The current COVID-19 pandemic is forcing millions of people to socially distance and remain at home as much as possible. Governments around the world are calling on their citizens to follow local requirements and recommendations to keep communities safe. While the results of social distancing and home quarantine are essential to keep the disease from spreading unchecked, it is not always easy to follow local health recommendations. Not going to work, not seeing your friends, or not going to your typical businesses is a sacrifice, and staying home most of the time can drive almost anyone stir crazy. Thankfully, modern technology has given us a slew of different gadgets to make social distancing more tolerable and more comfortable to endure so we can all do our part to slow the spread of the virus.

Escape with Audio

Whether you live alone or with housemates, sometimes it is nice to escape to another world even for a bit. Tune out your housemates or sounds from outside your house and relax with a pair of wireless headphones. Noise-canceling headphones are a nice plus, but any wireless headset will do the job without the hassle of wires. Put on your favorite music or an audio podcast to forget about the world. Listening to music while working or exercising can help you focus and give you an energy boost. Pick the right genre for your task at hand and let music make your life more enjoyable while you are in quarantine at home. 

More WiFi

Most homes in North America these days have WiFi connections, but one router may not be enough to broadcast a signal across the entire space. There are many oMany things can disrupt or prevent your WiFi from reaching every corner of your home, but walls and distance are the most common issues. Your WiFi signal can only reach so far, which can leave you with dead zones with no WiFi. To solve this problem, add a WiFi booster or repeater that can extend your signal and eliminate dead zones. Place your WiFi repeater halfway between your router and the dead zone to extend your signal coverage; you have the option of either a desktop repeater just like your router or a wall plug-in for a stealthy WiFi boost. 

Embrace Gaming

Music and other audio lets you escape the world for a bit, but there are different ways you can escape. Social distancing has kept friends and family from seeing each other in person, but gaming lets you stay connected in the virtual world. There are a plethora of different online games you can play with your friends to socialize and have fun. Grab a gaming headset for voice chat and jump into your favorite digital world. Don’t be fooled by popular gaming commercials; there are more options than just games with guns. There is a gaming genre for every taste, from role-playing games and educational games to life-like simulations and action games. 

You don’t have to buy an exp[ensive new computer or gaming console to game either. Mobile games have come a long way since Candy Crush, and there are full storied games available on mobile. Most laptops can also handle popular games, but you may have to mess with settings to achieve optimal performance, depending on your laptop. The next generation of gaming consoles, namely the PS5 and Xbox Series X, is coming out at the end of 2020, so if you do want to snag a console, now is a great time to get a console for a lower price. 

Workout Gadgets

Social distancing generally means not going to the gym, and you will have to find new ways to work out. Working out at home doesn’t have to be boring as there are many workout programs you can view online that don’t require equipment. There are undoubtedly online programs or routines that will make use of it if you have exercise gear at home. Fitness trackers are one of the most informative and straightforward pieces of workout gear. Use a fitness tracker like the famous Fitbit to monitor your heart rate, calories burned, and more depending on the model. Most fitness trackers have accompanying apps that help you track your fitness journey so you can use data to ensure you are moving in the right direction. 

Social distancing isn’t ideal for most people. Staying home and not seeing your friends or family can be hard, but you can use technology to make your time at home more bearable. Use audio for escapism, boost your WiFi to eliminate dead zones, embrace gaming as a way to connect with friends or jump into a virtual world, and use online programs with your fitness tracker to stay fit at home. 

The post Gizmos & Gadgets: The Technology Available to Us to Make Social Distancing Tolerable in the Age of Pandemic appeared first on Techso Mogro.

Anna Maria D’Hulster, Secretary-General of The Geneva Association, states “no single industry or government can solve the climate change.” But I would argue that if any industry has the means to push forward a solution it is insurance. Although insurance companies like so many white-collar businesses, contribute through building infrastructure and operations some of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) that are the cause of atmospheric warming, it is in their role as underwriters and deliverers of insurance policies that they can dramatically impact climate change.

How so?

If an insurer is unwilling to accept the risk when a company applies for coverage, that can lead to a change in behaviour on their part. And if insurers collectively agree on what is considered unacceptable risk, then the company may not find any individual insurer willing to issue a policy.

As risk experts, insurance companies know just how much industrial pollution is contributing to rising GHGs and the attendant increase in extreme weather events that impact payouts to policyholders.

In the Geneva Association report it makes three recommendations:

1. Governments, policymakers, standard-setting bodies and regulators across industry sectors need to work together to address key barriers that hinder insurers from scaling up their contribution to climate adaptation and mitigation.
2. The insurance industry has to institutionalize climate change as a core business issue, expand its contributions towards building financial resilience to climate risks and supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy by collaborating
   with governments and other key stakeholders.
3. Governments and the insurance industry need to explore ways to support climate resilience and decarbonized critical infrastructure through the industry’s risk management, underwriting, and investment functions.

Nowhere, however, does the document call on underwriters and policy issuers to say no to companies that are obvious climate change contributors. We are talking about the fossil fuel industry, shipping and transportation, and energy producers.

Insurers can in one fell movement pull the plug on entire sectors or subsectors. For example:

• Stop issuing policies to polluters like coal projects, oil refineries, thermal powerplants, and other GHG contributors.
• Create policy discounts to marine, air, and trucking firms who put low-carbon emission technologies into practice and disincentives through increased rates to those who don’t act.
• Similarly, incentivize thermal energy plants through significant savings on insurance if they implement decarbonizing infrastructures such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), or switching from coal, and oil to natural gas or hydrogen.

Does it require cooperation with government for the industry to do these things? I would argue, no. The industry knows that climate change is a material risk. The reinsurers have been tallying up economic losses decade by decade watching the dollar numbers grow with each extreme weather event or each millimeter of sea-level rise.

The question for all now is, “when will the tipping point be reached” forcing the insurers and reinsurers to get themselves out of bad long-term risk investments through their issuing of policies that act as a disincentive to action on the part of their customers to tackle global warming’s causes in their operations?

The post How the Insurance Industry Can Kickstart the Low-Carbon Economic Transition appeared first on Techso Mogro.

Being hopeful in the midst of a pandemic is a nice feeling. It’s not just being hopeful about the return of summer, but also because I have been reading about the under 35 young people who this year have been selected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the coolest, nerdiest people on the planet.

Every year for the past 20, MIT has held a contest in which editors of the MIT Technology Review, along with other judges select from a field of hundreds, the top 35 under the age of 35 who are bringing new knowledge, innovation, and assistance to the planet and humanity covering artificial intelligence, biotechnology, software development, energy initiatives, new materials, and more.

This year’s category of Inventors includes:

• Omar Abudayyeh, age 30, who is working with CRISPR to develop a genetic home test to spot COVID-19.
• Christina Boville, age 32, cofounder of Aralez Bio, who is designing processes to improve on how biology controls chemical reactions to accelerate development of new medications.
• Manuel Le Gallo, age 34, who with his team at IBM is developing AI software that processes data using a fraction of the processing and energy of conventional computing systems.
• Nadya Peek, age 34, who is building modular components and machine assemblies that can be programmed to do almost anything.
• Leila Pirhaji, age 34, CEO of ReviveMed, has developed an AI machine learning platform focused on treatment of liver, immune, inflammatory and other diseases by understanding the interaction of proteins and other molecules associated with these conditions.
• Randall Jeffrey Platt, age 32, has invented a method of recording molecular events within cells over time in real-time.
• Rebecca Saive, age 33, who has found a way to improve on the performance of solar photovoltaics to make solar panels cheaper and more energy-efficient.
• Venkat Viswanathan, age 34, who is working with pure lithium and polymer-ceramic separators in electric batteries to deliver more power per weight than the ones being used in electric vehicles today.
• Anastasia Volkova, age 28, who is combining remote sensing and scientific modeling of collected data to help farmers improve crop yields.
• Sihong Wang, age 33, who has created stretchable and bendable microchips that perform as well as those etched into silicon using a polymer substrate for a wide variety of applications from skin patches to nanogenerators that can be placed in the body without requiring an external power source.

In the category Entrepreneurs, MIT recognizes:

• Jiwei Li, age 31, who has developed AI-chatbots who he has licensed to Google and Facebook. The chatbot uses neural networks, natural-language processing, and deep reinforcement learning to create near Turing-Test-passing conversations with human callers.
• Atima Lui, age 30, who is using an AI app called Nudemeter for applying makeup to different shades of skin overcoming the cosmetic industry’s bias toward lighter pigment.
• Tony Pan, age 34, CEO of Modern Electron, has taken a 1950 invention, the heat engine, and turned it into a thermionic converter to convert furnaces and boilers used for home heating into mini residential power plants for generating electricity.

In the Visionaries category we have:

• Leilani Battle, age 31, who has developed a program called ForeCache, to scan visual datasets such as high-resolution satellite images to spot anomalies and quirks and for doing predictions, analysis, and planning.
• Morgan Beller, age 27, who has been the digital currency evangelist for Facebook’s Libra and the use of open-source blockchain infrastructure and digital wallets.
• Eimear Dolan, age 32, a biomedical engineer who has developed a small robotic device called a dynamic soft reservoir that improves the performance of implanted devices to protect them from our natural foreign body response which can cause implants like pacemakers and insulin delivery systems to fail.
• Rose Faghih, age 34, who is developing a smartwatch algorithm that can analyze imperceptible changes in skin sweat activity to detect changes in mental state such as agitation, PTSD, and others, as well as the detection of medical conditions such as low blood sugar to trigger an insulin pump response.
• Bo Li, age 32, who has developed “adversarial attacks” on AI-based systems to make them safer for use in autonomous vehicles, or in IBM’s Watson AI, and Amazon’s Alexa.
• Zlatko Minev, age 30, whose work at IBM has solved problems in quantum physics that even challenged Einstein  and Niels Bohr. His experiments focus on quantum computing to detect and reduce error rates caused by quantum jumps to make these devices more reliable for cracking encryption, modeling chemical reactions, and forecasting the weather.
• Miguel Modestino, age 34, whose work with the chemical industry using AI to reduce its overall carbon footprint has led to the founding of Sunthetics, a company that uses complex pulses of electricity in production processes that use less energy, produce better yields, and less waste.
• Inioluwa Deborah Raji, age 24, whose work in AI ethics has revealed gender and racial biases in facial recognition software and led to the development of standards and documentation for algorithmic accountability. Her standards have become the framework for facial recognition in the Google Cloud and on OpenAI platforms.
• Adriana Schulz, age 34, is currently starting the Center for Digital Fabrication at the University of Washington based the software tools she has developed for the building of robots, drones, and other machines incorporating materials science, batteries, and control systems, and automatically translating on-screen schematics into fabrication instructions which can be sent directly to 3D printers to build components.
• Dongjin Seo, age 31, is developing brain-machine communication including the circuit boards and chips for Elon Musk’s Neuralink where he heads up a team building low-power wireless computers to interface with the human brain.

Under Humanitarians, MIT has recognized:

• Mohamed Dhaouafi, age 28, is developing high-functioning, affordable, that is for people in the Developing World, artificial limbs that use software to connect the body’s electrical system to the onboard sensors allowing wearers to flex or relax muscles.
• Alex Le Roux, age 27, is the co-founder of Icon and the brains behind the Vulcan, industrial-scale 3D printer that can construct an entire house in 24 hours and that is currently building the first 3D-printed community in Mexico.
• Katharina Volz, age 33, is using machine learning to study Parkinson’s and has created OccamzRazor, a knowledge map that reveals how the disease starts and progresses to help with therapy.
• David Warsinger, age 32, is improving reverse osmosis through a process called batch reverse osmosis, to make desalination work better for the 3.6 billion on our planet who currently live with freshwater scarcity at least one month each year.

And in the final category, Pioneers, we have:

• Ghena Alhanaee, age 30, is working on a data-driven framework for mitigating disasters in high-risk infrastructure around the planet including offshore oil platforms, nuclear plants, and more.
• Avinash Manjula Basavanna, age 30, is developing bioplastics produced by bioengineered organisms which he calls AquaPlastic, and which can be produced on a commercial scale, and degrades in water in as little as two months.
• Lili Cai, age 33, has invented a nanomaterial textile that is as thin as a T-shirt but capable of keeping you warm or cooling you off by blocking or transmitting infrared radiation from our skin.
• Gregory Ekchian, age 32, is the cofounder of Stratagen Bio, a sensor that reads tumor oxygen levels and allows oncologists to personalize cancer treatment, reducing patient radiation exposure.
• Jennifer Glick, age 30, is an IBM researcher working with quantum computing to solve real-world problems faster than conventional systems from looking at securities transaction settlements to identifying new particles produced in high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.
• Andrej Karpathy, age 33, is developing convolutional neural networks that mimic the nerves in the visual cortex making it possible for the AI to discern multiple objects in a complex scene, useful for self-driving and collision avoidance in autonomous vehicles.
• Siddharth Krishnan, age 29, is a materials scientist who is developing tiny sensors to collect medical data for disease detection non-invasively for conditions like hydrocephaly, diabetes, and others.
• Andreas Puschnik, age 31, is using CRISPR to develop host-directed therapeutics to fight diseases like Dengue, Zika, Ebola, West Nile and other viruses.

The post MIT’s Under 35 List of Innovators Includes Inventors, Entrepreneurs, Visionaries, Humanitarians, and Pioneers appeared first on Techso Mogro.

In the last week in one county to the west of Toronto, 164 migrant workers from Mexico fell ill to the coronavirus. These are workers that arrived in Canada in early April to undergo 14-days of quarantine before being allowed to do their jobs on local Ontario farms. No one was sick coming out of quarantine. But poor and crowded living conditions led to community spread.

On another farm, out of 216 migrant workers, 125 tested positive for COVID-19, and there is no way to know just how far the virus may spread beyond the migrants themselves. This local outbreak on farms is symptomatic of a wider problem facing agriculture in the age of pandemic. We no longer can continue to do things the same way we have done them in the past.

The Agricultural Revolution happened 12,000 years ago. Technology has always been part of agriculture from the first digging sticks to plant seeds, to hand plows, plows pulled by animals, to harvesters, bailers, and combines. Even with all this technology agriculture remains labour intensive requiring lots of human muscle power.

Considering how the current pandemic and future ones may restrict the human migrant option, it should be no wonder that the agriculture’s future will involve a high degree of automation.

Enter the Robots

Robots are the future of agriculture. Whether ground-based or aerial, semi-autonomous and intelligent autonomous machines will become a common sight on farms.

Ecorobotix is a lightweight autonomous drone with built in GPS. Its job is to kill weeds using a herbicide spray. Mounted on wheels and solar-powered, the robot can work all day, using its onboard camera system to survey and target infestations. Farmers who implement the robot report having to use The 90% less herbicide because of it can discern precisely where the weed killer needs to be spread. And it is 30% cheaper on delivery than traditional untargeted treatments. 

Will robots like Econobotix replace human labour? There is no doubt that labour-intensive, repetitive jobs are ones that robots can do as well if not better than human counterparts. And in this case, the work of weeding may no longer require any human intervention.

Farms Get Into Sensors and the Internet of Things

The widespread use of sensors on farms is further reducing the need for farm workers. Famers can survey the state of their fields and crops from a home monitor or one onboard a tractor, connected to an array of sensors sending data to the Internet cloud. This is the developing field of precision agriculture. Sensors gather the data and software interprets the results. The type of sensors include:

• Location analysis data collectors for surveying fields and positioning autonomous equipment like weeders.
• Realtime analyzers that assess the chemistry, organic content and compaction of the soil.
• Moisture data collectors for both soil and air to determine where freshwater resources are needed.
• point-to-point weather stations to view the microclimate around individual plants or fields.

The growing use of precision agriculture reflects the changing climate. Areas of the United States, particularly the mid and southwest, are increasingly threatened by drought making water conservation critical. Moisture sensors make it easier to target irrigation. Efficient water delivery systems use precise air valves and sustainable pipes to distribute needed water at the appropriate time and in the right amount to maximize the health of individual plants and fields.

Even the Plants Are Getting Technical

Environmental concerns are making farmers take note of what to grow in their locations. There is an increased focus on “low impact” crops for sustainability, and a move away from animal husbandry as the industry’s carbon footprint is increasingly under examination.

Two interesting movements in both practice and crop science have arisen at opposite ends of the spectrum.

One is organic farming that grows traditional selectively bred crops. Organic farms limit the use of pesticides, avoid artificial chemical fertilizers, and implement natural processes and techniques to reinvigorate soils.

Two is focused on the genetic manipulation of plants to improve their ability to withstand environmental challenges. Drought-resistant wheat and corn, are two examples. Both have been developed through the genetic alteration of the plant. Manipulating the DNA to make these crops resilient in the face of drought is allowing farms to continue to produce crops on increasingly marginal agricultural lands. Tools like CRISPR are being used to replace defective genes with healthy ones, or to alter the characteristics of a gene to increase a plant’s resistance to insects, fungi, and other environmental pests. Known by the acronym GMO, the technology is seen by many to be the best way forward to ensure food security in a world where our human population continues to grow, and climate change represents an existential threat.

A Final Word

Farm labour, the plants we grow, and the food we put on our tables are all tied to innovations being made on farms and in agricultural research being done today whether at colleges or in industry. From energy use to water management to the storage, supply chain, and distribution agribusiness systems, the farms of our past are quickly disappearing turning the growing of crops into high tech.

The post Agriculture’s Future in the Age of Pandemic and Climate Change appeared first on Techso Mogro.

It started with one man’s vision to provide a sound alternative to the industrial model of classroom education. John Holt, an educational theorist, and school reform supporter, encouraged parents to liberate children from traditional learning by advocating for homeschooling. The result, homeschooling has become a movement widely practiced not only in the United States but all over the globe.

According to the U.S. National Home Education Research Institute, there are an estimated 2.5 million homeschool students in America as of spring 2019. Outside of the U.S. the numbers are much smaller with the global total under 3 million, largely because in many countries homeschooling remains illegal. The countries with the highest numbers of homeschooled children are the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

The Effects of Covid-19 on Educational Systems

In the early months of 2020, we witnessed a world reeling from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Among the earliest measures taken by most governments was the temporary closure of schools to stem the spread of the virus.

According to UNESCO, these actions have affected more than 60% of the world’s student population, not to mention the localized closures have impacted millions of additional learners. In fact, the pandemic has caused more than 1.6 billion children and youth to be out of school in 161 countries.

In the United States, thousands of schools started closing in mid-March. European countries, led by Italy, closed educational institutions in that month as well. The United Kingdom was the last in Europe closing all schools indefinitely across the country and canceling examinations on March 20th.

In May, schools in Europe and North America began to slowly reopen. It was seen as an important part of restarting the economies of countries that had suffered from lockdowns and community quarantine measures. The consequences of school closures had meant parents had to take time from work to look after their children.

Germany has been leading the way in handling the new normal when it comes to education. They have proposed cutting classes in half. Hallways have been turned into one-way corridors. Breaks are staggered. Teachers and students are instructed to wear masks. Most schools have their windows and doors open to improve air circulation.

When it comes to communication, some schools are using snail and email to stay connected. The majority of interactions, however, are happening online. Many schools are recreating the classroom using digital tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

This shift to learning from home by traditional bricks and mortar educational establishments is expected to continue with virtual instruction becoming part of the new school standard. For example, the United Kingdom Department for Education is now listing on its website resources for home learning. There are also nongovernment institutions like the Coalition for Responsible Home Education and UNESCO, which are offering help and homeschooling solutions for teachers and parents alike.

Tips for Homeschooling

Since education for the foreseeable future is moving to distance learning and more homeschooling, it is important for parents who have traditionally homeschooled to ensure their children can still get the best education possible. Here are some helpful tips to do so:

Creating a Daily Schedule

While homeschooling has convenience and flexibility that is not typical in traditional classrooms, it remains important to maintain a learning routine. Creating a learning schedule provides a comfortable daily structure. This should include set times for lunch breaks, activity hours, and even TV breaks. This helps children to manage their time well, and for working parents to schedule work to fit with the home learning calendar.

Setting up a Learning Environment

It can be tempting to hold the lessons anywhere in the house where the parent and child are comfortable. A designated learning area, however, facilitates better results. This way children know that a part of the home is “school” space with all the resources in place there to do schoolwork

Gathering Homeschooling Resources

Not all parents are experienced homeschooling their children. There are, however, an abundance of resources from public and private institutions to help them navigate the world of homeschooling and online learning. Many of these resources are online, but there are also local community resources that parents can reach out to for insight and support.

Making the Experience Fun

Children learn more if lessons are enjoyable. That means creating fun activities like indoor games and puzzles and other types of interactive materials. Parents can also add home activities like cooking and household chores to help children learn beyond what is in textbooks. Passion projects can include painting, and other forms of arts and crafts including learning to play a musical instrument. 

The Future of Homeschooling

The current global pandemic is an accelerator shifting conventional learning to experiment with the non-conventional. The result is a move to the online world, to open education, and to more homeschooling.

In terms of government policy, this may lead to wider financial support for families who choose to homeschool or even mix a combination of institutional and home learning together after the pandemic subsides. 

The post COVID-19 Reinvents Homeschooling appeared first on Techso Mogro.

In a second announcement, NASA extended the stay of the astronauts who flew to the ISS on Crew Dragon from two weeks to as much as 119 days. Crew Dragon will remain attached to ISS throughout the astronauts’ extended stay and will be further evaluated while mated to the station.

Originally, SpaceX intended to reuse Crew Dragon capsules for non-NASA crewed flights beginning as early as next year. These would be private flights for commercial customers. But now it appears that NASA will hog the show with Crew Dragons becoming the primary space taxi for American astronauts. SpaceX believes that the existing design sill have a shelf life of six missions before major refits or retirement. That would be a remarkable achievement in reusability considering the challenging environment of space and atmospheric re-entry.

Falcon 9 first stages have been reflown as many as five times by SpaceX for a variety of missions, but not for human crews until earlier this month. The current Falcon 9 which will eventually be replaced by the SpaceX Starship, has been designed to withstand launch and return for as many as ten missions. Starship, on the other hand, will be designed for 100% reusability.

Why is it that the first stage can manage up to ten missions while Crew Dragon is rated for six? The answer is in the re-entry which for the latter puts much more stress on the vehicle. You’ll get to see exactly how much when Crew Dragon returns in three months or so from the Demo-2 Mission.

Falcon 9’s return is comparatively a piece of cake. The first stage as it falls back into the atmosphere begins a reentry burn which slows it down and ensures it is oriented to produce minimum stress on the rocket during descent. Stabilizing fins deploy to maintain the rocket’s orientation and increase drag. At the end, the Falcon 9 does a speed-slowing landing burn and deploys retractable legs before touchdown.

Crew Dragon missions for the moment land on water just like in the days of Apollo. Crew Dragon, however, has something Apollo never had, onboard rockets which in the future could be used for soft landings on hard surfaces.

A new Crew Dragon spacecraft is expected to be on top of a Falcon 9 in late August for the next crewed mission to the ISS. Modified Crew Dragons will take over the supply missions to the ISS with almost double the payload capacity of the original Dragon capsule.

Of course, SpaceX has considered how to achieve 100% reusability with its current Falcon rockets. It has started to capture the space farings that sit atop the second stage to protect satellites during launches. It has even toyed with bringing the second stage back to Earth for a soft landing. But to do this SpaceX would have to redesign the stage to give it similar attributes to Falcon 9’s first stage. The company briefly considered a demo smaller-scale Starship could replace the second stage and be used to ferry crews and deploy satellites into near-Earth orbit. But that idea has been shelved as the company has continued to perfect Dragon, and to build test versions of the future Starship.

The post Reusable Rockets and Capsules Now Part of NASA’s Human Space Program appeared first on Techso Mogro.

Before my wife and I moved to midtown Toronto, we lived in the exurbs of the city where we were quite close to a power right-of-way. That’s where I often walked my dogs. On hot summer days, the wires between the towers would sing and crackle. On hot days they would sag. I wondered why.

Transmitting electricity over wires is all about putting enough power into the line at the outset to ensure that there is enough still there when at the destination. Our homes and businesses rely on a continuous source of steady voltage to run devices like the refrigerator, stove, and the computer on which I’m writing this post.

The process of generating and transmitting power is designed today with built-in losses. First, there are losses that occur at the point of generation within a power plant itself. Then there are the power losses during transmission. The singing and crackling I heard during my walks was an indicator of the lines losing power. The sagging was as well. Apparently, when powerlines get hot they expand their mass which makes them sag.

The high-voltage transmissions that come from power plants will travel hundreds if not thousands of kilometers to get to consumers. A typical 100 to 800 Kilovolt line loses about 2% of the total power it carries during transmission over distances between 100 and 500 kilometers. The further the distance the more power is lost. To compensate for this over longer distances, utility companies will use stepped up transformers intermittently to boost and keep voltage levels stable. When the power gets close to customers it is stepped down through transformers in substations and sent along those telephone pole lines to consumers. So we go from as much as 800 Kilovolts down to 120 in the process.

U.S. estimates show an average loss of 5% of energy generated during transmission. Losses vary depending on whether demand is at peak or low. High demand occurs in North America on hot summer days, and low demand on cool summer nights.

The inefficiencies of power distribution through the current utility network and grid is built into the price of electricity paid by the consumer. But what if we could eliminate the power losses? Experiments using superconducting multi-layered cables show that transmission losses can be cut to near zero. These cables feature layers containing coolant wrapping around the power transmission core. They are made of advanced superconducting materials that are far more expensive than the existing powerlines used today. An infrastructure upgrade to the entire grid would be a multi-decade project costing trillions of dollars to bring North America up to a near-zero power-loss standard. If done, utilities could yield savings by reducing the number of powerplants necessary across the entire grid, and would no longer need stepped up transformers. That would simplify the existing infrastructure and without the entropy and heat produced through power losses in operating the grid, would help in the fight against global warming. To date, however, there is little consensus to move forward with total replacement of the existing powerline infrastructure.

So what if we go another way entirely? What if we eliminate most of the grid and replace it with a distributed energy model that is well-suited to renewable energy projects, modular nuclear power, and other forms of local power generation and storage?

Back in 2016, I published a piece on this blog site that posed the question, “What’s Holding Us Back from a Distributed Energy Model Replacing Existing Power Grids?” What would power distribution and delivery look like in 2100 if we were to go to this type of decentralized way of producing and consuming energy? We would see tens of thousands of power-generating sources from rooftop solar to utility solar. We would see biomass power generation using anaerobic digesters fueled by sewage and garbage. We would see small modular nuclear power plants that could operate safely in a neighbourhood and be refueled in a day. We would see passive geothermal installations in houses and businesses, and utility-sized geothermal powerplants that would replace any remaining coal-fired facilities. We would exploit power from the wind, and from tides and waves. Building clusters would generate their own power distributing it through microgrids to multiple nearby sites and neighbourhoods. And we would see many homes and businesses go grid-free.

For the Developing World that lacks big centralized grids and massive thermal powerplants, they could skip this more than a century-old technology and infrastructure model, and go direct to a decentralized, locally distributed system. It would be equivalent to how current Developing World countries have been able to skip landline telecommunications infrastructure and go to mobile cellphone networks.

Back in 2013, in an article written for The New York Times, just after Hurricane Sandy, John Farrell, of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, is quoted calling this “a real paradigm shift….not only a shift in the physical generation of power but also the power over the system in terms of who is in control of it and who can benefit from it.” Many in the industry see a decentralized system as better suited to the new mix of power generation technologies that are becoming mainstream and see it as a far more effective way to reduce carbon emissions to mitigate climate change.

There is one additional benefit. In the event of an event like Hurricane Sandy which put much of New Jersey, Long Island, and Manhattan into darkness, a decentralized power generation and distribution system would prove more robust, allowing lights to stay on in many places even when centralized sources of power fail. The Sandy experience demonstrated the efficacy of decentralized, distributed power when New York University’s Greenwich Village campus and a housing complex in the Bronx, both kept their lights on using microgrids that they could temporarily disconnect from the main grid.

That’s not the case for the majority of the power grid upon which we rely today. Having lived through a number of large blackouts in my lifetime, including the 1965 Northeastern U.S. and Great North America Blackout of 2003, I still remember the vulnerability felt when the grid failed. My wife and I went out and bought sterno kits and lamps after 2003 and we keep them around in anticipation that we will see a reoccurrence in years to come as the grid continues to age.

The post The Future of the Electrical Grid – Will it Go Extinct by Century End? appeared first on Techso Mogro.

In this posting, we take a closer look at how nursing is set to change because of this crisis, and how those currently in the profession and those planning to join it can prepare for the future.

Putting the Nursing Shortage in the Spotlight

The World Health Organization reports a global shortfall of around six million nurses worldwide. This is expected to grow over for the next few years. The factors contributing to the shortfall include:

• An aging population that requires more nursing care
• Baby boomer nurses retiring
• A lack of nursing educators limits the supply of new nurses
• Existing nurses are overworked
• Excessive regulation limits the supply of medical professionals

Studies suggest that nurses were overstretched before COVID-19. In one survey it showed more than one in three considered leaving the profession. That is on top of the one million RNs who were expected to retire by 2030. Many administrators, however, acknowledge the problem and are seeking solutions. One of these would be to use technology and outside resources to reduce current nursing demand.

Excessive regulation in many countries is another issue. This hurts medical services delivery in a variety of ways. To eliminate some of these impediments, for example, the  U.S. federal government has loosened regulations to reduce administrative bloat. The type of regulatory change includes issues like having to have a pathologist on-site to read biopsy slides. Now pathologists can use the power of the Internet and digital technology to work from home. And in addition regulations around Medicare and Medicaid coverage have been altered to include telemedicine consultations. This is allowing nurses to stay at home because of health concerns or to remain in quarantine while continuing to assist patients.

Growth of Online Education

Adding new medical technology can improve patient outcomes, but it is prompting nurses to learn how to use it. This has led to nursing assistants with associate’s degrees or vocational diplomas to be increasingly seen as unqualified to work in their field even in the face of an industry shortage. It is increasing demand, furthermore, for nurses with advanced degrees, whether working in the ICU or in electronic medical records management.

This is where online learning can make a difference. The advent of Internet-based education is set to make a big impact on staffing. Nurses will now be able to get a baccalaureate in nursing science, a BSN, online from some of the most well-respected nursing schools in the United States without even having to leave their home state. Programs like Baylor University’s online accelerated BSN is allowing nurses to earn a degree relatively quickly through a full-time program that combines online courses, interactive courses, and clinical experience.

The benefits of an accelerated BSN program include:

• An ability to complete the degree in one year
• Hands-on experience with patients
• An easy option to fit around family and work obligations
• An opportunity to earn more
• Eligibility for many more jobs
• Access to a world-class network

While technology is set to improve education and reduce nursing workloads, it is not making up for the 12% increase in demand expected for RNs by 2030 while supply is in decline. Online classes, however, can play a role in reducing the impact of these shortages.

Impact on Pay Rates

It is also possible that the COVID-19 crisis will result in higher pay for ICU and emergency nurses for a variety of reasons. The public now realizes that nurses are putting their lives on the line every day during a pandemic. The result is a general increase in pay for hazardous duty, and that has created improving retention rates and new recruits into a number of higher-risk nursing specialties. All of this, however, isn’t making for the lack of training or an inadequate supply of personal protective equipment (PPE). It should be a priority that nurses and other health personnel be be trained on how to use every kind of PPE needed, or face the consequences of losing them to illness or weeks in quarantine.

Rolling Out Flexible Medical Spaces

Hospitals and clinics alike tend to have dedicated, specialized areas. But these have been proven to be insufficient in the face of pandemic when there has been a need for an increase of 30% or more in hospital beds or dozens of more ICU units to accommodate patients. Nor has it been fair to patients to stick them in vacated offices or hallways. We can expect, therefore, hospitals to begin building flexibility into the design of their existing space with some areas switched from triage to ICU, or to storage, as needed. 

Healthcare infrastructure will also have to evolve. We can expect future hospitals to have separate air handling units to isolate areas within the hospital, minimizing the spread of airborne pathogens. Advanced air filtration systems will be a certainty and could become the norm in entire facilities, not just in dedicated areas.

We may also see the creation of modular hospitals that can be built faster and more cheaply than existing designs. Modular hospitals have the added benefit of being mobile. For example, a number of field hospitals have been built during the present pandemic that are as good as the brick-and-mortar hospitals allowing for the isolation of COVID-19 patients from facilities that need to treat cancer patients, women in labor, and people having elective surgery.

COVID-19 has shown the profession that healthcare needs to change radically. Some of those solutions we have outlined here and we should see them being moved to the forefront because of the current crisis. Don’t be surprised if most, if not all we have described become mainstream.

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