Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: sustainability

Drawing inspiration from the plant world, researchers have invented a new electrode that could boost our current solar energy storage by an astonishing 3,000 percent.

The technology is flexible and can be attached directly to solar cells — which means we could finally be one step closer to smartphones and laptops that draw their power from the Sun, and never run out.

A major problem with reliably using solar energy as a power source is finding an efficient way to store it for later use without leakage over time.

Read more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjIm9yIm0zo

Unimaginable Radical Abundance:

Yesterday I took the time to read chapter 11 of Eric Drexler’s book Radical Abundance as to get a glimpse of what might be possible with Atomically Precise Manufacturing (APM). I highly recommend the book.

The potential of APM is truly unimaginable.

Try to imagine billion core processors, memory storage in the billions of gigabytes per cm2. Solar panels far exceeding todays best laboratory efficiencies. Batteries that are a billion times more energy dense. All this with a negligible impact on the environment.

APM can produce these products and many more at costs of roughly 20¢ per kilogram!

Just let that sink in. Just to illustrate this $1 would buy you more memory storage than is currently available throughout the entire world (roughly 10 Zettabytes).

Read more

Scientists literally pulled this out of thin air.

Engineers at MIT and the University of California Berkeley have designed a system, powered by sunlight, that can turn air into liters of drinkable water.

This box has the potential to help drought-stricken communities, desert explorers or — someday — astronauts traveling to dry, dusty planets. The report was a href=” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/04/12/science.aam8743” target=”_blank”

Read more

A water harvester designed and built at MIT condenses water from air. The harvester uses sunlight to heat metal-organic framework (MOF) material (inserted just below the glass plate on top), driving off the water vapor and condensing it (in the yellow and red condenser sitting at the bottom) for home use. (photo credit: Hyunho Kim/MIT)

MIT scientists have invented a water harvester that uses only sunlight to pull water out of the air under desert conditions, using a “metal-organic framework” (MOF) powdered material developed at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

Under conditions of 20–30 percent humidity (a level common in arid areas), the prototype device was able to pull 2.8 liters (3 quarts) of water from the air over a 12-hour period, using one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of MOF.

Read more

Architecture has evolved and has become much more than just a design realized in concrete and modern building material. It has been transformed to help humanity in achieving all kinds of sustainability.

The eVolo Magazine for Architecture has been organizing another round of Skyscraper Competition in 2017 to honor those visionaries that try to realize a future that benefits humanity and the one Earth we all need to cherish and sustain.

A team from Spain with aspiring architects Arturo Emilio Garrido Ontiveros, Andrés Pastrana Bonillo, Judit Pinach Martí and Alex Tintea is thinking of a hybrid solution, that ensures Humanity’s survival in the early days of Mars’ colonization. The skyscraper design is both clever and beautiful, combining existing technologies with many practical ideas to open up and terraform more red soil as we understand the planet. It’s a genesis of Mars and a revival of form following function.

Read more

When it comes to future challenges, one of the biggest will be water scarcity — on a warming planet we’re going to have plenty of seawater, but not enough fresh, clean water in the right places for everybody to drink.

And while a lot of research has focussed on desalination, a team of scientists have now come up with another possible solution — a device that pulls fresh water out of thin air, even in places with humidity as low as 20 percent. All it needs is sunlight.

It might sound too good to be true, but so far the research is solid. Called the ‘solar-powered harvester’, the device was created by teams from MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, using a special type of material known as a metal-organic framework (MOF).

Read more

While many scientists have shied away from explicitly political actions in recent decades, the community throughout history has spoken publicly on a wide variety of social, technological and ideological issues.

That has included everything from opposing fascism, nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam War to sitting on government panels that advise elected leaders on stem-cell research involving human embryos.

In U.S. history, scientists have been vocal about fascism, nuclear proliferation, the Vietnam War, stem cells and more.

Read more

“This month, urban thinkers from the United Nations, the European Commission and other organizations are meeting in Brussels to continue a curiously complex attempt: developing a universal definition of the “city.””

Read more

The spikes also have a big effect on wholesale energy prices, which dipped to zero or even to negative territory this spring during certain hours in California, the EIA said.

The extraordinary success of solar power in some pockets of the world that combine sunshine with high investment in the technology mean that governments and energy companies are having radically to rethink the way they manage—and charge for—electricity.

California is one such a place.

On March 11, it passed a milestone on the route to powering the whole state sustainably. For the first time, more than half the power needs of the entire state came from solar power for a few hours that day, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Read more