Lifeboat Foundation

What if we could go back in time to four decades ago, when we first heard the term “climate change,” and take a good look at planet Earth?

The new Google Earth Timelapse feature lets us do that. We can scan the globe and look back from the present day to 1984. The feature gives us a unique opportunity to see how human action and natural forces have changed the planet since the 1980s.

Continue reading “Look at how much the planet has changed in four decades with Google Earth Timelapse” »

You may not see them coming, but the effects of climate change are starting to be felt in certain parts of the world. An example of this is the destruction of several coral reefs around the globe in recent years. As devastating as that sounds, it is only the prologue to a long list of potentially catastrophic events yet to arrive. In the long term, climate change threatens to eventually drive humans towards extinction. Therefore, while little steps, like planting more trees and turning out lightbulbs when not in use, are certainly useful, bigger steps are needed to fend off the devastating effects of climate change.

An internal combustion engine is one of the prime contributors to climate change-causing carbon emissions. Such engines produce large quantities of nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and other hydrocarbons that harm the environment and cause respiratory disorders in individuals. Due to these—and many more—reasons, electric vehicles, or EVs, need to replace the ones with traditional combustion engines.

EV owners can save about US$700 a year on fuel costs alone. Also, the maintenance expenses of EVs are lower than those of standard vehicles. So, owning EVs can help them save money and reduce their extreme reliance on fossil fuel, thereby slowing down its inevitable depletion from the earth. Additionally, EVs are incredibly efficient as they only consume approximately 25–40 kWh per 100 miles. Most importantly, EVs reduce CO₂ emissions by nearly 178 million kg. What’s more, despite the high fuel efficiency and smaller carbon footprint, EVs can outperform vehicles with traditional combustion engines easily.

During a summer storm in 2018, a momentous lightning bolt flashed above a network of radio telescopes in the Netherlands. The telescopes’ detailed recordings, which were processed only recently, reveal something no one has seen before: lightning actually starting up inside a thundercloud.

In a new paper that will soon be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers used the observations to settle a long-standing debate about what triggers lightning — the first step in the mysterious process by which bolts arise, grow and propagate to the ground. “It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s the most energetic process on the planet, we have religions centered around this thing, and we have no idea how it works,” said Brian Hare, a lightning researcher at the University of Groningen and a co-author of the new paper.

The schoolbook picture is that, inside a thundercloud, hail falls as lighter ice crystals rise. The hail rubs off the ice crystals’ negatively charged electrons, leading the top of the cloud to become positively charged while the bottom becomes negatively charged. This creates an electric field that grows until a gigantic spark jumps across the sky.

The new prototype is part of a program designed to replace the aging Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellites on orbit.

HD video isn’t the only thing Saildrone captured. Data from the heart of the storm could help researchers, too.

And it can allegedly survive a ‘once-in-10,000-years weather event’.

A safe reactor is a seaworthy reactor.

Continue reading “China Claims Its First Floating Nuclear Reactor Can Withstand Extreme Typhoons” »

Designed for research into climate change this high-precision gas sensor is good to 133 parts per trillion CO and 65 parts per trillion N₂O.

Moderator: Michael Wall.
Panelists: Kennda Lynch, Abigail Fraeman, Morgan Cable.

Part of the Earth at the Crossroads conference held on Nov. 18, 2021.

Continue reading “Habitability in the Solar System” »

For the first time ever, a manmade object has entered the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, which inexplicably is thousands of times hotter than our star’s surface (or photosphere).

Researchers led by a team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor were able to predict where the Sun’s upper atmosphere began, and the probe was able to penetrate it for roughly five hours. The Parker probe was not only able to fly through the Sun’s atmosphere but was also able to sample particles and magnetic fields there, says NASA.

“Flying so close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere — the corona — that we never could before,” Nour Raouafi, the Parker project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a statement. “We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse.”

Continue reading “NASA’S Parker Solar Probe Touches The Sun’s Searing Upper Atmosphere” »