Lifeboat Foundation

Zero Mass’s ambitious plan to change water.

A team of engineers and architects from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has won the top prize for architecture in 2017’s international Mars City Design competition, which asks participants to design habitats that could one day be built on the Red Planet.

The competition, sponsored by both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), is one of many that asks participants to come up with creative solutions to the problems these agencies anticipate in the journey to Mars.

Like other contests before it, the Mars City Design competition aims to solve the problem of building livable and sustainable spaces on the Red Planet, from either the limited cargo astronauts would be able to bring with them or indigenous Martian resources. [How Will a Human Mars Base Work? NASA’s Vision in Images].

Continue reading “MIT Team Wins Mars City Design Contest for ‘Redwood Forest’ Idea” »

“Musk seems to be talking about something different, a sports car that could “hop” over obstacles. The emphasis would, presumably, still be on performance and practicality with four wheels on the ground.”

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“Former Executive Secretary to UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres has laid down a challenge to UNEP FI’s banking members, and the wider finance industry to increase their allocations to low carbon investments to avoid a 2 degrees scenario. Watch her recording which she made for participants at UNEP FI’s Europe Regional Roundtable on Sustainable Finance which took place in October 2017.”

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“Former Vice President and Chairman of Generation Investment Management, Al Gore, introduces PRI, UNEP FI and The Generation Foundation’s Fiduciary duty in the 21st century programme. The project finds that, far from being a barrier, there are positive duties to integrate environmental, social and governance factors in investment processes.”

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“Increasingly, sophisticated and costly treatment are available to ever more limited and privileged segments of the population, and this raises questions about the sustainability of health care delivery and about what might be called a systemic tendency toward growing inequality in health care,” the pope said.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Thursday urged lawmakers to ensure that health care laws protect the “common good,” decrying the fact that in many places only the privileged can afford sophisticated medical treatments.

The comments came as U.S. lawmakers in Washington, D.C., have been debating how to overhaul the nation’s health insurance laws.

Continue reading “Pope to lawmakers: Protect all people with health care laws” »

Would love to see inside one of these trucks.

Elon Musk unveiled the Roadster’s return toward the end of an event that was supposed to be all about Tesla’s new Semi trucks.

Have you ever lifted half a ton? With the Guardian GT, a set of robotic arms, you could do so with as little as two kilogram (five pounds) of force, allowing you to have superhuman strength.

Elon Musk recently made headlines asserting that, in order for us to both progress and survive as a species, we must merge with machines and become cyborgs. And, as climate change rages onwards and the biological difficulties of completing a human mission to Mars become ever more apparent, many are beginning to agree.

A controversial plan to cool down the planet by artificially simulating volcanic eruptions could have disastrous consequences for Earth—yet there are no laws or regulations to stop any country or private company from deploying such technology.

Solar geoengineering is one of the proposed ways to artificially reduce global temperatures. It is often seen as one of the most extreme options—but also potentially one of the most effective. It involves injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. When the gas combines with oxygen, droplets of sulfuric acid form. These droplets reflect sunlight away, cooling the planet in the process. All good in theory, but the consequences of solar geoengineering are largely unknown.

In a study published in Nature Communications, scientists led by Anthony Jones, from the University of Exeter, U.K., have now examined what would happen if solar geoengineering was used in the Northern Hemisphere to try to prevent global warming and the extreme weather that goes with it—in this case tropical cyclones.

Continue reading “Artificially Cooling Earth With Volcano Eruptions Is Dangerous—the Lack of Regulation Is ‘Deeply Disconcerting’” »