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Category: climatology – Page 96

Google Releases ‘Switch to Android’ App on iPhone

Way back in 2015, Apple released its very first app in the Google Play Store. It was called Move to iOS, and it helped people switch from Google’s platform to Apple’s. Turnabout is fair play, and Google has finally made its own switching app. With the predictable name “Switch To Android,” the app helps iPhone owners export their data for use on an Android phone. The app rolled out today in several markets, including the US, but it might be hard to find.

The current mobile dichotomy has been in place for over a decade at this point. Upstarts like Palm and Windows Phone tried and failed to create a third platform, but instead we’ve all become more entrenched with Android and iOS. After years and years using one platform, it can be imposing to move it someplace else. Apps like Apple’s Move to iOS and the new Switch To Android can make it a bit easier by automating the process, or at least pointing you to the right settings.

After installing the Switch To Android app on an iPhone, you’ll have the option to grab the basics like your contacts, calendar events, photos, and videos. Most of this data should plug into Google’s ecosystem without issue. You might notice some strange errors in contact data, but the app connects to Google Photos to salvage all your iCloud media. This all happens wirelessly, so you won’t have to worry about finding a cable to connect your Android phone’s USB-C port to the aging Lightning port on even the latest iPhones.

SaaS Outages: When Lightning Strikes, Thunder Rolls

… along with new, unfamiliar — and often poorly understood — risks.

Technology and business risks morph with changes in technology and how it is delivered. While cloud services are often considered more dependable, businesses face new risks with SaaS and public cloud — risks that are unfamiliar or not completely understood. People’s eyes pop open and ears perk up when they witness prolonged outage events such as the current issue with Atlassian. Suddenly, SaaS dependencies and resilience issues become relevant, as a business can’t access its favorite SaaS tool. The unique risk of using SaaS is that you don’t have control over the application or the tool and cannot reimplement yourself. It is also important to understand the cascading risks, as some of the well-known SaaS services are hosted on a leading hyperscaler’s infrastructure. You need to analyze the business impact of SaaS and cloud services outages just like for any other technology in your portfolio.

Trust but verify vendor claims about service-level agreements supporting operations and resilience plans. To ensure that your SaaS providers deliver on their own promises:

Optical vortex crystals for photonic simulations of complex systems

The system developed in Milano is robust and it also has the potential to process information encoded in different coupled systems, including far and enormous galaxies. Thanks to these new results, it is now possible to simulate in the lab complex coupled systems, with order altered by stable defects, difficult to be reproduced otherwise since involving ginormous scale, like galaxies, or part of extreme hydrodynamic systems.

Water whirlpools, smoke rings, violent tornados and spiral galaxies are all examples of twists in fluids, although very different each other. Analogous twists, but in the realm of light, have been created by the research group coordinated by Antonio Ambrosio at the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology), in Milano (Italy). The results, published in the journal Nature Photonics, show the realization of 100 light vortices, coupled to form an ordered structure, a light crystal.

Mutual interaction of light and nanostructured materials is the focus of the research of Antonio Ambrosio, Principal Investigator of the research line Vectorial Nano-imaging at IIT in Milano and grantee of the ERC Consolidator project “METAmorphoses.”

Twisted light generators have been developed in the last few years, but they typically create a single vortex propagating alone in . IIT researchers have shown instead that it is possible to create 100 light vortices, coupled into an ordered light crystal.

A new “molten salt” battery could store cheap, renewable energy year round

Scientists at the US Department of Energy have created a low-cost molten salt battery that can store energy for months — potentially giving us a way to store and use energy from renewables year round.

The challenge: To stop climate change, we need to transition toward cleaner sources of energy.

Renewable energy (especially wind and solar) has become increasingly cheap to generate over the last couple decades, but storage is still an issue — we can burn as much coal or gas as we want, whenever we need it, but we can’t force the wind to blow.

Wind and solar energy amounted to 10% of the global energy consumption in 2021

There’s still a long way to go, but it’s an important milestone.

Ten years ago, solar and wind didn’t even make up 1% of our global energy mix. Now, in just a decade, they’ve reached 10%. It may not seem like much, but becoming such a significant part of the global energy mix in such a short time is remarkable — though there’s still a long way to go.

The past couple of years have been horrendous in more ways than one, but that doesn’t mean all is bad in the world. In fact, renewable energy continued its impressive growth, according to research from Ember, a climate and energy think tank.

As the world recoiled after the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, economies were eager to reopen, and demand for energy surged. Some of what growth was covered by coal, which experienced its fastest growth since 1985, but renewables also rose to the challenge.

DeepMind Mafia, DishBrain, PRIME, ZooKeeper AI, Instant NeRF

Mar 31, 2022

Our 91st episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!
Outline:

Applications & Business.

Meet the DeepMind mafia: These 18 alumni from Google’s AI research lab are raising millions for their own startups, from climate to crypto.

Nvidia unveils new technology to speed up AI, launches new supercomputer.

Continue reading “DeepMind Mafia, DishBrain, PRIME, ZooKeeper AI, Instant NeRF” | >

Taking Definitive Action on Your Sustainability Goals

This doesn’t mean you need to don an ushanka and start marching. You can start taking collective action by focusing on community groups and connecting with climate leaders. This will likely help you solve other issues, too, like waste disposal, recycling, and community clean-up projects in your locale.

Conclusion

Combating climate change requires all of us to reconsider our individual and collective climate responsibility. As an individual, you can do your part and let others know what you are doing. It has never been easier to connect with the world and share than it is today. You can join others in writing letters to the editor of your local newspaper, or your local and national government representatives. You can join groups like Citizens’ Climate Lobby and learn how to engage policy decision-makers. And in your daily routines, you can lead by example.

A billion of the world’s most climate-vulnerable people live in informal settlements — here’s what they face

By Vanesa Castán Broto, University of Sheffield; Emmanuel Osuteye, UCL, and Linda Westman, University of Sheffield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Flooding is common in informal settlements in Bwaise, a neighbourhood in the Ugandan capital Kampala. Bwaise’s residents are largely excluded from planning and local decision-making processes, and have poor housing and limited access to sanitation and other essential services.

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