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Category: climatology – Page 71
Mesmerising aerial footage has captured a huge swarm of jellyfish off the coast of Israel.
The country’s marine authorities were inspecting the waters of Haifa Bay during the annual jellyfish migration, when its boat was surrounded.
Israel Parks and Nature Authority said that pollution and climate change are increasing the intensity of the jellyfish swarms.
Researchers uncover “Lightning Framework,” a new Swiss Army Knife-like Linux malware that has modular plugins and the ability to install rootkits.
Ford has started trials of its electric vehicle charging robot.
Ford’s all-electric F-150 Lightning truck can power houses for three days during blackouts utilizing its Ford Intelligent Backup Power.
The transport sector is transforming towards climate-friendly powertrains with significantly reduced CO 2 emissions. The electrification of powertrains remains a major challenge not only for trucks, buses, trains, and ships but also for aircraft. These applications cannot be realized in the future with batteries because of the energy requirements. The fuel cell is an extremely promising energy supplier for these applications, which supplies electrical energy from stored hydrogen and ambient air.
Fraunhofer Institutes LBF, IFAM, IISB, and SCAI joined their forces to develop advanced and highly efficient components for fuel cells. The project HABICHT aims to design and develop a high-speed motor for a fuel cell compressor to enable innovation in the utility vehicle and aviation domain. The electric machine should at least achieve apower density of 30 kW/kgby using innovative materials for direct cooling of the stator and maximizing the rotor’shigh-speed capability (150.000 rpm). The rotor design will use a new manufacturing process to glue and pot the magnets to be suitable for high circumferential speeds.
Prototype of a high-speed motor for a fuel cell compressor. (Image: Project HABICHT)
Carbon labelling gives consumers a weapon to fight climate change at the cash register.
What’s Involved with Carbon Labelling
Today, nutritional and content labelling can be found on packaged foods. The Government recently announced plans to enhance those labels. Why, because of concerns that Canadians need to learn more about what they eat so that they can make healthier choices.
Carbon labelling would serve a similar purpose by allowing Canadians to make healthier choices about carbon emissions. A carbon label would let consumers understand the environmental impact of items they purchase and consume. The label would contain the total carbon footprint of the product.
EPFL researchers have shown that people’s perception of office temperature can vary considerably. Personalized climate control could therefore help enhance workers’ comfort—and save energy at the same time.
Global warming means that heatwaves are becoming ever-more frequent. At the same time, we’re in a global race against the clock to reduce buildings’ energy use and carbon footprint by 2050. This has shone the spotlight on the importance of making the thermal comfort of buildings a strategic and economic priority. And this is the focus of research conducted by Dolaana Khovalyg, a tenure track assistant professor at EPFL’s School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) and head of the Laboratory of Integrated Comfort Engineering (ICE), which is linked to the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg.
In her latest study, published as a brief, cutting-edge report in the journal Obesity, she highlights the benefits of providing personalized thermal conditioning and heating for each office desk, rather than maintaining a standard temperature throughout an open space. Khovalyg and her team came to this conclusion after the human thermo-physiological data they collected showed that individuals display very different levels of thermal comfort under normal office conditions.
An XPrize competition funded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk just awarded teams of students $5 million to develop their ideas for carbon removal systems — and it still has another $95 million to give away.
The challenge: Between our cars, factories, and everything else, humans are pumping about 43 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.
To combat climate change, we not only need to cut that figure way down, we also need to capture and store a lot of the CO2 that’s already out there.
A recent study from the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and published in Wa | Chemistry And Physics.
This study is intriguing since one of the results of climate change is increasing water temperatures, so removing phosphorus from such waters will prove invaluable in the future, with this study appropriately being referred to as a “future-proof” method.
Since phosphorus in fresh water often results in algal blooms, removing it from wastewater prior to it being released into fresh water is extremely important. This is because algal blooms drastically reduce oxygen levels in natural waters when the algae die, often resulting in the delivery of high levels of toxins, killing organisms in those waters.
Below the surface of US coastal cities and towns, the salt line is rising in aquifers used for fresh water. The cause is climate change.
As sea levels rise, saltwater will intrude into groundwater. For more than 600 million who draw on aquifers, it means a freshwater crisis.