Quote of the Day: “Sometimes, being true to yourself means changing your mind.” – Vera Nazarian
Photo by: Shad Meeg
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An Australian company has invented a totally new electrolyzer to expand use of hydrogen fuel, which they say represents the first real revolution in the technology in 200 years.
Separating water into hydrogen gas and oxygen through electrical current, known as “electrolysis,” is both the chief method behind green hydrogen energy, and expensive and inefficient.
Yet for long-haul trucking, steel manufacturing, and more, hydrogen could be the only input available in green energy’s arsenal to replace petroleum products. The Swedish company SSAB is already making steel a bit greener by using hydrogen power to replace coal as a carbon input.
The Australian firm Hysata has changed the design of the major component to make the cost of pure hydrogen fuel competitive with fossil fuels by decreasing the heat and resistance generated through separating hydrogen.
“What we did differently was just to start completely over and to think about it from a very high level,” Gerry Swiegers, Hysata’s chief technology officer and a professor at the Univ. of Wollongong, New South Wales, told the Guardian. “Everyone else was looking at improving materials or an existing design.”
In a scientific paper, published in Nature, demonstrating their new electrolyzer’s potential, they first outline the problem with the old ones—namely that even state-of-the-art water electrolyzers typically require ~53 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce 1 kg of hydrogen, which contains 39.4 kWh of energy: a deficit of ~12.
Before we can understand why that deficit exists, it bares a short explanation of how these devices work.
An electrolyzer consists of an anode and a cathode separated by a sponge-like membrane. H2O is sent into the anode, where its electrons are stripped and turned into electricity, powering whatever it’s connected to. Its positively charged protons then cross through the membrane into the cathode, where oxygen is pulled into. There, the protons, reunited with their electrons post-electricity harvest, combine with the oxygen to form water and heat: the only emissions.
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Where Hysata break from long tradition is that in their electrolyzer’s circular shape, the hydrophilic membrane sits immersed only a little in an electrolyte reservoir in the same place as where the water enters. The membrane continuously pulls up the water and the electrolyte in steady amounts that allow electrolysis to occur without the formation of hydrogen gas bubbles typical of electrolyzers which house the anode and cathode entirely within the hydrogen reservoir.
These gas bubbles block physical access to the catalyst on the anode and cathode, reducing efficiency. The elimination of the gas bubble problem results in Hysata’s efficiency rate of 95%, or 41.5 kWh per kilogram of hydrogen.
Hysata aren’t just scientists however, and the economics of their electrolyzer make sense. The membranes are easy to manufacture and the process can be automated at scale.
The International Renewables Energy Agency set a target of 2050 to invent new methods of electrolysis that will reduce the kWh required per kilogram produced to 42. Hysata are now the only entity on Earth to have achieved that, and if a long-haul trucking sector required 1 million tons of hydrogen per year, generating that with Hysata’s technology would save $3 billion.
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An image recently shared around social media of empty strollers on a Polish rail border crossing has inspired a mountain of donations for Ukrainian refugees.
Now at Przemyśl Station, women, children, and infants fleeing the war are being greeted by mountains of clothes, stuffed animals, strollers, diapers, and more after they step off the train.
ABC reports that the number of spare carriers and strollers from Polish mothers have been particularly inspiring, with many donators leaving handwritten notes behind, with words of support.
“We see on the television and hear on the radio what happened, and we say ‘okay we can help,'” one Polish mother and volunteer told ABC.
The effort has become more organized over the weeks, which CNN details has spread like wildfire mostly by word of mouth. The Medyka border crossing from Ukraine involves taking a train to Przemyśl Station, which has become the center of the relief effort.
RELATED: Ukraine Receives Truckload of Starlink Terminals From Elon Musk For Uninterrupted Internet
The rooms of the train station are now being transformed from waiting rooms into warehouses, for food, diapers, and clothes.
Beyond the station, people from across Europe have been seen waiting in cars offering to drive incoming refugees to wherever they have relations, or a place to stay.
(WATCH the GMA video for this story below.)
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After a stroke, patients may lose feeling in an arm or experience weakness and reduced movement that limits their ability to complete basic daily activities.
Traditional rehabilitation therapy is very intensive, time-consuming, and can be both expensive and inconvenient, especially for rural patients travelling long distances to in-person therapy appointments.
That’s why a team of researchers, including one at the University of Missouri, utilized a motion-sensor video game, Recovery Rapids, to allow patients recovering from a stroke to improve their motor skills and affected arm movements at home while checking in periodically with a therapist via telehealth.
The researchers found the game-based therapy led to improved outcomes similar to a highly regarded form of in-person therapy, known as constraint-induced therapy, while only requiring one-fifth of the therapist hours. This approach saves time and money while increasing convenience and safety as telehealth has boomed in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“As an occupational therapist, I have seen patients from rural areas drive more than an hour to come to an in-person clinic three to four days a week, where the rehab is very intensive, taking three to four hours per session, and the therapist must be there the whole time,” said Rachel Proffitt, assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions.
“With this new at-home gaming approach, we are cutting costs for the patient and reducing time for the therapist while still improving convenience and overall health outcomes, so it’s a win-win. By saving time for the therapists, we can also now serve more patients and make a broader impact on our communities.”
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Traditional rehab home exercises tend to be very repetitive and monotonous, and patients rarely adhere to them. The Recovery Rapids game helps patients look forward to rehabilitation by completing various challenges in a fun, interactive environment, and the researchers found that the patients adhered well to their prescribed exercises.
“The patient is virtually placed in a kayak, and as they go down the river, they perform arm motions simulating paddling, rowing, scooping up trash, swaying from side to side to steer, and reaching overhead to clear out spider webs and bats, so it’s making the exercises fun,” Proffitt said. “As they progress, the challenges get harder, and we conduct check-ins with the participants via telehealth to adjust goals, provide feedback and discuss the daily activities they want to resume as they improve.”
Nearly 800,000 Americans have a stroke each year according to the CDC, and two-thirds of stroke survivors report they cannot use their affected limbs to do normal daily activities, including making a cup of coffee, cooking a meal or playing with one’s grandchildren.
“I am passionate about helping patients get back to all the activities they love to do in their daily life,” Proffitt said. “Anything we can do as therapists to help in a creative way while saving time and money is the ultimate goal.”
This research was recently published in eClinicalMedicine, an open-access journal from The Lancet.
Source: University of Missouri
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A baby rhino named “Kyiv” in honor of the Ukrainian defenders was born in a Czech zoo exactly a week after Russia began its invasion of the country.
Belonging to the Eastern black rhinoceros subspecies, Kyiv’s birth is another success for one of the few zoos in the world with a successful breeding program for these rare rhinos.
Kyiv is the 47th rhino of this critically endangered subspecies born in the Dvur Kralove Zoo since they received their first one back in 1971, and the first one born in about four years.
The young rhino’s mother, Eva, has been taking extremely good care of him and is very calm, even allowing some of her milk to be taken for the feeding of other youngsters, per an update from the zoo itself.
Sans horn, the little one is nevertheless growing fast—2.2 pounds per day usually.
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AP reports that Kyiv is one of four baby rhinos of this species born so far this year.
The zoo’s animals have, over the years, been transferred to other zoos to help genetic diversity of other breeding programs, and nine of their rhinos have been reintroduced into the wilds of Rwanda and Tanzania, and have since reproduced there.
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The latest update to the IUCN’s Red List found that the rhino numbers are increasing faster than they are decreasing.
Furthermore, the population remains largely intact, with animals able to reach each other easily, and there is a normal percentage of healthy mature animals among them.
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Quote of the Day: “True piety” is “loving one’s destiny unconditionally.” – Isak Dinesen
Photo by: Brunno Tozzo
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
A tiny marine microbe which could turn out to be a ‘secret weapon’ in the battle against climate change has been discovered.
The single-celled microbe has potential to absorb carbon naturally, even as oceans become warmer and more acidic, say scientists.
It is abundant around the world and can photosynthesize as well as hunt and eat prey.
The tiny organism, discovered by researchers in Sydney, Australia, secretes a carbon-rich exopolymer that attracts and immobilizes other microbes.
Then it eats some of the prey trapped inside before emitting the mucus-like, carbon-rich substance.
Once other microbes are trapped inside it, it becomes heavier and sinks, pumping carbon back into the oceans.
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Marine microbes govern the natural environment through a range of processes, including the vertical export and sequestration of carbon, which ultimately regulates the world’s climate.
While the role of plankton in helping store carbon dioxide is well understood, the role of other microbes in this process is less well known about, the scientists say.
This is especially true for organisms that can photosynthesize and eat other organisms.
They say their findings are hugely significant for how we see the ocean balancing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
It is estimated that the species, christened prorocentrum cf. balticum, has the potential to sink 0.02-0.15 gigatons of carbon each year.
Experts believe that, to meet climate goals, 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide will need to be removed from the atmosphere every year from now until 2050.
The findings imply there is more potential for carbon sinking in the oceans than it was previously believed, and that the seas could capture carbon in unexpected places.
The process could form part of a nature-based way of enhancing carbon capture in the ocean.
Lead study author Dr Michaela Larsson said, “Most terrestrial plants use nutrients from the soil to grow, but some, like the Venus flytrap, gain additional nutrients by catching and consuming insects.
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“Similarly, marine microbes that photosynthesize, known as phytoplankton, use nutrients dissolved in the surrounding seawater to grow.
“However, our study organism, prorocentrum cf. balticum, is a mixotroph, so is also able to eat other microbes for a concentrated hit of nutrients, like taking a multivitamin.
“Having the capacity to acquire nutrients in different ways means this microbe can occupy parts of the ocean devoid of dissolved nutrients and therefore unsuitable for most phytoplankton.”
The study’s senior author Professor Martina Doblin said, “This is an entirely new species, never before described in this amount of detail.
“The implication is that there’s potentially more carbon sinking in the ocean than we currently think, and that there is perhaps greater potential for the ocean to capture more carbon naturally through this process, in places that weren’t thought to be potential carbon sequestration locations.
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“The natural production of extra-cellular carbon-rich polymers by ocean microbes under nutrient-deficient conditions, which we’ll see under global warming, suggest these microbes could help maintain the biological carbon pump in the future ocean.
“The next step before assessing the feasibility of large-scale cultivation is to gauge the proportion of the carbon-rich exopolymers resistant to bacteria breakdown and determine the sinking velocity of discarded mucospheres.
“This could be a game changer in the way we think about carbon and the way it moves in the marine environment.”
The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.
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Europe’s first large-scale biorefinery for turning algae into fuels and feedstocks has been completed on the Black Sea shore of Istanbul.
Set to head up a new “bio-economy,” the refinery, powered entirely by wind energy, will turn microalgae and macroalgae species into carbon-negative jet fuel, feedstocks, supplements, and fertilizers.
They are carbon negative because algae absorbs CO2 as plants do, but far faster and in much greater amounts than woody plants like trees. Once processed into products, more of that carbon pulled from the atmosphere remains imprisoned than is released during production, hence it being carbon negative.
The project was funded in partnership by the government of Turkey and the European Union, and is just one of a number of initiatives dubbed Project INDEPENDENT. The biorefinery, located at Boğaziçi University’s Sarıtepe Campus, can process 1,200 tons of algae per year.
Reporting on the refinery says that the algae will be used to produce jet fuel that, when mixed with 5-10% fossil fuels, will power a flight leaving Istanbul by the end of the year.
The coconut palm is sometimes called the tree of 1,000 uses, well algae is certainly the plant of 1,000 uses. Algae-based supplements have been trialed in both Brazil and Australia as ways to diminish the methane emissions from ruminant grazers like cows and sheep.
Algae, as Project INDEPENDENT details, also can be used to absorb phosphorus and nitrogen: two normal and important agricultural inputs that due to topsoil erosion from industrialized farming have greatly polluted freshwater and coastal resources.
Algae is eaten as a vegetable in many parts of the world. Wakame and nori especially, are delicious, and as far as carb stocks go, they are far more nutritious than grains.
Algae supplements are also excellent chelators, or compounds which attract and dispose of heavy metals in the blood, such as cadmium, lead, mercury, and excess levels of less harmful metals. Other benzine-based particulates such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which can be released from the burning of fossil fuels in power plants, car engines, or fireplaces, can also be taken up by algae-sourced chemicals like spirulina and chlorella before being excreted in the urine.
LOOK: This Plant-Based Jet Fuel Can Reduce Emissions by 68% – Without Displacing Crops
Lastly, synthetic fertilizers are produced with large amounts of CO2 emissions contributions to the agriculture sector.
Non-synthetic fertilizer often comes from fish or shellfish waste like oyster shells, being that they’re rich in nitrogen. Producing fertilizer with algae produced in a carbon negative biorefinery could revolutionize the sector, and return attention of legislatures and environmentalists to the real sources of emissions in the world, namely transport, energy, and manufacturing.
(WATCH the video for this story below.)
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GNN reported earlier this month that from March 2nd to March 3rd, people from around the world booked 61,000 nights in Ukrainian cities via Airbnb, likely not one ever planning to check-in, or reschedule.
It was part of a creative social media campaign to channel funds into besieged cities where something like aid drops or supply trucks can’t reach, and saw $1.9 million raised for Ukrainians in just 48 hours.
Since that day, booking of Airbnbs across Ukraine has continued, with 434,000 rooms reserved and $15 million raised.
“We are so humbled by the inspiring generosity of our community during this moment of crisis,” said Haven Thorn, a company spokesperson. The company’s CEO also responded on Twitter.
One week later, 434,000 nights have been booked. That’s $15M going to Hosts in Ukraine
— Brian Chesky 🇺🇦 (@bchesky) March 12, 2022
On behalf of our Hosts in Ukraine, thank you. https://t.co/TXoQzDbF9l
Apart from this clever fundraising, the past two weeks have seen Airbnb.org, the business’s non-profit wing, receive more than $5.2 million in small-dollar, direct donations from a total of more than 59,000 individual donors across 92 countries.
Airbnb was also quick to announce it would be setting up temporary housing for 100,000 Ukrainian refugees across Europe and North America.
Airbnb hosts have answered this generosity with their own, and more than 21,000 individuals have signed up to open their Airbnb-listed properties to Ukrainians, including 14,000 across Europe and 4,000 in the U.S.
The Utah Jazz Foundation is also partnering with Airbnb.org to provide more than 32,200 nights of temporary housing to refugees fleeing Ukraine, a number representing exactly 200% of the capacity of their Vivint Arena home stadium.
“I cannot begin to express my thanks to the Utah Jazz Foundation for their support of Airbnb.org’s work,” said Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and chairman of Airbnb.org.
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In order to ensure a more comfortable stay, and to place less strain on their clients, a total of $16,625,000 has been contributed to an aid fund to help pay for these refugees’ lodgings, food, and other necessities by Airbnb employees and its co-founders, one of whom appeared on Ellen DeGeneres to announce an additional $10 million matching donation.
They said they were inspired by the reaction from their community and wanted to do their part.
Airbnb hosts that want to help need only register on the Airbnb.org Help Ukraine page.
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In 1857, a steam boat was going down in a storm off the coast of South Carolina. Loaded with more gold than had ever been placed onto a boat, the passengers chose to take photographs of family and loved ones before taking their chance with Davy Jones.
Thank to a recent expedition, dozens of these 150-year-old glass pane photographs have been recovered, putting a face on the SS Central America‘s unfortunates.
If the Titanic was the “Ship of Dreams,” Central America was the “Ship of Gold,” and of her 425 lost souls, most were miners returning from California gold fields wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
Dr. Sean Kingsley, a British maritime archaeologist, was financed by private investors who have been trying to recover the treasure for more than 30 years, to dive down a mile and a half off the coast of South Carolina and retrieve what he could.
He partnered with Odyssey Marine Expeditions to make the dive, and the Kingsley co-wrote a paper on the discovery with an Odyssey scientist.
These tintype photos—daguerreotypes and ambrotypes—are kinds of wet collodion photography, and consist of panes of glass coated in chemicals. Ambrotypes produced a negative image that could be seen in front of black material, while daguerreotypes produced positive images visible when backlit.
“When you look at the actual faces of people, it takes you right there. You are looking at folks who lived it, and they’re just like us, although the clothing and fashions have changed,” Dr. Kingsley told The Guardian.
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One individual he called the ‘Mona Lisa of the Depths’ is a young woman whose image is startlingly, almost eerily preserved. She stands with a quarter-smile, bare shoulders, swathed in jewels and lace.
The wreck and the tintypes are there to be seen in the magazine managed and published by Dr. Kingsley called Wreckwatch.
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“This is the largest cache of early photographs found at sea, and unpublished until now. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to actually see faces from the deep,” he said.
The SS Central America sank off South Carolina in 1857 with the loss of 425 lives. Dr Kingsley is focusing attention on a collection of glass plate photos that preserved the faces of miners,merchants &their families,staring up at the living from the seabed https://t.co/gyf7Z7Kipa pic.twitter.com/MlhPKTcR2m
— Ticia Verveer (@ticiaverveer) February 27, 2022
153 people are believed to have survived; mostly women and children who filled up the lifeboats. Of the other 425, The Wreckwatch review includes the words of one survivor.
“A great many of the passengers were miners, having considerable sums of gold about them, the product of years of toil. But the love of gold was forgotten in the anxiety and terror of the moment and many a man unbuckled his gold-stuffed belt and flung his hard-earned treasure upon the deck, some hoping to lighten their weight, and thus more easily keep themselves afloat, while others threw it away in despair, thinking there was no use for it in the watery grave they were going to.”
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Quote of the Day: “Whether I drink often or just once in a while; I’m always sure to raise a glass to the dear old Emerald Isle.” – Pat Maloney (Happy St. Patrick’s Day!)
Photo by: (above) Jeff Hart, CC license; (below) Grafvision, Fotolia license
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Geri and Anthony return to podcasting, talking about changes for GNN, a new podcast called Livin’ Good Currency, and our favorite good news stories of the week… Recorded on March 11, 2022.
REVIEW and Subscribe to the show on iTunes—or Podbean, or on Spotify.
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When marine biologists subjected two of the most common coral species to a +2°C aquarium for two years, mother nature showed she may just have a trick or two yet up her sleeves.
Keeping the planet from warming 2°C over the next thirty years has become somewhat of a mantra, especially when it comes to discussing vulnerable coral reefs in warming oceans, but the new experiment sheds light on potential adaptations scientists hadn’t foreseen.
Planning the longest coral resilience experiment ever done, coral expert Rowan McLachlan and her colleagues used a hammer and chisel to take samples of common corals from the reefs around Oahu, Hawai’i.
Rice coral, finger coral, and lobe coral were then transported into a 35-gallon aquarium on Coconut Island filled with sand, rubble, fish, and plankton, before being left outside to experience similar weather conditions as they would if they were under water.
“Porites compressa (finger coral) and Porites lobata (lobe coral) had the highest survivorship and coped well under future ocean conditions with positive calcification and increased biomass, maintenance of lipids, and the capacity to exceed their metabolic demand through photosynthesis and heterotrophy,” McLachlan et al. wrote in their corresponding paper on the experiment, published in Nature.
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“We saw this long-term arc where you see stress responses, but after long enough there was acclimatization,” Andréa Grottoli, a coral biogeochemist at Ohio State who was senior author of the paper, told National Geographic. “They weren’t just struggling. Two of the three species were doing really well.”
Interestingly, reef monitors in Hawai’i also told National Geographic that the experiment jived with what they are observing in the corals around the islands, adding that if they can be protected from pollution and other man-made disturbances, they should be able to survive in the coming decades.
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It’s good news for reefs around the world, since lobe coral is a pioneer species, and often the first kind of coral to begin building a reef. Finger coral too is not only found in Hawai’i but throughout the reefs in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
They could act as decent species for coral reef restoration projects, a yet-unexplored potential way to mitigate coral loss by actively expanding their populations, an option that a decade ago would probably not have been taken, Grottoli admits.
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A breeding ground for green turtles has seen a 500 percent boom in the numbers of clutches of eggs laid since hunting them was banned.
Scientists say the great conservation success story shows how numbers can slowly recover after killing the turtles was outlawed on Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles in 1968.
Back thenm around 2,000-3,000 clutches of eggs were laid a year—a figure that stands at 12,000-15,000 in the last data from 2019.
And with Aldabra’s turtle population still being well below estimated pre-exploitation population numbers, the increase is likely to continue.
A team from Exeter University analyzed the figures provided by researchers from the Seychelles Islands Foundation.
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Study lead author Adam Pritchard, from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall, said, “Green turtles have suffered massive historical population declines due to intensive harvesting of nesting females
“Aldabra Atoll was the first green turtle nesting site to be protected in the Western Indian Ocean, with a ban on turtle capture in 1968, followed by continued long-term monitoring by Seychelles Islands Foundation researchers.”
Professor Brendan Godley, who helped supervise the research, added, “It’s been an honour to support the analysis of the decades of work by the Seychelles team.
“The ongoing population increase of Aldabra’s green turtles is testament to long-term protection, and offers some clear evidence of the fact that we can be optimistic about marine conservation, well enacted.”
The study’s results reveal that green turtle clutches have increased at Aldabra by 2.6% per year overall, with the greatest increase at Settlement Beach on Picard, where exploitation of nesting females was historically the most intense.
Cheryl Sanchez, co-author of the study, published in the journal Endangered Species Research, who is currently doing a PhD on Aldabra’s turtles, said, “This study demonstrates the importance of long-term monitoring, which is often seen as less glamorous and valuable than targeted research.
“It has taken decades of tireless commitment to collect the data to confirm this increase, and the foresight to protect the nesting population before it was too late.
“Aldabra’s green turtles should continue to be an incredible conservation success story that we can follow for decades to come.”
The study’s figures confirm Aldabra as the second-largest monitored green turtle rookery in the region.
The research also shows the considerable contribution of Aldabra to regional green turtle numbers and clearly demonstrates the benefits of long-term protection and monitoring.
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A meta-analysis of more than half a million people has shown that a truly bare minimum of strength training can confer enormous benefit.
Researchers in Japan discovered that 30-60 minutes per week of muscle strengthening activities such as yoga, lifting weights, or gardening can reduce the risk of death from all causes by 10-20%.
When combined with aerobic exercise such as running, cycling, or swimming, this benefit was seen to rise to the 40 percentiles.
16 studies were looked at in the analysis. They consisted of more than half-a-million healthy adults being monitored for a period of at least twi years. The age range went from 18-97, and the monitoring period from 2-25 years.
All-cause mortality was looked at separately from heart disease and cancer, both of which tended to fall between 10-20%.
Reporting on the findings, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the Guardian noted that muscle strengthening activity doesn’t have to involve grunting over kettle and bar bells, but carrying children long enough, pushing a wheelchair, carrying shopping bags, heavy gardening, doing body weight exercises like pushups, squats, or sit-ups, or working with resistance bands.
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There was an L-shaped curve, showing that extending strength training by more than an hour slowly tapered off its effectiveness in fighting disease and mortality rates. Moderate to intense physical activity is already recommended at about 150 minutes per week, a generally-recognized minimum to build and maintain healthy skeleto-muscular function.
Extending strength training beyond 60 minutes per week has other health benefits not-related to death, heart disease, and cancer.
RELATED: Intensive Exercise the ‘Best Way to Alleviate Symptoms of Chronic Anxiety Without Drugs or Therapy’
It increases BDNF, a neurotransmitter in the brain key for proper hormonal function and memory, it clears stress hormones while releasing endorphins, fights off the onset of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases, it builds lean muscle mass, which itself is a predictor for disease, morbidity, and injury risk, and more.
The authors recognized limitations of the study, mainly that it relied on data from English-speaking countries. Greater diversity of participants would better flush out the research.
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From a crocodile’s toothy grin to a pouting fish the size of pea, some of the world’s best underwater pictures have been revealed in a top competition.
More than 1,200 pictures were entered for the 2021 underwaterphotography.com contest across 10 categories, from Macro Photography to Sharks.
The winner of the gold medal in the Over/Under category is this smiling crocodile in Cuba by Italian Massimo Giorgetta, taken in Garden of the Queen, a protected area on an archipelago on the south of the island.
Fellow Italian Raffaele Livornese won the Wide Angle/Marine Life category with this beautifully composed shot of two sea lions playing whilst hunting on a school of sardines in La Paz, Mexico.
This tiny juvenile pouting trunkfish was only the size of a pea but snapper Leslie Howell from the US bagged a bronze in the Macro-Swimming category.
She said, “This juvenile trunkfish was about the size of a pea. It was pretty active, darting in and out of the coral head, but it finally settled down enough for me to get this shot head on.”
RELATED: See the Stunning Winners of the Northern Lights Photographer of the Year Competition
No underwater photo competition would be complete without a good shark and a Great Hammerhead at Tiger Bay, Bahamas by German Reinhard Arndt was enough to bag him a gold medal.
But there was still beauty to be had in the tiny as these delicate white tufted worms billowing in the current got a bronze in the macro not swimming category for Czech Republic snapper Michal Štros.
Website owner Tal Mor, who runs the competition, said, “It has been a difficult couple of years for dive and travel, yet the competition has still received a total of 1,283 entries.
“This photography contest is the longest running and one of the most prestigious online. A panel of judges select the best images entered in an online photo contest from the previous year.
“Gold, silver, and bronze medals are awarded for the top three from each category in order of merit.
“Many other internationally acclaimed photographers have launched their photo careers here over the years.
“The judges comprise of industry professionals. They are unpaid, non-affiliated, and, of course, cannot enter themselves.”
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Quote of the Day: “I started to trust… Just because I didn’t know how to “fix” my life, didn’t mean I wouldn’t be led.” – Tama Kieves
Photo by: Ian Britton, CC license
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Two-thirds of Brits admit to loving the mood boost they get when doing something environmentally conscious, according to a new survey.
A poll of 2,000 adults found they take pride when buying products that reduce their impact on the environment, and when washing out tubs to reuse them—as well as disposing of food waste in their very own compost bin.
Half also get a buzz from taking a ‘bag for life’ to the shops with them, while spirits are lifted for one in three when ditching single-use wipes in favor of reusable ones.
And two in five are making more effort to visit zero-waste shops to refill old bottles and pots with produce, instead of buying it in packaging.
The survey was commissioned by household cleaning brand Ecover to mark the launch of the Ecover Refillery—a reused petrol station fighting plastic waste with refills.
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Tom Domen, Ecover’s global head of long-term innovation, said, “A small change can make a big difference.
“The simple act of refilling a plastic bottle can make you feel good, while also reducing the amount of plastic waste sent to landfill.
“That’s why we urge you to choose to reuse and join the ‘refillution’ by opting for refillable, reusable household products where you can use the packaging over and over and over.”
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The poll also found 41 percent think the government should be doing more to make refilling as accessible as recycling.
And one in five want to make refilling their products and pantries a priority for the year ahead.
In fact, over half (53 percent) would use ‘refill’ shops more if they had one closer to home, while more refillable stations in mainstream supermarkets would make 62 percent more likely to reuse rather than recycle.
But millions of Brits are already making valuable swaps—including refilling water bottles, reusable coffee cups, and opting for reusable bags.
Ecover’s Tom Domen added, “Refill stations are becoming increasingly common across the country, and a simple search will tell you where your local store is.
“By the end of 2022, we aim to help people refill their Ecover bottles over three million times in the UK—which would be the equivalent of one refill every 10 seconds.
“Just remember that plastic can last a lifetime, so let’s all put it to work.”
The Ecover Refillery will be open to the public for two days:23rd March (10am – 7pm) and 24th March (9am – 7pm), at 69 Borough Road in London.
TOP 20 ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY ACTIVITIES TO PUT BRITS IN A GOOD MOOD:
1. Taking a reusable bag shopping
2. Turning lights off when not in use
3. Reusing food leftovers
4. Washing out plastic containers and recycling them
5. Turning things off at the socket when not in use
6. Using a reusable water bottle
7. Turning down the heating/using the heating less often
8. Washing out packaging/ plastic bottles to reuse them
9. Cycling or walking instead of driving somewhere
10. Washing clothes at 30 degrees
11. Using a food container instead of clingfilm or foil
12. Using reusable cloths instead of single-use wipes
13. Eating less meat
14. Washing clothes less often
15. Disposing of food waste in compost
16. Upcycling or repairing items and clothes to give them a second life
17. Shopping for plastic packaging-free fruit and/or veg
18. Buying second-hand items
19. Buying eco-friendly products
20. Putting leftover food into a compost bin
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As physicists work in the nuclear fusion sector to unlock limitless clean energy through harnessing the power of the sun, they inadvertently invented a tool that could allow geothermal plants to deliver limitless clean energy by harnessing the power of the Earth.
That tool is a large millimeter-wave laser drill that will allow engineers to bore down more than 12.4 miles (20 km) into the Earth’s crust to harness the heat from the planet’s core.
Another link to nuclear fusion is that this laser drilling technology is being pioneered by a spin-off company called Quaise from MIT who also run a nuclear fusion reactor in Massachusetts.
The bottom line is that this idea is not science fiction, and Quaise has the money to put several full-scale demonstration machines into action by 2024, and hopes to have a 100- megawatt supercritical geothermal plant in operation by 2026.
At 12.4 miles into the Earth’s crust, temperatures soar to 500°C, a sector-redefining level compared to traditional drill bit borehole temperatures of around 200°C. At this stage and depth, water under the ground becomes “supercritical,” a state of matter where it’s neither a gas nor a liquid.
“A power plant that uses supercritical water as the working fluid can extract up to 10 times more useful energy from each drop when compared to non-supercritical plants,” a spokesperson from Quaise told New Atlas. “Aiming for supercritical conditions is key to attaining power densities consistent with fossil fuels.”
It’s perhaps ironic that humans would seek to harness the energy of the sun and stars in a nuclear fusion reactor when there is 20 billion times more heat under our feet than the entire world’s energy consumption. Merely 0.03% of global energy is delivered from geothermal despite this richness.
A virtually limitless supply of energy exists in the form of this supercritical fluid snaking its way through the crust and mantle of the planet, and just 0.01% of it would provide far more wattage than the world uses.
In order to reach it though, we need better drilling technology, and Quaise is taking advantage of the work put into a 1970s piece of technology called a gyrotron. When needing to heat water into a plasma at the heart of a nuclear fusion reactor, scientists need to generate between 90-150 million degrees Celsius of heat. This has been done by both lasers and super magnets.
The gyrotron is one of those lasers, and it generates electromagnetic waves in the millimeter-wave spectrum, shorter than microwaves and longer than infrared or visible light. Designed, invented, and tested in the USSR, the device is excellent at rapidly heating up a plasma without substantial energy usage.
So, accessing already existing energy with already existing technology, Quaise has proved itself remarkably efficient. They’ve raised $63 million in funding—a pittance in the field of nuclear fusion, but they’re looking to cut out fossil fuels in a real way before the end of the decade.
Their next planned step may be the greatest recycling trick in the industry. As coal-fired power plants continue to be shuttered around the world, their giant, already established infrastructure for converting steam into electricity, large electricity distribution equipment, and talented workforce could simply be taken over by Quaise, who could merely replace the coal-fired components with those meant for harnessing supercritical water.
“There are somewhere upwards of 8,500 coal-fired power plants around the world, totaling over 2,000 gigawatts of capacity, and they’ll all have to find something else to do by 2050,” writes Loz Blain at New Atlas.
Blain argues this is perhaps more revolutionary than nuclear fusion, and the beauty of the design, if it works, is that the technology originally made for fusion reactors could end up putting them out of a job.
Fusion reaction needs a bare-minimum of a decade more development before it can be deployed commercially. The financial investment needed over that time will also be substantial.
At 12-15 miles below the Earth’s surface, it doesn’t matter where the drill or ex-coal plant is located, the heat will be pretty much the same.
Tens of countries that are now struggling to advance into greener energy sources wouldn’t have to make the transition, which means hundreds of millions of acres of land saved from needing to be covered with wind turbines and solar panels, which produce huge amounts of e-waste, and don’t generate electricity if the weather conditions aren’t suitable.
In fact, the world would be set for a paradigm shift. Since unlimited clean energy could be obtained within most nations, it would untether them from geo-political concerns about oil-rich countries and their human rights abuses. On land and sea, birds and wildlife would be untouched by any massive polluting oil spills that would become a thing of the past.
(WATCH the video for this story below.)
POWER Up Those Feeds With News of This Energy Breakthrough…
The world’s first portable battery pack to recharge an electric vehicle (EV) will be shipping to customers in early 2023.
The ZipCharge Go was designed like a rolling suitcase and meant to address the fact that hundreds of millions of people might want an EV, but live in a building with street parking and therefore no way to recharge their EV at night.
An inability to charge near or at home is one of the main reasons to reject EVs in the UK. According to research, 38% of participants said they were not likely to buy an EV in the next five years, with 36% worried about being unable to charge at home.
With state-of-the art bi-directional charging, the Go can be filled up in one’s house in a single hour, while providing 20-40 miles of extra range in between 30-60 minutes when plugged into one’s car.
20-40 doesn’t sound like much, but neither did the mileage numbers for the early EVs, and the company will look to improve these numbers as soon as the product launches in 2023.
“Since our launch at COP26 in November last year, ZipCharge has received an unprecedented level of interest from potential customers around the world,” said ZipCharge co-founder Jonathan Carrier. “They immediately see the benefit of the Go portable charger to deliver low cost, convenient charging anywhere they park.”
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Carrier and fellow co-founder Richie Sibal haa 40+ years of experiences working in the EV departments for automobile companies like Jaguar Land Rover, Lotus, and McLaren. ZipCharge Go will come with a mobile app that will allow people to track the charging speed and status of their battery.
This will allow users to plug in, go back inside, and see exactly how much time is left to full charge while they make a nice cuppa’, or anything else. This, the owners believe, will be ideal for delivery or service fleet managers, who can monitor the the battery state of all their vehicles in the field, avoid unnecessary stops to recharge, as well as inconvenient parking to charge up back in the depot.
Pricing will be around the same as a high-speed home EV charging station, or available for lease at £49 ($63) per month. However, GNN can confirm that the charging pack will not be available in a leather briefcase, removing the ability for Go owners to pretend they’re spies.
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“We are committed to launching a truly ground-breaking product in the Go, one that meets the needs of a range of customer groups, and how they would like to use the Go,” Carrier says. “This includes private individuals, fleets and end-destinations, such as hotels, retail complexes, supermarkets and leisure activities – all locations where the ZipCharge Go can provide flexible, convenient and low-cost charging for everyone, anywhere they park.”
(WATCH the video for this story below.)
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