Lifeboat Foundation

For all of us, the act of being and thinking requires a network of complex support. The late physicist’s disability made it visible.

Midnight. As I was browsing the internet, I saw, like shooting stars, emails suddenly appear and disappear from the right-hand corner of my computer screen. The first from CNN announcing the death of Stephen Hawking, the second from an editor at The Atlantic asking me to write about him.

I had written about the man for 10 years—as a biographer of some sort, or an anthropologist of science to be more precise, studying the traces of Hawking’s presence. But now I felt a powerless inertia, unable to write anything. I didn’t think I would be affected by his death, but it touched me deeply. I was overwhelmed by the numerous articles that started to appear all over the world doing precisely what I had studied for so long and so carefully: recycling over and over again the same stories about him. Born 300 years after the death of Galileo Galilei, holder of Cambridge’s Lucasian Chair of Mathematics (once held by Isaac Newton), and now … died on the same day Albert Einstein was born. The life paths of history’s most iconic scientists intersected in weird ways. The puzzle seemed complete: Hawking had fully entered the pantheon of the great.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking Lived Beyond His Body” »

Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX and Tesla, came to SXSW this week and gave a grave talk about the future of humanity, warning about the dangers of nuclear war, climate, change, and runaway AI and telling the audience that the only way to keep humanity alive is to colonize the Solar System.

New York City’s discerning high-end chefs often ship in rare herbs and edible flowers from other states or even overseas. But Farm.One, an organic farm in the basement of an office building in Manhattan, can pick and deliver the precious leaves and flowers within the same day, says Robert Laing, the company’s CEO.

With its stacked shelves of hydroponic plants and grow lights, Farm. One is part of a growing movement of vertical farming across the world. The tech-enabled system uses less space and water than traditional farming.

Continue reading “The freshest herbs in Manhattan were grown in this office building basement” »

“A few months from now, a group of people will come here with something called an electric car. I need to know whether or not you have the right voltage connection for them to plug in their vehicles. Do you understand what I’m asking for?”

Mr. Dev Reddy, manager of a gas station in rural Anantapur district of India’s Andhra Pradesh looked at me as if he understood. It was 2008, and most people in India had never seen an electric car, but without flinching he took me to a shed to reveal a large plug point, which was used to power an electric sugar cane juicing machine. One look at it and I knew that there was sufficient voltage coming through the connection to be able to charge the lithium-ion battery in the REVA electric vehicles my friends and I would be driving 3,500 kilometers across India.

In 2008, it was folly to imagine India creating new technological solutions to address the climate crisis. For decades India had called itself a victim of climate change and thus incapable of acting to reduce emissions; what’s more, 400 million Indians had no access to electricity at all.

Continue reading “India’s Switch from Environmental Victim to Renewable Energy Champ” »

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As advanced and efficient as our solar panels are becoming, they’re still pretty much useless when rain clouds arrive overhead. That could soon change thanks to a hybrid cell that can harvest energy from both sunlight and raindrops.

The key part of the system is a triboelectric nanogenerator or TENG, a device which creates electric charge from the friction of two materials rubbing together, as with static electricity – it’s all about the shifting of electrons.

TENGs can draw power from car tyres hitting the road, clothing materials rubbing up against each other, or in this case the rolling motion of raindrops across a solar panel. The end result revealed by scientists from Soochow University in China is a cell that works come rain or shine.

Continue reading “This New Hybrid Solar Cell Can Harvest Electricity From Actual Raindrops” »

Tesla made a significant change to its electric motor strategy with the introduction of the Model 3, switching from an AC induction motor to a permanent magnet motor.

Now, Tesla’s principal motor designer, Konstantinos Laskaris, explains the logic behind the move.

Continue reading “Tesla motor designer explains Model 3’s transition to permanent magnet motor” »

Food scientists and startups are trying to make meat more ethically appealing by growing it — cell by cell — in a lab instead of on a farm. Even some vegans support so-called “clean” meat. But can lab grown meat overcome the dreaded “yuck factor?”

Still haven’t subscribed to WIRED on YouTube? ►► http://wrd.cm/15fP7B7

Continue reading “Inside the Quest to Make Lab Grown Meat” »

We could do this today. A couple ideas i would pitch would be: 1. A series of giant solar arrays in the American SW. 2. Giant wind turbines located in Tornado alley and built to withstand a direct hit from a tornado and try and put them where tornadoes would make direct hits on purpose.

After we get these sites built up enough to power the US, then build them up to power North and South America, eventually expand into Asia.

It would require an infrastructure overhaul costing hundreds of billions—if not trillions—of dollars, but technically speaking, it’s possible.

Continue reading “The US Could Supply 80 Percent of Its Energy with Wind and Solar” »