It's not just to hide clutter anymore—add "saving the planet" to the reasons you leave the camera off during your next virtual meeting.
Environment
Jan 14, 2021
2
3304
Pyrolyzed plastic ash is worthless, but perhaps not for long.
Nanomaterials
Jan 13, 2021
1
104
For many of us, coffee is essential. It allows us to function in the morning and gives a much needed boost during the day. But in new research, we revealed the effect that our favorite caffeine hit has on the planet.
Environment
Jan 05, 2021
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14
Tohoku University scientists have, for the first time, provided experimental evidence that cell stickiness helps them stay sorted within correct compartments during development. How tightly cells clump together, known as ...
Cell & Microbiology
Dec 24, 2020
0
252
With a massive, nationwide effort the United States could reach net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 using existing technology and at costs aligned with historical spending on energy, according to a study led by ...
Environment
Dec 16, 2020
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19
Diverting urine away from municipal wastewater treatment plants and recycling the nutrient-rich liquid to make crop fertilizer would result in multiple environmental benefits when used at city scale, according to a new University ...
Environment
Dec 15, 2020
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16
A new type of soil created by engineers at The University of Texas at Austin can pull water from the air and distribute it to plants, potentially expanding the map of farmable land around the globe to previously inhospitable ...
Materials Science
Nov 03, 2020
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650
A fish school is a striking demonstration of synchronicity. Yet centuries of study have left a basic question unanswered: Do fish save energy by swimming in schools? Now, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 26, 2020
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55
Mental accounting is a concept that describes the mental processes we employ to organize our resource use. Human beings tend to create separate mental budget compartments where specific acts of consumption and payments are ...
Environment
Oct 13, 2020
1
98
Ecologists often want to understand how a community functions. For example, how much food does a community of animals consume every day? Or how much oxygen do plants produce every day? These functions are often assessed by ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Aug 20, 2020
1
14
In 2005, total worldwide energy consumption was 500 Exajoules (= 5 x 1020 J) with 80-90% derived from the combustion of fossil fuels. This is equivalent to an average energy consumption rate of 16 TW (= 1.585 x 1013 W). Not all of the world's economies track their energy consumption with the same rigor, and the exact energy content of a barrel of oil or a ton of coal will vary with quality.
Most of the world's energy resources are from the sun's rays hitting earth - some of that energy has been preserved as fossil energy, some is directly or indirectly usable e.g. via wind, hydro or wave power. The term solar constant is the amount of incoming solar electromagnetic radiation per unit area, measured on the outer surface of Earth's atmosphere, in a plane perpendicular to the rays. The solar constant includes all types of solar radiation, not just visible light. It is measured by satellite to be roughly 1366 watts per square meter, though it fluctuates by about 6.9% during a year - from 1412 W/m2 in early January to 1321 W/m2 in early July, due to the Earth's varying distance from the sun, and by a few parts per thousand from day to day. For the whole Earth, with a cross section of 127,400,000 km², the total energy rate is 1.740×1017 W, plus or minus 3.5%. This 174 PW is the total rate of solar energy received by the planet; about half, 89 PW, reaches the Earth's surface.
The estimates of remaining worldwide energy resources vary, with the remaining fossil fuels totaling an estimated 0.4 YJ (1 YJ = 1024J) and the available nuclear fuel such as uranium exceeding 2.5 YJ. Fossil fuels range from 0.6-3 YJ if estimates of reserves of methane clathrates are accurate and become technically extractable. Mostly thanks to the Sun, the world also has a renewable usable energy flux that exceeds 120 PW (8,000 times 2004 total usage), or 3.8 YJ/yr, dwarfing all non-renewable resources.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
