Lifeboat Foundation

A gold miner in Canada discovered a near complete mummified baby woolly mammoth Tuesday, according to the Yukon government and Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin, a local traditional territory. The female baby was named Nun cho ga, which means “big baby animal” in the Hän language.

The miner found the baby, which retained its skin and hair, while excavating through the permafrost at Eureka Creek in the Klondike gold fields within Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Traditional Territory, the government’s press release said. She’s estimated to have frozen during the Ice Age, over 30,000 years ago. While alive, she likely roamed the Yukon with wild horses, cave lions and giant steppe bison.

It added that the discovery was “significant” and rare, even for an area like Yukon, which has “a world-renowned fossil record of ice age animals.”

The researchers also optimized their electrolyzer to produce the highest levels of acetate ever produced in an electrolyzer to date. What’s more, they found that crop plants, including cowpea, tomato, rice, green pea, and tobacco, all have the potential to be grown in the dark using the carbon from acetate. There’s even a possibility that acetate could improve crop yields, though more research is required.

The researchers believe that by reducing the reliance on direct sunlight, artificial photosynthesis could provide an important alternative for food growth in the coming years, as the world adapts to the worst effects of climate change — including droughts, floods, and reduced land availability. “Using artificial photosynthesis approaches to produce food could be a paradigm shift for how we feed people. By increasing the efficiency of food production, less land is needed, lessening the impact agriculture has on the environment. And for agriculture in non-traditional environments, like outer space, the increased energy efficiency could help feed more crew members with less inputs,” Jinkerson explained.

From there, they ran flight tests using a specially designed motion-tracking system. Each electroluminescent actuator served as an active marker that could be tracked using iPhone cameras. The cameras detect each light color, and a computer program they developed tracks the position and attitude of the robots to within 2 millimeters of state-of-the-art infrared motion capture systems.

“We are very proud of how good the tracking result is, compared to the state-of-the-art. We were using cheap hardware, compared to the tens of thousands of dollars these large motion-tracking systems cost, and the tracking results were very close,” Kevin Chen says.

In the future, they plan to enhance that motion tracking system so it can track robots in real-time. The team is working to incorporate control signals so the robots could turn their light on and off during flight and communicate more like real fireflies. They are also studying how electroluminescence could even improve some properties of these soft artificial muscles, Kevin Chen says.

Circa 2019

Researchers at Heriot-Watt University use “balls of lightning” to connect glass to metal.

Why we need to adopt an abundance mindset.

Peter Diamandis shared an email blast about dire headlines that keep us on edge: the war in Ukraine, food and gasoline prices, climate change, and the neverending pandemic. Getting away from bad news is difficult, it appears, because of the way we are wired. Mass media feeds the bad far more than the good.

In his missive, Peter talks about Matt Ridley, a zoologist, who wrote and published The Rational Optimist in 2010. The book takes a profoundly optimistic view of human progress, a counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our day. Ridley coined the phrase “moaning pessimism” to describe the current state.

Continue reading “From Pessimism to Optimism Despite the Headlines” »

A lightning-caused wildfire that led to an evacuation of the Kitt Peak National Observatory southwest of Tucson is 40% contained, authorities said.

More than 300 firefighters were working the wildfire Saturday. If all goes as planned, authorities said the blaze could be fully contained by next Sunday.

The wind-whipped fire started June 11 on a remote ridge on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, about 8 miles (13 kilometers) southeast of Kitt Peak.

Around 300 secret polar bears have been secluded from other bear populations in Greenland for about 200 years, scientists said Thursday when they published a new study in the journal Science.

The bears live in sea-ice conditions that reserachers say mimic what other parts of the Arctic will look like as climate change progresses. Their territory lacks ice more than 100 days over the previous limit known to sustain polar bears because they have adapted to use freshwater glacial ice instead. The population is now the world’s 20th polar bear subpopulation.

“Polar bears are one of the most mentioned—and iconic—potential victims of climate change,” co-authors wrote in the study. “Most polar bears rely on sea ice to hunt. Discovery of this population suggests both that such environments might serve as refugia for polar bears and that conservation of this new population is essential.”

Researchers at Imperial College London have developed a new dual drone that can both fly through air and land on water to collect samples and monitor water quality. The researchers developed a drone to make monitoring drones faster and more versatile in aquatic environments.

The ‘dual robot’ drone, tested at Empa and the aquatic research institute Eawag in Switzerland, has successfully measured water in lakes for signs of microorganisms and algal blooms, which can pose hazards to human health, and could in the future be used to monitor climate clues like temperature changes in Arctic seas.

Continue reading “MEDUSA‘ dual robot’ drone flies and dives to collect aquatic data” »

Greenhouse gas emissions need to be significantly reduced to avoid potentially catastrophic effects of climate change, with access to clean and affordable energy needed to eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels. Many researchers and companies are working to address this issue and replace fossil fuels through the use of hydrogen, a storable fuel.

When used in a fuel cell, hydrogen does not emit any greenhouse gasses at the point of use and can help decarbonize sectors such as shipping and transportation, where it can be used as a fuel, as well as in manufacturing industries. However, most hydrogen produced today is almost entirely supplied from natural gas and coal, producing greenhouse gases. And therefore, green hydrogen production is urgently needed.

New research led by the University of Strathclyde suggests that solar energy can be accessed and converted into hydrogen – a clean and renewable fuel.