Stephan: Here is the latest on the the Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) trend. I continue to believe something is going to come out of this from one of these companies that is a game changer.
There has been steady progress in the world of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), better known as Cold Fusion, in the last few months. The main commercial players have been quiet — although April is likely to be make-or-break for ‘Energy Catalyser’ (E-Cat) inventor Andrea Rossi — but the open-source Martin Fleishmann Memorial Project (MFMP) has made some big steps towards its goal of proving the reality of LENR to a skeptical world.
Bob Greenyer is one of the driving forces behind the MFMP. He’s a successful entrepreneur, having run a diverse portfolio of businesses in the fields of pharmaceuticals, finance, advertising and education. But now he’s in a business that costing him money rather than making it, and he loves it. Like the other MFMP team members, he has put in a lot of his own time and money because he believes in the cause.
While Rossi’s Leonardo Corp and rivals Defkalion are working in close secrecy with the aim of making money, the MFMP has no interest in intellectual property, says Greenyer. It wants to share it with the world.
One of the MFMP’s first aims is a cheap, simple apparatus that can be easily replicated and which shows that ‘new […]
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EMILY DUGAN, - The Independent (UK)
Stephan: One clearly sees the character of these corporations in times of disaster. They have obviously spent billions developing extraction technologies, and virtually nothing on how to cope with what happens if it all goes wrong. Here is as clear an example as anyone could provide.
Hundreds of beached dolphin carcasses, shrimp with no eyes, contaminated fish, ancient corals caked in oil and some seriously unwell people are among the legacies that scientists are still uncovering in the wake of BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill.
This week it will be three years since the first of 4.9 billion barrels of crude oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, in what is now considered the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. As the scale of the ecological disaster unfolds, BP is appearing daily in a New Orleans federal court to battle over the extent of compensation it owes to the region.
Infant dolphins were found dead at six times average rates in January and February of 2013. More than 650 dolphins have been found beached in the oil spill area since the disaster began, which is more than four times the historical average. Sea turtles were also affected, with more than 1,700 found stranded between May 2010 and November 2012 – the last date for which information is available. On average, the number stranded annually in the region is 240.
Contact with oil may also have reduced the number of juvenile bluefin tuna produced in 2010 […]
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JOHN VIDAL, - The Guardian/Observer (U.K.)
Stephan: Our failure to properly address climate change holds this in store. It is an extraordinary act of self-damage with enormous consequences.
Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.
As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor.
Frank Rijsberman, head of the world’s 15 international CGIAR crop research centres, which study food insecurity, said: ‘Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect
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, - Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: Month by month, year by year we are unraveling our past. Here is the story's latest installment.
She walked with a knock-kneed gait, with a heel like a chimp but the upright posture of a human, and she may provide the most complete evidence yet of early man’s closest ancestor, scientists said Thursday.
Two-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba’s awkward strut would eventually send a modern man begging for a knee or hip replacement, but scientists are stunned at how evolution equipped her for both climbing trees and walking.
The latest research on an unprecedented set of fossil bones from South Africa reveal an ancient creature with long arms and primitive shoulders like an ape, but legs that could straighten, dexterous hands and a human-like thumb for precision grip.
‘Just a weird, weird combination,’ said Jeremy DeSilva of Boston University, lead author of one of the six articles in the US journal Science that describe the most complete set of bones ever found for an early hominid.
The latest findings offer more distinctions from the famed hominid Lucy, who was discovered in 1974 and whose species Australopithecus afarensis roamed eastern Africa 3.2 million years ago, experts said.
‘What these papers suggest is that sediba probably doesn’t come from the East African species that Lucy comes from,’ said Lee Berger, who in 2008 discovered the fossil […]
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Stephan: Lightbulbs seem such a little thing, but, as this report notes, lighting accounts for nearly 20 per cent of the world's electrical usage. Like so many little things it adds up. So I see this as very good news.
Lighting company Philips has developed an LED lamp that it describes as ‘the world’s most energy-efficient’.
It said the prototype tube lighting LED is twice as efficient as those currently used in offices and industry around the world but offers the same amount of light.
Being able to halve the amount of energy used could bring huge cost and energy savings.
Lighting accounts for more than 19% of global electricity consumption.
The prototype tube lighting produces 200 lumens per watt (200lm/W) compared with 100lm/W for equivalent strip lighting and 15lm/W for traditional light bulbs.
Light-emitting diodes have been around for years.
Traditionally, they have been used as indicators on electrical devices, such as standby lights on TVs. This was because LEDs were available only in red, but recent advances mean that other colours are now available, and the light emitted is much brighter.
White light (used for general lighting) using LEDs can be created via a number of techniques. One example is mixing red, green and blue LEDs.
It is suggested that LEDs can last for up to 100,000 hours, compared with the 1,000 hours of traditional incandescent light bulbs and compact fluorescent lamps’ (CFLs) 15,000 hours.
The technology is also much more energy-efficient, using up to 90% less […]
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