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Category: climatology – Page 122

Plant science: overlooked research area that gave birth to cell biology

Plant scientists have revolutionised science and innovation. Research around the cell or cell biology was born out of plant science.

Researching plants is vital for our food security, maintaining our ecosystems and in our fight against climate change. Plant science is equally important to generate new knowledge that breaks disciplinary barriers to revolutionise several fields of research and innovation. But despite its valuable contribution, scientists and prospective young scientists often overlook plant science. It’s because of this low recognition, plant science doesn’t get the same prestige as other disciplines. This is detrimental to the future of plant science as bright young students continue to choose a career away from plant science. I never considered studying plants myself — it was entirely accidental that I studied plant science.

In other words, scientists and prize committees question the influence of basic plant science across different disciplines.

But the fact is that ever since the early days of science, plants have been central to breakthroughs. Discoveries in plant science have enabled technological advances that we enjoy today. Therefore, I’m aiming to write a series of blog posts to highlight a few significant findings from research in plants. Here, I explain how plant research revolutionised the field of cell biology.

Space or Earth? Both!

While we are opening our preliminary discussion for the 3rd SRI World Congress, a number of questions and concerns are being expressed by the main space columnists, about what could be the philosophic setup of the space policy defined by the new US Administration, should it be confirmed the next December 14th. Though Joe Biden didn’t yet say very much about space policy, the most accredited plans foresee cuts to the budget of NASA’s manned space flight programs, in order to give more fuel to the observation of Earth, climate change, and environmental issues.

We are not against raising the budget to Earth observation programs, which are much needed in the current climatic and environmental situation. Besides Earth observation, space agencies should also begin considering the use of space technologies to mitigate the effects of the climate change and the environmental issues, i.e. active space strategies targeted to control the Earth climate.

However, the most important point to be duly focused is that the same priority granted to environmental space programs should be given to bootstrapping the geo-lunar space region settlement and industrialization. Space development is the primary strategy against the awful multi-crisis that is striking our globalized civilization: pandemics, economic, climatic-environmental, resource conflicts, migrations, unemployment.

Green Wall: How to Green the Sahara

Greening the Desert / De-Desertification.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr. Paul Elvis Tangem the Coordinator for the GGWSSI at the African Union Commission, in the executive/administrative branch of the AU, headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Desertification is a type of land degradation in dry-lands in which biological productivity is lost due to natural processes, or induced by human activities, whereby fertile areas become increasingly arid, and may be caused by a variety of factors, such as climate change and over exploitation of soil.

One of the countermeasures for mitigating or reversing the effects of desertification is reforestation and in 2007 the African Union (AU) started the Great Green Wall Initiative (GGWSSI) Africa project in order to combat desertification in 20 countries across the Sahel and Sahara regions. The wall is projected to be 8,000 km wide, stretching across the entire width of the continent and has US$8 billion dollars in support so far. To date, the project has restored 36 million hectares of land, and by 2030, the initiative plans to restore a total of 100 million hectares. The Great Green Wall has created many job opportunities for the participating countries, with over 20,000 jobs created in Nigeria alone.

Dr. Paul Elvis Tangem is the Coordinator for the GGWSSI at the African Union Commission, in the executive/administrative branch of the AU, headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Continue reading “Green Wall: How to Green the Sahara” | >

A Norwegian Startup Is Turning Dry Deserts Into Fertile Cropland

The UN population forecast predicts that by 2050 there will be almost 10 billion people on the planet. They’ll live mostly in cities and have an older median age than the current global population. One looming questions is, what will they eat?

The Green Revolution of the 1960s used selective breeding to double crop yields of rice and wheat in some areas of the world, rescuing millions of people from food shortages and even famine. Now, the fast-growing global population combined with the impact of climate change on our ability to produce food—increased droughts and extreme weather events many crops can’t withstand—points to the need for another green revolution.

Luckily there’s already one underway. It’s more decentralized than the last, which makes sense given there are different challenges surfacing in different parts of the world. A Norwegian startup called Desert Control has a running start on solving a problem that’s only likely to get worse with time.

“Fifth state of matter” used to make new type of superconductor

Superconductors – materials in which electricity flows without any resistance whatsoever – could be extremely useful for future electronics. Now, engineers at the University of Tokyo have managed to create a superconductor out of a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) for the first time ever.

Sometimes called the fifth state of matter, behind the more commonly known solids, liquids, gases and plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates are what happens when you cool a gas of bosons right down to almost the coldest temperature possible. Experiments have shown that at this point, quantum phenomena can be observed at the macro scale. Scientists have used BECs as a starting point to create exotic states of matter like supersolids, excitonium, quantum ball lightning, and fluids exhibiting negative mass.

“A BEC is a unique state of matter as it is not made from particles, but rather waves,” says Kozo Okazaki, lead author of the study. “As they cool down to near absolute zero, the atoms of certain materials become smeared out over space. This smearing increases until the atoms – now more like waves than particles – overlap, becoming indistinguishable from one another. The resulting matter behaves like it’s one single entity with new properties the preceding solid, liquid or gas states lacked.”

Hurricanes: Evolution, Risk Reduction, Tracking and Simulation

Dr. Frank Marks, Director of the Hurricane Research Division, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), discussing improved forecasting technologies.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark interviews Dr. Frank D. Marks, MS, ScD, Director of Hurricane Research Division, at NOAA.

Ira Pastor comments:

Weather and climate disasters affect the world’s population.

The total approximate cost of damages from weather and climate disasters in the U.S. alone from 1980 to 2019, is over $1.75 trillion, and a major component of that damage results from hurricanes.

Continue reading “Hurricanes: Evolution, Risk Reduction, Tracking and Simulation” | >

Crystals reveal the danger of sleeping volcanoes

Most active volcanoes on Earth are dormant, meaning that they have not erupted for hundreds or even thousands of years, and are normally not considered hazardous by the local population. A team of volcanologists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), working in collaboration with the University of Heidelberg in Germany, has devised a technique that can predict the devastating potential of volcanoes. The scientists used zircon, a tiny crystal contained in volcanic rocks, to estimate the volume of magma that could erupted if Nevado de Toluca volcano (Mexico) wakes up from its dormancy. Up to 350 km3 of magma —about four times the volume of water stored in Lake Geneva— are currently lying below Nevado de Toluca and an eruption could bring devastation. The new technique, applicable to most types of volcanoes across the globe, is described in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

The largest volcanic eruptions in the last 100 years were sourced from volcanoes that do not erupt frequently and therefore fly under the radar of scientists. Yet today, 800 million people around the world live close to volcanoes and are potentially at risk. A determining factor for the dangerousness of volcanoes is the volume of eruptible stored in their bellies, as this is related to the magnitude of future eruptions. Unfortunately, this magma is stored at inaccessible depths of 6 to 10 km and cannot be directly measured.