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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
Imagine a future in which every home has an appliance that pulls all the water the household needs out of the air, even in dry or desert climates, using only the power of the sun.
That future may be around the corner, with the demonstration this week of a water harvester that uses only ambient sunlight to pull liters of water out of the air each day in conditions as low as 20 percent humidity, a level common in arid areas.
Most if not all the fires in this image taken by Suomi NPP satellite's VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instrument on April 11, 2017 are controlled fires set by farmers to manage land. Farmers in Kansas as allowed to burn grass every year to produce better grass for cattle. The grass burning typically occurs between March and mid-April on a yearly basis.
Both obesity and being underweight are associated with an increased risk for migraine, according to a meta-analysis published in the April 12, 2017, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The researchers looked at all available studies on body mass index (BMI) and migraine.
A new reconfigurable device that emits patterns of thermal infrared light in a fully controllable manner could one day make it possible to collect waste heat at infrared wavelengths and turn it into usable energy.
The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is the dominant atmospheric pressure mode over the North Atlantic that plays a significant role in determining the winter climate in Europe. Depending on the prevailing state of the NAO, Europe experiences mild or very cold winters and even strong storms. Geoscientists based at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) are currently reconstructing the fluctuations of the NAO over the last 10,000 years with the aim of being able to predict future developments. For this purpose, they use stalagmites obtained from subterranean caves as natural climate archives and are examining new indicators of climate change to retrieve climate information that is as accurate as possible. Initial results indicate that it is likely that the NAO will respond to the melting of the Arctic ice cap in the future, with consequences for our climate, environment, and society as a whole.
What is the volume of water in lakes on Earth? Using a mathematical analysis, researcher David Seekell, at Umeå University, and his American collaborators now suggest that the mean depth of lakes is 30 per cent lower than previously estimated. Shallower lakes implies less fresh water and has consequences for our understanding of climate change and the carbon cycle. The results have been published in Geophysical Research Letters.
