The world’s first urban wind turbine designed by AI has been unveiled in the UK.
Called the Birmingham Blade, the turbine is jointly developed by AI design specialists EvoPhase and precision metal fabricators KwikFab. The turbine is also tailored to the unique wind conditions of a specific geographic area.
EvoPhase claimed that it used its AI-driven design process to generate and test designs for their efficiency at wind speeds found in Birmingham, which, at 3.6 meters/second are substantially lower than the 10 meters/second rating for most turbines.
An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth’s total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers suggested the shift could indicate Earth’s continents have entered a persistently drier phase.
From 2015 through 2023, satellite measurements showed that the average amount of freshwater stored on land—that includes liquid surface water like lakes and rivers, plus water in aquifers underground—was 290 cubic miles (1,200 cubic km) lower than the average levels from 2002 through 2014, said Matthew Rodell, one of the study authors and a hydrologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “That’s two and a half times the volume of Lake Erie lost.”
During times of drought, along with the modern expansion of irrigated agriculture, farms and cities must rely more heavily on groundwater, which can lead to a cycle of declining underground water supplies: freshwater supplies become depleted, rain and snow fail to replenish them, and more groundwater is pumped.
The Arctic is likely to become “ice-free” by midcentury—and could pass that grim milestone much sooner—unless much more is done to combat climate change.
Envision a settlement where the sunlight that beams across Australia buoy on its vast outback powers millions of homes and industries across Southeast Asia. This is how the Australia-Asia PowerLink (AAPowerLink) is being realized: the longest sub-sea cable in the world, linking northern Australia to Singapore, presently is one of the all-time break-through renewable energy developments. By virtue of this mammoth solar farm with its advanced energy transmission technology, this ambitious vision will shape the future energy systems around the world while addressing some critical climate issues.
Taking enormous advantage from its plentiful sunlight, northern Australia houses the world’s biggest Solar Precinct in its Northern Territory gathering between 17–20 GW peak electricity, a size surpassing that of Australia’s largest coal-fired power station.
The project incorporates advanced storage of 36–42 GWh, supplying 800 MW to Darwin and 1.75 GW to Singapore. In addition to reducing emissions and electricity prices for the Darwin region, it creates a renewable energy export marketplace for the region and demonstrates the use of the solar-rich area to meet 15 percent of Singapore’s electricity demand.
Batteries made from waste and methane offer lower CO2 emissions than current technologies.
It’s also being claimed that the technology has the potential to improve fast-charging speed by up to 50%, making EV ownership even more convenient. Lithium-sulfur batteries are expected to cost less than half the price per kWh of current lithium-ion batteries, according to Stellantis.
The batteries will be produced using waste materials and methane, with significantly lower CO2 emissions than any existing battery technology. Zeta Energy battery technology is intended to be manufacturable within existing gigafactory technology and would leverage a short, entirely domestic supply chain in Europe or North America, according to a press release.
Ned Curic, Stellantis’s Chief Engineering and Technology Officer, stated that the collaboration with Zeta Energy is another step in helping advance the company’s electrification strategy as they work to deliver clean, safe, and affordable vehicles.
How much does sulfur emitted by marine life cool the atmosphere and help mitigate the effects of climate change? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as an international team of researchers conducted a first-time numerical analysis regarding the amount of sulfur is emitted by marine life and how much it cools the climate, with an emphasis on the Southern Ocean. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand how the planet cools itself, thus enabling us to work together to protect it.
“This is the climatic element with the greatest cooling capacity, but also the least understood,” said Dr. Charel Wohl, who is a senior research associate at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the study. “We knew methanethiol was coming out of the ocean, but we had no idea about how much and where. We also did not know it had such an impact on climate. Climate models have greatly overestimated the solar radiation actually reaching the Southern Ocean, largely because they are not capable of correctly simulating clouds. The work done here partially closes the longstanding knowledge gap between models and observations.”
For the study, the researchers produced a database of ocean methanethiol concentrations with the goal of estimating their produced emissions and how this contributes to ocean-derived aerosols that are responsible for cooling the planet. In the end, the researchers discovered that methanethiol emissions increase the aerosol amount between 30 to 70 percent over the Southern Ocean while simultaneously decreasing atmospheric oxidants and increasing planetary cooling. The Southern Ocean is located around Antarctica and serves as a staging ground for the world’s oceans, influencing their circulation.
Professor Carlos Duarte, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor, Marine Science, and Executive Director, Coral Research \& Development Accelerator Platform (CORDAP — https://cordap.org/), Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST — https://www.kaust.edu.sa/en/study/fac…), in Saudi Arabia, as well as Chief Scientist of Oceans2050, OceanUS, and E1Series.
Prior to these roles Professor Duarte was Research Professor with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Director of the Oceans Institute at The University of Western Australia. He also holds honorary positions at the Arctic Research Center in Aarhus University, Denmark and the Oceans Institute at The University of Western Australia.
Professor Duarte’s research focuses on understanding the effects of global change in marine ecosystems and developing nature-based solutions to global challenges, including climate change, and developing evidence-based strategies to rebuild the abundance of marine life by 2050.
Building on his research showing mangroves, seagrasses and salt-marshes to be globally-relevant carbon sinks, Professor Duarte developed, working with different UN agencies, the concept of Blue Carbon, as a nature-based solution to climate change, which has catalyzed their global conservation and restoration.
For the past years, Professor Duarte has also lead efforts to quantify the global role and importance of algal forests. He has conducted research across all continents and oceans, spanning most of the marine ecosystem types, from inland to near-shore and the deep sea and from microbes to whales, and has a particular focus on the role of seaweed aquaculture as a sustainable solution for multiple challenges.
Professor Duarte led the Malaspina 2010 Expedition, including over 700 scientists from 38 institutions from across 18 nations, that sailed the world’s oceans to examine the impacts of global change on ocean ecosystems and explore deep-sea biodiversity.
When molecules interact with ultraviolet (UV) light, they can change shape quickly, producing strain—stress in a molecule’s chemical structure due to an increase in the molecule’s internal energy. These processes typically take just tens of picoseconds (one millionth of a millionth of a second). Advanced capabilities at X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) facilities now enable scientists to create images of these ultrafast structural changes.
In work appearing in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, researchers found structural evidence of a strained bicyclic molecule (a molecule consisting of two joined rings) that emerges from the chemical reaction that occurs when a cyclopentadiene molecule absorbs UV light. Cyclopentadiene is a good sample chemical for studying a range of reactions, and these findings have broad implications for chemistry.
Highly strained molecules have a variety of interesting applications in solar energy and pharmaceuticals. However, strain doesn’t typically occur naturally—energy must be added to a molecular system to create the strain. Identifying processes that produce molecules with strained rings is a challenge of broad interest in physical chemistry.
