Tech pursuit for sustainable future will knock us out

Technological advances for increased human convenience with an eye on future sustainability of our planet is fine; but it is actually forcing us to consume more materials than what the planet can produce. And that is a big concern.

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The growing human appetite for higher and more compact technology in the hope of a better future for our planet has ironically put us on a track towards doom.

The pursuit of developing more sophistication for human convenience, while hoping it reduces material consumption, has on the contrary resulted in more materialization – which means we are only using more material to make more volumes of sophisticated technology. But we did not foresee that it would only result in higher demand, thus increasing material consumption.

This has brought us to a point where we are actually exploiting and consuming more resources from our planet than what it can produce naturally.

JEVONS’ PARADOX

The 19^th century English economist William Stanley Jevons, in 1865, had observed that while improvements were made in coal-fired steam engines to reduce the price of coal, the actual result was that coal consumption actually increased.

While experts of his time opined that technological improvements would lead to reduction in coal consumption, Jevons’ – based on his observation – was convinced that coal-fired power’s efficiency that saw a reduction in coal prices only resulted in an increase in consumer demand for electricity. And this resulted in further depletion of coal reserves.

This came to be known as Jevons’ Paradox.

NO REDUCTION IN MATERIALS USED

Now, an MIT-led research has examined whether the world’s use of materials has been swayed by Jevons’ Paradox.

The researchers found that technological advance by itself will not be able to bring about dematerialization and, ultimately, a sustainable world. They have elaborated that no matter how much more efficient and compact a product is made consumers will only demand more of that product. In the longer run, it increases the total amount of materials used in making that product.

Christopher Magee, a professor of the practice of engineering systems in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and his co-author, Tessaleno Devezas, a professor at the University of Beira Interior, in Portugal, have pointed to the world’s fastest-improving technologies, the silicon-based semiconductors, as one of the latest examples of this.

Over the last few decades, technological improvements in the efficiency of semiconductors have greatly reduced the amount of material needed to make a single transistor. As a result, today’s smartphones, tablets, and computers are far more powerful and compact than computers built in the 1970s.

However, they found that that consumers’ demand for silicon outpaced the rate of its technological change, and the world’s consumption of silicon has grown by 345% over the last four decades. And by 2005, there were more transistors used than printed text characters.

“Despite how fast technology is racing, there’s actually more silicon used today, because we now just put more stuff on, like movies, and photos, and things we couldn’t even think of 20 years ago,” says Magee. “So we’re still using a little more material all the time.”

An MIT release on the research says that the team developed a model to calculate whether dematerialization is taking place for a given product. The model considers a number of variables, including population and economic growth, a product’s yearly increase in technological performance, and demand elasticity — the degree to which demand for a product varies with its price.

“Not surprisingly, the researchers’ model indicates that dematerialization is more likely when demand elasticity for a product is relatively low and the rate of its technological improvement is high,” says the MIT release. “But when they applied the equation to common goods and services used today, they found that demand elasticity and technological change worked against each other — the better a product was made to perform, the more consumers wanted it.”

A similar trend was discovered in 56 other materials, goods and services, ranging from basic resources such as aluminum and formaldehyde to hardware and energy technologies such as hard disk drives, transistors, wind energy, and photovoltaics.

They found no evidence of dematerialization – or an overall reduction in their use – despite technological improvements to their performance.

“There is a techno-optimist’s position that says technological change will fix the environment,” Magee observes. “This says, probably not!...It seems we haven’t seen saturation in demand. People haven’t said, ‘That’s enough,’ at least in anything that we can get data to test for.”

Their study findings were published recently in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

Magee and Devezas gathered data for 57 common goods and services, including widely used chemical components such as ammonia, formaldehyde, polyester fiber, and styrene, along with hardware and energy technologies such as transistors, laser diodes, crude oil, photovoltaics, and wind energy. They worked the data for each product into their equation, and, despite seeing technological improvements in almost all cases, they failed to find a single case in which dematerialization — an overall reduction in materials — was taking place.

REDUCTIONS HAPPENED HERE, BUT…

In follow-up work, the researchers were eventually able to identify only six cases in which an absolute decline in materials usage has occurred.

However, these cases mostly include toxic chemicals such as asbestos and thallium, whose dematerialization was due not to technological advances, but to government intervention.

There was one other case in which researchers observed dematerialization: wool. The material’s usage has significantly fallen, due to innovations in synthetic alternatives, such as nylon and polyester fabrics. In this case, Magee argues that substitution, and not dematerialization, has occurred. In other words, wool has simply been replaced by another material to fill the same function.

TRACE OF HOPE

However, others are more hopeful that technology will bring about sustainability, albeit at significant cost.

“[Technology] will get us to a sustainable world – it has to,” says J Doyne Farmer, a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the research, but who was quoted in the MIT release. “I say this not only because we need it, but because there is only so much we can suck out of the Earth, and eventually we will be forced into a sustainable world, one way or another. The question is whether we can do that without great pain.  Magee’s paper shows that we need to expect more pain than some of us thought.”

Will Earth still exist 5 billion years from now?

Old star offers sneak preview of the future

Five billion years from now, the Sun will have grown into a red giant star, 100 times larger than its current size! Not to worry; we won't be there at the time...

What will happen to Earth when, in a few billion years' time, the Sun is a hundred times bigger than it is today? Using the most powerful radio telescope in the world, an international team of astronomers has set out to look for answers in the star L2 Puppis. Five billion years ago, this star was very similar to the Sun as it is today.
"Five billion years from now, the Sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than its current size," says Professor Leen Decin from the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy. "It will also experience an intense mass loss through a very strong stellar wind. The end product of its evolution, 7 billion years from now, will be a tiny white dwarf star. This will be about the size of the Earth, but much heavier: one tea spoon of white dwarf material weighs about 5 tons."
This metamorphosis will have a dramatic impact on the planets of our Solar System. Mercury and Venus, for instance, will be engulfed in the giant star and destroyed.
"But the fate of the Earth is still uncertain," continues Decin. "We already know that our Sun will be bigger and brighter, so that it will probably destroy any form of life on our planet. But will the Earth's rocky core survive the red giant phase and continue orbiting the white dwarf?"
To answer this question, an international team of astronomers observed the evolved star L2 Puppis. This star is 208 light years away from Earth - which, in astronomy terms, means nearby. The researchers used the ALMA radio telescope, which consists of 66 individual radio antennas that together form a giant virtual telescope with a 16-kilometre diameter.
"We discovered that L2 Puppis is about 10 billion years old," says Ward Homan from the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy. "Five billion years ago, the star was an almost perfect twin of our Sun as it is today, with the same mass. One third of this mass was lost during the evolution of the star. The same will happen with our Sun in the very distant future."
300 million kilometres from L2 Puppis - or twice the distance between the Sun and the Earth - the researchers detected an object orbiting the giant star. In all likelihood, this is a planet that offers a unique preview of our Earth five billion years from now.
A deeper understanding of the interactions between L2 Puppis and its planet will yield valuable information on the final evolution of the Sun and its impact on the planets in our Solar System. Whether the Earth will eventually survive the Sun or be destroyed is still uncertain. L2 Puppis may be the key to answering this question. 

ALMA is the world's largest observatory at millimetre wavelengths. It is installed on the high-altitude plateau of Chajnantor in the Atacama desert (Chile). It consists of 66 individual radio antennas used jointly to synthesize a giant virtual telescope of 16 km in diameter. [© ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)]

'Breathing Earth' causes ice age every 100,000 years

Experts have offered up an explanation as to why our planet began to move in and out of ice ages every 100,000 years.
Experts from Cardiff University have offered up an explanation as to why our planet began to move in and out of ice ages every 100,000 years.
This mysterious phenomena, dubbed the '100,000 year problem', has been occurring for the past million years or so and leads to vast ice sheets covering North America, Europe and Asia. Up until now, scientists have been unable to explain why this happens.
Our planet's ice ages used to occur at intervals of every 40,000 years, which made sense to scientists as the Earth's seasons vary in a predictable way, with colder summers occurring at these intervals. However there was a point, about a million years ago, called the 'Mid-Pleistocene Transition', in which the ice age intervals changed from every 40,000 years to every 100,000 years.
New research published today in the journal Geology has suggested the oceans may be responsible for this change, specifically in the way that they suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere.
By studying the chemical make-up of tiny fossils on the ocean floor, the team discovered that there was more CO2 stored in the deep ocean during the ice age periods at regular intervals every 100,000 years.
This suggests that extra carbon dioxide was being pulled from the atmosphere and into the oceans at this time, subsequently lowering the temperature on Earth and enabling vast ice sheets to engulf the Northern Hemisphere.
Lead author of the research Professor Carrie Lear, from the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, said: "We can think of the oceans as inhaling and exhaling carbon dioxide, so when the ice sheets are larger, the oceans have inhaled carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making the planet colder. When the ice sheets are small, the oceans have exhaled carbon dioxide, so there is more in the atmosphere which makes the planet warmer.
"By looking at the fossils of tiny creatures on the ocean floor, we showed that when ice sheets were advancing and retreating every 100,000 years the oceans were inhaling more carbon dioxide in the cold periods, suggesting that there was less left in the atmosphere."
Marine algae play a key role in removing CO2 from the atmosphere as it is an essential ingredient of photosynthesis.
CO2 is put back into the atmosphere when deep ocean water rises to the surface through a process called up-welling, but when a vast amount of sea ice is present this prevents the CO2 from being exhaled, which could make the ice sheets bigger and prolong the ice age.
"If we think of the oceans inhaling and exhaling carbon dioxide, the presence of vast amounts of ice is like a giant gobstopper. It's like a lid on the surface of the ocean," Prof Lear continued.
The Earth's climate is currently in a warm spell between glacial periods. The last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago. Since then, temperatures and sea levels have risen, and ice caps have retreated back to the poles. In addition to these natural cycles, human-made carbon emissions are also having an effect by warming the climate.

Computers in your clothes? A milestone for wearable electronics

Clothes that receive and transmit digital information are closer to reality

Researchers at The Ohio State University are developing embroidered antennas and circuits with 0.1 mm precision—the perfect size to integrate electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing. Photo by Jo McCulty, courtesy of The Ohio State University.

Researchers who are working to develop wearable electronics have reached a milestone: They are able to embroider circuits into fabric with 0.1 mm precision—the perfect size to integrate electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing.
With this advance, the Ohio State University researchers have taken the next step toward the design of functional textiles—clothes that gather, store, or transmit digital information. With further development, the technology could lead to shirts that act as antennas for your smart phone or tablet, workout clothes that monitor your fitness level, sports equipment that monitors athletes’ performance, a bandage that tells your doctor how well the tissue beneath it is healing—or even a flexible fabric cap that senses activity in the brain.
That last item is one that John Volakis, director of the ElectroScience Laboratory at Ohio State, and research scientist Asimina Kiourti are investigating. The idea is to make brain implants, which are under development to treat conditions from epilepsy to addiction, more comfortable by eliminating the need for external wiring on the patient’s body.
“A revolution is happening in the textile industry,” said Volakis, who is also the Roy & Lois Chope Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering at Ohio State. “We believe that functional textiles are an enabling technology for communications and sensing—and one day even medical applications like imaging and health monitoring.”
Recently, he and Kiourti refined their patented fabrication method to create prototype wearables at a fraction of the cost and in half the time as they could only two years ago. With new patents pending, they published the new results in the journal IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters.
In Volakis’ lab, the functional textiles, also called “e-textiles,” are created in part on a typical tabletop sewing machine—the kind that fabric artisans and hobbyists might have at home. Like other modern sewing machines, it embroiders thread into fabric automatically based on a pattern loaded via a computer file. The researchers substitute the thread with fine silver metal wires that, once embroidered, feel the same as traditional thread to the touch.
“We started with a technology that is very well known—machine embroidery—and we asked, how can we functionalize embroidered shapes? How do we make them transmit signals at useful frequencies, like for cell phones or health sensors?” Volakis said. “Now, for the first time, we’ve achieved the accuracy of printed metal circuit boards, so our new goal is to take advantage of the precision to incorporate receivers and other electronic components.”
The shape of the embroidery determines the frequency of operation of the antenna or circuit, explained Kiourti.
The shape of one broadband antenna, for instance, consists of more than half a dozen interlocking geometric shapes, each a little bigger than a fingernail, that form an intricate circle a few inches across. Each piece of the circle transmits energy at a different frequency, so that they cover a broad spectrum of energies when working together—hence the “broadband” capability of the antenna for cell phone and internet access.
“Shape determines function,” she said. “And you never really know what shape you will need from one application to the next. So we wanted to have a technology that could embroider any shape for any application.”
The researchers’ initial goal, Kiourti added, was just to increase the precision of the embroidery as much as possible, which necessitated working with fine silver wire. But that created a problem, in that fine wires couldn’t provide as much surface conductivity as thick wires. So they had to find a way to work the fine thread into embroidery densities and shapes that would boost the surface conductivity and, thus, the antenna/sensor performance. 

Asimina Kiourti, a research scientist at The Ohio State University, demonstrates the embroidery technique she and John Volakis invented for integrating electronics into clothing. The project recently reached a milestone with antennas and circuits featuring 0.1 mm precision—the perfect precision for connecting to electronic devices. Photo by Jo McCulty, courtesy of The Ohio State University.

Previously, the researchers had used silver-coated polymer thread with a 0.5-mm diameter, each thread made up of 600 even finer filaments twisted together. The new threads have a 0.1-mm diameter, made with only seven filaments. Each filament is copper at the center, enameled with pure silver.
They purchase the wire by the spool at a cost of 3 cents per foot; Kiourti estimated that embroidering a single broadband antenna like the one mentioned above consumes about 10 feet of thread, for a material cost of around 30 cents per antenna. That’s 24 times less expensive than when Volakis and Kiourti created similar antennas in 2014.
In part, the cost savings comes from using less thread per embroidery. The researchers previously had to stack the thicker thread in two layers, one on top of the other, to make the antenna carry a strong enough electrical signal. But by refining the technique that she and Volakis developed, Kiourti was able to create the new, high-precision antennas in only one embroidered layer of the finer thread. So now the process takes half the time: only about 15 minutes for the broadband antenna mentioned above.
She’s also incorporated some techniques common to microelectronics manufacturing to add parts to embroidered antennas and circuits.
One prototype antenna looks like a spiral and can be embroidered into clothing to improve cell phone signal reception. Another prototype, a stretchable antenna with an integrated RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip embedded in rubber, takes the applications for the technology beyond clothing. (The latter object was part of a study done for a tire manufacturer.)

John Volakis

Yet another circuit resembles the Ohio State Block “O” logo, with non-conductive scarlet and gray thread embroidered among the silver wires “to demonstrate that e-textiles can be both decorative and functional,” Kiourti said.
They may be decorative, but the embroidered antennas and circuits actually work. Tests showed that an embroidered spiral antenna measuring approximately six inches across transmitted signals at frequencies of 1 to 5 GHz with near-perfect efficiency. The performance suggests that the spiral would be well-suited to broadband internet and cellular communication.
In other words, the shirt on your back could help boost the reception of the smart phone or tablet that you’re holding – or send signals to your devices with health or athletic performance data.
The work fits well with Ohio State’s role as a founding partner of the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America Institute, a national manufacturing resource center for industry and government. The new institute, which joins some 50 universities and industrial partners, was announced earlier this month by U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.
Syscom Advanced Materials in Columbus provided the threads used in Volakis and Kiourti’s initial work. The finer threads used in this study were purchased from Swiss manufacturer Elektrisola. The research is funded by the National Science Foundation, and Ohio State will license the technology for further development.
Until then, Volakis is making out a shopping list for the next phase of the project.
“We want a bigger sewing machine,” he said. 

Courtesy: Ohio State University at https://news.osu.edu/news/

 

Certain sleeping positions can impact the quality of your rest

(Medical Xpress) -- Sleeping is essential for good health, but there have been debates over the years about whether or not there is a "best" way to snooze.

UC Health sleep expert Virgil Wooten, MD, says it varies from person to person.

"A person’s best sleeping position highly depends on the individual, just like the mattress they prefer,” he says. "I have patients who come into the sleep clinic and say that they have to sleep on their stomach or on their side, but people change body positions many times during the night, even though a person may stay in one position longer than another.

"There are, however, pros and cons of each position, depending on the sleeper.”

Wooten says people with back problems should sleep flat on their back or on their side with a pillow between their knees to relieve pressure on the spine.

"Neck support is important as well to avoid neck and spine pain, so orthopedic pillows are often the best option to hold the contour of the neck,” he says.

Wooten says people who experience chronic acid reflux or heartburn might want to sleep on their left side or sleep slightly elevated on their back to avoid the discomfort that accompanies these conditions.

"For pregnant women, sleeping on the side is advocated,” he says. "It’s thought not to be good to sleep on the back because it could cause back pain for the mother and could reduce blood supply to the fetus.”

Overall, Wooten says sleeping on one’s stomach is the worst position for back health.

"This puts more strain on the spine and the neck and is not a good sleeping position if someone is prone to back or neck pain,” he says. "But really, any position is fine; it just depends on a person’s preference. With certain medical conditions—like back pain or acid reflux—changing the body position during sleep can help in getting a better night’s rest.”

He adds that there are ways to train a person to sleep in a certain way, one of which is positioning pillows around the body, making it harder to toss and turn.

"It’s important to sleep well in order to be a productive, healthy person,” Wooten says. "If you are having trouble sleeping and staying asleep, it may just mean that you need to change your sleeping environment—always try to sleep in a dark, quiet, cool room—or it could mean something more serious, like a sleep disorder.

"It’s imperative that you address sleep issues immediately to sustain and improve your quality of life.”

Spicy Indian dish ideal to fight H1Ni?

Alabama researchers have found that anti-oxidant-rich diets are good to fight the H1N1 effects. Though anti-oxidants do not prevent the onset of the disease, at least they can prevent death. The researchers found that when an individual contracts H1N1 flu, a destructive protein called M2 Protein kills lung epithelial cells (which form the inner linings of the lungs). These cells have the ability to expel lung fluid, thus preventing pneumonia. but once destroyed fluid retention continues in the lungs. Therefore, we have seen the most common cause of death in H1N1 flu is pneumonia.
The researchers however have discovered that antioxidants stall this destructive process of the M2 protein.
Now, here's the best part. Spices, fruits and vegetables are known to be powerhouses of antioxidants. Nutritionists in India vouch that spicy veggie food, which forms the common diet among Indians, could be best suited to fight mortality in H1N1 flu patents. Th experts eel this is the reason why the lethal impact of the disease failed to have the expected results once the pandemic broke out. The World Health Organisation had foretold that India would surely be the most affected country, recording high number of deaths. But that has happened, and nutritionists now strongly believe that the secret lies in the spicy Indian food. Probably, Mexican may try to compete as well.
So, the next time you see spicy veggie food, don't turn your face away. Instead, go for it! But do take care of your tummy.

Research the species called politicians

Going by what we have just witnessed of the Karnataka political crisis, it must be a psychologist's delight to understand the behaviour of the politician. Why waste resources on mice when you have bipeds exhibiting strange behaviour, putting all else on the backburner, and self before everything else. The species called politicians needs a thorough research of the mind. Probably, only then we we might be able to unravel the truth about why the human being is more selfish than all other species. And, not just selfish, self-destructive too. Research these creature, fellows!