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Category: climatology – Page 66

Electric bees 🐝🌞

“When I looked at the data, I was kind of surprised to see that it had a massive effect,” says Hunting. It was already known that individual bees carry a small charge, but a voltage of this magnitude had never been documented in swarming honeybees before.

The team deployed additional electric field monitors in combination with video cameras to measure the electric field and swarm density, and waited for the bees at nearby hives to naturally swarm. The researchers recorded three swarms passing the monitors for around 3 minutes at a time. They found that the bee swarms created an electric charge ranging from 100 to 1,000 volts per metre. By analysing the proximity of bees to each other in the swarms, the team found that the denser the swarm, the stronger the electric field was.

Hunting compared the bees’ highest charge to previous data on meteorological events like fair-weather storm clouds, thunderstorms and electrified dust storms, and found dense bees swarms outcharged them all. Their charge density was around eight times as great as a thunderstorm cloud and six times as great as an electrified dust storm.

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Researchers created an artificial intelligence process that determines when and where wildfires will occur.

Wildfires have caused extreme fire damages across the globe, along with many deaths. It is significant to know when wildfires are spreading, and where, to prevent loss of life. Realizing this important information in advance is key. Forecasting wildfire danger can be a difficult task because of the complexity involving climate system, interactions with vegetation and socio-economic components.

Currently, available information for widespread fires only provides limited data and information.

Pixabay / Clandestino.

New method.

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The collapse of Arecibo’s radio telescope was a devastating blow to the radio astronomy community. Issues began in 2017 for the nearly 55-year-old telescope when Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, shearing off one of the 29-meter (96-foot) antennas that was suspended above the telescope’s 305-meter (1,000-foot) dish, with falling debris puncturing the dish in several places.

In early 2020, earthquakes temporarily closed the observatory for safety reasons; then a succession of cable failures ultimately led to the December 2020 collapse of the 900-ton instrument platform suspended above the observatory, which crashed down on the iconic telescope’s giant dish. This collapse officially ended any possible hopes of refurbishing the famous observatory.

Since then, many have called for the telescope to be rebuilt or for building an even better replacement telescope at the site. Instead, the NSF wants Arecibo to serve as a hub for STEM education and outreach.

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It enables us to make extraordinary leaps of imagination.

We all have to make hard decisions from time to time. The hardest of my life was whether or not to change research fields after my Ph.D., from fundamental physics to climate physics. I had job offers that could have taken me in either direction — one to join Stephen Hawking’s Relativity and Gravitation Group at Cambridge University, another to join the Met Office as a scientific civil servant.

I wrote down the pros and cons of both options as one is supposed to do, but then couldn’t make up my mind at all. Like Buridan’s donkey, I was unable to move to either the bale of hay or the pail of water.

Metamorworks/iStock.

Since it was doing my head in, I decided to try to forget about the problem for a couple of weeks and get on with my life. In that intervening time, my unconscious brain decided for me. I simply walked into my office one day and the answer had somehow become obvious: I would make the change to studying the weather and climate.

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After a treacherous journey, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has reached an area that is thought to have formed billions of years ago when the Red Planet’s water disappeared.

This region of Mount Sharp, the Curiosity rover’s Martian stomping ground, is rich in salty minerals that scientists think were left behind when streams and ponds dried up. As such, this region could hold tantalizing clues about how the Martian climate changed from being similar to Earth’s to the frozen, barren desert that Curiosity explores today.

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Thanks to its mild climate, expansive highway network, and lax regulations, Texas has become the country’s proving ground for driverless trucks. From cargo to produce, goods have been traveling the state’s highways partially driver-free (the trucks aim to use autonomous mode on highways, but safety drivers take over to navigate city streets) for a couple of years already. Now there’s another type of cargo traveling through Texas via autonomous trucks: furniture. This week Kodiak Robotics announced a partnership to transport IKEA products using a heavy-duty self-driving truck.

Kodiak has been moving furniture and other IKEA goods since August, but the companies carried out a testing period before making the agreement public. The route runs from an IKEA distribution center in Baytown, east of Houstin, to a store in Frisco, 290 miles away just north of Dallas. It’s mostly a straight shot on highway 45.

Like the self-driving trucks that’ve come before it, the vehicle has a safety driver on board. He or she picks up loaded trailers at the distribution center in the morning and provides driving help where needed, reaching the store by late afternoon; it’s about a five-hour drive in a car, so a bit more in a heavy-duty truck.

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Deltec Homes is changing the way the world builds. For over five decades, we have designed and engineered homes to fight climate change and withstand the harshest of weather conditions. The connections, both inside and out, that our homes provide make it truly the strongest home for people and our planet.

The engineering and innovation behind each Deltec is why they have stood against some of the most detrimental storms in history including direct hits from Hurricanes Dorian, Michael, Maria, Irma, Harvey, Sandy, Katrina, Hugo, Ivan and Charley.

Please check out this June, 2021, Weather Channel interview of our President, Steve Linton, describing why our homes are hurricane resistant.

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This GB Live News is in partnership with VB Lab funded by Xsolla.

Video games have always been resilient, even in an increasingly volatile geopolitical climate. Long-time game players are fiercely loyal, and enthusiastic new gamers keep pouring into the market, says Chris Hewish, president of Xsolla. In the first half of 2022 alone, more than 651 deals were announced or closed, for a value of $107 billion. But in a fiercely competitive market, clouded by less economic certainy, studios and indie developers are exploring an increasing number of ways to reach the audiences.

“Game companies do need to look at how their business models can function in a macroeconomic climate, heading into a recession,” he added. “Capital is going to become tighter. If you have a business model based upon growth over profitability, it’s going to be harder to find fuel for that growth. Readjusting to focus on profitability is probably one of the biggest things game companies can do right now, if they haven’t already, to weather the storm in a macro sense. But the opportunity with players and the number of people playing and spending, that’s still looking good.”

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