Roughan notes that 90% of the heat that gets trapped in the atmosphere because of greenhouse gas emissions ends up in the ocean. Normally, the vertical displacement of warm surface water by deeper cold water offsets the heating. But that is not what is happening now.
Why wasn’t this phenomenon detected before? Because the cycling of La Niña, and El Niño events masked the overall thermodynamics. With the latest La Niña waning after three years, the cause of cooler conditions overall, we are now due for a new El Niño which should see global atmospheric temperatures rise.
Roughan notes a change in the normal upwelling of cold water off the coast of South America. This phenomenon keeps Pacific Ocean surface waters cool. But it is not happening as the new El Niño begins to take shape.
The El Niño which is also known as the back half of the Southern Oscillation cycle that repeats between every 3 and 7 years, has been responsible for creating the fire weather that plagues Australia, droughts in Indonesia and South Africa, torrential rain and flooding events in parts of South America, and disruptions to the lucrative local fisheries off South America’s coast. It is associated with Amazon rainforest loss and with years when sea ice in the Arctic is at its lowest. And El Niño is seen as contributing to the increasing range of vector-borne tropical diseases.
With the cold ocean current conveyor belt off South America impacted negatively, the western Pacific will see the ocean absorbing even more of atmospheric heat which penetrates to a depth of 2 kilometres (1.2 miles) beneath the surface. With the average ocean depth being 4 kilometres (2.4 miles), it means that half of the total volume of the ocean is being affected.
Roughan quotes from a study of just how much extra heat Earth’s atmosphere has trapped between 1960 and 2020. A subset of the data from 1971 to 2020 shows that the planet has absorbed 380 zettajoules of extra heat or the equivalent of 25 billion nuclear bombs. Consider the ocean has taken up 90% of the extra heat and you can see why we are getting into hot water which is not confined to the tropics, but rather is spreading to the poles.
An article appearing in The Washington Post on April 28, 2023, quotes a senior scientist from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who states “You’ve got this relentless rise of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere….we just know unless that turns around in some way, we will continue to set records.” Another NOAA scientist notes that by 2024 as the coming El Niño strengthens we should see “new highs in global mean surface temperatures.”
A side effect of a warmer ocean is thermal expansion which threatens coastlines as sea levels rise. Warmer surface water feeds the cycle of hurricanes in the Atlantic, cyclones in the Indian Ocean, and typhoons in the Pacific. Warmer surface waters increase evaporation which supercharges rain events. Warmer surface waters reinforce air temperature warmth. The ocean-to-air water cycle sees a 2.2% increase in water vapour volume for every one Celsius (4%i per one Fahrenheit) degree increase in air temperature.
Ocean warmth is unevenly distributed with some areas warming faster than others. This is largely influenced by ocean currents. For example, the Gulf Stream off the U.S. eastern seaboard is altering temperatures and weather patterns for the U.S. northeast.
A conclusion drawn by climatologists and oceanographers states that the warming regardless of what we do to slow greenhouse gas emissions and reverse our contributions is likely “irreversible this century.” So indeed, we are in hot water like the proverbial frog in a pot sitting on top of a lit stove.
]]>The robotic arm was developed at UNSW’s Medical Robotics Lab under the supervision of Dr. Thanh Nho Do, a Scientia Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, Mai Thank Thai, one of his Ph.D. students, and other UNSW staff. They recently published their research in the journal of Advanced Science.
Bioprinters up until now have tended to be large desktop printers. Creating living constructs, therefore, has been done outside the body. That means transporting the finished print job to the operatory and then inserting it into a host. This method can lead to many things going wrong. The finished print may not fit where it is intended to go. The threat of contamination is real. And during transport, the bioprinted material could be damaged.
The UNSW team decided that a better approach would be to do bioprinting inside a living body. So they created a proof-of-concept 3D bioprinter called the F3DB. It features a flexible robotic arm, a soft printing head, and software based on a kinematic inversion model and machine-learning-based controllers.
This bioprinter is intended to be a model for the future development of endoscopic surgical robots to allow for minimally-invasive procedures to be used to repair tissue damage from disease, trauma, and injury. How soon will this go from concept to common usage?
The team sees with further improvements to the F3DB, such as an integrated camera and real-time scanning to create 3D tomography, its successors within the next five years will be used by medical teams to do minimally invasive procedures to go to places hard to reach to make necessary repairs.
The team has demonstrated the F3DB using a variety of shaped biomaterials in an artificial colon as well as on a pig kidney. Their experiments did no damage to living cells which continued to grow after usage.
In a UNSW press release, Dr. Do states, “This system offers the potential for the precise reconstruction of three-dimensional wounds inside the body, such as gastric wall injuries or damage and disease inside the colon.”
He continues, describing the F3DB as “able to 3D print multilayered biomaterials of different sizes and shape…thanks to its flexible body.”
How big is the F3DB proof-of-concept? It is similar in size to commercial therapeutic endoscopes used today for gastroscopies and endoscopies. But the team believes it can be made even smaller for future applications.
The F3DB features:
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A team form the University of New South Wales in Australia recently published results of their research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Reprogramming human bone and fat cells to convert them into induced multipotent stem cells (iMS) the University team demonstrated this capability using laboratory mice as test subjects.
Lead study author, John Pimanda, a hematologist and Associate Professor, states, “We have taken bone and fat cells, switched off their memory and converted them into stem cells so they can repair different cell types once they are put back inside the body.” Human trials are to begin in 2017.
What’s involved?
For two days human fat and bone cells get exposed to 5-Azacytidine (AZA) and platelet-derived growth factor-AB. The latter continues to be used for up to three weeks. AZA induces cell plasticity which when combined with the growth factor transforms the cells into iMS. The iMS cells are then injected into damaged tissue where they multiply and promote growth and healing.
The authors of the study contend that this technique is far safer for repairing damaged bone and muscle than any other stem cell therapy. They point out that embryonic stem cells are clinically unacceptable for use in tissue repair and regeneration because of their potential to cause cancer. And other stem cell therapies requiring the use of viruses to deliver the genetic information also expose recipients to unnecessary risk. The potential represented by iMS to treat joint, back, neck, spine and muscle injury, therefore, is seen as a significant medical breakthrough.
For people like me with aging joints and a candidate for surgical replacement of my left knee I suddenly have a new nonsurgical option other than cortisone or hyaluronic acid injections. To not have to undergo surgery and a long convalescence is welcome news. I cannot wait to hear the clinical trial results over the next couple of years. I know I’m willing to wait.
To learn more about iMS and regenerative stem cell therapy view this YouTube video.
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The first two bullet points below I have previously written about. The latter two, however, represent the latest quantum computing advances.
Passing the Bell Test
Also referred to as Bell’s inequality experiments, the test is named after John Bell and demonstrates the unique phenomenon that occurs in quantum mechanics known as entanglement. Entanglement allows what is referred to as counter-intuitive phenomena. For example, the measuring of a particle locally can instantly affect another particle even if it is located far away from the first. This is quantum physics at its most mysterious level. And recently just to prove its real, Australia’s University of New South Wales reported that one of its engineering teams wrote and manipulated two quantum bits in a silicon microchip passing the Bell test.
The University’s experiment is explained in a video link provided here. It involved two quantum particles, one an electron and the other a nucleus from a single phosphorus atom placed inside a silicon chip. Although in close proximity to each other the experiment created two-particle entangled states. Stated Professor Andrea Morello in the School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications, “passing the Bell test with such a high score is the strongest possible proof that we have the operation of a quantum computer entirely under control. In particular we can access the purely-quantum type of code that requires the use of the delicate quantum entanglement between two particles.”
Writing Quantum Software Code
A new Vancouver, British Columbia company, 1QBit, founded three years ago, is out to build software for D-Wave quantum computers. Its customers are Fortune 50 companies and its product, quantum-ready software, takes about six months to build per project. The applications being built tackle high-value problems in finance, energy, the life sciences and others according to 1QBit’s web site. Getting companies quantum-ready is the mission. Non-disclosure agreements prevent the company from identifying its customers but the projects being tackled appear to be focused on finding meaningful patterns in complex data.
States Andrew Fursman, (seen in picture below) CEO of 1QBit, “similarly shaped molecules have similar effects.” He’s talking about comparing the molecules of new drugs for one of the company’s clients. “…if you build something you think is going to be a pretty good cure for heart disease but has a similar shape to something known to cause cancer, that’s a good cause for concern.”
Quantum-ready software capable of this type of discernment can be tweaked to look at other patterns. Fursman notes it is just as applicable to discern patterns in money laundering for example. “The breakthroughs made here are going to trickle down to so many different industries.”
But from Down Under comes some exciting news for those of you who have been forever waiting for the quantum computing revolution to spring forth. The promise of a commercial quantum computer has existed for several decades. In Canada, D-Wave, a Vancouver-based company, is the closest so far to delivering quantum technology. Google uses D-Wave technology. Facebook is investing in quantum technology. And Intel just announced a budget of $50 million to be spent on quantum research and development.
The Australian breakthrough as announced in the last week is an engineering feat, the building of a silicon-based quantum logic gate. Produced by an electrical engineering team at University of New South Wales, the logic gate performs calculations in quantum fashion. Instead of being in a either a bit state of “0” or “1” the gate bridges the divide allowing the qubits (quantum bits) to intertwine making fuzzy calculations possible. And by fuzzy we mean states that lie between “0” and “1,” something our current computer technology is incapable of doing.
Now comes the next step, building a prototype silicon quantum processor which the Aussie team believes will require somewhere between $35 and $70 million U.S. in investment. The University is seeking commercial partners for the venture and recently filed a patent for a full-scale quantum computer chip featuring millions of qubits.
So when will you and I have a quantum computer in our homes? Not likely for several decades states the engineers from New South Wales. The first commercial quantum computers will more than likely be purchased by big data companies and will be housed in large data centres where they will provide cloud-based services to users like you and me who will access applications through the Internet.
When you think about it that shouldn’t be a surprise. I already use a Chromebook computer when I am traveling and do all my work in the cloud. Quantum computing may further this trend.
In this case the amorphous glassy structures being created contain three or more metals including magnesium, copper and yttrium. The work is being done by researchers at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, New South Wales, Australia. In a study published in Nature Communications on September 15, 2015, the research team describes the progress being made in understanding how to make metallic glass with strength three times greater than titanium while remaining lightweight.
What distinguishes metal glass from ordinary metals? It is the organization of atoms. In a crystalline metal atoms are highly structured. In metal glass the atoms are irregular and highly disordered. This contributes to the strength and malleability of the material which can be moulded and shaped and even blown behaving like a glass but with the shatter-proof strength of a metal.
The breakthrough by the New South Wales team is the creation of a cookbook for making 200 varieties of metal glass. In the press release announcing the publication of their findings it mentions metal glass from titanium, magnesium, silver, copper and zinc. No transparent aluminum although I’m sure somewhere in the recipes Scotty’s formula lurks.
What does metal glass bring to materials science? A material three times stronger than an equivalent metal while being far lighter. As malleable as chewing gum and therefore easily moulded metal glass will become a material of choice for automobiles, airplanes, and buildings here on Earth, and for spaceships and robotics operating beyond Earth. The Martian rover planned for 2020 will incorporate metallic glass alloys in its structure, the first time the material will be used for an extra-terrestrial purpose.
Not familiar with concentrated photovoltaics? The technology uses additional optics such as lenses and curved mirrors to enhance and concentrate sunlight. The end form factor required to maximize energy yield can be smaller than that used by conventional solar panels. But it is in commercial solar power where concentrated photovoltaics is creating a significant impact.
RayGen Resources, an Australian company, is working with the University of New South Wales team to commercialize their invention for power towers similar to the one that appears in the picture below. This is part of an 11 Megawatt complex operated by Abengoa Solar in Spain. Abengoa would probably be a prime customer for the invention since the company is the largest commercial solar power generator in the world today.
The research team led by Martin Green, who is Director of the Australian National Energy Agency, Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, will present their invention to the Asia-Pacific Solar Research Conference today in Sydney. A paper on the breakthrough will soon appear in the journal, Progress in Photovoltaics.
