Lifeboat Foundation

China has always been a frontrunner, especially in technological advancements. The country has engaged itself in increasingly audacious and ambitious projects. It is, therefore, no astonishment in calling China, ‘the rising power’.China has established Weather Modification Offices, that enables in manipulating weather using technology. The offices are a network of dedicated units that help in changing the weather throughout China. 55 billion tons of rain is created by China every year, making the country the largest cloud seeder on earth.

China has found the urge to manipulate weather mainly because of the extreme climate it experiences. The region has heavy downpour in rainy season while it suffers from drought in summers. Dust and sand storms are common in springtime. Moreover, given the fact that China has the largest population, it cannot afford to rely on climate. Most importantly, for agriculture. China found the only hope in technology in the manipulating weather for accruing benefits.

Weather modification offices require huge financial resources, human capital and weaponry. It is no wonder that China has spent millions of money on weather modification process. It has spent $150 million on single regional artificial rain program. China has escaped $10.4 billion dollars economic losses by employing weather modification system from 2002 to 2012. Over 35000 people have been employed to carry out this project. About 12000 rocket launchers are being used to fire pellets containing silver iodide into the clouds.

Continue reading “China using Technology over Nature: Weather Modification Office” »

A future of soft robots that wash your dishes or smart T-shirts that power your cell phone may depend on the development of stretchy power sources. But traditional batteries are thick and rigid—not ideal properties for materials that would be used in tiny malleable devices. In a step toward wearable electronics, a team of researchers has produced a stretchy micro-supercapacitor using ribbons of graphene.

The researchers will present their work today at the 252nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

“Most power sources, such as phone batteries, are not stretchable. They are very rigid,” says Xiaodong Chen, Ph.D. “My team has made stretchable electrodes, and we have integrated them into a supercapacitor, which is an energy storage device that powers electronic gadgets.”

Continue reading “Stretchy supercapacitors power wearable electronics” »

Additional insights on methods in improving efficiencies during the conversion of light energy into chemical energy.

The chromatophore of purple bacteria is an intracellular spherical vesicle that exists in numerous copies in the cell and that efficiently converts sunlight into ATP synthesis, operating typically under low light conditions. Building on an atomic-level structural model of a low-light-adapted chromatophore vesicle from Rhodobacter sphaeroides, we investigate the cooperation between more than a hundred protein complexes in the vesicle. The steady-state ATP production rate as a function of incident light intensity is determined after identifying quinol turnover at the cytochrome bc1 complex (cytb⁢c1) as rate limiting and assuming that the quinone/quinol pool of about 900 molecules acts in a quasi-stationary state.

Execellent.

Excellent.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=44331.php

Subscribe! Receive a convenient email notification whenever a new Nanowerk Nanotechnology Spotlight posts.

Continue reading “Defect-engineered graphene improves supercapacitors” »

Every year, humans advance climate change and global warming — and quite likely our own eventual extinction — by injecting about 30 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

A team of scientists from the University of Toronto (U of T) believes they’ve found a way to convert all these emissions into energy-rich fuel in a carbon-neutral cycle that uses a very abundant natural resource: silicon. Silicon, readily available in sand, is the seventh most-abundant element in the universe and the second most-abundant element in the earth’s crust.

The idea of converting carbon dioxide emissions to energy isn’t new: there’s been a global race to discover a material that can efficiently convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water or hydrogen to fuel for decades. However, the chemical stability of carbon dioxide has made it difficult to find a practical solution.

Continue reading “Scientists solve puzzle of converting gaseous carbon dioxide to fuel” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Wn66O-KLow

A rubbery little “octobot” is the first robot made completely from soft parts, according to a new study. The tiny, squishy guy also doesn’t need batteries or wires of any kind, and runs on a liquid fuel.

The octopus-like robot is made of silicone rubber, and measures about 2.5 inches (6.5 centimeters) wide and long. The researchers say soft robots can adapt more easily to some environments than rigid machines, and this research could lead to autonomous robots that can sense their surroundings and interact with people.

Continue reading “Soft, Rubbery ‘Octobot’ Can Move Without Batteries” »

I never get tired of reading about the glass energy solutions.

Harnessing Big Data Power Promises Greater Rewards for Environment & Businesses

‘Ideal’ energy storage material for electric vehicles developed.

Continue reading “A breakthrough in the use of glass for power storage could unleash a torrent of innovation in the transportation and energy sectors” »

A novel device architecture is used to simultaneously achieve extremely high internal quantum efficiencies, low drive voltages, and long lifetimes, at practical luminance levels.

An LED with an emissive organic thin film sandwiched between the anode and cathode is known as an organic-LED (OLED). The emission mechanism of an OLED is superficially similar to that of a standard LED, i.e., holes and electrons are injected from the anode and cathode, respectively, and these carriers recombine to form excited states (excitons) that lead to light emission.¹ In recent years, smartphones and TVs with OLED displays have rapidly become widespread because OLEDs provide high contrast, a wide color gamut, light weight, thinness, and flexibility for the displays. OLEDs also have great potential for the creation of new lighting applications.² The high power consumption and short lifetime of OLEDs, however, remain key issues.

Continue reading “Organic LEDs with low power consumption and long lifetimes” »

My sociology of knowledge students read Yuval Harari’s bestselling first book, Sapiens, to think about the right frame of reference for understanding the overall trajectory of the human condition. Homo Deus follows the example of Sapiens, using contemporary events to launch into what nowadays is called ‘big history’ but has been also called ‘deep history’ and ‘long history’. Whatever you call it, the orientation sees the human condition as subject to multiple overlapping rhythms of change which generate the sorts of ‘events’ that are the stuff of history lessons. But Harari’s history is nothing like the version you half remember from school.

In school historical events were explained in terms more or less recognizable to the agents involved. In contrast, Harari reaches for accounts that scientifically update the idea of ‘perennial philosophy’. Aldous Huxley popularized this phrase in his quest to seek common patterns of thought in the great world religions which could be leveraged as a global ethic in the aftermath of the Second World War. Harari similarly leverages bits of genetics, ecology, neuroscience and cognitive science to advance a broadly evolutionary narrative. But unlike Darwin’s version, Harari’s points towards the incipient apotheosis of our species; hence, the book’s title.

This invariably means that events are treated as symptoms if not omens of the shape of things to come. Harari’s central thesis is that whereas in the past we cowered in the face of impersonal natural forces beyond our control, nowadays our biggest enemy is the one that faces us in the mirror, which may or may not be able within our control. Thus, the sort of deity into which we are evolving is one whose superhuman powers may well result in self-destruction. Harari’s attitude towards this prospect is one of slightly awestruck bemusement.

Here Harari equivocates where his predecessors dared to distinguish. Writing with the bracing clarity afforded by the Existentialist horizons of the Cold War, cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener declared that humanity’s survival depends on knowing whether what we don’t know is actually trying to hurt us. If so, then any apparent advance in knowledge will always be illusory. As for Harari, he does not seem to see humanity in some never-ending diabolical chess match against an implacable foe, as in The Seventh Seal. Instead he takes refuge in the so-called law of unintended consequences. So while the shape of our ignorance does indeed shift as our knowledge advances, it does so in ways that keep Harari at a comfortable distance from passing judgement on our long term prognosis.

Continue reading “Steve Fuller's Review of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari” »