Lifeboat Foundation

A UCF research team with collaborators at Virginia Tech have developed a new “green” approach to making ammonia that may help make feeding the rising world population more sustainable.

“This new approach can facilitate ammonia production using renewable energy, such as electricity generated from solar or wind,” said physics Assistant Professor Xiaofeng Feng. “Basically, this new approach can help advance a sustainable development of our human society.”

Ammonia, a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, is essential to all life on the planet and is a vital ingredient in most fertilizers used for food production. Since World War I, the ammonia in fertilizer has been primarily produced using the Haber-Bosch method, which is energy and fossil-fuel intensive. There have been substantial obstacles to improving the process, until now.

Many of us think we know what electronic waste is because we wonder what to do with devices we no longer want or need.

It’s the old cellphone and its charger stuffed in the drawer.

It’s that old laptop, monitor or printer packed behind the door or in the basement.

Continue reading “Almost everything you know about e-waste is wrong” »

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano could have a major devastating eruption at ‘any time’, the US Geographical Survey has said.

The volcano has been erupting for 10 days, and more than 2000 residents have already been evacuated.

Continue reading “Hawaii goes on RED ALERT for ‘major eruption’ of Kilauea volcano” »

After two years in development, Project MELT (Manufacturing of Experimental Layer Technology) has resurfaced with a prototype microgravity 3D printer.

Made for the European Space Agency (ESA) the Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM) breadboard machine is designed to 3D print high performance polymers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and other off-world locations.

Westworld’s first season was largely focused on the abuse of artificial life, given that the park hosts’ purpose almost exclusively revolved around sex, violence, and suffering. The freedom Dolores and her ilk were fighting for was simple consciousness—a right to their own memories and self-awareness. In just the first four episodes, Westworld’s second season has exploded that basic quest into all kinds of fascinating directions, but “The Riddle of the Sphinx” was the first to really grapple with one of the most obvious questions in AI, which is: Isn’t artificial intelligence the key to immortality?

Three Atlantic staffers discuss “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” the fourth episode of Season 2.

Don’t panic.

An asteroid the size of the Statue of Liberty is set to narrowly miss Earth on Tuesday evening. Luckily, it won’t actually smack into our planet or cause any da.

It’s growing so rapidly that it’s shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy.

A “supermassive” black hole swallowing up the mass of our sun every two days has been found by Australian astronomers.

Astronomers at the Australian National University (ANU), led by Dr Christian Wolf of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, found the fastest-growing black hole known in the universe by looking back more than 12 billion years to what they call “the early dark ages of the universe.”

Continue reading “The fastest-growing black hole in the universe eats a sun every 48 hours — and astronomers have found it” »

May 15 (UPI) — Until now, scientists weren’t sure how gene activation mechanisms avoided nucleosomes, the bodyguards tasked with keeping DNA turned off.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, however, have pinpointed a key factor responsible for unraveling nucleosome structures and allowing genes to be activated.

Geneticists described the newly identified nucleosome destabilizing factor, or NDF, this week in the journal Genes and Development.

Continue reading “Key part of human gene activation revealed by new study” »

By combining virtual reality with a brain-based computer interface, researchers hope to create more immersive, lifelike experiences for gaming and health care applications.