Lifeboat Foundation

Porsche made headlines for a battery it says can be charged with 400 kilometers (250 miles) of range in 15 minutes. If Piëch’s claims about a 4:40 charge hold up, Engadget pointed out, they’ll blow Porsche’s technology out of the water.

“We have developed a sports car that we ourselves would like to buy, and we talked for a long time to many enthusiasts about what was missing on the market,” co-founder Toni Piëch said in the press release. “We want to offer a modern classic that isn’t subject to consumer cycles. The driver of this sports car should enjoy any minute they can spend in the car.”

READ MORE: Piëch’s electric coupe charges to 80 percent in five minutes [Engadget] .

China says it is working to develop a solar energy plant in space that could one day beam enough power back to Earth to light up an entire city.

If scientists can overcome the formidable technical challenges, the project would represent a monumental leap in combating the Earth’s addiction to dirty power sources which worsen air pollution and global warming.

A space-based solar power station could also provide an alternative to the current generation of earthbound and relatively ineffective renewable energy sources.

Continue reading “Exploring China’s latest space ambitions” »

Leslie Dewan wants to revive technology from the 1960s to solve the problem of climate change today.

A way to speed up quantum computer tech progress has arrived from Intel. If you are interested in following the waves and advances in quantum computing, then get familiar with this word trio: Cryogenic Wafer Prober. Before their design, the electrical characterization of qubits was slower than with traditional transistors. Even small subsets of data might take days to collect.

Drug development. Chemistry. Climate change. Financial modeling. Scientists in all areas look forward to more advancements to push quantum computers to the frontlines. Speeding progress could also mean speeding up advancements in science and industry.

“Quantum computing, in essence, is the ultimate in parallel computing, with the potential to tackle problems conventional computers can’t handle,” said Intel.

Widespread and sometimes drastic marine oxygen declines are stressing sensitive species—a trend that will continue with climate change.

• By Laura Poppick on February 25, 2019

When was the last time you thought about your breathing? Take a breath right now and think about it. You breathe because you need oxygen, a gas which makes up 21 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. All that oxygen has to come from somewhere. You might already know that it comes from photosynthetic organisms like plants. But did you know that most of the oxygen you breathe comes from organisms in the ocean?

That’s right—more than half of the oxygen you breathe comes from marine photosynthesizers, like phytoplankton and seaweed. Both use carbon dioxide, water and energy from the sun to make food for themselves, releasing oxygen in the process. In other words, they photosynthesize. And they do it in the ocean.

Continue reading “With Every Breath You Take, Thank the Ocean” »

Circa 2012

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Continue reading “What our civilization needs is a billion-year plan” »

According to the Bulletin, we’ve done nothing in the past year to make the situation any less precarious — humanity still faces not one, but two “existential threats” in the form of nuclear weapons and climate change.

While the clock remains set at 11:58, the potential of either threat to destroy humanity has increased over the past 12 months, according to the Bulletin’s 2019 statement. We must do something to alter our path.

“Though unchanged from 2018, this setting should be taken not as a sign of stability but as a stark warning to leaders and citizens around the world,” the scientists wrote. “The current international security situation — what we call the ‘new abnormal’ — has extended over two years now… Th e longer world leaders and citizens carelessly inhabit this new and abnormal reality, the more likely the world is to experience catastrophe of historic proportions.”

Fans like Ben Pearson use NASA data to project the car’s location through space. For now, the convertible will continue its long drive around our inner solar system. And perhaps if humans make it to Mars like Musk hopes, we might even see the Roadster on our way there.