Lifeboat Foundation

From the Peak District to John O’Groats, nearly 1,300 kilometres of off-road ups and downs, forest trails and canal paths await two-wheeled adventurers in the UK. The newly launched Great North Trail creates a continuous route linking England and Scotland in a bid to open up the countryside to cyclists. Passing through the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales and Kielder Forest in England, up to Loch Lomond, the Trossachs National Park and Loch Ness in Scotland, the route takes in some of the UK’s best-known beauty spots. In Scotland, cyclists can branch towards Cape Wrath, the most north-westerly part of the UK, or John O’Groats on the northeast tip.

Wangari Maathai for years told people to plant trees. She is the reason Kenyans plant trees in protected forests, and will continue for a very long time.

Trees are a low-tech, high-efficiency way to offset much of humankind’s negative impact on the climate. What’s even better, we have plenty of room for a lot more of them.

A new study conducted by researchers at Switzerland’s ETH-Zürich, published in Science, details how Earth could support almost an additional billion hectares of trees without the new forests pushing into existing urban or agricultural areas. Once the trees grow to maturity, they could store more than 200 billion metric tons of carbon.

Continue reading “How Tech Can Help Curb Emissions” »

Hanwha Q Cells officially opened its 300,000 square foot solar panel factory in Dalton, Georgia last week, claiming it is the largest such manufacturing facility in the western hemisphere. The $200 million factory employs more than 650 workers and is capable of producing 12,000 solar panels a year — enough to generate 1.7 GW of electricity. Its standard production panel features six bus bars, has an efficiency of about 19%, and an output of up to 345 watts.

Result: Some 6 million pounds of spent nuclear waste, generated over a half-century, remain in seismically sensitive spots on the California coast, at both San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. That’s among some 200 million pounds of radioactive waste languishing at 80 reactor sites in 35 states from sea to shining sea, where it will remain for the foreseeable future.

“We’ve so tainted this whole process because of fear,” said James Conca, a controversial nuclear energy advocate with a doctorate in geochemistry from the California Institute of Technology. “You get everyone so scared you never do anything.

”Look, we know where to put this stuff,” he said. ”We’ve known for 60 years. We have an operating deep geologic repository right now — but it’s only for bomb waste.”

It’s the promise of stem cell medicine: Someday soon, clinics will rebuild diseased or broken hearts, kidneys, pancreases or blood by growing and reprogramming human cells, then adding them back to the bodies of the patients they came from.

If only it were that easy.

After two decades of human stem cell research, researchers have learned how to create what appear to be reasonably functional versions of several types of cells, first using genetic tricks to turn cells back to an uncommitted state and then molding them into the type of cell needed — say, an insulin-producing cell or a particular kind of nerve cell. And many early clinical trials of stem cell medicine have shown genuinely promising results.

Coenzyme Q10, or CoQ10, is a compound that generates energy in your cells and has a wide range of health benefits. Here are 9 benefits of coenzyme Q10.

There’s plenty of malware that turns victims’ computers into zombified servants. A new strain is using some surprising — and completely legitimate — software to do it.

Humanity is moving ever faster towards a perfect world, but we’ll probably never get all the way to perfect. A somewhat plausible alternative to this utopian future is that humanity destroys itself. Typical science fiction dystopias, on the other hand, are quite unrealistic, in my view.

Interstellar is one of my favorite movies, but there’s one thing about it I don’t like; it’s set in a dystopian future where sandstorms and blight make it increasingly difficult for humans to survive. Although science fiction is my favorite genre, it annoys me a bit that science fiction movies are often dystopian to some degree.

Continue reading “Why The Future Will Be An Unimaginable Utopia Beyond Our Wildest Imaginations” »

Hurricane Lorenzo intensified into a Category 5 hurricane Saturday night, smashing a record for the easternmost Atlantic hurricane to attain such a strong intensity, and poses a danger to the Azores this week.

Lorenzo rapidly deepened Saturday from Category 3 status with estimated maximum sustained winds of 115 mph at 11 a.m. EDT to Category 5 status with winds of 160 mph just 12 hours later.

This is by far the farthest east in the Atlantic Ocean any of the previous 35 Category 5 hurricanes have occurred in records dating to the 1920s.