Lifeboat Foundation

McGill University researchers have harnessed the power of sunlight to transform two of the most harmful greenhouse gases into valuable chemicals. The discovery could help combat climate change and provide a more sustainable way to produce certain industrial products.

“Imagine a world where the exhaust from your car or emissions from a factory could be transformed, with the help of sunlight, into clean fuel for vehicles, the building blocks for everyday plastics, and energy stored in batteries,” said co-first author Hui Su, a Postdoctoral Fellow in McGill’s Department of Chemistry. “That’s precisely the kind of transformation this new chemical process enables.”

The research team’s new light-driven chemical process converts methane and carbon dioxide into green methanol and carbon monoxide in one reaction. Both products are highly valued in the chemical and energy sectors, the researchers said.

Jupiter’s moon, Io, is the most volcanically active planetary body in the entire solar system as it boasts hundreds of active volcanoes. This number continues to grow as recent study at the Europlanet Science Congress 2024 meeting showed a new active volcano on the small moon taken by NASA’s JunoCam after the spacecraft conducted the first up-close images of Io in more than a quarter of a century.

Not only have Io’s volcanoes been observed to shoot volcanic material hundreds of miles into space, but its lava fields also spread almost as far across its surface due to the much smaller gravity. For example, the volcanic deposits from this new image were observed to encompass an area spanning 180 kilometers by 180 kilometers (112 miles by 112 miles).

“Our recent JunoCam images show many changes on Io, including this large, complicated volcanic feature that appears to have formed from nothing since 1997,” said Dr. Michael Ravine, who is an Advanced Projects Manager at Malin Space Science Systems, Inc, which designed, developed and operates JunoCam for the NASA Juno Project, and is lead author of the study.

Do cities get more rainfall than rural areas?

How does an urban environment influence its rainfall? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated what is known as the urban precipitation anomaly, which is when urban environments potentially cause increases in rainfall compared to rural environments due to increased surface temperatures. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand the impact that urban environments have on the climate, specifically as climate change continues to ravage the planet.

For the study, the researchers analyzed urban precipitation anomalies across 1.056 cities around the world with the goal of ascertaining the scope of these anomalies based on location and present climates and developing more accurate climatology datasets and greater resilience among cities. In the end, the researchers found that 60 percent of cities around the world have increased levels of urban precipitation anomalies, with the most extreme anomalies occurring in Africa where the surface temperatures are already high, with one factor being tall buildings result in wind being funneled into city centers.

Continue reading “Global Study Reveals Urban Areas Receive Significantly More Rainfall Than Rural Neighbors” »

NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have signed an interagency agreement to collaborate on a satellite servicing demonstration in geosynchronous Earth orbit, where hundreds of satellites provide communications, meteorological, national security, and other vital functions.

Under this agreement, NASA will provide subject matter expertise to DARPA’s Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program to help complete the technology development, integration, testing, and demonstration. The RSGS servicing spacecraft will advance in-orbit satellite inspection, repair, and upgrade capabilities.

Diamonds are forever 💎 A team of scientists from UniMelb, RMIT University and The City College of New York were able to observe lightning in a diamond ⚡️ Diamond chips can potentially be used in electronics and are more powerful than silicon. Tap to learn more ➡️

We also don’t yet fully understand how charges flow inside diamond, and how unavoidable impurities and defects affect these electrical properties.

In a recent study with colleagues from the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and the City College of New York, we sought to combine electrical measurements of a diamond optoelectronic device with 3D optical microscopy.

Continue reading “Lightning in a diamond to power the quantum revolution” »

In both the natural world and human society, there commonly exist complex systems, such as climate systems, ecological systems, and network systems. Due to the involvement of numerous interacting elements, complex systems can stay in multiple different states, and their overall behavior generally exhibits randomness and high disorder.

What does the future hold? What will become of this planet and its inhabitants in the centuries to come?
We are living in a historical period that sometimes feels like the prelude to something truly remarkable or terribly dire about to unfold.
This captivating video seeks to decipher the signs and attempt to construct plausible scenarios from the nearly nothing we hold in our hands today.
As always, it will be scientific discoveries leading the dance of change, while philosophers, writers, politicians, and all the others will have the seemingly trivial task of containing, describing, and guiding.
Before embarking on our journey through time, let me state the obvious: No one knows the future!
Numerous micro and macro factors could alter this trajectory—world wars, pandemics, unimaginable social shifts, or climate disasters.
Nevertheless, we’re setting off. And we’re doing so by discussing the remaining decades of the century we’re experiencing right now.

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DISCUSSIONS \& SOCIAL MEDIA

Continue reading “From Today To The Year 3000: Let’s Dive Into The Future!” »

What influence do global environmental stressors have on the ability of an ecosystem to withstand these stresses and rebuild itself? This is what a recent study published in Nature Geoscience hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated a correlation between environmental stressors and ecosystem resilience. This study comes as climate change continues to ravage the planet with more severe and frequent weather patterns, including increased temperatures and storms. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand the short and long impacts of climate change on the environment and the steps that can be taken mitigate them.

“Terrestrial ecosystems are subject to a myriad of climate change and environmental degradation factors, including global warming, drought processes, atmospheric pollution, fires or overgrazing among many others. We know that these global change factors impact the ability of our ecosystems to provide services such as carbon sequestration or soil fertility that are key in the fight against climate change and in food production.” said Manuel Delgado Baquerizo, who leads the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Lab (BioFunLab) leader and is a co-author on the study.

For the study, the researchers conducted a global and elaborate study combining approximately 14,000 observations regarding ecosystems functions and biodiversity from a 15-year study with the goal of ascertaining an ecosystem’s ability to resist global environmental stressors, including those resulting from climate change. In the end, the team discovered a negative correlation between environmental stressors and an ecosystem’s resilience, meaning as these stressors increase the resilience of an ecosystem decreases. Additionally, they found the opposite regarding biodiversity, meaning its resilience increases to increasing global environmental stressors.

An exploration of new work done at Arecibo regarding the infamous Wow! Signal of 1977 that seems to account for all aspects of the observed signal but turned out to be a very strange natural event that isn’t likely to repeat often that is analogous to a lightning flash in a hydrogen cloud in interstellar space.

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Continue reading “The Wow Signal Potentially Explained … and it’s Weird” »