Technology

A Startup Wants to Help Predict Floods

- Adam Clare
Water

For years engineers tried to prevent flooding, then they realized they can’t stop nature. Now instead of trying to stop it, we try to mitigate flooding by creating spaces that can absorb a lot of water (parks along rivers are an example of this). Still, these attempts don’t always work and with increasing instability in our climate it’s getting harder to deal with more extreme flooding instances. This is where a new startup, Floodmapp, fits in. They are using machine learning and AI to improve how we understand flooding instead of the traditional physics-driven modelling.

The company’s premise is simple: We have the tools to build real-time flooding models today, but we just have chosen not to take advantage of them. Water follows gravity, which means that if you know the topology of a place, you can predict where the water will flow to. The challenge has been that calculating second-order differential equations at high resolution remains computationally expensive.

Murphy and Prosser decided to eschew the traditional physics-based approach that has been popular in hydrology for decades for a completely data-based approach that takes advantage of widely available techniques in machine learning to make those calculations much more palatable. “We do top down what used to be bottoms up,” Murphy said. “We have really sort of broken the speed barrier.” That work led to the creation of DASH, the startup’s real-time flood model.

Real time.

A Cheap Material for Producing Power from Waste Heat

- Adam Clare

Solar panels on grass

Machines produce a lot of waste heat, and if we can capture that heat we can convert it into electric energy. Capturing thermal energy is currently inefficient because of thermal dynamics and the lack of super capacitors. Not to be deterred by these obstacles, researchers have found ways to efficiently capture thermal energy. By using an inexpensive material a small thermoelectric can be placed to convert heat to power.

“This looks like a very smart way to realize high performance,” says Li-Dong Zhao, a materials scientist at Beihang University who was not involved with the work. He notes there are still a few more steps to take before these materials can become high-performing thermoelectric generators. However, he says, “I think this will be used in the not too far future.”
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The result, which they report today in Nature Materials, was not only a thermal conductivity below that of single-crystal tin selenide but also a ZT of 3.1. “This opens the door for new devices to be built from polycrystalline tin selenide pellets and their applications to be explored,” Kanatzidis says.

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Experimenting on Digital Twins Helps us Understand Reality

- Adam Clare
construction

It’s hard to predict the future, but with enough data we can at least get better at it. That’s exactly what digital twins are all about. By using as much real world data as possible to model out anything from a building, to a person, to a city in a digital space we can run simulations on what can work best for the real world counterpart. Of course, since simulations are only as good as the data source (and how we process the data) there are limits to effectiveness of digital twins; still, the idea that we can effectively model solutions and their potential outcomes in higher fidelity is appealing.

With the rise of the internet of things, sensor technology is increasingly being installed in our homes and workplaces, as well as the physical infrastructure that surrounds us. Meanwhile, cloud computing makes it easier than ever for data to be shared across different devices and networks.

As a result, businesses and other organisations have been able to build up huge volumes of data. Not all of this is private either – online sources such as the London Datastore are making live data readily available to anyone who wants to use it.

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“We see digital twins as a way of improving decision making,” Hayes told Dezeen.

“A city is effectively a system of systems – water, electricity, housing, schools, hospitals, prisons, natural environment – it all fits together,” she said. “When you start to connect the datasets from these digital twins, you can build a bird’s eye view of a city, which gives you better information about the consequences of your decisions.”

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The Right to Repair in Europe

- Adam Clare

things

One of the largest markets in the world will soon be demanding manufactures to let consumers repair what their products. You may have bought a product like a cellphone that gets minor damage which you can’t repair yourself, so you need to send it back to the manufacturers for an expensive or worse: buy a new one. The amount of waste produced by negligent manufactures because their products cannot be repaired is astronomical. This has led Europe to begin the process of passing legislation around the consumer’s right to repair what they own.

Some political leaders agree. In November, the EU Parliament called on the European Commission to make routine repair of everyday products easier, systematic and cost-efficient. It said that warranties should be extended, and that replacement parts should be improved and made more accessible, as should information enabling general repair and maintenance.

The EU’s existing eco-design regulations could be an instrument to reach these goals. These mandates were established years ago to improve the energy efficiency of products sold in the EU. But in March, the first eco-design regulation that will define standards for repair and useful life will come into force. Manufacturers of washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators and monitors will have to ensure that components are replaceable with common tools. Instruction manuals must be accessible to specialist companies. And producers must supply spare parts within 15 days.

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How Satellite Alerts Save Forests

- Adam Clare

desert and stars

Information is key to success, and that’s especially true when it comes to fighting deforestation. Organizations and governments trying to protect our forests need to know where the illegal activity is happening, when, and who the perpetrators are. A team of researchers wondered if providing alerts from satellites could help organizations preventing deforestations. The short answer is yes.

Those findings come from new research into the effect of GLAD, the Global Land Analysis and Discovery system, available on the free and interactive interface Global Forest Watch. Launched in 2016, GLAD provides frequent, high-resolution alerts when it detects a drop in forest cover. Governments and others interested in halting deforestation can subscribe to the alerts on Global Forest Watch and then intervene to limit forest loss.
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Moffette and her co-authors set out to understand whether these kinds of automated alerts could achieve their goal of reducing forest loss, which has global climate implications. Land-use changes like deforestation account for 6 percent to 17 percent of global carbon emissions. And avoiding deforestation is several times more effective at reducing carbon emissions than regrowing forests.

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