Lifeboat Foundation

The number of tornadoes so far in the United States this year is just above average. But their distribution is changing.

If humans build settlements on Mars, how will they feed ourselves? Waiting on deliveries from Earth would take too long and costs would be exorbitant, since getting to the Red Planet is currently a nine-month one-way journey. On top of that, dehydrating foodstuff—the best preservation method for perishables sent to space—removes vital nutrients.

More than likely, Martian settlers will need to grow their own food.

Researchers are now exploring how best to optimize crop yield on Mars using intercropping, a technique perfected by Maya farmers centuries ago that involves growing multiple plants in close proximity to one another. Their findings—published this month in the journal Plos One—could not only benefit the pioneers who end up colonizing the Red Planet, but also farmers here on Earth amid a rapidly changing climate.

As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO₂) contributes to climate change as it accumulates in the atmosphere. One way to reduce the amount of unwanted CO₂ in the atmosphere is to convert the gas into a useful carbon product that can be used to generate valuable compounds.

It’s not every year that a major discovery is made in the basic natural sciences of Earth, but using painfully precise measurements, MIT has written a new chapter in something that most people probably thought they knew completely: evaporation.

The scientists say the discovery could explain “mysterious measurements” in the literature of clouds which may increase the precision of climate modeling, while also aiding in industrial applications.

In this study, the discovery that evaporation can occur just with light and without heat was so unexpected and surprising that it was subjected to 14 different tests and measurements to try and disprove what the scientists observed.

A team of scientists in the United Kingdom say they’ve discovered a porous material that has the potential to store large quantities of greenhouse gases, making it a possible new tool in the arsenal to fight climate change.

The scientists detailed how they used computational models to develop this material in a newly published paper in the journal Nature Synthesis, arguing that certain features of the structure could make it excellent storage for carbon dioxide and sulphur hexafluoride, another powerful greenhouse gas.

“This is an exciting discovery because we need new porous materials to help solve society’s biggest challenges,” engineering professor Marc Little from Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University said in a statement about the research.

Over the course of nearly two decades, its powerful radar provided never-before-seen details of clouds and helped advance global weather and climate predictions.

CloudSat, a NASA mission that peered into hurricanes, tallied global snowfall rates, and achieved other weather and climate firsts, has ended its operations. Originally proposed as a 22-month mission, the spacecraft was recently decommissioned after almost 18 years observing the vertical structure and ice/water content of clouds.

Continue reading “Peering Into the Heart of Clouds: NASA’s CloudSat Wraps a Revolutionary Journey” »

Engineers at Georgia Tech have designed a process that converts carbon dioxide removed from the air into useful raw material that could be used for new plastics, chemicals, or fuels.

Their approach dramatically reduces the cost and energy required for these direct air capture (DAC) systems, helping improve the economics of a process the researchers said will be critical to addressing climate change.

The key is a new kind of catalyst and electrochemical reactor design that can be easily integrated into existing DAC systems to produce useful carbon monoxide (CO) gas. It’s one of the most efficient such design ever described in scientific literature, according to lead researcher Marta Hatzell and her team. They have published the details in Energy & Environmental Science.

When facing a predator, single cells sometimes unite to defend themselves, paving the way for more complex multicellular life forms to evolve.

A recent study published in the journal Nature by an international team of 279 scientists, including three biologists from the University of Michigan, provides the latest insights into the flowering plant tree of life.

Using 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species covering almost 8,000 known flowering plant genera (ca. 60%), this achievement sheds new light on the evolutionary history of flowering plants and their rise to ecological dominance on Earth.

Led by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the research team believes the data will aid future attempts to identify new species, refine plant classification, uncover new medicinal compounds, and conserve plants in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss.