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Category: climatology

“A good ratio of oxygen to methane is key to combustion,” said Justin Long.

Can methane flare burners be advanced to produce less methane? This is what a recent study published in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Michigan (U-M) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) developed a methane flare burner with increased combustion stability and efficiency compared to traditional methane flare burners. This study has the potential to develop more environmentally friendly burners to combat human-caused climate change, specifically since methane is a far larger contributor to climate change than carbon dioxide.

For the study, the researchers used a combination of machine learning and novel manufacturing methods to test several designs of a methane flare burner that incorporates crosswinds to simulate real-world environments. The burner design includes splitting the methane flow in three directions while enabling oxygen flow from crosswinds to mix with the methane, enabling a much cleaner combustion. In the end, the researchers found that their design achieves 98 percent combustion efficiency, meaning it produces 98 percent less methane than traditional burners.

“A good ratio of oxygen to methane is key to combustion,” said Justin Long, who is a Senior Research Engineer at SwRI. “The surrounding air needs to be captured and incorporated to mix with the methane, but too much can dilute it. U-M researchers conducted a lot of computational fluid dynamics work to find a design with an optimal air-methane balance, even when subjected to high-crosswind conditions.”

Continue reading “New Methane Flare Tech: Efficiency Plus Combustion Stability” | >

“The pattern we found is so reproducible that we were able to make an accurate prediction of when each interglacial period of the past million years or so would occur and how long each would last,” said Dr. Stephen Barker.

Earth has experienced several climate cycles throughout its long history, including several ice ages that caused the planet to freeze over. The last ice age occurred approximately 11,700 years ago, but when could the next one occur? This is what a recent study published in Science hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated specific characteristics that could help predict Earth’s next ice age. This study has the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand Earth’s climate history and how climate change could alter this history.

For the study, the researchers analyzed Earth’s climate history over the last one million years and compared this data to changes in Earth’s axial tilt, the axial tilt’s wobble (also called precession), and changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The goal of the study was to connect these planetary parameters to past ice ages, also called glacial periods, while also attempting to predict future ice ages without human-caused climate change.

In the end, the researchers not only discovered when every ice age occurred over the past 900,000 years, but they predict the Earth will have approximately 10,000 years until the next ice age, noting we are currently in an interglacial period known as the Holocene.

Continue reading “Predicting the Future: When Will the Next Ice Age Begin?” | >

In a bold move towards a sustainable future, Helsinki, Finland’s capital, has installed the world’s largest heat pump, a groundbreaking piece of technology that has the capacity to power 30,000 homes. This ambitious project is a significant step in the fight against climate change, utilizing renewable energy sources to provide a reliable and efficient heating system even in the coldest of winters. In this article, we’ll explore how this technological marvel works, its environmental impact, and the potential it has to change energy production on a global scale.

Helsinki’s heat pump represents a major breakthrough in energy technology. The system works by transferring heat from a colder environment to a warmer one, ensuring maximum energy efficiency. One of the most impressive features of this heat pump is its use of carbon dioxide as a refrigerant, which allows the pump to generate heat at temperatures of up to 90°C.

A standout innovation is the oil-free compressor, a key component that ensures the system operates efficiently while minimizing its environmental footprint. This marks the first time such a system has been implemented on this scale, reinforcing Finland’s commitment to adopting sustainable solutions for energy production. By using renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, this heat pump reduces the need for fossil fuels and helps Finland move towards a more sustainable energy future.

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Among the roughly 10 billion white dwarf stars in the Milky Way galaxy, a greater number than previously expected could provide a stellar environment hospitable to life-supporting exoplanets, according to astronomers at the University of California, Irvine.

In a paper published recently in The Astrophysical Journal, a research team led by Aomawa Shields, UC Irvine associate professor of physics and astronomy, share the results of a study comparing the climates of exoplanets at two different stars.

One is a hypothetical white dwarf that’s passed through much of its life cycle and is on a slow path to stellar death. The other subject is Kepler-62, a “main sequence” star at a similar phase in its evolution as our sun.

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In today’s AI news, Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek wrapped up a week of revealing technical details about its development of a ChatGPT competitor, which was achieved at a fraction of the typical costs, in a move that is poised to accelerate global advances in the field. Over the past few days, DeepSeek published eight open-source projects on GitHub, the world’s largest open-source community.

In other advances, TikTok is preparing to sunset its creator marketplace in favor of a new, more expanded experience, the company has informed businesses and creators via email. The online platform, which connects brands with creators for collaborating on ads and other sponsorships, will stop allowing creator invitations or the creation of new campaigns as of Saturday the company says.

Ll need a Mac with an M1 chip or higher, which means Intel-based Macs are out of the loop. + And, Hume AI has unveiled Octave, an innovative text-to-speech (TTS) system that leverages large language model (LLM) technology to generate contextually aware and emotionally nuanced speech. The incredibly human-like voice tool competitively positions Octave as a leader in AI-driven voice synthesis. Traditional TTS systems often produce context-insensitive speech, which leads to monotonous output.

In videos, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, returns to the Hard Fork podcast for a candid, wide-ranging interview. We discuss Anthropic’s brand-new Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, the A.I. arms race against China, and his hopes and fears for this technology over the next two years. Then, we gather up recent tech stories, put them into a hat and close out the week with a round of HatGPT.

Continue reading “DeepSeek Ends Week-Long Marathon To Disclose AI Model Details” | >

Beginning around 2.5 million years ago, Earth entered an era marked by successive ice ages and interglacial periods, emerging from the last glaciation around 11,700 years ago. A new analysis suggests the onset of the next ice age could be expected in 10,000 years’ time.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

An international team, including researchers from UC Santa Barbara, made their prediction based on a new interpretation of the small changes in Earth’s orbit of the sun, which lead to massive shifts in the planet’s climate over periods of thousands of years. The study tracks the natural cycles of the planet’s climate over a period of a million years. Their findings offer new insights into Earth’s dynamic climate system and represent a step-change in understanding the planet’s glacial cycles.

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Dr. Rumi Chunara: “Our system learns to recognize more subtle patterns that distinguish trees from grass, even in challenging urban environments.”

How can artificial intelligence (AI) help improve city planning to account for more green spaces? This is what a recent study published in the ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies hopes to address as a team of researchers proposed a novel concept using AI with the goal of both monitoring and improving urban green spaces, which are natural public spaces like parks and gardens, and provide a myriad of benefits, including physical and mental health, combating climate change, wildlife habitats, and increased social interaction.

For the study, the researchers developed a method they refer to as “green augmentation”, which uses an AI algorithm to analyze Google Earth satellite images with the goal of improving current AI methods by more accurately identifying green vegetation like grass and trees under various weather and seasonal conditions. For example, current AI methods identify green vegetation with an accuracy and reliability of 63.3 percent and 64 percent, respectively. Using this new method, the researchers successfully identified green vegetation with an accuracy and reliability of 89.4 percent and 90.6 percent, respectively.

“Previous methods relied on simple light wavelength measurements,” said Dr. Rumi Chunara, who is an associate professor of biostatistics at New York University and a co-author on the study. “Our system learns to recognize more subtle patterns that distinguish trees from grass, even in challenging urban environments. This type of data is necessary for urban planners to identify neighborhoods that lack vegetation so they can develop new green spaces that will deliver the most benefits possible. Without accurate mapping, cities cannot address disparities effectively.”

Continue reading “New AI Method Revolutionizes Urban Green Space Mapping” | >

Researchers from Japan and Taiwan reveal for the first time that helium, usually considered chemically inert, can bond with iron under high pressures. They used a laser-heated diamond anvil cell to find this, and the discovery suggests there could be huge amounts of helium in the Earth’s core. This could challenge long-standing ideas about the planet’s internal structure and history, and may even reveal details of the nebula our solar system coalesced from.

The research is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

During a there are often traces of what is known as primordial helium. That is, helium, which differs from normal helium, or 4 He, so called because it contains two protons and two neutrons and is continuously produced by radioactive decay. Primordial helium, or 3 He, on the other hand, is not formed on Earth and contains two protons and one neutron.

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In today’s AI news, in a social media post, DeepSeek said the daily releases it is planning for its Open Source Week would provide visibility into these humble building blocks in our online service that have been documented, deployed and battle-tested in production. As part of the open-source community, we believe that every line shared becomes collective momentum that accelerates the journey.

In other advancements, Together AI an AI cloud platform that enables companies to train and deploy artificial intelligence models — has raised $305 million in Series B funding in a round led by General Catalyst, more than doubling its valuation to $3.3 billion from $1.25 billion last March. The funding comes amid growing demand for computing power to run advanced open-source models.

In personal and professional development, if you’re curious about how to integrate AI smartly into your business, here are some friendly tips to get you started while keeping things safe and effective. The key is strategic integration with safeguards in place, use AI’s strengths — without losing your own.

Then, search startup Genspark has raised $100 million in a series A funding round, valuing the startup at $530 million, according to a source familiar with the matter, as the race to use artificial intelligence to disrupt Google’s stranglehold on the search engine market heats up. The Palo Alto-based company currently has over 2 million monthly active users, and the round was led by a group of U.S. and Singapore-based investors.

S like to compete with Google, and what the future of search could look like. + Then, as AI scales from the cloud to the very edges of our devices, the potential for transformative innovation grows exponentially. In this Imagination In Action session at Davos, Daniel Newman, CEO The Futurum Group moderates this expert panel which includes: Åsa Tamsons, Executive VP, Ericsson, Gill Pratt, CEO Toyota Research, Chief Scientist Toyota, Kinuko Masaki, CEO, VoiceBrain, Cyril Perducat, CTO, Rockwell Automation, and Alexander Amini, CSO, Liquid AI.

Continue reading “DeepSeek Goes Beyond “Open Weights” AI With Plans For It’s Source Code Release” | >

An interesting glimpse into the adventurous world of neutrino research in Antarctica!

At McMurdo, Karle must wait for the weather to permit the final leg of the trip. “It is not uncommon to spend several days in McMurdo,” he says. (Karle’s record is 10.) When it’s time, he takes a 3.5-hour flight on a ski-equipped LC-130 aircraft to reach the South Pole. Anyone or anything else that goes to the South Pole must take a similarly tedious route.

There’s a reason scientists have endured the challenges of the climate, the commute and the cost for over half a century—since members of the US Navy completed the original Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in 1957. Despite all the trouble it takes to get there, the South Pole is an unparalleled environment for scientific research, from climate science and glaciology to particle physics and astrophysics.

This sentiment was echoed by the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel in its 2023 report, a decadal plan for the future of particle physics research in the United States. Under its recommendation to “Construct a portfolio of major projects that collectively study nearly all fundamental constituents of our universe and their interactions,” the report prioritized support for five specific projects—two of which are located at the South Pole: cosmic microwave background experiment CMB-S4, the top priority, and neutrino experiment IceCube-Gen2, recommended fifth. Because of the high scientific priority of these projects, the report also urged maintenance of the South Pole site.

Continue reading “A harsh environment for life, an ideal environment for research” | >