Lifeboat Foundation

This special report will look at the energy transition from the perspective of America, the EU and China as well as petrostates such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. It will pinpoint winners and losers. It will argue that America is at risk of squandering an early lead, obtained by using natural gas and renewables to slash emissions, promoting clean technology and helping pioneer the Paris agreement. China is catching up fast. Saudi Arabia and Russia are in most obvious peril.

TO ENTER TAFT, two hours north of Los Angeles, you drive along the “Petroleum Highway”, past miles of billboards advertising Jesus. God’s country is also oil country. Spread over the sagebrush hills surrounding the town are thousands of steel pumpjacks (pictured), contraptions that suck oil out of the ground. They look like a herd of dinosaurs. Some Californians would describe the oil industry in the same way.

The oil produced at Taft is not produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as much of it is in Texas and North Dakota. It is so heavy it needs to be steamed out of the ground, in a process known locally as “huff and puff”. Yet Kern County, with Taft on its western edge, produces 144m barrels of oil a year, the second highest output of any county in America. Fred Holmes, a third-generation oilman and patron of the West Kern Oil Museum, says he is proud of the heritage, however much it irks local drivers of electric Tesla cars that the Golden State has such a carbon-heavy underbelly. “Oil is renewable energy. It just takes longer to renew,” he quips. He has built a giant wooden derrick at the museum to celebrate it.

Continue reading “Clean power is shaking up the global geopolitics of energy” »

The US military likes to stay at the forefront of the cutting edge of science — most recently investigating ways they can ‘hack’ the human brain and body to make it die slower, and learn faste r.

But in an unexpected twist, it turns out they’re also interested in pushing the limits of quantum mechanics. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced it’s funding research into one of the strangest scientific breakthroughs in recent memory — time crystals.

In case you missed it, time crystals made headlines last year when scientists finally made the bizarre objects in the lab, four years after they were first proposed.

Continue reading “DARPA Is Researching Time Crystals, And Their Reasons Are ‘Classified’” »

A drug with the potential to revolutionise medication has been approved in the US.

Folks in the planet’s higher latitudes have been treated to some https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2017/07/16/the-aurora-…right-now/” target=”_self”>fantastic nighttime aurora borealis light shows in the past few days thanks to cracks that open up in Earth’s magnetosphere around the time of the fall and spring (or autumnal and vernal, to be a bit more formal about it) equinoxes.

The U.S. Air Force is considering Orbital ATK’s Next Generation Launcher under its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program. What does this new launch vehicle look like? How tall will it be? What will it capable of? To find the answers to these questions, SpaceFlight Insider spoke with one of the officials responsible for the new booster’s development.

SpaceFlight Insider spoke to Orbital ATK’s Mark Pieczynski, the Dulles, Virginia-based company’s vice-president of Business Development for Orbital ATK’s Flight Systems Group.

Continue reading “Next Generation Launcher considered under U.S. Air Force’s EELV program” »

Works crews transferring spent fuel at the San Onofre nuclear plant from cooling pools into dry storage discovered a loose bolt inside one of the canisters, prompting Southern California Edison to temporarily halt the relocation effort. The job resumed earlier this week.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) — Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile shield was launched on Sunday against Palestinian machine gun fire originating in the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip, and not against incoming militant rockets, the Israeli army said.

Flaming streams of about 10 Iron Dome rockets could be seen rising into the night sky in a spectacular light show, but there was no indication that Islamist militants in Gaza had fired rockets, a military spokeswoman said.

A subsequent army statement said: “Following reports of sirens sounding in southern Israel, unusual machine gun fire towards Israel was identified. No rocket launches were identified. The (military) is looking into the circumstances which led to the activation of the Iron Dome system.”

Continue reading “Israeli interceptors deployed against machine gun fire, not rockets: army” »

T he feeling of the ground shaking can be a scary experience. But have you ever wondered how or why earthquakes happen in the first place? According to National Geographic Society, earthquakes occur near tectonic plates boundaries, slabs of rocky crust that fit together to form the Earths outer shell. Plates, moving by mere inches annually, can grind, collide, separate, and scrape pass one another. Through these interactions, the more strains it builds results in vibrations, known as earthquakes. Some major plates are the Northern American and the Pacific Plate. Although earthquakes are watched closely, they are still hard to predict.

Did you know: In Fort Tejon California, north of LA, had a magnitude of 8.3 earthquake in 1857?

Come explore and learn more about earthquakes from these artistic maps that depict selected earthquakes in the U.S with a magnitude of 7.8 or greater, from 1897–1996, or a map that illustrates how moderate magnitude earthquakes can produce serious effects in Los Angeles, as well as a map that anticipates loss from future earthquakes. My favorite map is the colorful stress map that estimates the differential stress levels in the lithosphere, where earthquakes occur, and by researching the variations of unstable to stable frictional slips on faults can explain the occurrence of ductile earthquakes. Also available is a map that points out previous earthquakes that had generated tsunamis.

Continue reading “Featured Maps! Plate Tectonics & Earthquakes” »

One of the big issues for traveling to Mars is fuel. It’s a lot of weight to carry in order to travel that far. A new thruster from the European Space Agency could be the answer to that problem and the next step in interplanetary journeys to the red planet.