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A New Energy-Efficient Hydrogel Pulls Water From Air

Cars That Think

Using a new kind of hydrogel material, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have pulled water out of thin air at temperatures low enough to be achieved with sunlight. Atmospheric water harvesting draws water from humidity in the air. The material is a hydrogel, a polymer network that naturally retains a lot of water.

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How Engineers Can Help Protect Earth From Worsening Climate Change

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Fortunately, we still have a narrow window of opportunity to alter the Earth’s climate path, and I believe we can do it. Climate change is a global societal crisis that is causing devastating consequences. Deforestation is contributing to climate change. IoT food container tags can reduce food and water waste.

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Heating Buildings With Solar Energy Stored in Sand

Cars That Think

Anthropogenic climate change confronts humanity with a challenge: How can we keep warm now as we try to prevent our world from overheating in the future? A Small Country with Large Heating Needs Big problems demand big solutions, and there is perhaps no bigger 21st-century problem than climate change.

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Baker Institute-led group to develop nationwide protocol for paying ranchers and farmers to store carbon

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Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy has initiated a working group to develop a United States protocol for paying ranchers and farmers to store carbon in their soil. The current system for voluntary carbon transactions is broken and needs to be fixed, group founders said. We formed this group out of necessity. —Kenneth Medlock.

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Study finds perennial biofuel crops’ water consumption similar to corn

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Evapotranspiration (ET) refers to the sum total of water lost while the plant is growing, either from evaporation through the plant stem itself (a process called “transpiration”), or from water evaporated off of the plant’s leaves or the ground. —Hamilton et al.

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Copenhagen Diagnosis Released, Detailing Accelerating Indicators of Climate Change In Last Three Years

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A team of 26 climate scientists from Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States have published the “Copenhagen Diagnosis”, an interim synthesis report on developments in climate change science from mid-2006 to the present day.

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New ORNL tool to assess global freshwater stress suggests that population growth could be a bigger factor in water availability than increasing temperatures

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An Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) paper published in Computers & Geosciences outlines a process that might help to determine the relative importance of population increases vs. climate change. Our work establishes a new method to couple geographic information system data with global climate outputs and statistical analysis.

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