Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: environmental – Page 22

Written By: — Singularity Hub

tobacco-plant

While computers scientists find new ways to supercharge computers, a team of plant scientists have demonstrated that they can supercharge a plant.

Hoping to speed up plant photosynthesis, researchers from the US and UK have successfully upgraded a carbon-fixing enzyme vital to photosynthesis in a tobacco plant with two enzymes from cyanobacteria, which function at a faster rate. If photosynthesis can be performed more efficiently, plants would grow larger and crops could have higher yields, possibly as high as 60% according to computer models.

“This is the first time that a plant has been created through genetic engineering to fix all of its carbon by a cyanobacterial enzyme,” said Cornell Professor Maureen Hanson, a co-author of the study, in the release. She added, “It is an important first step in creating plants with more efficient photosynthesis.”

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By Naomi Creason, The Sentinel
Joseph T. Simpson Public Library's new seed library

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture sees its new protocol for seed libraries as an opportunity to safely regulate them while saving an organization or person from liability.

Proponents of seed libraries, however, see the department’s efforts as a way to effectively shut down movement to grow and maintain local seed varieties.

The issue at hand stems back to April 26, when the Joseph T. Simpson Public Library opened a seed library, in which it would allow residents to “borrow” seeds and then offer seeds back to the library to start the process over again. It’s the second part of that process that caught the attention of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, which then contacted the Cumberland County Library System to rectify what it saw as a violation of the Pennsylvania Seed Act of 2004.

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Catherine Griffin — Science World Report
Honeybee
Could spiders save the bees? They just might. Scientists have created a novel bio-pesticide with the help of spider venom and a plant protein. The new pesticide is actually safe for honeybees, despite being highly toxic to a number of key insect pests.

Honeybees perform sophisticated behaviors while foraging. These behaviors, in part, are why they’re so successful. With their ability to pollinate key crop species, these insects are crucial for our food industry. And yet bee populations have been declining due to climate change and an increased use of pesticides, which can interrupt their key behaviors.

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An innovative Australian digital radar built with a series of modified rugby goalposts is attracting worldwide attention the ABC reports.

A consortium led by La Trobe University in Melbourne developed the Tiger-3 digital radar, which is 10 times more sensitive than any other research radar. Lead researcher Professor John Devlin said the radar would be used to study space weather, which has an impact on navigation and surveillance systems for shipping and aircraft, as well as for GPS systems. “It measures the ionospheric reflections from a distance out to about 5,000 kilometres,” he said.

Researchers measure the data to study space weather, like recent solar flares, which can potentially knock out power, satellites, navigation and surveillance systems for shipping, aircraft and GPS.

The recent solar flares just grazed the Earth, but Dr Custovic said flares had the potential to knock out transformers, potentially shutting off power for weeks.

Radars were first developed during World War II, but engineer Dr Eddie Custovic said technology had come a long way since then. “The innovation is largely in new software technology that is used to analyse data and signal processing,” he said. La Trobe University Engineering and Space Physics staff have been working on digital radars since the 1990s, and the Tiger-3 took a team three years to build.

Digital radars still work on waves, using frequencies of 8–20 MHz in the High Frequency band, but the electronics and signal processing are now entirely digital, meaning the radar is less susceptible to instrumentation noise. Most radars are still analogue or hybrid, and the digital one offers greater sensitivity, longer range and a much wider field of view, which means researchers are able to detect objects and structures that were not previously visible.

Question: A Counterpoint to the Technological Singularity?

0 wildest

Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, indicated about The Singularity is Near Book (ISBN: 978–0143037880),

“ … A very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad …”

AND FOR INSTANCE:

“… Technology is the savior for everything. That’s the point of this course. Technology is accelerating, everything is going to be good, technology is your friend … I think that’s a load of crap …” By Dr. Jonathan White

Back to the White Swan hardcore:

That discourse can be entertained at a forthcoming Renaissance, not now. Going against this idea will be outrageously counterproductive to ascertain the non-annihilation of Earth’s locals.

People who destroy, eternally beforehand, outrageous Black Swans, engaging into super-natural and preter-natural preparations for known and unknown Outliers, thus observing — in all practicality — the successful and prevailing White Swan and Transformative and Integrative Risk Management interdisciplinary problem-solving methodology, include:

(1.-) Sir Martin Rees PhD (cosmologist and astrophysicist), Astronomer Royal, Cambridge University Professor and former Royal Society President.

(2.-) Dr. Stephen William Hawking CH CBE FRS FRSA is an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge. Formerly: Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

(3.-) Prof. Nick Bostrom Ph.D. is a Swedish philosopher at St. Cross College, University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, the reversal test, and consequentialism. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (2000). He is the founding director of both The Future of Humanity Institute and the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology as part of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University.

(4.-) The US National Intelligence Council (NIC) [.…] The National Intelligence Council supports the Director of National Intelligence in his role as head of the Intelligence Community (IC) and is the IC’s center for long-term strategic analysis [.…] Since its establishment in 1979, the NIC has served as a bridge between the intelligence and policy communities, a source of deep substantive expertise on intelligence issues, and a facilitator of Intelligence Community collaboration and outreach [.…] The NIC’s National Intelligence Officers — drawn from government, academia, and the private sector—are the Intelligence Community’s senior experts on a range of regional and functional issues.

(5.-) U.S. Homeland Security’s FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency).

(6.-) The CIA or any other U.S. Government agencies.

(7.-) Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International).

(8.-) GBN (Global Business Network).

(9.-) Royal Dutch Shell.

(10.-) British Doomsday Preppers.

(11.-) Canadian Doomsday Preppers.

(12.-) Australian Doomsday Preppers

(13.-) American Doomsday Preppers.

(14.-) Disruptional Singularity Book (ASIN: B00KQOEYLG).

(15.-) Scientific Prophets of Doom at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bUe2-7jjtY

White Swans are always getting prepared for Unknown and Known Outliers, and MOST FLUIDLY changing the theater of operation by permanently updating and upgrading the designated preparations.

Authored By Copyright Mr. Andres Agostini
White Swan Book Author
www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini
www.amazon.com/author/Agostini

By Lily Kuo — Quartz

Over the past six years, Beijing has seen at least 1,812 days of “unhealthy” air quality, and that trend isn’t going to get better any time soon. Pan Tao, head of the Beijing Municipal Research Institute of Environmental Protection, estimates that air pollution in the capital won’t be reach safe levels until at least 2030.

China’s president Xi Jinping has called air pollution the “most prominent challenge” Beijing faces. Foreign firms are paying their workers “hardship” salaries to be posted in the city. In February a report from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences said that pollution in the capital is “near a level that is no longer livable for human beings.”

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Maureen Wise — Nation of Change
Article image

You’ve probably heard that bees—their honey, their awesome pollinating powers and their stingers—are on the decline. It’s a global problem that affects more than just the little yellow and black buzzers; it can and will interrupt the way we produce food if it continues. Bees pollinate most of the crops farmers grow worldwide, so without them, we don’t have food. Most scientists agree that pesticides, drought, habitat loss, pollution and other major environmental concerns are all contributing to colony collapse disorder. It’s a big deal and there are a lot of people working to keep bees buzzing.

A new project has set out to help understand the issue in individual colonies and bring the problem to the people called Open Source Beehives. This multi-continent partnership between Open Tech Collaborative and Fab Lab Barcelona proposes public participation through easily made backyard hives in conjunction with software that will track hive health.

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Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan — Gizmodo

When most of us imagine what the mantle of the Earth is like, we see burning hot rock and magma (and maybe satan hanging out for good measure or something). But scientists have discovered evidence that all that rock may be hiding huge amounts of water—three times the volume of all our oceans combined.

The scientists behind the study, which was published online today in the journal Science, think they’ve figured out the answer to a question that has long plagued Earth science: Just how much water is there on Earth in total? “I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet,” said study co-author and Northwestern geophysicist Steve Jacobsen to PhysOrg. “Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades.”

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Although I have already mentioned a recent technical note on the application of Astronomical Observation to LHC/Collider Safety in comments to other posts here and there, I have not posted specifically about it until now. So finally, a short mention:

The technical note follows on from a modest paper I wrote in 2012 (Discussions on the Hypothesis that Cosmic Ray Exposure on Sirius B Negates Terrestrial MBH Concerns from Colliders), which concerned micro-black hole (MBH) production and the white dwarf safety assurance. There I demonstrated that not only are most white dwarf stars not suitable as a safety assurance, but that those hand-picked for the 2008 safety report had magnetic field strength measured to just 99% confidence within the range for safety assurance. That is not to say that the LHC safety argument was only 99% reliable — just that one of the cornerstone assurances was. The affirmation of these measurements was needed for a safety assurance to LHC p-p collisions based on astronomical observations – as a safety assurance that is not based on Hawking Radiation theory — but based on verifiable measurement. The technical note captures the official LSAG (CERN) response on the matter after internal review at CERN in late 2012, which had remained archived from email discussions until recently, when those conclusions were formalised into this technical note:

Link to the technical note: http://environmental-safety.webs.com/TechnicalNote-EnvSA01.pdf

mostly harmless

That conclusion was fortunately, as expected, one of safety: significant progress had been made on the accuracy of B field measurement technology since the original 2008 safety report — and after a survey of latest literature, one finds that there are now extensive examples of WD with fields measured with uncertainty ranges within the 1–100 kG range required for assurance. However — despite an eventual conclusion of safety on this one matter (MBH concerns from p-p collisions) I would like to reiterate a point that I made back in 2008, that there is an obligation on industry to keep safety debate open and honest. We are not likely to see credible argument on any of the other concerns to LHC operations (strangelet production, magnetic monopoles, de sitter space transitions and vacuum bubbles, and so on), but these discussions do illustrate that re-visitations can be necessary.

Whilst onwards we strive to find new understandings to the universe, and to engineer new ways of being, we need to stand back and take a look at where we are, lest we get lost.

Rebecca Morelle — BBC News
Beijing haze
Researchers have found that pollutants are strengthening storms above the Pacific Ocean, which feeds into weather systems in other parts of the world.

The effect was most pronounced during the winter.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Lead author Yuan Wang, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, said: “The effects are quite dramatic. The pollution results in thicker and taller clouds and heavier precipitation.”

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