solar cells increases their efficiency. Working with partners in the PERCISTAND project, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have produced perovskite/CIS tandem solar cells with an efficiency of nearly 25%—the highest value achieved thus far with this technology. Moreover, this combination of materials is light and versatile, making it possible to envision the use of these tandem solar cells in vehicles, portable equipment, and devices that can be folded or rolled up. The researchers present their results in the journal ACS Energy Letters.

Perovskite solar cells have made astounding progress over the past decade. Their efficiency is now comparable to that of the long-established silicon solar cells. Perovskites are innovative materials with a special crystal structure. Researchers worldwide are working to get perovskite photovoltaic technology ready for practical applications. The more electricity they generate per unit of surface area, the more attractive solar cells are for consumers.

The efficiency of solar cells can be increased by stacking two or more cells. If each of the stacked solar cells is especially efficient at absorbing light from a different part of the solar spectrum, inherent losses can be reduced and efficiency boosted. The efficiency is a measure of how much of the incident light is converted into electricity. Thanks to their versatility, perovskite solar cells make outstanding components for such tandems. Tandem solar cells using perovskites and silicon have reached a record efficiency level of over 29%, considerably higher than that of individual cells made of perovskite (25.7%) or silicon (26.7%).