Study describes passive cooling system that aims to help impoverished communities, reduce cooling and heating costs, lower CO2 emissions. //

A study published on February 8, 2021, in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science describes a uniquely designed radiative cooling system that:

Lowered the temperature inside a test system in an outdoor environment under direct sunlight by more than 12 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit).

Lowered the temperature of the test box in a laboratory, meant to simulate the night, by more than 14 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit).

Simultaneously captured enough solar power that can be used to heat water to about 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit).

While the system tested was only 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) squared, it could eventually be scaled up to cover rooftops, engineers say, with the goal of reducing society’s reliance on fossil fuels for cooling and heating. It also could aid communities with limited access to electricity.

This database will contains the history of every single Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress which was built. This site shows all the manufactures production-blocks of the B-17s. Click on a production-block to get details of the B-17 serial numbers of the production-block.

The B-17 database is complete now and contains all 12.731 planes:

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Like the American Founders and the Declaration of Independence, King didn’t seek to abolish the rule of law, but to appeal to it. King saw, as Thomas Jefferson did, that it wasn’t enough to define law as whatever the sovereign power declared it to be. He saw, as did the Founders, that law defined as such provides no constraint on tyrants who want to reduce it to a matter of their own will and power. //

So what distinguishes a just law from an unjust one?

In addressing this question, both King and the Declaration of Independence drew on a classical tradition that perceives law as rooted in objective reality, in the way that things are. It’s a tradition at least as old as Aristotle. King cited St. Augustine as stating the principle that “an unjust law is no law at all.” He cited St. Thomas Aquinas as teaching that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” //

Communism and Nazism both accept a relativism that reduces “truth” to a matter of will and power, while seeking to impose their own truth on others. They’re obviously tyrannical, if not totalitarian. But we see the same tendencies in ideologies and movements promoted by Western elites that deny objective truth and seek to suppress free speech, open debate, and democratic decision-making.

The tyranny of radical relativism is one of its paradoxes. It denies the very existence of objective reality while insisting on its own truth. //

The point is simply that justice depends on recognizing the real, objective nature of truth (beyond what the state or party or leaders says it is at the moment), establishing the truth of the matter, and then telling it (or at least not lying about it), even when the cost of truth-telling is high in terms of job security or, in these days of doxxing, in terms of the risk to one’s family.

NASA satellite data has shown that anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of improvements in key U. S. crop yields since 1940 could potentially be attributed to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to human activity, according to a new paper from Columbia University’s Charles A. Taylor and Wolfram Schlenker.

The authors noted that their findings are “on the very high end of the range found in the literature.”

“Taylor and Schlenker’s numbers are 10–100 times as large as previous estimates,” Richard S.J. Tol, a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex, told The Epoch Times via email. //

Their models were based on data from 2015 through 2020 collected by NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory- 2 (OCO-2) satellite, which they replicated with NOAA’s CarbonTracker system. They also used county-level data on corn, soybeans, and winter wheat yields from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service. Taylor and Schlenker found that an increase of 1 part per million of carbon dioxide raised corn yields by 0.5 percent, soybean yields by 0.6 percent, and wheat yields by 0.8 percent. //

They also noted that the potentially dramatic fertilizing effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide might not be so unexpected, given how it’s used in actual agricultural greenhouses.

“The gas has long been pumped into greenhouses to spur photosynthesis and increase the yield of horticultural crops. Optimal CO2 concentrations of 900 [parts per million] have been suggested, which is over twice current ambient levels,” the authors wrote.

Taylor and Schlenker’s approach contrasts with field- and laboratorybased studies on carbon dioxide enrichment. The authors argued that such experiments “are limited in the extent to which they reflect real-world growing conditions in commercial farms at a large geographic scale.”