If we find life on another world, it will be an extremely important discovery and we will have to take great care not to do anything that might endanger that life. If the life we find is sentient we will have moral obligations to that life. Whether it is sentient or not, we have a duty to...

Exoplanets are born and evolve in the radiation and particle environment created by their host star. The host star’s optical and infrared radiation heats the exoplanet’s lower atmosphere and surface, while the ultraviolet, extreme ultraviolet and X-radiation control the photochemistry and...

Geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change, has been more widely considered as an accompanying strategy to conventional climate change mitigation measures to combat global warming. However, this approach is far...

We have now confirmed the existence of 1800 planets orbiting stars other thanthe Sun; known as extrasolar planets or exoplanets. The different methods for detectingsuch planets are sensitive to different regions of parameter space, and so, we are discoveringa wide diversity of exoplanets and...

The objective of this paper is to present to the scientific community a new dataset derived from existing literature on soil respiration in Africa. The data has thus been obtained by searching for records in peer review papers and grey literature. The main search engines used are: Scientific...

Utilization of renewable energy resources is imperative due to energy access, energy security, and energy sustainability coupled with the rising environmental concern. India is one of the largest land mass countries in the world and amply bestowed with biomass resources. Investigations on...

This work presents an estimation of the global electricity usage that can be ascribed to Communication Technology (CT) between 2010 and 2030. The scope is three scenarios for use and production of consumer devices, communication networks and data centers. Three different scenarios, best,...

We undertake Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the cumulative energy demand (CED) and global warming potential (GWP) for a portfolio of 10 multi-family residences in the U.S. We argue that prior LCA studies of buildings use an inconsistent boundary for processes to be included in the supply chain:...

The main objectives of this socio-technical study are to investigate the Indian farmers’ biomass production capacities and their perceptions and willingness to supply their surplus biomass to fuel an envisioned biomass-based power plant in three selected Indian states: Maharashtra, Madhya...