Lifeboat Foundation

Like electric vehicles – traditionally seen as expensive and niche – solar power is now becoming a realistic option for many households, as well as businesses wishing to decarbonise their operations. While the upfront costs of installing a photovoltaic (PV) rooftop system can be expensive, home solar will usually pay for itself within 5–10 years – and then provides the owner with an essentially free, limitless supply of clean energy, decentralised and unaffected by price volatility. Unlike the world’s increasingly scarce, finite supplies of coal, oil and gas, our Sun will continue to shine for another five billion years. Home solar can also be combined with batteries (which, like solar, are rapidly declining in cost) for energy storage at night.

At the utility scale, gigantic solar projects are now emerging in many countries. Recent years have seen the first gigawatt-scale (GW) facilities. The largest has a nameplate capacity of 2.3 GW. China is the world leader, accounting for 30% of all solar electric generation, followed by Europe (21%) and then the USA (16%). The vast majority is produced from PV modules, with a small fraction obtained by concentrated solar power (using mirrors or lenses to concentrate a large area of sunlight onto a receiver).

Continue reading “Solar power reaches 1 TW milestone” »

A team of researchers from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital has developed a device to help patients experiencing refractory hypoxemia. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their new device and how well it worked when tested on human blood and blood inside of live rats.

Refractory hypoxemia is a condition sometimes experienced by patients on ventilators—it is generally due to acute respiratory distress syndrome. Less oxygen makes the trip from the lungs into the bloodstream, leading to organ damage and sometimes death. Current treatment often involves the use of an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine. It extracts most of a patient’s blood, removes carbon dioxide, adds oxygen and then pumps it back into the patient. Because ventilators can damage lungs, and because access to ECMO machines is limited (and risk of infection is high), the researchers developed a new machine that can add oxygen directly to blood while it is still inside the patient.

The new machine works by first infusing oxygen into a liquid solution. That solution travels through a series of ever-smaller nozzles, reducing the size of the bubbles down to micron scale. The bubbles, the researchers note, are smaller than red blood cells. Next, the bubbles get a coating of a lipid membrane that is similar to some types of natural cell membranes. This prevents toxicity and also keeps the bubbles from sticking together. The resulting solution is then injected directly into a patient’s bloodstream. Once inside, the lipids dissolve, releasing the oxygen into the bloodstream. They are tiny enough that they will not block any blood vessels.

An elastic light-emitting polymer that glows like a filament in a light bulb could lead to affordable, practical and robust flexible screens.

Flexible screens could form part of wearable computers that stick to our skin and do away with the need to carry a separate smartphone or laptop. But the various existing flexible displays all have flaws: they either require high voltages to run, are too fragile, too expensive, not bendy enough or lack brightness.

A gas made of particles of light, or photons, becomes easier to compress the more you squash it. This strange property could prove useful in making highly sensitive sensors.

While gases are normally made from atoms or molecules, it is possible to create a gas of photons by trapping them with lasers. But a gas made this way doesn’t have a uniform density – researchers say it isn’t homogeneous, or pure – making it difficult to study properly.

Now Julian Schmitt at the University of Bonn, Germany, and his colleagues have made a homogeneous photon gas for the first time by trapping photons between two nanoscale mirrors.

Odd radio circles, or ORCs, are so massive that they measure about a million light-years across — 16 times bigger than our Milky Way galaxy. Now, astronomers have captured the best image yet of these strange celestial objects.

It’s a big ask to tell countries with very little access to electricity to accept the same level of responsibility as electricity-rich nations in striving to achieve the net-zero 2050 emissions target set by the United Nations. And nuclear energy has to be in the mix.

Is the IPCC goal of getting to net-zero by 2050 aspirational or legitimate? A Foreign Policy Review panel tackles the question.

A new study of an ancient Roman tomb might have uncovered the secret to Roman concrete’s longevity. Turns out it could have a secret ingredient.

Ingenuity, the helicopter currently zipping its way around Mars, has been a hotly watched topic here at UT. After completing its 21st mission and being on the planet for a little over a year, Ingenuity’s handlers have officially extended its mission in the hopes that it will continue its stellar, groundbreaking performances.

Perseverance, Ingenuity’s rover companion, is transitioning into its second scientific campaign, where it plans to travel 130 meters up from the Jezero crater floor to a dried-up river delta. Here it will focus on one of its primary missions – searching for evidence of ancient life on Mars. And Ingenuity will help lead the way.

Even Ingenuity’s path to the river delta, which isn’t limited to staying on the ground, won’t be easy. It will likely take three separate flights to get to a new staging area in the delta, including one that goes around a hill that rises off the crater floor. During this time, it will help scout a pathway for Perseverance to take, including providing information to decide which of two river channels the rover should take to reach the delta itself.

Other than Earth, no planet in our solar system has been so thoroughly or long examined as Mars. For decades, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has continuously explored the Red Planet with an array of orbiters, landers, and rovers.

What laid the groundwork for this unparallel record of exploration? This 90-minute documentary describes the challenges of JPL’s first attempts to send spacecraft to the Red Planet.

Continue reading “JPL and the Space Age: The Changing Face of Mars” »