Lifeboat Foundation

HOW FRESH IS FRESH?

Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pie will soon fill our kitchens with the sweet smell of Thanksgiving. If you’re anything like us, you’ll need to clear out a few things from your fridge before you can squeeze in all of the leftovers. As you stare into your salad crisper and decide what to keep and what to toss, take a moment to read the labels. Where do your vegetables come from? Here is what we found in our TRANSCEND fridge: cucumbers from Ontario Canada, green beans from Florida, grapes from California, lemons from Argentina, and oranges from South Africa. Imagine the trucks, boats, and people involved in getting all of that produce to our table!

Now, consider the quality of your produce. Are your tomatoes sweet and firm? Broccoli crunchy? Strawberries fresh and juicy? What does “fresh” actually mean? Our agricultural system depends on the weather which means we are constantly chasing the perfect environment to grow the perfect crops. And sometimes that perfect environment is thousands of miles from where we live, which means those crops have to spend weeks or months in cold storage and on trucks before they arrive in our local markets. Did you know that the typical storage time for apples is six to twelve months before they are put out for sale? Lettuce is stored for up to four weeks, tomatoes are stored for up to six week, and carrots are stored for up to nine months. Yet they are all considered “fresh” by current standards.

Monarch Tractor is leveraging technology more commonly associated with battery-powered Teslas and autonomous Waymo vans for robotic farm tractors.

I think this might be the answer to the question we’ve all been debating here lately. Provided it ACTUALLY happens, and that it includes others (like Jeff Bezos), and that it happens within a transparent, focused, well structured and effective framework.

It’s not the end all be all to wealth inequity, but it IS a good start and could really help us avoid another tribal political dust up and focus on a worthy, positive, and equitable posthuman (or whatever it is that make… See more.

The billionaire Elon Musk said he’d sell Tesla stock and donate the proceeds if the UN could prove that just a tiny percentage of his wealth could save tens of millions of lives.

Continue reading “The UN says $6B from the world’s billionaires could solve a hunger crisis. Elon Musk says he will sell Tesla stock and donate proceeds if the UN can prove that” »

It’s the dog days of summer. You bite down on a plump, chilled orange. Citrus juice explodes in your mouth in a refreshing, tingling burst. Ahh.

And congratulations—you’ve just been vaccinated for the latest virus.

That’s one of the goals of molecular farming, a vision to have plants synthesize medications and vaccines. Using genetic engineering and synthetic biology, scientists can introduce brand new biochemical pathways into plant cells—or even whole plants—essentially turning them into single-use bioreactors.

A few days ago, United Nations World Food Program (WFP) director David Beasley told CNN that a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals such as Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk could help solve world hunger with just a fraction of their net worth. Musk’s net worth currently stands at $311 billion thanks to a recent rally in TSLA stock, effectively making the CEO the world’s wealthiest individual today.

While speaking at CNN’s Connect the World with Becky Anderson, Beasley called for billionaires to “step up now, on a one-time basis.” He also noted that even just 2% of Musk’s current net worth could solve world hunger. This translates to roughly about $6 billion. “$6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them. It’s not complicated,” the UN WFP director said.

Musk has now responded to Beasley’s statements. While responding to a post on Twitter which highlighted that the UN World Food Program actually raised $8.4 billion in 2,020 Musk noted that if the WFP could explain exactly how $6 billion would solve world hunger, then he would be more than willing to sell some TSLA stock right now. This is a key point as most of Musk’s net worth is tied to his majority stake in Tesla. This means that for Musk to have $6 billion in cash, he’d have to sell TSLA stock, which would then be taxed.

Saturday on W5: experts warn the next pandemic could come sooner than you think, and that unless changes are made to industrial farming practices worldwide, it could spark a virus more deadly than COVID-19.

Barely-alive creatures, such as the slime mold pictured, are able to produce “memories” — they just store them in their physical surroundings rather than a brain. “A slime mould is not a fungus or mould, but is in fact a protist, which is really the odds and ends of the natural world that don’t fit in with the rest of our taxonomic grouping system,” said PhD student Christopher Reid who led the study.

Is it possible to know where you’ve been when you don’t have a brain? Depending on your definition of “know,” the answer may be yes. Researchers have shown that the slime mold, an organism without anything that resembles a nervous system (or, for that matter, individual cells), is capable of impressive feats of navigation. It can even link food sources in optimally spaced networks. Now, researchers have shown it’s capable of filling its environment with indications of where it has already searched for food, allowing it to “remember” its past efforts and focus its attention on routes it hasn’t explored.

Circa 2019 😃

“SolarStratos has an opportunity to push the limits of what we think is humanly possible and prove that renewable energy has the capacity to power our lives while preserving our planet. We are fortunate to energize SolarStratos with SunPower’s industry-leading solar technology and look forward to further showcasing the value of innovative and reliable solar solutions for the world to see.”

The company is also changing the way the whole world thinks about renewable energy…at least, that is their goal. SunPower doesn’t just want to power buildings and farms. They want to use their durable and efficient solar panels for all the types of applications available. They believe that anything that can and needs to be powered, should be powered by natural sources, like the sun.

Continue reading “This Airplane Will Fly Into The Stratosphere On SunPower Without Using A Drop Of Fossil Fuels” »

Anders Sandberg, University of Oxford.

One of the deepest realizations of the scientific understanding of the world that emerged in the 18th and 19th century is that the world is changing, that it has been radically different in the past, that it can be radically different in the future, and that such changes could spell the end of humanity as we know it. An added twist arrived in the 20th century: we could ourselves be the cause of our demise. In the late 20th century an interdisciplinary field studying global catastrophic and existential risks emerged, driven by philosophical concern about the moral weight of such risks and the realization that many such risks show important commonalities that may allow us as a species to mitigate them. For example, much of the total harm from nuclear wars, supervolcanic eruptions, meteor impacts and some biological risks comes from global agricultural collapse. This talk is going to be an overview of the world of low-probability, high-impact risks and their overlap with questions of complexity in the systems generating or responding to them. Understanding their complex dynamics may be a way of mitigating them and ensuring a happier future.

Continue reading “Global catastrophic and existential risks: the weightiest complex phenomena?” »