Category Archives: Web Article Review

half the world’s power from the Sahara

There’s a big idea to provide half the world’s energy from solar panels in the Sahara desert, using the actual desert sand as a raw material to manufacture the panels. An interesting article in Science says that wind and solar farms on such a large scale could actually change the local weather drastically by altering wind and surface temperatures, ultimately increasing rainfall and allowing more vegetation in the desert.

In this study, we used a climate model with dynamic vegetation to show that large-scale installations of wind and solar farms covering the Sahara lead to a local temperature increase and more than a twofold precipitation increase, especially in the Sahel, through increased surface friction and reduced albedo. The resulting increase in vegetation further enhances precipitation, creating a positive albedo–precipitation–vegetation feedback that contributes ~80% of the precipitation increase for wind farms. This local enhancement is scale dependent and is particular to the Sahara, with small impacts in other deserts.

Could this work on Mars? I guess not, because you don’t have the water vapor in the atmosphere to begin with. Unless you get that alien ice breaker thing from Total Recall (the 1990 version, again, I don’t recognize the 2012 version’s right to exist) – why do I keep coming back to this movie?

Ford signals self-driving car’s “intent”

Ford is trying a set of blinking lights to help pedestrians understand whether a self-driving car is likely to stop or run them over. Somewhat interesting, but really I think the legal responsibility needs to be on the car’s owner/programmer and not the pedestrian. If this saves a few lives by preventing a few otherwise unavoidable crashes it is a good thing. If it creates an excuse to blame the victim, it is a bad thing. In recent U.S. history at least, the situation between driver and pedestrian has almost always been the latter.

A back-and-forth white light means the car is yielding. When the car is about to go, the white light quickly blinks. Ford said it’s trying to find a way to communicate that doesn’t use text.

Once cars are machine-driven, any pedestrian-driver communication gets a lot harder. So how does a woman walking or a kid biking check in with a car to know it’s safe to cross the street?

3D model builder for construction sites

Here’s a technology to build 3D (digital) models of what is happening on construction sites over time using data from cameras mounted on workers’ helmets. If you have a 3D model of what is supposed to be built ahead of time, you can imagine this providing the chance to compare what is being built to what was planned, giving you the ability to catch and correct mistakes in real time.

construction productivity

The construction industry has languished in terms of productivity growth for decades. But there are ideas, some of which are mentioned in this white paper from UK firm Balfour Beatty. Many are organized around the idea of prefabricating as many components as possible offset, then bringing them in for assembly. Another way of looking at it is that construction is basically a form of (inefficient, risky and very site-specific) manufacturing, and can try to learn some lessons from other manufacturing industries.

…we know this is an industry that lives on thin margins, is plagued by time and cost overruns and inherently operates in one of the higher risk environments of any sector – risk in terms of cost, time and, above all, human safety. But do we also think of this as an industry with one of the largest opportunities of any sector to transform its model? Can we think of many industries where the size of the prize is to shift 25% of current output to a solution that radically improves speed, quality and safety – all while creating (not destroying) jobs?

Today a new generation of industrialised construction methods, including offsite and modular building techniques, are increasingly being recognised as the best way for the UK construction industry to boost productivity and plug skills shortages. And moving to these methods drives better outcomes for all stakeholders: for the customer, reducing onsite construction times and waste; for the construction supply chain, by improving quality, repeatability (and
therefore output) of infrastructure; for the workforce above all, by raising safety performance and securing long-term employment.

 

forestry robot

Here’s a robot that can help forestry scientists collect data in the field.

Mikhailov is a 16-year-old student atITMO University, the renowned science and technology institution in St. Petersburg, Russia. As a member of the school’s Youth Robotics Lab, he was perfectly positioned to bring his idea to life. With a full team working on the the project, the robot won the gold medal at last year’s World Robot Olympiad; it can record tree locations within a forest, identify their species, measure the widths of their trunks, and even identify if a tree is healthy or not.

Its name is Forester, and most of its job is to explore forests and hit trees with its mallet. It’s a robotic adaptation of a technique that human tree experts often use, called “sounding,” to help their appraisal of a tree’s health.

gene-edited soybean oil

Gene editing is starting to move into food, using CRISPR and something new (to me) called TALENs.

Calyxt’s soybean is the first of 23 gene-edited crops the Agriculture Department has recognized to date.

Scientists at Calyxt, a subsidiary of the French pharmaceutical firm Cellectis, developed their soybean by turning “off” the genes responsible for the trans fats in soybean oil. Compared with the conventional version, Calyxt says, oil made from this soybean boasts far more “healthy” fats, and far less of the fats that raise bad cholesterol…

Tripodi likes to say the product is akin to olive oil but without the pungent flavor that would make it off-putting in Oreos or granola bars. It has earned praise from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group that says public health will benefit from ingredients with less trans and saturated fats, regardless of how they were developed.

I’m not really afraid of genetically engineered food, but when we monkey with whole foods in this way, it almost never ends up being healthier. Two good cases in point are vitamin pills and baby formula. If you want to be healthy, you should eat the actual soybeans rather than the Oreos or granola bars with soybean oil in them, whether genetically modified or not. And I happen to like olive oil, by the way.

My other concern is biodiversity. The more patented, altered, and homogeneous our food supply is, I wonder if it is more vulnerable to some pest or disease coming out of left field and wiping out the vast majority of it. This concern is not limited to genetic engineering either.

“pro-growth education for Japan”

I was ready to rail against this article about “pro-growth education“, thinking from the title that it would be all about STEM and teaching job skills rather than thinking skills. But it turned out to be more about thinking skills, and went over some research on early childhood education with an emphasis to music, even giving a shout out to the Suzuki and Kodaly methods of teaching music to young children.

infrastructure decay like “hidden debt”?

This article describes the U.S. lack of needed investment in infrastructure and (including maintenance) and renewable energy as a “hidden debt” that will come due. They liken it to not disclosing to a home buyer that your roof needs repairs, which if disclosed would reduce the expected selling price of the home. I don’t know about the accounting questions involved, but as a communication approach maybe this could work.

The federal government also has debt that has not been accounted for, and which one doesn’t often hear about. The debt that has been accounted for is the $15.6 trillionheld by the public in the form of US Treasury bonds. The debts that have not been accounted for include the deferred costs of maintenance on roads, water systems, and 54,560 structurally deficient bridges, as well as the yet-to-be-built low-carbon energy systems necessary to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change. And these are just two broad examples.

So, just how much hidden US debt is there? At this point, we must rely on rough estimates. For example, according to a 2016 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), upgrading the country’s crumbling infrastructure would cost $5.2 trillion. And, according to a 2014 International Energy Agency (IEA) report and our own calculations based on the US share of global CO2 emissions, transitioning to a clean-energy system will cost an additional $6.6 trillion. All told, that is $11.8 trillion in unaccounted-for non-inflation-adjusted liabilities.