Lifeboat Foundation

Christina Sarich — Nation of Change

Scenes from the movie Slumdog Millionaire accurately depict India’s latest consumer-influenced economy. Tree groves are littered with a rainbow color of plastic bags like some kind of ominous carnival wreckage. Plastic bottles, candy wrappers, and other ‘garbage’ liters the streets in a land where city officials have long forsaken their duties of providing a pristine infrastructure to its inhabitants, but a professor of chemistry in Madurai, India thinks that the trash lining his country’s roads and fields could be utilized as a ‘wonderful resource,” transforming common plastic liter, from thicker acrylics to bottles and grocery bags, into a substitute for bitumen in asphalt.

The ‘Plastic Man,’ as Rajagopalan Vasudevan is known in India, travels throughout the country instructing engineers how to apply his technology to recycle the trash copiously littering streets from Punjab to Tamil Nadu. To date, more than 3000 miles of plastic roads have been laid in at least 11 states.

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The Daily Galaxy via University of Sydney

By Lily Kuo — Quartz

Over the past six years, Beijing has seen at least 1,812 days of “unhealthy” air quality, and that trend isn’t going to get better any time soon. Pan Tao, head of the Beijing Municipal Research Institute of Environmental Protection, estimates that air pollution in the capital won’t be reach safe levels until at least 2030.

China’s president Xi Jinping has called air pollution the “most prominent challenge” Beijing faces. Foreign firms are paying their workers “hardship” salaries to be posted in the city. In February a report from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences said that pollution in the capital is “near a level that is no longer livable for human beings.”

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As Data Overflows Online, Researchers Grapple With Ethics http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/technology/the-boon-of-onl…e&_r=0

Can Tech Innovation Help End Cancer? http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2014/07/can-tech-innovation-help-end-cancer.html

This Doctor Thinks We May Achieve Immortality, But Isn’t Sure We’d Want To www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/12/david-casarett-shocked-imm…mg00000046

Brain regeneration: Crayfish turn blood into neurons http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26042-brain-regenerati…-u2nGMb8my

Continue reading “Lifeboat Foundation Worldwide Ambassador White Swan Update and Published Amazon Author by Andres Agostini at www.amazon.com/author/agostini AND www.linkedin.com/in/andresagostini” »

By Jaime Fuller — Washington Post

Despite plenty of debate in Congress, a majority of the American people (52 percent) remain in favor of using drones against extremists on foreign soil.

On that count, though, the United States is in the distinct minority on the Planet Earth.

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By Michael Snyder — Washington’s Blog

From our fields to our forks, huge corporations have an overwhelming amount of power over our food supply every step of the way. Right now there are more than 313 million people living in the United States, and the job of feeding all of those people is almost entirely in the hands of just a few dozen monolithic companies. If you do not like how our food is produced or you don’t believe that it is healthy enough, it isn’t very hard to figure out who is to blame. These mammoth corporations are not in business to look out for the best interests of the American people. Rather, the purpose of these corporations is to maximize wealth for their shareholders. So the American people end up eating billions of pounds of extremely unhealthy food that is loaded with chemicals and additives each year, and we just keep getting sicker and sicker as a society. But these big corporations are raking in big profits, so they don’t really care.

If we did actually have a capitalist system in this country, we would have a high level of competition in the food industry. But instead, the U.S. food industry has become increasingly concentrated with each passing year. Just consider the following numbers about the U.S. agricultural sector…

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Princeton

Research to curb global warming caused by rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, usually involves three areas: Developing alternative energy sources, capturing and storing greenhouse gases, and repurposing excess greenhouse gases. Drawing on two of these approaches, researchers in the laboratory of Andrew Bocarsly, a Princeton professor of chemistry, collaborated with start-up company Liquid Light Inc. of Monmouth Junction, N.J. to devise an efficient method for harnessing sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into a potential alternative fuel known as formic acid. The study was published June 13 in the Journal of CO₂ Utilization.

Christopher Helman — Forbes

For the new issue of Forbes Magazine I wrote an article about David Crane, the visionary CEO of NRG Energy . When I met Crane for lunch a couple weeks ago, no sooner had we sat down than he began singing the praises of this new contraption he had in his basement. The machine — which can generate 10 kilowatts of continuous power, fed by Crane’s natural gas line — is a new iteration of an old creation, the Stirling engine. This version, called the Beacon 10, was created after a decade of engineering by famed inventor Dean Kamen.

I caught up with Kamen (who is best known for creating the Segway scooter) over the phone last week to ask him about the device. “We’ve turned his basement into an extension of our laboratory,” said Kamen. “It’s certainly not a machine made for the typical home, but he has a gigantic swimming pool and a huge house.”

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Christina Sarich — Nation of Change

For all those who think the adage, ‘everything is vibration’ is a bunch of bunkum, check this out: biophysics researchers have discovered that molecular vibrations deep within our vegetables help them to process light for photosynthesis, the primary way a plant metabolizes energy from the sun. This discovery could lead to more efficient solar arrays and better energy storage.

Utilizing short pulses of light to peer inside spinach leaves to see how the mechanics of photosynthesis really work, researchers from the University of Michigan have discovered that the vibrations of plant molecules aid in energy conversion of light into power a plant can sustain itself with.

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