Lifeboat Foundation

Renewable energy boom will mean vastly cheaper electricity

Renewable energy, combined with prolific battery storage, will soon result in vastly cheaper electricity — and solar power that’s less expensive than what fossil fuel-based power plants can produce.

Additionally, solar power with lithium-ion and flow-battery storage systems will make the combination of renewable energy so inexpensive that it will surpass nuclear power and obviate the need for futuristic power sources such as fusion, according to Tesla CTO JB Straubel.

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“We have the technology to successfully integrate distributed, renewable energy with the grid to provide a reliable, seamless power source. That includes software that helps renewable-power providers better predict their output throughout the day and feed that information upstream to utilities so they can blend that power with their traditional generation portfolio…The real barrier to greater renewable use is less technological and more philosophical. People worry that connecting all these renewable sources to the grid will bring it down.” Read more

Knowledge is Power and soon it’s going to be free and available to all. #Awesome

As university students we often take for granted the massive luxury of having access to unprecedented amounts of scientific articles. But accessing journals and papers can be prohibitively expensive for individuals or small organizations.

In the coming decade, science will become increasingly open-sourced. This will further democratize science and pave the way for powerful innovation.

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One of the most basic yet important surgical skills to keep a patient alive and intact may be closing wounds. It seems that doctors will now get the job done with more ease thanks to new, nontoxic surgical glue that instantly seals a bleeding wound and helps it heal without a scar or inflammation.

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Lightweight composite metal foams like this one have been found effective at blocking X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation, and are capable of absorbing the energy of high impact collisions — holding promise for use in nuclear safety, space exploration, and medical technology applications (credit: Afsaneh Rabiei, North Carolina State University)

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I sometimes wonder, How much data am I generating? Meaning: how much data do I generate just sitting there in a chair, doing nothing except exist as a cell within any number of global spreadsheets and also as a mineable nugget lodged within global memory storage systems — inside the Cloud, I suppose. (Yay Cloud!)

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The SCiO is the world’s first spectrometer that fits in a pocket, and it can measure the molecular fingerprint of just about anything you see.

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Green Bank Telescope (credit: Geremia/Wikimedia Commons) Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Frank Drake and others announced at The Royal Society today $100 million funding for Breakthrough Listen — the “most powerful, comprehensive, and intensive scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.”

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An interview on transhumanism, Transhumanist Party, and longevity science in Quartz, which is the business site of Atlantic Media:.

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