theory

More efficient cooling for data centers

July 22, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Increasing reliance on digital technologies in general and artificial intelligence in particular are dramatically increasing the energy consumption of data centers. Data centers consume far more energy per square foot than other commercial buildings. By the year 2030, data center energy consumption in the US is projected to reach 9% of the country’s electricity generation.

Computing hardware consumes large amounts of energy and generates large amounts of heat in the process. Currently, cooling the equipment so it doesn’t burn out accounts for as much as 40% of a data center’s total energy use.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new cooling technology that could significantly improve the energy efficiency of data centers. The technology makes use of a specially engineered fiber membrane that passively removes heat through evaporation.

The membrane has a network of tiny, interconnected pores that draw cooling liquid across the membrane surface using capillary action. As the liquid evaporates, it removes heat from the electronics underneath. No extra energy is required.

Tests of the membrane demonstrated record-breaking performance in removing heat from electronics and being able to withstand very high levels of heat flux.

The researchers say that the technology is still operating well below its theoretical limit, and with additional work, can lead to optimized performance. The membranes will be integrated into cold plates, which are components that attach to power-hungry computing components to dissipate heat. The team is also launching a startup company to commercialize the new cooling technology.

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New Cooling Tech Could Curb Data Centers’ Rising Energy Demands

Photo, posted January 23, 2023, courtesy of Jefferson Lab via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A record warm January

March 4, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Americans experienced unusually cold and wintery weather in January. Places like southern Louisiana and Florida saw appreciable amounts of snow. For those who experienced January’s Arctic blast, it was a cold January. But despite that, January was the world’s warmest on record, extending a run of extraordinary heat in which 18 out of the last 19 months saw an average global temperature more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. In fact, the global average temperature in January was 1.75 degrees above the pre-industrial average.

The exceptional warmth was surprising to climate researchers. It happened despite the emergence of La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean, which tend to lower global temperatures, at least for a while.

Researchers are investigating whether there is something beyond the effects of greenhouse gas emissions that is boosting temperatures to an unexpected degree. It is true that emissions, associated with the burning of coal, gas, and oil, reached record levels in both 2023 and 2024. But January’s warmth was still something of a surprise.

One prevalent theory is that cutting dangerous pollution is playing a role in causing global warming to accelerate. As regulators have curbed sulfate pollution to protect people’s lungs, the cooling effect of these particles that help form more and brighter clouds has diminished.

January demonstrates that the global climate system is complex and the weather in any particular region does not necessarily reflect what is happening to the planet as a whole.

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Global Temperatures Shattered Records in January

Photo, posted December 22, 2013, courtesy of SD Anderson via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Thawing permafrost: Is it a ticking timebomb?

July 8, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Permafrost covers about a quarter of the landmass in the Northern Hemisphere. It stores vast quantities of organic carbon in the form of dead plant matter. As long as it stays frozen, it is no threat to the climate. But as it thaws, microorganisms start breaking down that plant matter and large amounts of carbon are released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and methane.

This process has often been described as a ticking timebomb for the climate. The theory is that once global warming reaches a certain level, the process will become self-amplifying setting off a catastrophic amount of warming. If that level was reached, it would be a tipping point in the changing climate.

An international research team from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany has extensively researched this hypothesis. Their conclusion is that within the permafrost, there are multiple geological, hydrological, and physical processes that are self-amplifying and, in some cases, irreversible. However, these processes act only locally or regionally. There is no evidence that some particular threshold in global warming could affect all permafrost and accelerate its thawing on a global level.

This research does not mean that Arctic permafrost is nothing to worry about. In fact, there are ways in which it is more worrisome. Because the permafrost is very heterogenous – meaning it is very different in different places – there will be numerous small, local tipping points that will be exceeded at different times and at different levels of warming. All of this will proceed in step with global warming, contributing to the overall worsening situation. There is no warming level below which permafrost thawing is not a problem.

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Thawing permafrost: Not a climate tipping element, but nevertheless far-reaching impacts

Photo, posted January 24, 2014, courtesy of Brandt Meixell / USGS via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A New Method of Refrigeration | Earth Wise

February 10, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Salting roads before winter storms is a familiar sight in the Northeast. The purpose is to change the temperature at which ice can form on the road. The underlying concept has formed the basis of a new method of refrigeration that has been dubbed “ionocaloric cooling.”

It is described in a paper published in the journal Science by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The method takes advantage of how energy in the form of heat is either stored or released when a material changes phase – such as water changing from ice to liquid and vice versa. Melting absorbs heat from the surroundings while freezing releases heat. An ionocaloric refrigerator makes use of this phase and temperature change using an electrical current to add or remove ions provided from a chemical salt.

The potential is to make use of this refrigeration cycle instead of the vapor compression systems in present-day refrigerators, which make use of refrigerant gases that are greenhouse gases, many of which very powerful ones. The goal is to come up with a system that makes things cold, works efficiently, is safe, and doesn’t harm the environment.

There are a number of alternative refrigeration systems under development that make use of a variety of mechanisms including magnetism, pressure, physical stretching, and electric fields. Ionocaloric cooling uses ions to drive solid-to-liquid phase changes.

Apart from some very promising theoretical calculations of the system’s potential, the researchers have also demonstrated the technique experimentally. They have received a provisional patent for the technology and are continuing to work on prototypes to demonstrate its capabilities and amenability to scaling up.

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Berkeley Lab Scientists Develop a Cool New Method of Refrigeration

Photo, posted October 29, 2021, courtesy of Branden Frederick via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Shipping And The Endangered Whale Shark | Earth Wise

June 9, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Whale sharks are the largest fish in the world. While they measure up to 60 feet long and weigh up to 15 tons – larger and heavier than a school bus – whale sharks are actually harmless. They are a graceful, slow-moving, filter-feeding carpet shark. They are found in marine environments around the world and play an important role in the marine food web and healthy ocean ecosystems.

Whale sharks are an endangered species. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, growing human pressures are putting whale sharks at an increased risk of extinction. The numbers of these gentle giants have declined by more than 50% over the last 75 years despite many international protections. Fishing bycatch, poaching, and collisions with ships are the main drivers of the population decline.

According to new research from marine biologists from the Marine Biological Association and the University of Southampton in the U.K., lethal collisions between whale sharks and large ships are vastly underestimated, and could be the reason why populations are continuing to fall. Whale sharks spend a large amount of time in surface waters in coastal regions, and the research team theorized that collisions with ships could be causing significant whale shark deaths.

In the study, researchers tracked the global movements of both ships and whale sharks, and then mapped so-called hotspots where their movements overlapped. The research team found that more than 90% of whale shark movements fell under the footprint of shipping activity.

While many conservation measures have been taken to protect whale sharks, no international regulations currently exist to protect them from ship collisions. The researchers say it’s time for that to change.

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Shipping poses significant threat to the endangered whale shark

Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus)

Global collision-risk hotspots of marine traffic and the world’s largest fish

Photo, posted July 8, 2010, courtesy of Marcel Ekker via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Has Wheat Changed for the Worse? | Earth Wise

September 11, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

In recent years, the number of people affected by celiac disease, wheat allergies, or gluten or wheat sensitivity has increased dramatically. Why this should be is not well understood. One theory is that modern wheat varieties contain more immunoreactive protein than those used in the past. Researchers at two German research institutions investigated this issue in detail.

Wheat grains contain about 70% starch. Proteins constitute 10 to 12% of wheat, and nearly 80% of that protein is gluten. Gluten is a compound mixture of two types of protein subgroups: gliadins and glutenins.

The researchers investigated the protein content of 60 preferred wheat varieties in use during the period between 1891 and 2010, making use of an extensive seed archive. They selected 5 leading wheat varieties for each decade over that 120-year period and cultivated the plants under the same geographical and climate conditions.

The results were that the modern wheat varieties actually contain slightly less protein than old ones. Gluten content itself has been essentially constant over the 120 years, although the proportion of gliadins (which are the prime suspect for causing undesired immune responses) was actually 18% lower while the proportion of glutenins was 25% higher.

Overall, they found no evidence that the immunoreactive potential of wheat has changed over the years as a result of the cultivation factors.

The researchers note that some of the other, less significant proteins in wheat have not been investigated with regard to their physiological effects, so there is more work to be done. But so far, the culprit for increasing wheat sensitivity has not been found.

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Is modern wheat off the hook?

Photo, posted July 3, 2009, courtesy of Clare Black via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Why The Arctic Is Warming So Fast | Earth Wise

April 7, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The Arctic has been warming at the fastest rate of any place on Earth. There have long been observations of amplification of Arctic warming, meaning that its temperature increases have been well above what would be expected from the global temperature rise.

Many climate models have attributed this warming to the melting of sea ice. As the bright white ice disappears for longer periods of the year, the dark surface waters that are exposed absorb sunlight rather than reflecting it back into space the way the ice does. This is known as the ice-albedo feedback. But it does not entirely explain the amount of warming in the Arctic.

Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have developed a new theory that helps to explain what is going on.

In the areas of the Arctic Ocean where there is sea ice, the water is actually warmer at depth and colder near the surface. The deeper waters are fed by the relatively warm Pacific and Atlantic Oceans while the surface water is cooled by the ice. The increasing temperature difference between surface and deeper water causes a greater upward flow of heat. This was first observed in research cruises that revealed evidence that the Arctic Ocean water was becoming more turbulent over time.

According to computer modeling, this phenomenon is responsible for about 20% of the amplification of global warming that occurs in the Arctic.

There are multiple ongoing studies looking at the Arctic warming trend. Other factors that have contributed over time are the presence of chlorfluorocarbons in the atmosphere. That contribution is waning since the use of CFCs has been phasing out over time.

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Researchers Find New Reason Why Arctic is Warming So Fast

Photo, posted April 19, 2017, courtesy of Markus Trienke via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Science And False Beliefs

January 21, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

There are sizeable numbers of people who hold to beliefs that run counter to overwhelming contrary evidence. Flat Earthers and Holocaust deniers are well-known examples and, more recently, people – some of them in high places – who reject the evidence for climate change.

New research published in the journal Open Mind by developmental psychologists at UC Berkeley suggest that feedback, rather than hard evidence, boosts people’s sense of certainty when learning new things or trying to tell right from wrong. People’s beliefs are more likely to be reinforced by the positive or negative reactions they are exposed to than by logic, reasoning, and scientific data.

People’s learning habits can limit one’s intellectual horizons. According to the study, if you think you know a lot about something, even though you don’t, you’re less likely to be curious enough to explore the topic further and will fail to learn how little you know.

This phenomenon plays out in social media and cable-news echo chambers and explains how some people are easily duped by charlatans. Receiving positive feedback for what they are saying can make people believe they know more than they actually do. This confidence makes them less likely to seek out and learn more information about the subject, as well as take into account contradicting opinions or facts.

Another factor is that what influences people’s certainty is that their confidence tends to depend on what they heard most recently rather than on long-term cumulative data. A few pieces of recent information tend to get much more attention than an extensive body of data. If a crazy theory is able to make a correct prediction a few times, people tend to get fixed in their belief in that theory and be less open to other information.

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