Lifeboat Foundation

Solar powered bikes for use in fighting poaching. 😃

What’s even more badass than defending endangered animals from illegal poaching? How about rolling up on a stealthy solar-powered bush bike made specifically to sneak up on poachers and bust their asses? These electric motorcycles are light, nimble, rechargeable and best of all zero-emissions. Get wrecked, poachers!

Renewable energy is now the cheapest energy on the planet. Countries all over the globe are rapidly converting from destructive and limited fossil fuels to wind turbines, solar power and even more creative options, including the UK which is now powered more by renewables than other sources.

Despite being one of the best sources of renewable energy, wind turbines have received significant pushback from opposition that claims they kill native bird populations. It is a valid criticism – research has shown collisions with turbine blades do kill birds, albeit at a fraction of the rate fossil-fueled power plants do.

In an attempt to minimize the ecological impact of wind turbines, a new smart camera system developed by IdentiFlight detects the presence of birds, identifies if they are endangered, and shuts down the spinning blades before impact. According to a study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, deploying a curtailment system near a wind turbine site led to a decrease in Eagle fatalities of 82 percent, suggesting the camera systems could have a drastic effect on saving protected bird species.

Though the Earth’s deeper layers have been raging at thousands of degrees for billions of years, new research involving Florida Tech has shown that tapping into that heat to produce geothermal heating for urban regions on the surface has a far, far shorter lifespan.

It summarizes the whole thing well.

““As important as Steve Jobs was, here’s the difference: Elon Musk is trying to invent a future, not by providing the next app,” says renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Continue reading “Neil deGrasse Tyson: Elon Musk Is The Most Important Person Alive Today” »

Video of artificial leather. 😃

This lab-grown leather that leaves animals the fuck alone is ready to wear! About 80% of leather worldwide is tanned in a toxic process resulting in massive amounts of chemical waste flooding the environment. It also poses a serious health risk to industrial tannery workers, not to mention the animals who lose their lives for a pair of shoes. By using nature’s building blocks to create materials designed for functionality, performance AND style, Modern Meadow might just have found a win-win solution!

Use of waste heat contributes largely to sustainable energy supply. Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Tōhoku University in Japan have now come much closer to their goal of converting waste heat into electrical power at small temperature differences. As reported in Joule, electrical power per footprint of thermomagnetic generators based on Heusler alloy films has been increased by a factor of 3.4.

Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster will be able to fly a little bit, so perhaps the new Model S yoke will be used so that the driver pulls back on it to fly.

Fast, One-Step Assembly at Room Temperature Yields High Efficiency at Low Cost University of Houston-A team of researchers led by Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH,…

Google is using artificial intelligence to help EV owners plan their routes. Charging an electric vehicle can be very confusing, with stations offering different plugs and different speeds. Google wants to take some the guesswork out of it.