Lifeboat Foundation

Building a corn cob—cell by cell, gene by gene.

Corn hasn’t always been the sweet, juicy delight that we know today. And, without adapting to a rapidly changing climate, it is at risk of losing its place as a food staple. Putting together a plant is a genetic puzzle, with hundreds of genes working together as it grows. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor David Jackson worked with Associate Professor Jesse Gillis to study genes involved in corn development. Their teams analyzed thousands of individual cells that make up the developing corn ear. They created the first anatomical map that shows where and when important genes turn on and off during key steps in development. This map is an important tool for growing better crops.

This coating might prove useful for several sorts of applications.

Managing temperatures in particularly hot and sunny climates can be very difficult even today. You can use air conditioning to displace the heat from inside structures and vehicles, but it sucks up so much power and can generate pollution that ultimately makes temperature problems even worse.

Things we already know: The world is growing uncomfortably warm due to humanity’s insistence on burning fossil fuels. Elon Musk is currently the wealthiest human on the planet. Yet for being among the wealthiest people on the planet, Musk’s philanthropic track record over the years has been paltry compared to the likes of Jeff Bezos. So, yeah, it did come as a bit of a surprise on Thursday when the Tesla CEO took to Twitter to announce that he plans to donate $100 million as a prize towards a winning carbon capture system.

Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 212021

Details on Musk’s upcoming carbon capture competition have not been released but are expected to arrive “next week.” This is not the first time that a company has sought the public’s help with carbon capture technology, which seeks to pull this element from the atmosphere and squirrel it away to help slow the rate of human-induced climate change. In 2018, X-Prize held a similar competition and awarded five finalist teams a share of its $20 million grand prize. But with a $100 million purse on the line, Musk’s competition will not only offer five times the funding as X-Prize, it’ll also constitute his single-largest philanthropic investment to date (10 times the amount of his second-largest donations so far). Of course, this is far from the first effort to collect and convert atmospheric CO₂ into consumer products.

Blue jets have been observed from the ground and aircraft for years, but it’s hard to tell how they form without getting high above the clouds. Now, instruments on the International Space Station have spotted a blue jet emerge from an extremely brief, bright burst of electricity near the top of a thundercloud, researchers report online January 20 in Nature.

Understanding blue jets and other upper-atmosphere phenomena related to thunderstorms, such as sprites (SN: 6/14/02) and elves (SN: 12/23/95), is important because these events can affect how radio waves travel through the air — potentially impacting communication technologies, says Penn State space physicist Victor Pasko, who was not involved in the work.

Cameras and light-sensing instruments called photometers on the space station observed the blue jet in a storm over the Pacific Ocean, near the island of Nauru, in February 2019. “The whole thing starts with what I think of as a blue bang,” says Torsten Neubert, an atmospheric physicist at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. That “blue bang” was a 10-microsecond flash of bright blue light near the top of the cloud, about 16 kilometers high. From that flashpoint, a blue jet shot up into the stratosphere, climbing as high as about 52 kilometers over several hundred milliseconds.

From planet of love to scorching Hell planet—the image of Venus has changed considerably since ancient times, because it is no longer just the third brightest natural object in Earth’s skies. The ancients equated the mysterious third light with the goddess of love; in Greece that was Aphrodite, whom the Romans conflated with the goddess Venus. That’s where our closest planetary neighbor got its name and why Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus worked as a best-selling title, as recently as 1992, and still sells. But since the mid-20th century, we’ve known in detail why a paradise Venus is not. Average temperature on the surface is a scorching 462° Celsius (864° Fahrenheit) while atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of Earth at sea level, or equivalent to being at 900 meters depth in Earth’s oceans.

A handful of Russian landing probes have survived for several minutes on the planet’s surface before being cooked and crushed, but the conditions are unquestionably inhospitable for life forms. Consequently, you do not hear about astrobiologists searching for native microorganisms on the Venusian surface the way you hear about the search for microorganisms on Mars. Nevertheless, since the late 20th century, planetary scientists have speculated that Venus could have boasted a much more hospitable environment in the distant past, perhaps 2–3 billion years ago. That’s around the time that Earth was accumulating oxygen in its oceans and atmosphere. At that point in history, Venus and Earth may have had similar climates.

What’s been in the news lately is a study involving computer climate simulations in which data from NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus were found to support the idea of a once habitable Venus. The study involved researchers from NASA, Uppsala University in Sweden, Columbia University, and the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, AZ.

Although no list like this can be definitive, we polled dozens of researchers over the past year to develop a diverse line-up of ten software tools that have had a big impact on the world of science. You can weigh in on our choices at the end of the story.

From Fortran to arXiv.org, these advances in programming and platforms sent biology, climate science and physics into warp speed.

All the clean technologies that we need to combat climate change – whether that’s wind turbines, solar panels or batteries, they’re all really, really mineral intensive.

Cornwall, 1864. A hot spring is discovered nearly 450m (1485ft) below ground in the Wheal Clifford, a copper mine just outside the mining town of Redruth. Glass bottles are immersed to their necks in its bubbling waters, carefully sealed and sent off for testing. The result is the discovery of so great a quantity of lithium – eight or 10 times as much per gallon as had been found in any hot spring previously analysed – that scientists suspect “it may prove of great commercial value”.

But 19th-Century England had little need for the element, and this 50C (122F) lithium-rich water continued steaming away in the dark for more than 150 years.

Continue reading “The new ‘gold rush’ for green lithium” »

Circa 2016

Many people think that it is the rubber tires that protect them when their car is struck by lightning. In reality, their car is becoming a Faraday cage. What is that and how does it work?

Michael Faraday was a British scientist born in 1791. Although not formally educated, he had a strong interest in electromagnetism. He also credited with discovering Benzene and popularizing terms such as anode, cathode and electrode. As an apprentice for a bookbinder, he read many books which encouraged his interest in science. He soon became a well known experimental scientist leading to his name becoming a unit of electrical charge. He is also known for inventing the Faraday rotator and Faraday cage.

Atmospheric Water Extraction (AWE) performers aim to meet clean water needs of deployed troops, even in austere environments.

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Continue reading “DARPA Selects Teams to Capture Potable Water from Air” »