ADAM SLAVNEY
However, the irony is as the planet warms, the technology we seek refuge in can only contribute to climate change, making the climate hotter. Room air conditioners are expected to quadruple to 4.5 billion by 2050, according to Scientific American.
For decades children and adults have learned the motto “when thunder roars, go indoors.” It is a low-tech approach to staying safe when lightning could be in the immediate area, but thanks to advancements in forecast products, meteorologists are getting more advanced warning when these sudden dangers could be on the horizon.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says several forecast offices around the country are using an experimental LightningCast product to determine who has the greatest chance of seeing lightning upwards of an hour before a strike.
The data comes from the GOES-16 and GOES-17 satellites that are constantly monitoring the skies over North America.
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.
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.
This incredible phenomenon looks like something out of sci-fi, but it’s real!
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 storage capacity 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 solid electrolytes; so, the creation of a capacitor with high storage capacity that can also operate at high temperatures has been desired for a long time.
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.
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 energy consumption, space-coolers also threaten the environment in different ways: by using halogenated refrigerants with high global warming 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 carbon dioxide 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.
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 .