Lifeboat Foundation

There is an urgent need to address climate change, making the development of sustainable energy alternatives more important than ever. While proton-exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) have shown great promise for energy production, particularly in the transportation industry, there is a long-standing problem with their durability and cost.

A Western research team has addressed the issue with a new cobalt-modified nanomaterial making PEMFCs more robust, readily sourced and environmentally sustainable demonstrating just a two percent loss in efficiency rate following 20,000 cycles in a durability test.

The new nanomaterial is used to enhance oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), the process that forms water in the fuel cell allowing a higher current for more efficient power generation. The cobalt-modified nanomaterial also reduces the reliance on platinum to construct these fuel cells. A costly precious metal, and mined primarily in South Africa, only a few hundred tons of platinum are produced annually.

That’s one idea for how the brain organizes itself to support our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. But if the brain’s information processing dynamics are like waves, what happens when there’s turbulence?

In fact, the brain does experience the equivalent of neural “hurricanes.” They bump into one another, and when they do, the resulting computations correlate with cognition.

These findings come from a unique study in Nature Human Behavior that bridges neuroscience and fluid dynamics to unpack the inner workings of the human mind.

An international team of scientists, including from the University of Cambridge, have launched a new research collaboration that will leverage the same technology behind ChatGPT to build an AI-powered tool for scientific discovery.

While ChatGPT deals in words and sentences, the team’s AI will learn from numerical data and physics simulations from across scientific fields to aid scientists in modeling everything from supergiant stars to the Earth’s climate.

The team launched the initiative, called Polymathic AI earlier this week, alongside the publication of a series of related papers on the arXiv open access repository.

For the first time, scientists have managed to deflect lightning, to the relief of anyone afraid of thunder and lightning storms but probably the chagrin of Zeus. They managed to show that lasers can act as virtual lightning rods, redirecting the direction in which bolts jump.

The Franklin lightning rod was a major scientific advance of its day, preventing millions of fires and electrocutions and demonstrating humanity’s capacity to control forces we had long feared as belonging to the gods. Nevertheless, it’s been 270 years, and it remains the basis of our lightning protection: maybe it’s time for an upgrade.

That is what Dr Aurélien Houard of ENSTA Paris and co-authors propose in a paper pubpished in Nature Photonics, demonstrating that laser pulses can change the direction of a lightning strike.

One of the largest ozone holes on record has been observed over Antarctica this year, according to measurements from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite.

A lower concentration of O₃ molecules

The ozone hole is a section of the stratosphere of Earth where there is a markedly lower concentration of ozone (O₃) molecules. The ozone layer is severely diminishing in some parts of the stratosphere, although it is not technically a hole. By absorbing the bulk of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation, the ozone layer, a region of the Earth’s atmosphere with a relatively high concentration of ozone molecules, plays a crucial role in safeguarding life on the planet.

Continue reading “ESA satellite reveals one of the biggest ozone holes ever” »

Although climate change and global warming affect countries all over the world, Iraq has been hit especially hard. Temperatures are rising twice as fast and annual rainfall is decreasing, leaving the country struggling with many severe droughts. However, the lower water levels of the Euphrates River during these droughts allowed the secrets of a forgotten civilization to emerge. Join us as we embark on an extraordinary journey to discover the ancient ruins found under the Euphrates River!

In 2018, a terrible drought in Iraq left the water levels of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers dangerously low. In an effort to help the country, the Mosul Dam Reservoir in the Kurdistan region was drained, providing much-needed water to dying crops. But, as the reservoir’s water receded, the ruins of an ancient city suddenly emerged!

Racing against time, archaeologists diligently worked to explore and map out the newly-exposed ancient ruins before the water covered them once again. They discovered the ruins of a large palace with 22-foot tall walls, some of which were 6 feet thick! Many of the walls were also adorned with well-preserved wall paintings, shining bright with their blue and red hues. The palace, built in two distinct phases, had been used over a long period of time and may hold many of the secrets of the mighty Mitanni Empire. However, before they could evaluate it further, the palace and the rest of the city resubmerged beneath the Euphrates River, leaving their mysteries unresolved for the next four years.

Scientists use bacteria to make cheese from yellow peas, a plant-based and sustainable alternative to dairy cheese.

Department of food science, university of copenhagen.

However, with growing concerns about the environmental impact of dairy production and the effects of climate change, there is a growing need to shift towards more plant-based alternatives in our food system. Scientists are now exploring how to harness the potential of protein-rich plants like peas and beans to create a new generation of non-dairy cheeses that rival traditional dairy cheeses’ sensory properties.

Continue reading “Bacteria help create cheese-like products from yellow peas” »

The nation is looking into emissions-free travel.

According to a report by Reuters.

“It will be on trial for next week, hopefully for the next few months. We will have the first hydrogen train in the Middle East,” the government official said during the UN MENA Climate Week in Riyadh.

To make its weather predictions, it analyzes 60 million daily observations from satellite, aircraft, and ground-based reports, using what we know about atmospheric physics to determine what the weather is likely to be like across the globe over the next 15 days.

This can literally save lives — if people know in advance that hurricanes or winter storms are heading their way, they can take action to prepare — but because the model is so complex, it must be run on a supercomputer over the course of several hours, which also makes it expensive.

The AIs: AI-based weather forecasting models are starting to catch up with traditional ones, like the European Model.