WASHINGTON (AP) — A warmer world makes for nastier hurricanes. Scientists say they are wetter, possess more energy and intensify faster.
Their storm surges are more destructive because climate change has already made the seas rise. And lately, the storms seem to be stalling more often and thus dumping more rain.
Study after study shows that climate change in general makes hurricanes worse. But determining the role of global warming in a specific storm such as Hurricane Florence or Typhoon Mangkhut is not so simple — at least not without detailed statistical and computer analyses.
(AP) — California Gov. Jerry Brown said Friday that the state plans to launch its “own damn satellite” into orbit to battle climate change.
The man the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko famously dubbed “Gov. Moonbeam” made the announcement at the conclusion of a two-day climate summit he organized in San Francisco.
Brown said state officials will work with the San Francisco-based company Planet Labs to develop a satellite to track climate-change causing pollutants. Brown said the earth-imaging company has launched 150 satellites.
WASP, the Italian manufacturer behind DeltaWASP 3D printers, has unveiled a new construction system which will be used to print sustainable houses in a village.
The Crane WASP, also referred to as the “the infinity 3D printer” is designed to accelerate the development of the technological village of Shamballa, a WASP project to develop 3D printed eco-friendly houses. The company states.
“Crane WASP the Infinity 3D printer reinterprets the classic building cranes from a digital manufacturing point of view. It is composed of a main printer unit that can be assembled in different configurations depending on the printing area and therefore on the dimensions of the architectural structure to be calculated in 3D.”
Ready-made snap-together solar panels that turn waste heat into hot water are being developed at Brunel University London in a £10 million sustainable energy scheme starting next month.
With energy use in buildings predicted to double or even triple by 2050, and most home energy used to heat water, project PVadapt promises to crack several sustainable energy problems at once.
Funded by Horizon 2020, the three and a half-year multi-disciplinary project aims to perfect a flexible solar powered renewable energy system that generates both heat from hot water and electricity.
Researchers are paving the way to total reliance on renewable energy as they study both large- and small-scale ways to replace fossil fuels. One promising avenue is converting simple chemicals into valuable ones using renewable electricity, including processes such as carbon dioxide reduction or water splitting. But to scale these processes up for widespread use, we need to discover new electrocatalysts—substances that increase the rate of an electrochemical reaction that occurs on an electrode surface. To do so, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are looking to new methods to accelerate the discovery process: machine learning.
Zack Ulissi, an assistant professor of chemical engineering (ChemE), and his group are using machine learning to guide electrocatalyst discovery. By hand, researchers spend hours doing routine calculations on materials that may not end up working. Ulissi’s team has created a system that automates these routine calculations, explores a large search space, and suggests new alloys that have promising properties for electrocatalysis.
“This allows us to spend our time asking science questions, like, ‘How do you predict the properties of something,’ ‘What is the thermodynamic model,’ ‘What is the model of the system,’ or ‘How do you represent the system?’” said Ulissi.
University of Birmingham scientists are paving the way to swap the lithium in lithium-ion batteries with sodium, according to research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Lithium-ion batteries (LIB) are rechargeable and are widely used in laptops, mobile phones and in hybrid and fully electric vehicles. The electric vehicle is a crucial technology for fighting pollution in cities and realising an era of clean sustainable transport.
However lithium is expensive and resources are unevenly distributed across the planet. Large amounts of drinking water are used in lithium extraction and extraction techniques are becoming more energy intensive as lithium demand rises – an ‘own goal’ in terms of sustainability.
Several automakers interested in electric vehicles are turning to solid-state batteries for next-gen electric cars in the “post Li-ion era.”
Now a startup developing all solid-state batteries (ASSB) secured backing from several high-profile investors, including several automakers, as it claims a breakthrough for the technology that will enable better electric cars.
Solid Power is a Colorado-based startup that spun out of a battery research program at the University of Colorado Boulder.
$82 Trillion to convert a desert to land that could grow crops to help feed the world…is it worth it?
Researchers simulated the effects of around 79 terawatts of solar panels and 3 terawatts of wind turbines. Computer modeling looked at the effect of covering 20 percent of the largest desert on the planet in solar panels and installing three million wind turbines.
There would be 16X the rain in the aridest parts of the Sahara, and double that of the Sahel.
It should be noted that massive amounts of solar and wind power does directly alter the climate.
Scientists have developed a photoelectrode that can harvest 85 percent of visible light in a 30 nanometers-thin semiconductor layer between gold layers, converting light energy 11 times more efficiently than previous methods.
In the pursuit of realizing a sustainable society, there is an ever-increasing demand to develop revolutionary solar cells or artificial photosynthesis systems that utilize visible light energy from the sun while using as few materials as possible.
The research team, led by Professor Hiroaki Misawa of the Research Institute for Electronic Science at Hokkaido University, has been aiming to develop a photoelectrode that can harvest visible light across a wide spectral range by using gold nanoparticles loaded on a semiconductor. But merely applying a layer of gold nanoparticles did not lead to a sufficient amount of light absorption, because they took in light with only a narrow spectral range.
A 2011 invention made by Aalto University’s researchers has proceeded from concept to reality. Just a few years ago the researchers obtained the record efficiency of 22% in the lab for nanostructured solar cells using atomic layer deposition, and now with the help of industrial partners and joint European collaboration, the first prototype modules have been manufactured on an industrial production line.
“Our timing could not have been better” prof. Hele Savin, who led the research, was pleased to tell. Indeed, 2018 is commonly called the “Year of Black Silicon” due to its rapid expansion in the photovoltaic (PV) industry. It has enabled the use of diamond-wire sawing in multicrystalline silicon, which reduces costs and environmental impact. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement as the current black silicon used in industry consists of shallow nanostructures that leads to sub-optimal optical properties and requires a separate antireflection coating.
Aalto’s approach consists of using deep needle-like nanostructures to make an optically perfect surface that eliminates the need for the antireflection coatings. Their industrial production, however, was not an easy task. “We were worried that such a fragile structure would not survive the multi-step mass production, because of rough handling by robots or module lamination.”
