Latest Posts by dotmpotter - Page 4
Teen Starts Company To Make Low-Cost Printers To Help Blind People
SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) — In Silicon Valley, it’s never too early to become an entrepreneur. Just ask 13-year-old Shubham Banerjee. The California eighth-grader has launched a company to develop low-cost machines to print Braille, the tactile writing system for the visually impaired. Tech giant Intel Corp. recently invested in his startup, Braigo Labs.
For behind this incredible technology go here.
Could Europe Be Powered by African Solar Energy?
For a long time, people looking for big fixes to climate change have been talking about building huge solar installations in North Africa, which gets a lot more sun than most of the places where solar power is big — Germany, for example. But now, it looks as if someone finally is doing it.
Next month in Ouarzazate, Morocco, the first portion of what eventually will be the world’s biggest concentrated solar power plant – called Noor I – is set to go online, according to the Guardian, a British newspaper.
Eventually, when the entire $10 billion complex, which is being financed with assistance from the World Bank and European Union, is completed in 2020, it will generate 580 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide a big portion of Morocco’s energy needs while still leaving plenty of juice for export. The complex could prevent 700,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being spewed into the atmosphere each year.
The plant uses an ingenious technology for getting the most out of sunlight. A huge array of 500,000 crescent-shaped mirrors focus sunlight and transmit it to a single point on a tower. (The mirrors actually have tiny computers in them, which adjust the angle throughout the day to gather the most energy.)
The plant could turn Morocco, which depends upon fossil fuel imports to fill 94 percent of its energy needs, into a major producer of electricity for export. Find out how by clicking here.
Ancient Mars had a thick atmosphere filled with carbon dioxide that kept it warm. Rivers trickled into lakes across its surface. Some researchers think there might even have been an ocean. It looked a lot like ancient Earth.
But Mars doesn’t have Earth’s magnetic field, and that has made all the difference. Our magnetic field blocks solar wind - the high energy particles emitted by the sun.
Thanks to new data from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) we know that this solar wind has been assaulting Mars for centuries, and as a result its atmosphere is constantly leaking into space.
Read more here!
The study authors have calculated the cost of the “lost ecosystem services value” our planet has suffered in the last decade and a half. According to their calculations, the loss due to land degradation averages US $43,400 to $72,000 per square km, some US $870 to $1,450 per person, globally each year. The percentage of the world’s land affected by land degradation has grown a lot in the last decades – it has doubled between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. And the process is far from its end.
“This study by ELD shows the immediate and global impact of land degradation and highlights that actions to tackle it pay off,” Karmenu Vella, European Commissioner for Environment, Fisheries and Maritime Affairs commented on the paper.
“Increased land degradation is also one of the factors that can lead to migration and it is being exacerbated by climate change. On our planet, the area affected by drought has doubled in 40 years. One third of Africa is threatened by desertification. As President Juncker said in his State of the Union speech last week, climate refugees will become a new challenge – if we do not act swiftly.”
In an experiment, two ravens had to simultaneously pull the two ends of one rope to slide a platform with two pieces of cheese into reach. If only one of them pulled, the rope would slip through the loops, leaving them with no cheese. Without any training they solved the task and cooperated successfully.
However, when one of the two birds cheated and stole the reward of its companion, the victims of such cheats immediately noticed and started defecting in further trials with the same individual.
“Such a sophisticated way of keeping your partner in check has previously only been shown in humans and chimpanzees, and is a complete novelty among birds.”
Source
Watch: A haircut may not solve homelessness — but it can make all the difference for these women.
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An estimated 30 trillion cells in your body—less than a third—are human. The other 70-90% are bacterial and fungal!
Learn more in the new exhibition, The Secret World Inside You, now open!
Image: Gaby D'Allesandro / © AMNH
Through this workshop, participants will be able to:
Identify locally-important climate change impacts, challenges, and opportunities
Develop specific actions to adapt forests to changing conditions
Use the Adaptation Workbook to create their own “climate-informed” projects
Better communicate with stakeholders about key climate change impacts, challenges, and opportunities
Access post-training support from NIACS staff during project planning and implementation
DATES Six-week distance learning course held the weeks of January 18 through February 22, 2016 REGIONS Northwoods and New England
REGISTER ONLINE
http://goo.gl/forms/reGFz1r6xE
There is no registration fee thanks to support from the US Forest Service and USDA Northern Forests Climate Hub.
New book on the Halley VI Research Center. Halley VI is a string of 8 modules located on the Brunt Ice Shelf floating on the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. These sexy buildings are built on skis to help them move around. Check out the book, here.
TED Grant Goes to Archaeologist Who Combats Looting With Satellite Technology
Her laptop brims with satellite images pitted with thousands of black dots, evidence of excavations across Egypt where looters have tunneled in search of mummies, jewelry and other valuables prized by collectors, advertised in auction catalogs and trafficked on eBay, a criminal global black market estimated in the billions of dollars.
“For the first time technology has gotten to the point where we can map looting,” said Sarah H. Parcak, a pioneering “space archaeologist,” founding director of the University of Alabama’s Laboratory for Global Observation in Birmingham and an associate professor there.
Satellite eyes in the sky, which have transformed the worldwide search for buried archaeological treasures, are now being used to spy on the archenemies of cultural preservation: armies of looters who are increasingly pockmarking ancient sites with illicit digs and making off with priceless patrimony. Read more.
Migrant women hired to make $70 "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirts are paid $1/hour and sleep in dormitories with 16 women in a single room.
If it would take a woman worker in the factory two weeks of pay to buy one shirt, what’s feminist about that?
Is it important to know the real story behind our clothes? Read the full story here
Pew Research Center analyzed 1,041,336 apps in the Google Play Store as of September 2014 to determine the specific permissions requested by each app. We found that across all Android apps, 165 permissions allowed access to device hardware and 70 allowed access to various types of user information.
Apps Permissions in the Google Play Store
Meet the architect who wants to return Mexico City to its ancient lakes
“The pre-Hispanic civilizations built a system of dams, in order to control the salt water and to bring clean water. But then the Spaniards, in order to conquer the city, broke the dams … They started to follow a European scheme, which didn’t match the geography. And we have followed that inherited inertia for the last 500 years.” || Read more in The Guardian
What´s new about the new science of cities?
Every year, 4.3 million lives are lost to diseases caused by indoor smoke from cooking, heating, oil lamps and candles. That’s one person every eight minutes - mostly women and children.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The Sustainable Energy for All initiative is working to ensure universal access to modern energy services by 2030 - while also ramping up renewable energy and efficient energy use to help fight climate change.
Find out more here: http://www.cleanenergyislife.org/
The bottom line is that there is no longer a financial or technical excuse to leave low-income and vulnerable people at risk in prolonged power outages.
We’ve seen the breakthroughs in clean energy technology from Tesla and SolarCity, but these companies are primarily marketing only to big commercial customers that want to reduce their utility bills. While this is a good way to build the early markets for clean energy and solar-plus-storage systems, vulnerable residents don’t have time to wait for these innovations to trickle down to their communities — not when they are economically feasible today and mean the difference between protection and tragedy.
(via Build Affordable Housing That Can Weather the Next Superstorm – Next City)
From Hawaii’s flurry of hurricanes, to record high sea ice in Antarctica, and a heat wave that cooked the Australian Open like shrimp on a barbie, 2014 saw some wild weather. How much of that was tied to climate change is what scientists around the world tried to answer in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s annual attribution report, which was published Thursday.
What they discovered was that the clearest impacts of warming could be found in heat-related events, from heat waves on land to unusually hot ocean waters. Other events, like droughts in East Africa and the Middle East, California’s intense wildfires, and winter storms that continually swept across the eastern U.S., were harder to pinpoint. In part this is because such events are inherently complex, with a multitude of factors influencing them.
For example, while the East African drought was found to be both more likely and more intense because of warming, the situation in the Middle East was less clear, with no discernable climate change connection to the various factors that influenced it. Likewise, no direct push from climate change could be found in California’s wildfire activity, though it is clear that it is increasing the overall wildfire risk there.
And while some events, like the U.S. winter storms and the record high Antarctic sea ice extent, could be pinned to a particular cause, that cause could not be linked to climate change. For other events, like the drought in Brazil and flooding in the Canadian prairies, humans influenced the likelihood in other ways besides the greenhouse gases that continue to be emitted into the atmosphere.
What was clear, though, is that the fast-growing field of what is called extreme event attribution is gaining momentum. Researchers are casting a wider net for extreme events to examine and continually refining their methods. Attribution work has traveled a considerable distance since its inception just over a decade ago.
“Extreme event attribution” is a new topic for me. Very cool science right thar.
“A bus map you often see is the same thickness and same color line for the whole network: It makes [agencies] look like they’ve got the whole place covered,” says Wiggins. “That’s to the benefit of them and not to the rider.”
Wiggins thinks transit maps designed around coverage ultimately harm the system as a whole. Instead of using the map to find a bus route that works for a particular trip, riders stick to one specific line whose schedule they know—avoiding the map altogether. The result is a ridership that ends up taking a car more than it otherwise might, and one that objects loudly when the agency proposes a system change that would force them to learn a new route.
“I think with a better map, it actually might facilitate people being able to let go a little bit,” he says. “It stops becoming ‘this is my route and this is what I cling to’ and more of a network you can relate to.”
How San Francisco Got Its New Rider-Friendly Transit Map
It is easy to see where we are heading – the future will need far fewer workers. Computers, automation and robots will eliminate jobs in increasingly large numbers, and also apply downward wage pressure. Which is completely backwards from what could be happening if we designed society for the benefit of all. If the wealth were not concentrating, every worker would be benefiting from the increases in productivity created by all of this new technology. Wages would be rising and the work week would be shortening. Instead, all of the benefits are flowing straight to the 1% and everyone else is suffering.
This is where the idea of the Basic Income comes in. It is a standardized way of addressing the large scale unemployment that is coming soon, as well as simplifying welfare, retirement and disability payments, as well as making the productivity increases available to everyone in society instead of the elite few.
The idea is simple: everyone in society receives a regular income simply for being alive. The ultimate goal is for the Basic Income payment, by itself, to provide a comfortable living for every member of society without working.
Byzantine 'flat-pack' church to be reconstructed in Oxford after spending 1,000 years on the seabed
Centuries before the Swedes started flat-packing their furniture, the Holy Roman Emperor Justinian had his own version, sending self-assembly churches to newly conquered parts of his empire.
Now one of the “Ikea-style” churches, which spent more than 1,000 years on a seabed after the ship carrying it sank, is to be reconstructed for the first time in Oxford.
The Byzantine church will be on display at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology as part of the exhibition Storms, War and Shipwrecks: Treasures from the Sicilian Seas, opening in June.
Paul Roberts, co-curator of the exhibition, said: “Everything in the exhibition will be from under the sea. It’s very different from what’s been done before. Read more.
Michelle Obama launches #62MillionGirls to fight for girls’ education
Michelle Obama has unveiled a new campaign focusing on the tens of millions of girls around the world who lack access to any kind of education. "Right now, 62 million girls are not in school,“ the first lady told the Global Citizens Festival. “And what’s important to know is that these are our girls. They deserve the same chances to get an education as my daughters and your daughters and all of our children.“ Celebrities, politicians and other Twitter users were quick to jump on the hashtag.
Watch: A haircut may not solve homelessness — but it can make all the difference for these women.
Follow @stylemic
One of the many data-driven projects to make the world a better place over at DataKind.
Question
Information can be very valuable. But it loses value with age. It becomes history, and less of a tool for change.
What value does information about poverty have? Well, when it’s timely—which historically poverty data has not been—that information can trigger reactions: in monetary policy, in foreign aid, in any imaginable channel of support. Time can mitigate starvation and disease, and save untold lives.
So we wanted to know: What kind of data could be secured easily, cheaply, and quickly that might provide nearly real time analysis on poverty? We thought the answer might be written in the lights.
Check out their findings: (via DataKind | Shining a Light on Poverty)
Greenland is Melting Away
This river is one of a network of thousands at the front line of climate change.
By NYTimes: Coral Davenport, Josh Haner, Larry Buchanan and Derek Watkins
On the Greenland Ice Sheet — The midnight sun still gleamed at 1 a.m. across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept toward the edge of a river that rushed downstream toward an enormous sinkhole.
If he fell in, “the death rate is 100 percent,” said Mr. Overstreet’s friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.
But Mr. Overstreet’s task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet. [bold/itals mine]
“We scientists love to sit at our computers and use climate models to make those predictions,” said Laurence C. Smith, head of the geography department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the leader of the team that worked in Greenland this summer. “But to really know what’s happening, that kind of understanding can only come about through empirical measurements in the field.”
For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet’s warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise.
Dire report by three excellent Times journalists covering a team of researchers camped out on the icesheets of Greenland. The conclusion is that glaciers and land ice are melting at rates far higher than scientists anticipated, or that climate models have shown. This means that sea levels are rising faster than projected, and many coastal communities are in grave danger.
The economic impacts are incalculable.
The UK’s first new nuclear power station for a generation will cost electricity customers at least £4.4bn and the subsidy bill could reach £20bn, the government has revealed.
The charges, which will be passed on to nearly 30 million customers, are a result of ministers’ decision to guarantee the new Hinkley Point C operators £92.50 for every unit of electricity – more than double the current market price.
It comes less than a week after the government admitted the £24bn plant in Somerset will be subsidised – something it denied throughout the last parliament.
Details of the costs – an average of about £150 to £660 per customer over the 35 years of the deal – are exposed in a document quietly put before parliament last week and which has only just come to light.
(via Hinkley Point C will cost customers at least £4.4bn | Environment | The Guardian)