Lifeboat Foundation

Bladeless turbines for wind energy. 😃

Air conditioners and other cooling systems are among our biggest consumers of electricity, so finding ways to passively cool buildings will be important in our increasingly warmer future. Now, researchers at the University at Buffalo have developed a prototype hybrid device that can not only cool buildings drastically without using electricity, it can capture solar energy to heat water.

Created in many forms over the years, radiative cooling systems absorb heat from inside a room or building, and emit it in infrared waves towards the sky. At those wavelengths, the Earth’s atmosphere is “invisible” to the radiation, meaning there’s nothing stopping the heat from venting directly into the cold of outer space.

These devices use panels made of materials that can absorb and emit the heat. The logical way to orient these thermal emitter panels is to have one face pointing towards the sky, like a solar panel, but the team on the new study says that’s not the most efficient method. The panels emit heat from both sides, so in that position some of the heat is being emitted back towards the ground.

In the awful wake of an oil spill, it’s typically the smallest of organisms who do most of the cleaning up. Surprisingly, scientists know very little about the tools these tiny clean-up crews have at their disposal.

Three-dimensional “bio-printing” and real cow cells — an achievement that’s prompting the Israeli startup to eye other meat…The firm’s technology prints living cells that are incubated to grow, differentiate and interact to acquire the texture and qualities of a real steak. “It incorporates muscle and fat similar to its slaughtered counterpart,” Aleph Farms said, adding that the product boasts the same attributes “of a delicious tender, juicy ribeye steak you’d buy from the butcher.”

Flip flops from plants. 😃

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have figured out how to turn algae into flip flops. They founded a startup to sell the shoe, but face a challenge in getting their invention mass produced: There aren’t enough algae farms to support the startup’s supply chain.

Continue reading “Flip-Flops Made From Plants And Algae Can Help Reduce Plastic Pollution | World Wide Waste” »

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” »