Lifeboat Foundation

A city in Southern California has become the first in the nation to replace its police patrol cars with electric vehicles, officials announced Monday, unveiling a fleet of 20 new Teslas.

South Pasadena on the edge of Los Angeles will replace its gas-guzzling police cruisers with the Teslas to help protect public health and fight climate change through reducing emissions. The Teslas will use new electric vehicle chargers installed at City Hall, officials said.

An astronaut’s photo from the International Space Station showcases Siberia and Lake Baikal at night, with snow and ice brightening the landscape.

Lake Baikal is the largest and deepest freshwater lake, known for its significant age and biodiversity. The image also highlights bright city lights, oil fields, and parts of the Trans-Siberian Railway. UNESCO has designated Lake Baikal a World Heritage site due to its unique fauna.

Siberia and lake baikal at night.

An electric air taxi startup is developing an aircraft powered by tomorrow’s fuel: hydrogen. The concept is a hydrogen-powered version of its vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. This fueling power could enable longer routes between cities.

The electric air taxi startup Joby is known for its electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVOTL) or an air taxi. The company is testing sustainable fuel instead of a battery to power this vehicle. Hydrogen fuel cells are already used in cars, trucks, and industrial equipment. However, using the fuel in aircraft is a game changer. For example, the aviation industry faces much pressure due to its greenhouse gas emissions. Google even added an emissions tracker when looking for a flight.

The company announced that it successfully flew a 523-mile demonstration flight using its one-of-a-kind hydrogen air taxi. The aircraft was tested last month in California and involved a converted prototype of one of its eVOTL aircraft already in development. It’s equipped with a hydrogen fuel cell and hydrogen-electric propulsion. And get this: the only emission is a trail of water vapor.

Brandon Wang is vice president of Synopsys.

The rapid development of AI has led to significant growth across the computing industry. But it is also causing a huge increase in energy consumption, which is leading us into an energy crisis. Current AI models, especially large language models (LLMs), need huge amounts of power to train and run. AI queries require much more energy than traditional searches; for example, asking ChatGPT a question consumes up to 25 times as much energy as a Google search. At current rates of growth, AI is expected to account for up to 3.5% of global electricity demand by 2030, twice as much as the country of France.

We need to address this issue urgently before it becomes unsustainable. If we don’t, the impact could threaten sustainable growth and the widespread adoption of AI technologies themselves. Fortunately, there are a number of pathways toward more energy-efficient AI systems and computing architectures.

Adopting the right mix of sustainable construction practices could allow Canada to meet its housing goals—as many as 5.8 million new homes by 2030—without blowing past its climate commitments.

Researchers in the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Sustainable Built Environment (CSBE) have developed a computer simulation that forecasts the emissions associated with new housing and infrastructure construction. The paper is published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

The work builds on previous CSBE research showing that in order for Canada to meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets, homes built in 2030 will need to produce 83% fewer greenhouse gases during construction than those built in 2018.

The expansion of solar photovoltaic systems in Germany continues to grow as more companies and private households opt for solar energy.

Putting 50 billion transistors into a microchip the size of a fingernail is a feat that requires manufacturing methods of nanometer level precision—layering of thin films, then etching, depositing, or using photolithography to create the patterns of semiconductor, insulator, metal, and other materials that make up the tiny working devices within the chip.

The process relies heavily on solvents that carry and deposit materials in each layer—solvents that can be difficult to handle and toxic to the environment.

Now researchers led by Fiorenzo Omenetto, Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering at Tufts, have developed a nanomanufacturing approach that uses water as the primary solvent, making it more environmentally compatible and opening the door to the development of devices that combine inorganic and biological materials.

Local decentralized energy systems, known as microgrids, can make urban infrastructures more resilient and reduce risks for the population, for example, in large-scale power outages due to natural hazards or cyberattacks.

In Nature Sustainability researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) present design criteria for microgrids that allow for fair treatment of different social groups alongside technical factors. The study shows how cities can shape the transformation towards a secure and more sustainable and equitable energy supply.

Climate change increases the probability of extreme events, as we have seen during the massive flooding of large parts of southern Germany in June. The question of how cities and municipalities can make power supply more resilient and more secure in the face of such crises is bringing so-called microgrids into focus.

The desert moss Syntrichia caninervis is a promising candidate for Mars colonization thanks to its extreme ability to tolerate harsh conditions lethal to most life forms. The moss is well known for its ability to tolerate drought conditions, but researchers report June 30 in the journal The Innovation that it can also survive freezing temperatures as low as −196°C, high levels of gamma radiation, and simulated Martian conditions involving these three stressors combined. In all cases, prior dehydration seemed to help the plants cope.

“Our study shows that the environmental resilience of S. caninervis is superior to that of some of highly stress-tolerant microorganisms and tardigrades,” write the researchers, who include ecologists Daoyuan Zhang and Yuanming Zhang and botanist Tingyun Kuang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “S. caninervis is a promising candidate pioneer plant for colonizing extraterrestrial environments, laying the foundation for building biologically sustainable human habitats beyond Earth.”

A small number of previous studies have tested the ability of microorganisms, algae, lichens, and plant spores to withstand the extreme environments of outer space or Mars, but this is the first study to test whole plants.