Global warming entering into a crucial stage

Climate change is entering into a crucial stage. With 2'C set as limit by UN Climate change institution by 2100, we have reached the first half. The global temperature is set to enter 1'C global temperature increase after pre-industrial times by end of 2015.
Global temperatures in 2014 were just below 0.9'C. According to climate observatories 2015 was the hottest year of history. As we witnessed heatwaves, droughts and  floods hitting different part of the planet. Including heatwave observed in Europe after the catastrophic heatwave of 2003. Droughts hit different states of USA, California in most.
Read Also: What if we stop using fossil fuels?
Carbon dioxide the leading global warming cause, was noted to be higher than ever. With concentrations of 440 ppm. Which is two-third of maximum to limit global temperature increase by 2'C.
The temperature increase comes with 60cm increase in average sea-level rise. This may seem little but can inundate lots of coastal cities.

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New Battery Technologies

Nanotube-based batteries
Current lithium-ion battery technology will reach its limit soon – there is only so much that can be achieved through tweaking the battery chemistry of a lithium-ion system – but a change in the way the electrode is made, using nanotechnology, could breath new life into lithium. By making the electrodes out of nanotubes researchers have dramatically increased the rate of recharging the batteries, reaching a 70% charge in just two minutes.

Some researchers have used both silicon in place of graphite for the new electrodes. Others, including a team from the Nanyang Technology University in Singapore have patented the use of titanium dioxide nanotubes, which has been licensed for commercial development and could be available within two years.
Pros: fast charging, longer recharge life (ie the number of times it can be recharged)
Cons: similar energy density to current batteries means similar battery life
Sulphur-based batteries
Research focused on squeezing longer battery life out of the same-sized batteries has experimented with different battery chemistries. One promising candidate is the sulphur-based battery.
Lithium-sulphur batteries promise up to five times the amount of energy per gram as current lithium-ion technology. Once commercially available lithium-sulphur batteries are more likely to have an energy density closer to twice that of current batteries, but that would enable twice the battery life for devices and cars.
The technology has been in development for over 20 years, and at least one company is aiming to have lithium-sulphur batteries powering electric cars by 2016, but batteries designed for portable devices such as smartphones are likely to be many years away.
Pros: at least twice the battery life
Cons: low recharge life, volatile chemistry, similar recharge times
Metal-air batteries
Metal air batteries replace the cathode, which is typically graphite in traditional lithium-ion cells, with oxygen in the air. This saves weight and provides a cathode that can simply be replaced with fresh air that is essentially free.
Saving weight means a higher energy density, which some researchers have claimed to be similar to petrol in these batteries, meaning longer life, making it ideal for electric cars. Tesla has a patented system for integrating metal air batteries into its electric cars, while an electric Citroen C1 was driven 1,800km on a single charge using the technology.
But degradation issues, problems recharging them and poor recharge life cycles have hampered commercialisation of the technology.
Pros: very high energy density means fantastic battery life
Cons: difficult to recharge, poor recharging life
Solid-state batteries
Solid-state batteries remove the liquid electrolyte required by most other batteries to transfer ions between electrodes and generate electricity. In doing so they have a much higher energy density.
Battery firm Sakti3, which recently saw investment and a commercial partnership with British vacuum firm Dyson, claims its batteries could store up to twice the energy and therefore battery life as current lithium-ion batteries.
Pros: twice the battery life, safer, could be made into different shapes and sizes, more environmentally friendly
Cons: not many
Supercapacitors
Capacitors are used in all kinds of technology, but commonly in devices that need a lot of electricity in a very short space of time, like a flash or a sub-woofer in a car. They charge in seconds but release all that charge in one go.
A supercapacitor works in a similar manner, charging in seconds but releasing its energy more slowly, like a battery. Current research using graphene promises supercapacitors that charge in about 16 seconds and can be recharged over 10,000 times. But even the best supercapacitors can only store energy in densities about the same as current lithium-ion batteries.
Pros: almost instant charging, very long recharge life, potential for use as a secondary electricity storage device in electric cars
Cons: low energy density, therefore lower battery life
New battery technology is coming and could be in electric vehicles before the end of the decade, but it could be several years before cells fit for use in portable electronics make our smartphones last more than a day.
Read about Aluminum batteries here.

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New Aluminum / Aluminium Batteries

A research to produce efficient aluminum batteries carried out by students at Stanford claims to produce batteries that can be charged in a minute and can power a smartphone.
The battery is not the first of its kind to use aluminum ions to power the battery. Earlier we have lithium, lithium polymer and nickel-cadmium batteries. The battery has seen to have far better life then previous aluminum batteries.

Stanford’s new battery can be recharged around 7,500 times. Typical lithium-ion batteries used in everything from smartphones and laptops to electric cars last around 1,000 recharge cycles.
The new aluminium-ion batteries are far from being available for commercial use in electronics, as they produce just half the voltage of lithium-ion batteries.
“I see this as a new battery in its early days. It’s quite exciting,” said Ming Gong, one of the authors of the study published in Nature. “Improving the cathode material could eventually increase the voltage and energy density. Otherwise, our battery has everything else you’d dream that a battery should have: inexpensive electrodes, good safety, high-speed charging, flexibility and long cycle life.”
The new aluminium battery technology is not the only one vying to solve our battery life crunch – the primary issue holding back current electronic devices.

Read more about new battery technologies here.

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Pi Day

Entrance mathematician's building, TU-Berlin

Pi (π)
The number π is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, approximately equal to 3.14159(The first 100 decimal digits are 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679).

Pi Day
Pi Day is an annual celebration commemorating the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is observed on March 14 (or 3/14 in the U.S. month/day date format), since 3, 1, and 4 are the three most significant digits of π in the decimal form. In 2009, the United States House of Representatives supported the designation of Pi Day.
Pi Approximation Day is observed on July 22 (or 22/7 in the day/month date format), since the fraction 22⁄7 is a common approximation of π, which is accurate to two decimal places and dates from Archimedes

History
The earliest known official or large-scale celebration of Pi Day was organized by Larry Shaw in 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where Shaw worked as a physicist, with staff and public marching around one of its circular spaces, then consuming fruit pies. The Exploratorium continues to hold Pi Day celebrations.
On March 12, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution (HRES 224), recognizing March 14, 2009, as National Pi Day.
For Pi Day 2010, Google presented a Google Doodle celebrating the holiday, with the word Google laid over images of circles and pi symbols.
The entire month of March 2014 (3/14) was observed by some (University of Maryland Alumnus) as "Pi Month".
In the year 2015, Pi Day will have special significance on 3/14/15 at 9:26:53 a.m. and p.m., with the date and time representing the first 10 digits of π. That same second will also contain a precise instant corresponding to all of the digits of π. However, some argue that 9:26:54 a.m. and p.m. on 3/14/15 are more accurate because of the 11th digit of π being 5, which would cause the 10th digit to round up to 4.

Observance
Pi Day has been observed in many ways, from eating pie to discussing the significance of the number π. Some schools hold competitions as to which student can recall Pi to the highest number of decimal places.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has often mailed its application decision letters to prospective students for delivery on Pi Day. Starting in 2012, MIT has announced it will post those decisions (privately) online on Pi Day at exactly 6:28 pm, which they have called "Tau Time", to honor the rival numbers Pi and Tau equally.

The town of Princeton, New Jersey, hosts numerous events in a combined celebration of Pi Day and Albert Einstein's birthday, which is also March 14. Einstein lived in Princeton for more than twenty years while working at the Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to pie eating and recitation contests, there is an annual Einstein look-alike contest.

Source
Wikipedia.

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What Will Happen If Antarctica Melts?

When we talk about global warming at the poles, the Arctic tends to get more press than the Antarctic, because it's happening faster there than anywhere else on Earth. But Antarctica is still a juggernaut. Antarctica is approximated to contain 90% of world's ice and 70% of world's fresh water reserves. The amount of ice is so enormous that if a fraction of it gets melted into the water, the oceans can rise in feet. Current situation of global warming has lead to collapse of ice sheets in Antarctica, and this process is termed as irreversible by scientists, and believed that it may raise global sea level as high as 10 feet.
Greenland is also on its way to melting its reserves of ice. According to scientist the rate at which it is melting is 60 years ahead of what has been previously called as worst case.
After much controversies United Nations called the largest political summit on global climatic changes in 2014. In contrary to that people in United states are still debating on this issue of climate change. Even one of the senator termed global warming as a hoax. Still people are denying the current increase in global temperatures. According to Joe Bast, President Heartland Institute, climate change is not man made and there is no data that proves global warming is a crisis. But some politician are serious about the issue as Vice President Joe Biden, said "Denying climate change is like denying gravity", in his interview by VICE documentary series on HBO.
Getting to the science of this glacial melting in Antarctic continent, Dr. Eric Rignot says its because of stronger winds circulating around Antarctic continent that drives warmer water towards Antarctic ice. These warmer currents of water melts icebergs from below, thus collapsing the ice sheets. This is termed irreversible contrary to reversible that is the ice melting in summer and freezing again in winters.
In 2013 a iceberg of size equal to Singapore (length ~21miles) broke off the Pine Island Glacier in the western Antarctica. While other parts in western Antarctica are melting at higher rates was confirmed by British Glaciologist in 2014, including Pine Island Galcier, Thwaities Glacier, Haynes Glacier, Pope Glacier, Smith Glacier and Kohler Glacier in western Antarctica bordering with Amundsen Sea.
The solution that is proposed to deal with this situation by scientists and climatologist is to cut off carbon dioxide emissions. Dr. Andrew Clark, an Emeritus fellow, with experience of over 40 years of researching and 215 scholarly papers says about the climatic change as "To slow the pace of damage, maybe in very long term, but for generations to come there is red button and its going to continue."
The result of this melting is inundation of coastal areas. Bangladesh is at top of the list of countries that will face such situation, because of its low lying flat land. According to Dr. Atiq Rehman an environmentalist (who is a co-recipient of Nobel Peace Prize for  for his work on climate change), for 1meter rise in global sea-level, Bangladesh's 17% land is to be inundated for this rise in sea level. A total of 300million people are to suffer by end of this century due global sea-level rise.
Thus its time to make our contribution towards the saving of the environment. Everyone has to share his own part in saving the humanity from this crisis. Either it's decreasing the carbon based fuels or turning towards green energy solutions. Also we need to make up for the damages we had done in last decades.

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Some Famous Female Contributors to Science

Some of the greatest scientists of all time were females who have made important discoveries in a variety of fields in science. Several of their contributions throughout history have even surpassed those of their male counterparts. Our list of the most famous female scientists below are organized in order of popularity so you can read about the advancements that they made. 

Marie Curie (1867-1934) Famous For: Work on radioactivity Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to win this award in two categories: Physics and Chemistry. She discovered polonium and radium and her work helped with the creation of X-rays.	Jane Goodall (1934) Famous For: Primate studies Jane Goodall is known world-wide for her groundbreaking studies on primates. She is considered the top expert on chimpanzeees in the world and is perhaps best known for her 45 year study on the social lives of these animals in Tanzania.
Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012) Famous For: Nerve growth studies Rita Levi-Montalcini was a neurologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986 for her findings in nerve growth factor (NGF). She was the first Nobel laureate to live past her 100th birthday.	Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) Famous For: Research on RNA, DNA, graphite, coal and viruses Rosalind Franklin was a X-ray crystallographer and biophysicist whose work greatly contributed to the comprehension of molecular structures. Her most notable work revolved around X-ray diffraction images of DNA. Her work in this resulted in the finding of the DNA double helix.
Lise Meitner (1878-1968) Famous For: Work on radioactivity and nuclear physics Lise Meitner was a key member of a group that discovered nuclear fission. One of her colleagues, Otto Hahn, was given the Noble Prize for this work and Meitner’s exclusion from the award is considered to be a huge error by the Nobel committee.	Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) Famous For: Work in nuclear physics Shirley Ann Jackson was the first African American woman to attain a doctorate degree at MIT in nuclear physics. She has received many awards for her research and work as well as several honorary doctorate degrees.
Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) Famous For: Findings in astronomy Maria Mitchell was the very first American female to become a professional astronomer. She discovered a comet in 1847 that was aptly named “Miss Mitchell’s Comet.”	Irène Joliot-Curie (1897-1956) Famous For: Study of radiation Daughter of famed Marie Curie, Irene Joliot Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for the finding of artificial radioactivity. She, along with her husband Frederic, also turned boron into radioactive nitrogen as well as aluminim into phosphorus and magnesium into silicon.
Elizabeth Blackburn (1948) Famous For: Work with telomere Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for her discovery of telomerase which is the enzyme which replenishes telomere. Telomere is part of the end of a chromosome which protects them.	Melissa Franklin (1957) Famous For: Particle physics studies Melissa Franklin currently holds a position as an experimental particle physicists at Harvard University where she is Department Chair. She headed a team at the Fermi National Acceleration Lab in Chicago where they found the first signs that top quarks exist. Franklin was also the first woman to get tenure at the Harvard Physics department.
Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) Famous For: Discovering comets Caroline Herschel worked closely together with her brother Sir William Herschel throughout their careers as astronomers. Caroline discovered several comets, one of which, the 35P/Herschel-Rigollet, is named after her. She was the first woman scientist to be recognized by the United Kingdom.	Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994) Famous For: Protein crystallography Dorothy Hodgkin is known for her advancement of X-ray crystallography techniques which are now implemented to figure out the three dimensional structures of biomolecules. She was given the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her findings on the makeup of vitamin B12.
Gertrude B. Elion (1918-1999) Famous For: Development of new drugs Gertrude B. Elion was a joint-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988 “for discoveries of important principles for drug treatment.” One of her most notable creations was the development of the AIDS drug AZT.	Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) Famous For: Work with experimental physics and radioactivity Chien-Shiung Wu is known for her work on the Manhattan Project and her help with finding the process for separating uranium into U-238 and U-235. She has several nicknames including the “Chinese Marie Curie” and the “First Lady of Physics.”

Adapted from 'Famous Female Scientists'

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Playing a musical instrument can improve a child's brain

According to an investigation of the association between playing a musical instrument and brain development, kids who are trained in music have better attention spans, a better grip on their emotions, and are less likely to be anxious.

Psychologist have studied the connection between musical training and brain development to find that the hobby can shape a young person’s brain and help them with functions such as emotion processing and focusing attention.
Run by researchers at the University Of Vermont, College Of Medicine in the US, the study follows on from research conducted previously by professor of psychiatry and Vermont Centre for Children director, James Hudziak. In previous years, Hudziak had been working with the US National Institutes of Health to complete an MRI study of what normal brain development looks like. His team then used this data to observe the brain development of 232 children aged six to 18. Children have particularly adaptable brains, and as they grow up, the outer layer of the brain - the cortex - experiences changes in thickness. In an earlier study, Hudziak and his team first discovered that thinning or thickening of specific areas of the cortex can be linked to instances of anxiety or depression, problems with attention span, aggression and other behavioral problems, even in kids who are otherwise perfectly healthy.  More recently, the team decided to see if a ‘positive activity’ - for example, musical training - could influence cortex thickness and mitigate any negative effects.


Publishing in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the team’s findings support a model proposed by Hudziak called the Vermont Family Based Approach. Rather sensibly, the model suggested that everything in a young person’s environment, including their family, friends, teachers, pets, and hobbies, all contribute to their psychological health. And “music is a critical component in my model,” says Hudziak in a press release.
The team found that because learning a musical instrument calls for control and coordination of very specific movements, the activity alters the motor areas of the brain. But it also controls the changes experienced by areas of the brain that regulate behavior. For example, it reportedly influences thickness in the part of the cortex that relates to "executive functioning, including working memory, attentional control, as well as organization and planning for the future,” the team writes.
They also found that a child's musical background was also correlated to the thickness of the cortex in areas that play a crucial role in emotion processing and inhibitory control.
Referring to the fact that three-quarters of high school students in the US rarely or never take up a hobby in music or the arts, Hudziak says we need to make an effort to make these activities more attractive to young people.
"Such statistics, when taken in the context of our present neuro-imaging results," the team writes, "underscore the vital importance of finding new and innovative ways to make music training more widely available to youths, beginning in childhood."

Adapted from Sciencealert.

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Snøhetta The Green Home

This Zero-Emission Home Creates Enough Energy To Power An Electric Car For One Year.

This just might just be the most beautiful zero-emission home we have ever laid eyes on. Snøhetta, a design firm in Norway, has created the ZEB Multi-Comfort House in Ringdalskogen, Larvik, Norway. The house not only runs solely on solar energy, but collects enough extra solar energy to power an electric car for one year.

ZEB took 10 months to build and, according to Kristian Edwards, the lead architect of the project, a very intricate process was employed to ensure that the solar energy would be used at the highest efficiency.

The result? A home with striking features like a tilted roof that is slanted at a 19-degree angle to accommodate the photovoltaic panels (the ones that provide electricity) and the solar thermal panels (the ones that provide heat and hot water). Edwards told The Huffington Post that the roof also provides a dramatic flair to the inside of the home. "It is perhaps the most striking element of the upper floor," he says. "Relatively small bedrooms gain great volume, hugely beneficial to sleep comfort, light transmission and of course, a certain drama."

In the atrium, Edwards used recovered brickwork from a barn that was being demolished. "The recovered brick serves a thermal mass which passively contributes to balance temperature spikes," says Edwards.

There are currently no tenants in the home. However, Edwards says that there are plans in the works to have families occupy the space "in order to realistically test the building and system performance." Feedback from visitors has been "generally extremely positive," he adds.

Despite it's forward-thinking approach, Edwards says the goal of ZEB was to create a place that is welcoming and comfortable, with energy-saving features that virtually disappear into the background. "Our goal was to ensure that the house, whilst advanced, is predominantly welcoming," says Edwards. "The outdoor covered atrium with a fireplace gives a welcome extension of the outdoor season that is fundamental to the Norwegian culture. This shows that the steps toward zero carbon housing need not represent a quantum leap in lifestyle, and therefore, makes it simpler and quicker to make the switch."


Published in The Huffington Post  |  By Renee Jacques  |  01/11/2015

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Cheap asphalt that can suck up carbon dioxide has been created

Credits: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Researchers have developed a cheap type of asphalt that can capture carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere.

The asphalt that forms our roads can be modified to store carbon and help reduce the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere, new research as found.
A team from Rice University in the US has used asphalt, or bitumen, to make a cheap porous material that can store an impressive 114 percent of its weight in carbon dioxide.
Known as asphalt-porous carbon (A-PC), the new material stores the carbon dioxide like a sponge at room temperature, but lets other gasses, such as methane flow through freely.

The asphalt that forms our roads can be modified to store carbon and help reduce the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere, new research as found.
A team from Rice University in the US has used asphalt, or bitumen, to make a cheap porous material that can store an impressive 114 percent of its weight in carbon dioxide.
Known as asphalt-porous carbon (A-PC), the new material stores the carbon dioxide like a sponge at room temperature, but lets other gasses, such as methane flow through freely.
This means it’s an ideal material to use as a filter in natural gas wellheads, which currently release a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in addition to the desired methane. The captured CO2 could later be extracted for other practical purposes, and the study shows that the material can store and then release CO2 over and over again without degrading.
"This provides an ultra-inexpensive route to a high-value material for the capture of carbon dioxide from natural gas streams," said chemist James Tour, who led the research, in a press release. "Not only did we increase its capacity, we lowered the price substantially."
The team made several variation of the material, which is made by mixing asphalt with potassium hydroxide at a high temperature, but the cheapest cost was just 30 cents per pound (~0.4 kg).
Their research has been published in the journal Applied Materials and Interfaces.
Tour notes that this makes the material better than any other that’s currently in use. And they’re hoping to tweak it further to make it more efficient.
Source: EurekAlert


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What if we stop using fossil fuels?

If all the peoples of the world got together tomorrow and agreed to never build another fossil fuel power plant or gasoline-powered automobile, all the carbon-emitting structures already built would still produce 496 gigatonnes of CO₂ between now and 2060. 

According to Steven Davis and his team at the Carnegie Institution, our energy infrastructure is already so hugely built up that producing another 496 gigatons of CO₂ is almost a certainty, even if we had zero growth of CO₂-emitting devices. Here's the (slightly) good news - if only that amount of carbon is emitted, then carbon dioxide levels would stabilize at about 430 parts per million in the atmosphere, and that would only raise temperature levels to about 1.3 degrees above pre-industrial times.

That figure is somewhat moving, because most climatologists agree we will start to see the more dire effects of global warming once temperatures rise two degrees. That means we have to figure out a way to utilize lots more alternative energy sources over the next fifty years without using that final 0.7 degrees worth of carbon emissions. Davis estimates we will need to produce 30 terawatts of power from alternative energy sources if we want to maintain current growth while avoiding the worst effects of climate change. While 30 terawatts is about double the world's total energy output in 2006, and fifteen times the amount of renewable energy we managed to produce.

To address this issue the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said to avoid “severe, pervasive and irreversible” consequences, the majority of the world’s electricity should produced by renewable energy by 2050, and the use of fossil fuels must be eliminated by 2100.

The scientific consensus is that keeping global temperatures from rising above 2 °C is the threshold for acceptable levels of global warming. The IPCC outlined various approaches to meet this target—but they all end with the elimination of coal, oil, and gas by the end of the century, as mentioned in the report by IPCC.

The IPCC estimates a cost of only 0.06% of global GDP every year to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 °C in 2100, while global GDP in that same period will grow by 300%. In other words, it is affordable to fight climate change.[1]

Environmentalist George Marshall argues that all the dithering since 1992 may mean it’s already too late. Instead of containing rising temperatures to 2 °C—which is dangerous enough—the Earth is heading for a rise of 4 °C. The influential climate scientist John Schellnhuber (paywall) tells Marshall that “the difference between two and four degrees is human civilization.” [2] Among the consequences of a 4 °C rise:

• Temperatures the Earth has not experienced in at least 5 million years, leading to heat waves that the human race may not be able to cope with
• Sea levels rising by 30 feet, submerging two-thirds of the world’s major cities, through the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
• 40% of plant and animals would be at risk of extinction.
• The loss of most of the Amazon through fire, as well as a third of Asian rainforests.

And this is not a problem that most of us can leave to our children, even if we wanted to. Marshall warns that we may see that rise of 4 °C in the next 60 years. (None of this is new; the World Bank warned we are on track for “4°C world” in 2012.) [3] And it’s going to get even harder to prioritize anything over growth—the Earth’s population could reach 11 billion by 2100[4], when the IPCC wants us to be fossil fuel-free.

 “The challenge that remains is that the scale of action is incremental and we need transformational approaches.”

Refences:

 [1] http://qz.com/266329/countries-can-rescue-the-planet-from-meltdown-and-save-money-doing-it/

[2]http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n20/paul-kingsnorth/the-four-degrees

[3]http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-change-report-warns-dramatically-warmer-world-this-century

[4]http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/18/world-population-new-study-11bn-2100

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