Environmental Chemistry 2024

Australia could save thousands of bats a year with simple tweak to wind turbines, study says   Jack Turnbull   Peer-Reviewed Article: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aec.13220   News Coverage: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/australia-wind-turbines-simple-tweak-save-bat-lives-study     BACKGROUND “Who needs bats anyway?” asks the cynical reader   You do.   Though you might not consider them often, apart from around Halloween-time, bats play an integral role in our ecosystems and are responsible for controlling pests, pollinating plants, and dispersing seeds. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, over $3 billion in pest control is saved each year by the consumption of insects by bats. 1   Producing energy by more sustainable methods (such as using wind turbines) has been of great interest to many and serves as a method for reducing anthropogenic climate change 2 . The cost to produce energy by...

Name: Sarah Reed New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/climate/wind-turbine-recycling-climate.html?searchResultPosition=1 Science publication: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp5395                Wind power is a promising avenue to achieve green energy goals worldwide. However, current industrial processes for making these turbine blades use carbon-fiber material and polymer thermosets (materials that permanently set when heated) that are not easily recycled. 1 Current recycling methods include pyrolysis, which leaves a large portion of charred material recovered unusable, and shredding/grinding for use in concrete, a method that is not effective enough to account for projected wind blade waste in the coming decades. 1 Scientists currently predict 43 million tons of blade waste by 2050, with most of the waste coming from end-of-life blade removal rather than blade maintenanc...

  Hannah Geiss News Article: https://www.dailywire.com/news/when-wildfires-strike-canada-blames-racism-instead-of-taking-action Referenced Publication: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07878-z   Last year was Canada’s most devastating year on record for forest fires. During 2023, a total of 6,623 fires across all 13 provinces and territories forced over 230,000 people to evacuate their homes and dangerously reduced air quality for many more (2). Many factors impact the ability and likelihood of a fire to spread, and most of these factors, including landscape, wind, and weather patterns are entangled with climate change. Wildfires play an important role in the carbon cycle in an undisrupted ecosystem. They release carbon, primarily as CO2 and CH4, into the atmosphere where it can potentially later be incorporated into carbon sinks, including forests (3). Climate trends appear to be impacting the frequency, size, and expansiveness of wildfires (2). The Byrne et. al. pu...

 Leo Vermaak News Article Journal Article With the effects of climate change becoming more apparent with time, there has been a rush to explore renewable, clean energy sources to replace fossil fuels. Tremendous effort has been put into researching and developing wind, solar, and hydroelectric power to meet these clean energy needs. One field of renewable energy that has been getting recent attention in the past decade is humidity generation. By creating a humidity gradient across a hydrophilic film, a current can be generated, allowing for energy generation. A recently published article from The Guardian compared the humidity generation projects of a team at the University of Massachusetts and the startup CascataChuva. In the Guardian article, Ned Miles describes how the Yao lab originally discovered humidity generation in 2018 when a humidity detector made of nanotubes/wires was running despite not being plugged in. They describe how water enters a nanotube, bumps into the sides ...

  Nicole Fritsch News Article: https://abcnews.go.com/US/climate-change-altering-length-days-earth-new-research/story?id=111843796 Original Journal Article: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2406930121   Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the burning of fossil fuels by humans has led to a rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. This increase in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, has resulted in rapid global warming, and this anthropogenic climate change has a number of impacts, including the melting of ice caps and subsequent sea level rise. When polar ice melts in large quantities, it causes a redistribution of Earth’s mass, as mass that was frozen at the poles enters the ocean and becomes concentrated closer to the equator. Such mass redistribution can have quite literally astronomical impacts: it affects the rate at which Earth rotates. The length of day (LOD) is defined as the difference between the actual amount of time that it takes the pl...