Suzanne Jacobs – Alternative Energies

Suzanne Jacobs
australia
country
January 21, 2016
0 Comments

The human population is aging. Can our cities handle it?

If there’s anything that our inability to tackle climate change has taught us, it’s that we are exceptionally good at ignoring — or straight up denying — problems that lie in our future, especially when they affect generations other than our own. So I hate to say it, but we’ve got another one coming: The human population is aging, and our cities aren’t ready for it. Here’s the scoop from the Washington Post: By 2030, more than 1 billion people (one in eight) will be aged 65 or older, and by 2050, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas. What’s needed between now and then, according to a new report from McGraw Hill Financial Global Institute, is new thinking about how…

Suzanne Jacobs
climate
communications
January 15, 2016
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These bacterial communities are heating up the desert

Do you ever feel like this is a microbial world, and that we’re just living in it? It seems like every day, scientists are discovering new ways that these invisible communities are manipulating our health, impacting the climate, keeping ecosystems in check, and (maybe) occasionally killing off more than 70 percent of all species on Earth. Well, now we can add one more thing to their resume: heating up the desert. According to a new paper published in Nature Communications, bacterial communities that form on arid soil can increase surface temperatures by as much as 10 degrees C. They do this by secreting a kind of “sunscreen” that, while protecting the microbes themselves from harmful ultraviolet light, actually absorbs sunlight that would otherwise reflect off the soil…

Suzanne Jacobs
article
atmosphere
January 12, 2016
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Are we alone in the universe because all the aliens went extinct?

If we’re alone in the universe, then the big question is: Why? There are billions upon billions of Earth-like planets out there. Surely, life would have evolved many times over. But lo, Jody Foster couldn’t find any back in 1997, and today, almost 20 years later, we’re still searching. This conundrum is known as the Fermi Paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked “Where is everybody?” one day while eating lunch with his colleagues (note to self: nix the sad desk lunch; you’ll never get a paradox named after you this way), and scientists have been scratching their heads over it for decades. But in a new paper published this week in the journal Astrobiology, two researchers from the Australian…

Suzanne Jacobs
aztec
built
January 9, 2016
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This guy started an e-waste band, and it’s actually amazing

You know what they say — when life gives you e-waste, start a band and make sick tunes with it. Together with his band Open Reel Ensemble, Japanese programmer and musician Ei Wada uses old projectors, cathode ray television sets, tape recorders, ventilation fans, discarded computers, and any other vintage tech with bizarre noise potential to make the kind of electronic music that would make a cyberpunk swoon. According to Motherboard, Wada’s interest in music began when he was four years old and attended a gamelan concert with his family. (The influence of gamelan, a traditional form of music from Indonesia, on electronica has been well-documented.) Here’s more from Motherboard: The memory stuck, and several years later, when Wada started tinkering with…

Suzanne Jacobs
check-out-this
climate & energy
December 30, 2015
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Geoengineering simulation lets us play with the future

Wherever you stand on geoengineering — whether you think it’s our only chance of survival or a fast track to extinction — we should at least consider the idea. As I argued last year, just studying geoengineering could teach us a lot about the climate and just talking about it could ease some lingering political tensions around climate change. So in the spirit of keeping all options on the table when it comes to preventing a climate catastrophe, check out this interactive geoengineering simulation from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project. It lets you look at what global temperatures could look like between 10 and 50 years from now, if we decide to jump down the geoengineering rabbit hole. Here are the specifics from Slate: This interactive shows temperature…

Suzanne Jacobs
advice
blue
December 29, 2015
0 Comments

Plant hackers trade software for DNA, still live with their parents

The modern-day “hacker,” as portrayed in popular culture, is a human subspecies native to basements, back rooms, and warehouses. They often sport multiple piercings and complicated hairstyles. They tend to wear perpetual looks of disdain and, indifferent toward mental or physical health, feed on fast food and vending machine fare — a peculiar preference, given the inconvenience of sticky fingers on keyboards. But this stereotype might be changing, the Wall Street Journal reports, because just as the hackers of yore co-evolved with the internet boom, there’s a new kind of hacker co-evolving with the biotech boom. Sebastian Cocioba, a 25-year-old resident of Queens, NY, is one such “biohacker.” Here’s more from the Wall Street Journal: Born into…