Lifeboat Foundation

After ten years of waiting, Tesla has revealed the Model 3, the vehicle that CEO Elon Musk hopes will take the electric car to the masses.

At the unveiling of the Model 3 this evening at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne, California, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the car will deliver at least 215 miles of range beginning at just $35,000 — that’s a bold claim, and an important one for Tesla to meet. Musk is “fairly confident” that deliveries will begin by the end of 2017, and “you will not be able to buy a better car for $35,000, even with no options.”

Are you really surprised?

In a majority vote, the lower house of Dutch parliament supported a motion to no longer allow new sales of petrol or diesel cars from 2025. The action was brought by the PvdA, which would bring forward Netherland’s commitment to full electric transportation by decades.

If followed through on (via a Labour motion for the Cabinet’s support), in 2025 only sustainable, zero-emission cars will be available to be purchased.

Continue reading “Netherlands Moves To Only Allow EV Sales By 2025 — End Of Gas, Petrol” »

If you dig deep enough into the Earth’s climate change archives, you hear about the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. And then you get scared.

That was a time period, about 56 million years ago, when something mysterious happened — there are many ideas as to what — that suddenly caused concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to spike, far higher than they are right now.

The planet proceeded to warm rapidly, at least in geologic terms, and major die-offs of some marine organisms followed due to strong acidification of the oceans.

Continue reading “Study suggests Earth is heading toward a second catastrophic hot-house event” »

Researchers at the ASU School of Life Sciences may have found a way to improve crop performance and yield with the help of some new biotechnology. They’ve discovered a method to enhance a plant’s tolerance to stress, which could help them survive inclement conditions and still produce food.

The world’s population is currently exploding. There is already well over 7 billion people on Earth, and that number is expected to grow even larger in the next few years. This means that feeding the human race will become more of a challenge in the coming decades.

As the human population grows, climate change is taking its toll. Weather conditions are shifting in areas that are usually used to grow crops, which means that plants in those areas may not produce as much as they normally would. Drought, abnormal heat and other conditions could cause farms to lose production.

Continue reading “New Biotechnology Improves Crop Tolerance To Stress And Absorption Of Nutrients” »

Researchers at Xerox PARC are working on a way to cheaply print efficient solar cells at a large scale.

Nuclear fusion needs a “Wright brothers” moment, to convince the world of its promise of unlimited clean and safe energy and so unlock significant private investment, according to a physicist whose says his company is closing in on that goal.

David Kingham, the chief executive of Tokamak Energy, has announced his company’s target of producing its first electricity by 2025 and feeding power into the grid by 2030, as well as investment from the UK’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Harnessing the nuclear energy which powers the sun has long been touted as the ultimate solution to the challenge of powering the world while halting climate change. But, as fusion sceptics often say, the reality has stubbornly remained a decade or two away for many years.

Continue reading “Nuclear fusion needs a ‘Wright brothers’ moment, says firm closing on the target” »

New miniature sized dye solar cell technology developed by an Israeli company can be installed onto devices and charge them with indirect light, making batteries obsolete. Sharon Reich reports.

Vortex is a bladeless, wind-powered generator prototype that produces electricity with minimal moving parts and leaves a minuscule footprint. To top it off, it makes almost no sound. The design aims to reduce both visual and aural impact of traditional bladed turbines, and utilizes the power within swirling vortices of air.

There are many people using standard wind turbines who find them to be problematic. Bladed wind turbines are dangerous to birds, they are incredibly noisy, and their gigantic size makes commercial use a property allowance issue as well. These concerns might be excuses for those who prefer old-aged electricity, but they hold truth to them and these reasons might be holding back the universal acceptance of standard turbines. This is where Vortex finds itself with the upper hand. The unit is much more compact than windmills, and uses the natural currents of wind to move a series of magnets located within its base to generate electricity.

Continue reading “Bladeless Turbines? Say Hello To Vortex Wobble Technology” »