Lifeboat Foundation

Catherine Griffin — Science World Report

Could spiders save the bees? They just might. Scientists have created a novel bio-pesticide with the help of spider venom and a plant protein. The new pesticide is actually safe for honeybees, despite being highly toxic to a number of key insect pests.

Honeybees perform sophisticated behaviors while foraging. These behaviors, in part, are why they’re so successful. With their ability to pollinate key crop species, these insects are crucial for our food industry. And yet bee populations have been declining due to climate change and an increased use of pesticides, which can interrupt their key behaviors.

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An innovative Australian digital radar built with a series of modified rugby goalposts is attracting worldwide attention the ABC reports.

A consortium led by La Trobe University in Melbourne developed the Tiger-3 digital radar, which is 10 times more sensitive than any other research radar. Lead researcher Professor John Devlin said the radar would be used to study space weather, which has an impact on navigation and surveillance systems for shipping and aircraft, as well as for GPS systems. “It measures the ionospheric reflections from a distance out to about 5,000 kilometres,” he said.

Researchers measure the data to study space weather, like recent solar flares, which can potentially knock out power, satellites, navigation and surveillance systems for shipping, aircraft and GPS.

The recent solar flares just grazed the Earth, but Dr Custovic said flares had the potential to knock out transformers, potentially shutting off power for weeks.

Continue reading “Australian digital radar innovation attracts global attention” »

Question: A Counterpoint to the Technological Singularity?

Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, indicated about The Singularity is Near Book (ISBN: 978–0143037880),

“ … A very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad …”

Continue reading “Question: A Counterpoint to the Technological Singularity?” »

By Lily Kuo — Quartz

Over the past six years, Beijing has seen at least 1,812 days of “unhealthy” air quality, and that trend isn’t going to get better any time soon. Pan Tao, head of the Beijing Municipal Research Institute of Environmental Protection, estimates that air pollution in the capital won’t be reach safe levels until at least 2030.

China’s president Xi Jinping has called air pollution the “most prominent challenge” Beijing faces. Foreign firms are paying their workers “hardship” salaries to be posted in the city. In February a report from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences said that pollution in the capital is “near a level that is no longer livable for human beings.”

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Maureen Wise — Nation of Change

You’ve probably heard that bees—their honey, their awesome pollinating powers and their stingers—are on the decline. It’s a global problem that affects more than just the little yellow and black buzzers; it can and will interrupt the way we produce food if it continues. Bees pollinate most of the crops farmers grow worldwide, so without them, we don’t have food. Most scientists agree that pesticides, drought, habitat loss, pollution and other major environmental concerns are all contributing to colony collapse disorder. It’s a big deal and there are a lot of people working to keep bees buzzing.

A new project has set out to help understand the issue in individual colonies and bring the problem to the people called Open Source Beehives. This multi-continent partnership between Open Tech Collaborative and Fab Lab Barcelona proposes public participation through easily made backyard hives in conjunction with software that will track hive health.

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Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan — Gizmodo

When most of us imagine what the mantle of the Earth is like, we see burning hot rock and magma (and maybe satan hanging out for good measure or something). But scientists have discovered evidence that all that rock may be hiding huge amounts of water—three times the volume of all our oceans combined.

The scientists behind the study, which was published online today in the journal Science, think they’ve figured out the answer to a question that has long plagued Earth science: Just how much water is there on Earth in total? “I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet,” said study co-author and Northwestern geophysicist Steve Jacobsen to PhysOrg. “Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades.”

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Although I have already mentioned a recent technical note on the application of Astronomical Observation to LHC/Collider Safety in comments to other posts here and there, I have not posted specifically about it until now. So finally, a short mention:

The technical note follows on from a modest paper I wrote in 2012 (Discussions on the Hypothesis that Cosmic Ray Exposure on Sirius B Negates Terrestrial MBH Concerns from Colliders), which concerned micro-black hole (MBH) production and the white dwarf safety assurance. There I demonstrated that not only are most white dwarf stars not suitable as a safety assurance, but that those hand-picked for the 2008 safety report had magnetic field strength measured to just 99% confidence within the range for safety assurance. That is not to say that the LHC safety argument was only 99% reliable — just that one of the cornerstone assurances was. The affirmation of these measurements was needed for a safety assurance to LHC p-p collisions based on astronomical observations – as a safety assurance that is not based on Hawking Radiation theory — but based on verifiable measurement. The technical note captures the official LSAG (CERN) response on the matter after internal review at CERN in late 2012, which had remained archived from email discussions until recently, when those conclusions were formalised into this technical note:

Link to the technical note: http://environmental-safety.webs.com/TechnicalNote-EnvSA01.pdf

Continue reading “Affirmation / ES Technical Note on LHC Collider Safety (p-p/MBH)” »

Rebecca Morelle — BBC News

Researchers have found that pollutants are strengthening storms above the Pacific Ocean, which feeds into weather systems in other parts of the world.

The effect was most pronounced during the winter.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Lead author Yuan Wang, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, said: “The effects are quite dramatic. The pollution results in thicker and taller clouds and heavier precipitation.”

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