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Category: climatology

HARRISBURG, Pa. — The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant said Friday that it plans to restart the reactor under a 20-year agreement that calls for tech giant Microsoft to buy the power to supply its data centers with carbon-free energy.

The announcement by Constellation Energy comes five years after its then-parent company, Exelon, shut down the plant, saying it was losing money and that Pennsylvania lawmakers had refused to bail it out.

The plan to restart Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 comes amid something of a renaissance for nuclear power, as policymakers are increasingly looking to it to bail out a fraying electric power supply, help avoid the worst effects of climate change and meet rising power demand driven by data centers.

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In North Africa, some of the driest places on Earth have seen five times their average September rainfall. Flooding has affected more than 4 million people in 14 countries, according to the U.N. World Food Program. Heavy rain and floods have killed or displaced thousands and disrupted farming activities in areas where there already isn’t enough food for the population.

A northward shift in the region of clouds and rain that circles Earth near the equator is responsible for the flooding and greening. In this area, called the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), Southern Hemisphere winds blowing from the southeast converge with Northern Hemisphere winds blowing from the northeast. The combination of converging winds, strong sun and warm ocean water leads to rising, moist air and constant clouds, showers and thunderstorms.

The movement of the ITCZ north and south of the equator during the year is primarily driven by the difference in temperature between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. It drifts toward the warmer hemisphere, which means it resides north of the equator during the Northern Hemisphere summer, usually reaching its northernmost point in August or September.

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In context: Upscaling tech like Nvidia’s DLSS can enhance lower-resolution images and improve image quality while achieving higher frame rates. However, some gamers are concerned that this technology might become a requirement for good performance – a valid fear, even though only a few games currently list system requirements that include upscaling. As the industry continues to evolve, how developers address these concerns remains to be seen.

AI, in its current primitive form, is already benefiting a wide array of industries, from healthcare to energy to climate prediction, to name just a few. But when asked at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco last week which AI use case excited him the most, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded that it was computer graphics.

“We can’t do computer graphics anymore without artificial intelligence,” he said. “We compute one pixel, we infer the other 32. I mean, it’s incredible… And so we hallucinate, if you will, the other 32, and it looks temporally stable, it looks photorealistic, and the image quality is incredible, the performance is incredible.”

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McGill University researchers have harnessed the power of sunlight to transform two of the most harmful greenhouse gases into valuable chemicals. The discovery could help combat climate change and provide a more sustainable way to produce certain industrial products.

“Imagine a world where the exhaust from your car or emissions from a factory could be transformed, with the help of sunlight, into clean fuel for vehicles, the building blocks for everyday plastics, and energy stored in batteries,” said co-first author Hui Su, a Postdoctoral Fellow in McGill’s Department of Chemistry. “That’s precisely the kind of transformation this new chemical process enables.”

The research team’s new light-driven chemical process converts methane and carbon dioxide into green methanol and carbon monoxide in one reaction. Both products are highly valued in the chemical and energy sectors, the researchers said.

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Jupiter’s moon, Io, is the most volcanically active planetary body in the entire solar system as it boasts hundreds of active volcanoes. This number continues to grow as recent study at the Europlanet Science Congress 2024 meeting showed a new active volcano on the small moon taken by NASA’s JunoCam after the spacecraft conducted the first up-close images of Io in more than a quarter of a century.

Not only have Io’s volcanoes been observed to shoot volcanic material hundreds of miles into space, but its lava fields also spread almost as far across its surface due to the much smaller gravity. For example, the volcanic deposits from this new image were observed to encompass an area spanning 180 kilometers by 180 kilometers (112 miles by 112 miles).

“Our recent JunoCam images show many changes on Io, including this large, complicated volcanic feature that appears to have formed from nothing since 1997,” said Dr. Michael Ravine, who is an Advanced Projects Manager at Malin Space Science Systems, Inc, which designed, developed and operates JunoCam for the NASA Juno Project, and is lead author of the study.

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Do cities get more rainfall than rural areas?

How does an urban environment influence its rainfall? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated what is known as the urban precipitation anomaly, which is when urban environments potentially cause increases in rainfall compared to rural environments due to increased surface temperatures. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand the impact that urban environments have on the climate, specifically as climate change continues to ravage the planet.

For the study, the researchers analyzed urban precipitation anomalies across 1.056 cities around the world with the goal of ascertaining the scope of these anomalies based on location and present climates and developing more accurate climatology datasets and greater resilience among cities. In the end, the researchers found that 60 percent of cities around the world have increased levels of urban precipitation anomalies, with the most extreme anomalies occurring in Africa where the surface temperatures are already high, with one factor being tall buildings result in wind being funneled into city centers.

“The buildings further enhance this convergence by slowing the winds, resulting in a stronger upward motion of air. This upward motion promotes the condensation of water vapor and cloud formation, which are critical conditions for producing rainfall and precipitation,” said Dr. Zong-Liang Yang, who is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author on the study.

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NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have signed an interagency agreement to collaborate on a satellite servicing demonstration in geosynchronous Earth orbit, where hundreds of satellites provide communications, meteorological, national security, and other vital functions.

Under this agreement, NASA will provide subject matter expertise to DARPA’s Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program to help complete the technology development, integration, testing, and demonstration. The RSGS servicing spacecraft will advance in-orbit satellite inspection, repair, and upgrade capabilities.

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Diamonds are forever 💎 A team of scientists from UniMelb, RMIT University and The City College of New York were able to observe lightning in a diamond ⚡️ Diamond chips can potentially be used in electronics and are more powerful than silicon. Tap to learn more ➡️

We also don’t yet fully understand how charges flow inside diamond, and how unavoidable impurities and defects affect these electrical properties.

In a recent study with colleagues from the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and the City College of New York, we sought to combine electrical measurements of a diamond optoelectronic device with 3D optical microscopy.

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