Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Leeds, have assessed how robotics and autonomous systems might facilitate or impede the delivery of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Their findings identify key opportunities and key threats that need to be considered while developing, deploying and governing robotics and autonomous systems.

The key opportunities robotics and autonomous systems present are through autonomous task completion, supporting human activities, fostering innovation, enhancing remote access and improving monitoring. Emerging threats relate to reinforcing inequalities, exacerbating environmental change, diverting resources from tried-and-tested solutions, and reducing freedom and privacy through inadequate governance.

Slow sand and membrane filters can knock out nearly all of the tiny pollutants.

With a more sustainable world goal, MIT researchers have succeeded in developing a new LEGO-like AI chip. Imagine a world where cellphones, smartwatches, and other wearable technologies don’t have to be put away or discarded for a new model. Instead, they could be upgraded with the newest sensors and processors that would snap into a device’s internal chip – similar to how LEGO bricks can be incorporated into an existing structure. Such reconfigurable chips might keep devices current while lowering electronic waste. This is really important because green computing is the key to a sustainable future.

MIT engineers have developed a stackable, reprogrammable LEGO-like AI chip. The chip’s layers communicate thanks optically to alternating layers of sensing and processing components, as well as light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Other modular chip designs use conventional wiring to transmit signals between layers. Such intricate connections are difficult, if not impossible, to cut and rewire, making stackable configurations nonreconfigurable.

Rather than relying on physical wires, the MIT design uses light to transfer data across the AI chip. As a result, the chip’s layers may be swapped out or added upon, for example, to include extra sensors or more powerful processors.

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas is planning to add enough electric vehicle charging stations throughout the state to support 1 million electric vehicles with dozens of new stations to allow for easier long-distance travel.

In a draft plan released this month, the Texas Department of Transportation broke down a five-year plan to create a network of chargers throughout the state, starting along main corridors and interstate highways before building stations in rural areas.

The plan is to have charging stations every 50 miles along most non-business interstate routes.

Why we need to adopt an abundance mindset.

Peter Diamandis shared an email blast about dire headlines that keep us on edge: the war in Ukraine, food and gasoline prices, climate change, and the neverending pandemic. Getting away from bad news is difficult, it appears, because of the way we are wired. Mass media feeds the bad far more than the good.

In his missive, Peter talks about Matt Ridley, a zoologist, who wrote and published The Rational Optimist in 2010. The book takes a profoundly optimistic view of human progress, a counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our day. Ridley coined the phrase “moaning pessimism” to describe the current state.

Continue reading “From Pessimism to Optimism Despite the Headlines” »

Plaintiff Keith Johnson seeks a class-action suit against Musk, SpaceX and Tesla.

Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have demonstrated a tin-lead perovskite cell that overcomes problems with stability and improves efficiency.

To improve cell stability, NREL researchers used a hole-transporting material made of phenethylammonium iodide and guanidinium thiocyanate. Researchers noted that the formation of quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) structures from additives based on mixed bulky organic cations phenethylammonium and guanidinium provides critical defect control to substantially improve the structural and optoelectronic properties of lead-perovskite thin films with a narrow-bandgap of 1.25 eV.

The new tandem solar cell design with two layers of perovskites measured a 25.5% efficiency. It retained 80% of its maximum efficiency after 1,500 hours of continuous operation or more than 62 days.

Around 300 secret polar bears have been secluded from other bear populations in Greenland for about 200 years, scientists said Thursday when they published a new study in the journal Science.

The bears live in sea-ice conditions that reserachers say mimic what other parts of the Arctic will look like as climate change progresses. Their territory lacks ice more than 100 days over the previous limit known to sustain polar bears because they have adapted to use freshwater glacial ice instead. The population is now the world’s 20th polar bear subpopulation.

“Polar bears are one of the most mentioned—and iconic—potential victims of climate change,” co-authors wrote in the study. “Most polar bears rely on sea ice to hunt. Discovery of this population suggests both that such environments might serve as refugia for polar bears and that conservation of this new population is essential.”

We’ll need thousands of these direct air capture plants or their equivalents from industry and nature to reduce atmospheric CO₂.

Direct Air Capture, also known as DAC, is one of a number of carbon capture technologies seen as a way to mitigate the worst impacts of global warming. The technology harvests carbon dioxide (CO₂) from ambient air. It is not an add-on to a coal-fired or natural-gas thermal power plant, but rather a standalone solution to removing CO₂ from the atmosphere for the purpose of permanently sequestering it underground.

A leader in this form of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is Carbon Engineering, a Canadian-based company whose demonstration plant sits in Squamish, British Columbia. Bill Gates is an investor. And now Occidental Petroleum through its subsidiary 1PointFive has entered into a partnership to build and deploy a minimum of 70 or as many as 135 DAC plants like the one seen in the picture above by 2035.

Continue reading “Carbon Engineering-Occidental Petroleum Partnership to Build 70 to 135 Direct Air Capture Plants by 2035” »