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Category: climatology – Page 81

After quitting the ISS, Russia reveals its next-gen space station

Meet ROSS, Russia’s new space station.

But unlike the ISS, ROSS won’t have permanent residents year-round. Instead, it will only host cosmonauts “twice a year for extended periods,” according to Reuters.

ROSS is still years out and shrouded in secrecy, so it’s hard to predict exactly how the new space station could surpass the ISS’s capabilities.

Roscosmos officials have told Russian state media that the station will likely orbit at higher latitudes than the ISS does. This could offer a better view of the Earth’s polar regions, which Russian researchers could analyze with optical, infrared, ultraviolet instruments. After all, Russia’s borders cover 53 percent of the Arctic Ocean’s entire coastline, and the country likely wants to use ROSS to chart northern sea routes as climate change melts Arctic sea ice.

What Happens When the Doomsday Clock Hits Midnight?

The invasion that Russia has wrongfully started in Ukraine has led to more people talking about the threat of Nuclear war and World War 3. How does the Doomsday Clock relate to all this?

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Script:
Since 2020, the Doomsday Clock has been set to 100 seconds to midnight. Which is the closest its ever been to midnight in its 75 years of existence. As the scientists who set the clock put it: we’re “at doom’s doorstep.”

The Doomsday Clock is a metaphor to remind humans how close we are to destroying our planet through the technology we develop, with midnight representing the apocalypse. It’s a symbol to remind us to address these dangers so that we can survive on our planet. It was created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization founded by scientists at the University of Chicago who worked on the Manhattan Project, which was America’s effort to develop atomic weapons during the Cold War.

When the Doomsday Clock debuted in 1947, its creator, artist Martyl Langsdorf, set it to 7 minutes to midnight. She was married to a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. When she heard him and other scientists talk about the consequences of developing this dangerous technology, she created the clock to show that we didn’t have much time left to get atomic weapons under control.

Continue reading “What Happens When the Doomsday Clock Hits Midnight?” | >

New heat-tolerant, high-capacity capacitor created with solid electrolytes borrowed from all-solid-state batteries

Capacitors are energy storage devices—consisting of two electrodes and an electrolyte—that are capable of rapid charging and discharging because of charge adsorption and desorption properties at the electrode-electrolyte interface. Because capacitors’ energy storage does not involve chemical reactions, their storage capacity is lower than that of lithium-ion batteries, but they are useful for power leveling for renewable energy that requires repeated charging at high currents, regenerative braking energy for trains and electric or hybrid cars, as well as instantaneous voltage drop compensation devices that prevent equipment failure due to lightning strikes. They are also expected to be used to store energy for wearable devices in the near future.

Most capacitors use a liquid electrolyte with a low boiling point, which can only be used at temperatures below 80℃. Ceramic capacitors that use solid inorganic materials as a dielectric can be used at temperatures above 80℃, but their is much lower than liquid electrolyte capacitors, which limits their use to electronic circuits.

To increase the energy storage of capacitors, it is necessary to have a large contact area at the interface between the electrode and the electrolyte. Making a large contact area is difficult using ; so, the creation of a capacitor with high storage capacity that can also operate at high temperatures has been desired for a long time.

Inventor unveils ‘game-changing’ zero emissions hydrogen engine

I interviewed the gentleman talked about in this article yesterday. If his invention is what he says it is, deploying it to convert the existing inventory of billions of internal combustion engines would get us to net-zero emissions a lot faster.

A POWYS inventor has unveiled a zero-emissions internal combustion engine, which he says could be a game-changer in the fight against climate change.

Is propane a solution for more sustainable air conditioning?

Current severe heatwaves that will likely increase in severity and frequency in the future are driving a rise in the use of air conditioners, threatening the environment with their high energy consumption and refrigerants with high warming potential. A new study finds that switching to propane as a refrigerant could lessen the global temperature increase from space cooling.

We spend enormous amounts of energy on fighting off the heat in the summer, or throughout the whole year at lower latitudes—about one-tenth of the total worldwide electricity supply. If current temperature trends continue, the energy demands of space-coolers will more than triple by 2050. Apart from the rise in , space-coolers also threaten the in different ways: by using halogenated refrigerants with high potential.

Split-air conditioners (Split ACs) that use an indoor and an outdoor air unit connected by pipes are the most common appliances used for space-cooling. They mostly utilize HCFC-22 and HFC-410 as refrigerants, both of them characterized by a very high global warming potential score, up to 2,256—meaning that they trap up to 2,256 times more heat than over 100 years. Urged by the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, many manufacturers are looking for alternative refrigerants with lower global warming potential scores, such as HFC-32. However, with a global warming potential score of 771, HFC-32 still poses a significant climate hazard.

Nuclear War Would Cause a Global Famine and Kill Billions, Rutgers-Led Study Finds

We might all starve.

Researchers from Rutgers University calculated the possible effects of nuclear wars. The result shows that a nuclear war between countries such as Russia and USA could kill billions and cause starvation within two years.

It also demonstrates that large deficits would arise in imports due to the depletion of crops.

Every human being is afraid of nuclear war beyond any doubt. Researchers went into overdrive to see what would happen when a nuclear war broke out, dangerous enough to bring the end of humanity as well as all life on Earth.

More than 5 billion people would die of hunger following a full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, according to a global study led by Rutgers climate scientists that estimates post-conflict crop production.

“The data tell us one thing: We must prevent a nuclear war from ever happening,” said Alan Robock, a Distinguished Professor of Climate Science in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers-New Brunswick and co-author of the study. Lili Xia, an assistant research professor in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, is lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Food .

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Plasma-powered oxygen harvesting could help humans live on Mars

We’re talking fuels and fertilizers required for the development of life-support systems on the Red Planet.

In 2015, Vasco Guerra, from the University of Lisbon, happened to attend a lecture by Professor Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab and a former deputy administrator of NASA, on space exploration and the forthcoming NASA missions. Back then, Guerra was leading a project on plasma reforming of carbon dioxide on Earth — how CO2 could be a potential raw material to produce fuels with the help of green energy.

Scientists have been working on plasma technologies to split CO2 into oxygen and carbon monoxide, primarily prompted by the persistent problems of climate change. international team of researchers have introduced a plasma-based method that could convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and produce fuels on Mars.

How Technology Companies Can Get Their ESG Strategy to Appeal to Youth

As investors continue to put money into technology companies making a difference, there is a misconception that a majority of investors belong to younger generations. New research shows the distribution in ESG-motivated investment: 54% are Gen Z and millennials, 42% are baby boomers, and 25% are Gen Xers.

ESG Standards That Younger Generations Care About

From combatting climate change to expanding diversity in the boardroom and instituting more corporate equitable policies, technology companies need to understand what Gen Z and Gen X care about. If any sector of the global economy is sensitive to ESG it should be technology with its appeal to younger audiences. That’s why the recent acceleration of widespread reporting on ESG principles and practices is creating a shift in power, money and jobs from baby boomers to millennials and Gen Z, in which passive investing, COVID, social injustice issues, the Great Resignation and talent shortages are all contributing factors.