Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s Discover supercomputer simulated the extreme conditions of the distant cosmos.

A team of scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used the U.S. space agency’s Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Discover supercomputer to run 100 simulations of jets emerging from supermassive black holes.

Continue reading “NASA uses a climate simulation supercomputer to better understand black hole jets” »

Cooling accounts for about 15 percent of global energy consumption. Conventional clear windows allow the sun to heat up interior spaces, which energy-guzzling air-conditioners must then cool down. But what if a window could help cool the room, use no energy and preserve the view?

Tengfei Luo, the Dorini Family Professor of Energy Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and postdoctoral associate Seongmin Kim have devised a transparent coating for windows that does just that (ACS Energy Letters, “High-Performance Transparent Radiative Cooler Designed by Quantum Computing”).

The coating, or transparent radiative cooler (TRC), allows visible light to come in and keeps other heat-producing light out. The researchers estimate that this invention can reduce electric cooling costs by one-third in hot climates compared to conventional glass windows.

Object detection has been an important task in the computer vision domain in recent decades. The goal is to detect instances of objects, such as humans, cars, etc., in digital images. Hundreds of methods have been developed to answer a single question: What objects are where?

Traditional methods tried to answer this question by extracting hand-crafted features like edges and corners within the image. Most of these approaches used a sliding-window approach, meaning that they kept checking small parts of the image in different scales to see if any of these parts contained the object they were looking for. This was really time-consuming, and even the slightest change in the object shape, lightning, etc., could have caused the algorithm to miss it.

Then there came the deep learning era. With the increasing capability of computer hardware and the introduction of large-scale datasets, it became possible to exploit the advancement in the deep learning domain to develop a reliable and robust object detection algorithm that could work in an end-to-end manner.

Walking can boost not only your own energy but also, potentially, the energy of your wearable electronic devices. Osaka Metropolitan University scientists made a significant advance toward self-charging wearable devices with their invention of a dynamic magnifier-enhanced piezoelectric vibration energy harvester that can amplify power generated from impulsive vibrations, such as from a human walking, by about 90 times, while remaining as small as currently developed energy harvesters. The results were published in Applied Physics Letters.

These days, people carry multiple electronic devices such as smartphones, and wearable devices are expected to become increasingly widespread in the near future. The resulting demand for more efficient recharging of these devices has increased the attention paid to energy harvesting, a technology that converts energy such as heat and light into electricity that can power small devices. One form of energy harvesting called vibration energy harvesting is deemed highly practical given that it can transform the kinetic energy from vibration into electricity and is not affected by weather or climate.

A research team led by Associate Professor Takeshi Yoshimura from the Graduate School of Engineering at Osaka Metropolitan University has developed a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) piezoelectric vibration energy harvester that is only approximately 2 cm in diameter with a U-shaped metal component called a dynamic magnifier. Compared with conventional harvesters, the new harvester allows for an increase of about 90 times in the power converted from impulsive vibrations, which can be generated by the human walking motion.

A new study equates a green view and the proximity of green space with better mental health in urban settings.

Researchers at the University of Maine on Monday unveiled what they say is a promising, climate-friendly response to the nation’s affordable housing crisis: the world’s first, bio-based 3D printed home.

University, state and federal officials joined Maine Gov. Janet Mills and U.S. Sen. Susan Collins at a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the 600-square-foot-home.

The home is made entirely from a wood-based material, which University of Maine researchers say is an inexpensive, renewable and recyclable building option.

Continue reading “UMaine unveils first 3D-printed home in a bid to mass-produce affordable housing” »

It is essential to understand how lightning works so that buildings, airplanes, skyscrapers, and people can be protected more effectively.

Ever wondered why lightning zig-zags? Or how it is connected to the thundercloud ago? You might have tried looking up the many textbooks on the lightning but failed to find a definite and convincing answer.

Solarseven/iStock.

Continue reading “Lightning no longer a mystery, physicist publishes landmark paper revealing clues about phenomenon” »

Mitigating and reversing the effects of climate change is the most important scientific challenge facing humanity. Carbon sequestration describes a range of technologies with the potential to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. Most of these schemes involve storing the gas underground, however, this is not without risk, and scientists are concerned that underground storage could lead to increased seismic activity (a phenomenon known as “induced seismicity”).

Now, researchers in the US and Switzerland have studied microseismicity, the small seismic events caused by carbon injection into host rock, at the Illinois Basin Decatur Project (IBDP) in the midwestern US. In 2011–2014, the IBDP injected one million tonnes of CO₂ into an underground reservoir just above a rhyolite crystalline basin. Nikita Bondarenko and Roman Makhnenko at the University of Illinois and Yury Podladchikov at the University of Lausanne have used a combination of field observations and computer simulations to show how microseismicity at the IBDP is highly dependent on the microscale structure of the host rock.

Some of them could fertilize ecosystems, while others could have pathogenic potential.

More and more glaciers are melting as the Earth heats up, posing a multitude of threats to humanity. From rising sea levels to increased coastal erosion, the record speed at which the world’s ice sheets are melting has the potential to disrupt societies globally.

Now scientists from Aberystwyth University warn that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of microbes could leak into lakes and rivers as the world’s glaciers melt due to climate change, according to an institutional press release.