Lifeboat Foundation

Skycharge, developed by Green Motion and Pipistrel, has recently been approved by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) as the world’s first OEM-independent electric aircraft charging station.

Pipistrel’s Velis Electro aircraft had already become the first electric aircraft to receive a type certificate from EASA in June last year. The approval of Skycharge is another important milestone on the way to environmentally sustainable aviation.

Skycharge is based on Eaton’s proprietary DC charging technology. The charging infrastructure for electric aircraft and eVTOL (electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing) aircraft offers exceptional conversion efficiency (over 96%), compactness and power density.

Curtin University research has identified a new, cheaper and more efficient electrocatalyst to make green hydrogen from water that could one day open new avenues for large-scale clean energy production.

Typically, scientists have been using precious metal catalysts, such as platinum, to accelerate the reaction to break water into hydrogen and oxygen. Now Curtin research has found that adding nickel and cobalt to cheaper, previously ineffective catalysts enhances their performance, which lowers the energy required to split the water and increases the yield of hydrogen.

Lead researcher Dr. Guohua Jia, from Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences, said this discovery could have far-reaching implications for sustainable green fuel generation in the future.

A provocative and controversial Documentary about solutions for Humanity and Global Warming.

A film following Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg who offers a fresh perspective on global warming based on human needs as well as environmental concerns.

Magnets, typically using rare earth metals like neodymium, are found at the heart of most electric vehicle motors. It’s nice to have a permanent source of powerful rare earth magnetism in your rotor, because using powered coils instead means you have to somehow transfer electricity from the battery through to the coils in a spinning rotor. That means you’ll need a sliding point of contact, and sliding points of contact develop wear and tear over time.

Permanent magnets, though, come with their own baggage. Ninety seven percent of the world’s rare earth metal supply comes out of China, and state control over such a crucial resource across a number of high-tech industries has been a serious issue in the past. Official accounts differ about why China decided to restrict rare earth exports back at the start of the decade, as official accounts tend to do, but the result either way was a 750-percent leap in neodymium prices and a 2,000-percent leap in dysprosium prices.

Could these metals be produced elsewhere? Yes. They’re not as rare as the name might suggest. But wherever they’re mined, the only way to economically turn them into magnets is to send them to China for processing – nowhere else in the world is set up for the task, and nobody can compete against China’s minimal labor costs and environmental regulations.

The material offers the high performance and stability needed for industrial-scale electrolysis, which could produce a clean energy fuel from seawater.

Hydrogen fuel derived from the sea could be an abundant and sustainable alternative to fossil fuels, but the potential power source has been limited by technical challenges, including how to practically harvest it.

We live in a world where significant technological developments in processing technology have dramatically transformed our way of life, with rapid improvements in computing capacity.

The world’s information continues to grow. In 2,018 the total amount of data stored in the world was 33 zettabytes (33×1021 bytes). To put it another way, one zettabyte of data would require 33 billion one-terabyte.

As difficult as it is to wrap one’s head around that amount of data, it is expected to swell to 175 zettabytes by 2025. To this date, extracting and storing this increasingly massive amount of data represents a tremendous challenge in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and sustainable energy cost.

The low-slung drone-ship catamaran is equipped with solar panels, various antennae, and camera systems.

Civilian Space Development has kicked-off: the work begins now!

Newsletter 17.09.2021 by Bernard Foing & Adriano V. Autino

During the last months we have seen the first civilian passengers fly to space, onboard Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic vehicles. September 15th, four civilian astronauts, onboard a Space X Dragon capsule, passed the 500 km orbit, more than 100 km higher than the ISS.In 2016 we started to publicly talk about and promote Civilian Space Development, while the whole space community kept on talking only about space exploration. Earlier, in 2,008 we founded the Space Renaissance movement, and a couple of years later the Space Renaissance International, as a philosophical association targeted to complete the Kopernican Revolution, supporting the Civilization expansion into space. Nowadays the concept of civilian space flight is everywhere on the media, and many people in the space community talk about a space renaissance. Of course the Coronavirus pandemics accelerated the awareness of the urgency to expand humanity into outer space. And space tourism — the first stage of civilian space settlement — is now a reality, in its first steps.

Of course nobody could be more happy than ourselves, for the above development, and of course**2 we want to congratulate with Elon, Richard and Jeff, for such a great achievement!

Continue reading “Civilian Space Development has kicked-off: the work starts now!” »

No matter the price tag, the industry also has to convince consumers it’s worth their time to upgrade to new technologies.

“It’s difficult to get homeowners to change from the technology that they’re used to, especially in staid devices like water heaters, because they think of it as a utility: open the faucet, water comes out,” Callahan told Freethink. “There’s an education process to get them to understand that there’s a better, cheaper, faster, cooler way to [heat water].”

Continue reading “The man hacking hot water to save the planet” »