Lifeboat Foundation

In the United States, the energy market dynamics are quite different. There is less top-down pressure to deploy renewables in the US, and the main support comes in the form of tax credits on the back end rather than feed-in tariffs or other subsidies on the customer-facing side. These subsidies are applied across the industry and not through a competitive bidding process. As a result, there isn’t as strong a push to get the industry off the incentives that are available.

But one element of the American renewable energy experience is gaining ground in Europe, namely the use of power purchasing agreements (PPAs) with utilities to buy electricity at a fixed price for years at a time.

PPAs are far less common in Europe than in the United States, but some of these new unsubsidized renewable energy projects are counting on them.

Continue reading “Europe is building more wind and solar — without any subsidies” »

Research on people’s reaction to life extension is rather rare; this article discusses two such papers.

Two papers by Partridge et al [1, 2], both published in 2009, provide the somewhat rare opportunity to examine some concerns about life extension as formulated by actual people, rather than their general, more abstract forms. As highlighted in the studies, research on the public’s perception of life extension science has been very much neglected; this, in turn, has made it harder to identify the misconceptions and incorrect information fueling some common concerns about life extension and made it even harder to address those very concerns. Needless to say, the more that the public views life extension negatively, the less supportive that it will probably be, which is bad news for researchers.

The papers present the results of several interviews, conducted either in person or on the phone, aimed at understanding what ethical concerns the interviewees had about life extension and what implications they thought extended human lifespans would have for themselves and for society. The research was conducted on a sample of the Australian population only, but the issues they raised were entirely representative of a typical discussion about life extension. In both studies, the interviewees were presented with the general premise of possibly slowing down aging and the onset of age-related diseases in order to greatly extend human healthy lifespan.

Continue reading “Popular reactions to life extension” »

Who wants to lose weight, feel great, and live a long and healthy life, and what does it take to achieve these goals? Diet and exercise are equally important in long-term health, but let’s look at what recent science is telling us about the healthiest diets.

This article will rely heavily on University of Southern California professor Valter Longo’s work because I consider it to be the gold standard for nutrition research, and his recommendations in his book The Longevity Diet are well-supported with both data and good logic. Longo is the director of the Longevity Institute at USC and the IFOM Program on Longevity and Cancer in Milan.

He comes from an area of Italy known for very long lives, and part of his research focus has been looking at similar areas around the world and why those people live so much longer than normal.

Love him or hate him, Softbank’s Masayoshi Son is shaking up Silicon Valley and global investing. He once lost more money than anyone has ever lost in history, but has since recovered to make some of the world’s most successful tech investments. (Video by Robin Fall) (Source: Bloomberg)

All Nippon Airways’ parent company ANA Holdings has made a Y200 million ($1.8 million) investment in commercial space flight company PD Aerospace.

The equity infusion, via a third-party allotment, comes on top of a Y20.4 million investment that the company made in October 2016.

“ANA is excited about the future of transportation and how PD Aerospace’s space technology will play an integral role,” says Yoshiaki Tsuda, vice-president of ANA Digital Design Lab. “We are increasing our support to help expedite the project’s timeline of testing and launching an unmanned spacecraft to an altitude of 100km.”

Continue reading “ANA Holdings tips Y200m into spacecraft company” »

A rare earth element that doesn’t get much mention could become the key to upgrading atomic clocks to become even more accurate. This could help us explore space and track satellites, and even keep the world’s time zones in sync.

Atomic clocks use the oscillations of atoms under laser fire as a measurement of time, in the same way a grandfather clock uses the swing of a pendulum. They can lose less than a second over 50 million years, depending on the elements used — but scientists want even greater accuracy.

That’s where lutetium (Lu) comes in. It offers both a higher level of stability and a higher degree of precision than the caesium or rubidium of today’s atomic clocks, according to a team of researchers from the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) in Singapore.

Continue reading “A Forgotten Element Could Help Us Redefine The Way We Measure Time” »

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A new theory suggests that dark matter may be more dynamic than we currently assume.

In general, modelers attack the problem by breaking it into billions of bits, either by dividing space into a 3D grid of subvolumes or by parceling the mass of dark and ordinary matter into swarms of particles. The simulation then tracks the interactions among those elements while ticking through cosmic time in, say, million-year steps. The computations strain even the most powerful supercomputers. BlueTides, for example, runs on Blue Waters—a supercomputer at the University of Illinois in Urbana that can perform 13 quadrillion calculations per second. Merely loading the model consumes 90% of the computer’s available memory, Feng says.

For years such simulations produced galaxies that were too gassy, massive, and blobby. But computer power has increased, and, more important, models of the radiation-matter feedback have improved. Now, hydrodynamic simulations have begun to produce the right number of galaxies of the right masses and shapes—spiral disks, squat ellipticals, spherical dwarfs, and oddball irregulars—says Volker Springel, a cosmologist at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany who worked on Millennium and leads the Illustris simulation. “Until recently, the simulation field struggled to make spiral galaxies,” he says. “It’s only in the last 5 years that we’ve shown that you can make them.”

The models now show that, like people, galaxies tend to go through distinct life stages, Hopkins says. When young, a galaxy roils with activity, as one merger after another stretches and contorts it, inducing spurts of star formation. After a few billion years, the galaxy tends to settle into a relatively placid and stable middle age. Later, it can even slip into senescence as it loses its gas and the ability make stars—a transition our Milky Way appears to be making now, Hopkins says. But the wild and violent turns of adolescence make the particular path of any galaxy hard to predict, he says.

Continue reading “Galaxy simulations are at last matching reality—and producing surprising insights into cosmic evolution” »