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Category: climatology – Page 32

A chemical etching method for widening the pores of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) could improve various applications of MOFs, including in fuel cells and as catalysts. Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan and East China Normal University in China developed the new method with collaborators elsewhere in Japan, Australia, and China, and their work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

MOFs are composed of metal clusters or ions interconnected by carbon-based (organic) linker groups. Varying the metallic and organic components generates a variety of MOFs suitable for a wide range of applications, including catalysis, , and gas storage.

Some MOFs have clear potential for catalyzing the inside fuel cells, which are being explored as the basis of renewable energy systems. Because they don’t use , fuel cells could play a key role in the transition to a low-or zero-emissions economy to combat climate change.

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An interesting exploration of the importance of oceanic microorganisms to biogeochemical processes, how existing computational climate models do not adequately capture the complexity introduced by these microbes, and suggestions for future directions in climate modeling that better incorporate the…

Microorganisms are the engines that drive most marine processes. Ocean modelling must evolve to take their biological complexity into account.

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Everybody knows that the public fast-charging life is just easier when you’re a Tesla owner. But starting today, Ford F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E owners will begin to play on their level too as the Tesla Supercharger network opens up to them.

Ford today announced two major developments on the electric front. First, Ford customers can now order the Fast Charging Adapter—the first from a major automaker—that allows Tesla North American Charging Standard (NACS) plugs to link up to the Combined Charging System (CCS) fast-charging port standard on basically all non-Tesla EVs.

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The Voyager 1 was launched in 1977. Almost 50 years later, it’s still going and sending back information, penetrating ever deeper into space. It can do that because it’s powered by nuclear energy.

Long a controversial energy source, nuclear has been experiencing renewed interest on Earth to power our fight against climate change. But behind the scenes, nuclear has also been facing a renaissance in space.

In July, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) jointly announced that they plan to launch a nuclear-propelled spacecraft by 2025 or 2026. The European Space Agency (ESA) in turn is funding a range of studies on the use of nuclear engines for space exploration. And last year, NASA awarded a contract to Westinghouse to develop a concept for a nuclear reactor to power a future moon base.

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Azeem speaks with Professor Yoshua Bengio. In 2018, Yoshua, Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCun were awarded the Turing Award for advancing the field of AI, in particular for their groundbreaking conceptual and engineering research in deep learning. This earnt them the moniker the Three Musketeers of Deep Learning. I think Bengio might be Aramis: intellectual, somewhat pensive, with aspirations beyond combat, and yet skilled with the blade.

With 750,000 citations to his scientific research, Yoshua has turned to the humanistic dimension of AI, in particular, the questions of safety, democracy, and climate change. Yoshua and I sit on the OECD’s Expert Group on AI Futures.

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A recent study from UNSW Sydney demonstrates that significant reductions in the temperatures of major cities located in hot desert climates can be achieved alongside decreases in energy expenses.

The findings, recently published in Nature Cities, detail a multi-faceted strategy to cool Saudi Arabia’s capital city by up to 4.5°C, combining highly reflective ‘super cool’ building materials developed by the High-Performance Architecture Lab with irrigated greenery and energy retrofitting measures. The study, which was conducted in collaboration with the Royal Commission of Riyadh, is the first to investigate the large-scale energy benefits of modern heat mitigation technologies when implemented in a city.

“The project demonstrates the tremendous impact advanced heat mitigation technologies and techniques can have to reduce urban overheating, decrease cooling needs, and improve lives,” says UNSW Scientia Professor Mattheos (Mat) Santamouris, Anita Lawrence Chair in High-Performance Architecture and senior author of the study.

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Do the impacts of deforestation go beyond the environment? What about human health, specifically the health of children? This is what a recent study published in Economics & Human Biology hopes to address as Dr. Gabriel Fuentes Cordoba, who is an associate professor of economics from Sophia University in Japan, investigated how deforestation in Cambodia effects the health of children around the time of their birth. This study holds the potential to help scientists, conservationists, and the public better understand the health effects of deforestation, specifically with the increasing effects of climate change around the world.

For the study, Dr. Fuentes Cordoba analyzed data obtained from the Cambodian Demographic Health Surveys and forest loss to ascertain the health impacts for pregnant women and children under five years of age who reside in areas of deforestation. In the end, Dr. Fuentes Cordoba discover alarming results that suggest deforestation exposure to women less than one year before pregnancy could lead to development of anemia, which is a precursor to malaria. This could result in significant health impacts on children being born, specifically reductions in birth weight, along with overall height and weight as they age.

“This research shows a negative impact of deforestation on child health,” Dr. Fuentes Cordoba said in a statement. “This negative impact may persist into adulthood and affect other aspects of wellbeing such as education acquisition and even wages. My findings indicate that future research should explore this aspect further.”

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Cybersecurity company Cybereason reveals that the actual price of a ransomware attack on a business includes much more than the ransom itself.

When choosing whether to comply and pay the demanded ransom to cyber attackers, there are many different considerations to have in mind. The latest report by Cybereason reveals that only one in two victims who paid ransom actually got their data back uncorrupted, and four out of five were eventually breached again by the same attackers.

According to Cybernews, the company’s researchers went over 1,008 IT professionals who all dealt with breachers at least once in the past two years and found that 84% chose to pay the ransom, averaging $1.4 million in the US. However, only 47% got their data and services back uncorrupted, so this doesn’t appear to have been the optimal strategy.

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Understanding cloud patterns in our changing climate is essential to making accurate predictions about their impact on society and nature. Scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology published a study in the journal Science Advances that uses a high-resolution global climate model to understand how the clustering of clouds and storms impacts rainfall extremes in the tropics. They show that with rising temperatures, the severity of extreme precipitation events increases.

Extreme rainfall is one of the most damaging natural disasters costing human lives and causing billions in damage. Their frequency has been increasing over the last years due to the .

For several decades, scientists have been using computer models of the Earth’s climate to better understand the mechanisms behind these events and to predict future trends.

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The search for habitable exoplanets involves looking for planets with similar conditions to the Earth, such as liquid water, a suitable temperature range and atmospheric conditions. One crucial factor is the planet’s position in the habitable zone, the region around a star where liquid water could potentially exist on the planet’s surface. NASA’s Kepler telescope, launched in 2009, revealed that 20–50% of visible stars may host such habitable Earth-sized rocky planets. However, the presence of liquid water alone does not guarantee a planet’s habitability. On Earth, carbon compounds such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and carbon monoxide (CO) played a crucial role in shaping the climate and biogeochemistry and could have contributed to the emergence of life.

Taking this into consideration, a recent study by Associate Professor Kazumi Ozaki from Tokyo Institute of Technology, along with Associate Researcher Yasuto Watanabe from The University of Tokyo, aims to expand the search for habitable planets. Published in the Astrophysical Journal(External site) on 10 January 2024, the researchers used atmospheric modeling to identify conditions that could result in a CO-rich atmosphere on Earth-like planets that orbit sun-like (F-, G-, and K-type) stars. This phenomenon, known as CO runaway, is suggested by atmospheric models to have possibly occurred in early planetary atmospheres, potentially favoring the emergence of life.

“The possibility of CO runaway is critical in resolving the fundamental problem regarding the origin of life on Earth because various organic compounds suitable for the prebiotic chemistry are more likely to form in a CO-rich atmosphere than in a CO2-rich atmosphere,” explains Dr. Ozaki.

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