Officials launch bold energy project with huge potential to solve two crises at once: 'This is a no-brainer'
Project Nexus, a $20-million project to examine the viability of placing solar panels over canals, could have huge implications for California's climate goals.
In 2021, researchers from the University of California's Merced and Santa Cruz campuses calculated that covering California's canals with solar panels could generate huge amounts of energy while conserving water.
The latter benefit is particularly exciting for a state that historically struggles with droughts. According to the findings, covering all 4000 miles of canals would generate 13 gigawatts of energy while saving 63 billion gallons of water. That's enough energy for two million homes and water for two million people.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said of the scheme, "This is a no-brainer. This is common sense."
Interestingly, solar panels perform better over water than they do on land. The water's cooling effect lowers the panels' operating temperature, boosting efficiency.
Water-based solar panels also save water by acting as a barrier against evaporation and reducing algae growth, and they avoid one of the major downsides of solar farms on land: the displacement of local wildlife.
As Brandi McKuin, one of the study's authors, pointed out in an explainer video, "If you're going to install solar panels in your home, you wouldn't put them in your backyard."
The project can help California reach its climate and biodiversity goals. Adding to existing infrastructure is an excellent example of win-win innovation.
Another area ripe for further exploration is installing solar panels in car parks. Michigan State University invested $10 million to do just that in 2017, and it's paying off.
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As Project Nexus shows, energy innovation can go hand-in-hand with land conservation.
California's Natural Resources Agency director Wade Crowfoot told PV Magazine the state is "leading the way in exploring innovative solutions to tackle climate change and strengthen our water and energy resilience. … Science-driven collaborations like this one are critical to guide our path forward."
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4 hours ago
Scientists say they have solved the mystery of what killed over 5 billion sea stars
WASHINGTON -- Scientists say they have at last solved the mystery of what killed more than 5 billion sea stars off the Pacific coast of North America in a decade-long epidemic. Sea stars – often known as starfish – typically have five arms and some species sport up to 24 arms. They range in color from solid orange to tapestries of orange, purple, brown and green. Starting in 2013, a mysterious sea star wasting disease sparked a mass die-off from Mexico to Alaska. The epidemic has devastated more than 20 species and continues today. Worst hit was a species called the sunflower sea star, which lost around 90% of its population in the outbreak's first five years. 'It's really quite gruesome,' said marine disease ecologist Alyssa Gehman at the Hakai Institute in British Columbia, Canada, who helped pinpoint the cause. Healthy sea stars have 'puffy arms sticking straight out,' she said. But the wasting disease causes them to grow lesions and 'then their arms actually fall off.' The culprit? Bacteria that has also infected shellfish, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. The findings 'solve a long-standing question about a very serious disease in the ocean," said Rebecca Vega Thurber, a marine microbiologist at University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. It took more than a decade for researchers to identify the cause of the disease, with many false leads and twists and turns along the way. Early research hinted the cause might be a virus, but it turned out the densovirus that scientists initially focused on was actually a normal resident inside healthy sea stars and not associated with disease, said Melanie Prentice of the Hakai Institute, co-author of the new study. Other efforts missed the real killer because researchers studied tissue samples of dead sea stars that no longer contained the bodily fluid that surrounds the organs. But the latest study includes detailed analysis of this fluid, called coelomic fluid, where the bacteria Vibrio pectenicida were found. 'It's incredibly difficult to trace the source of so many environmental diseases, especially underwater,' said microbiologist Blake Ushijima of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, who was not involved in the research. He said the detective work by this team was 'really smart and significant.' Now that scientists know the cause, they have a better shot at intervening to help sea stars. Prentice said that scientists could potentially now test which of the remaining sea stars are still healthy — and consider whether to relocate them, or breed them in captivity to later transplant them to areas that have lost almost all their sunflower sea stars. Scientists may also test if some populations have natural immunity, and if treatments like probiotics may help boost immunity to the disease. Such recovery work is not only important for sea stars, but for entire Pacific ecosystems because healthy starfish gobble up excess sea urchins, researchers say. Sunflower sea stars 'look sort of innocent when you see them, but they eat almost everything that lives on the bottom of the ocean,' said Gehman. 'They're voracious eaters.' With many fewer sea stars, the sea urchins that they usually munch on exploded in population – and in turn gobbled up around 95% of the kelp forest s in Northern California within a decade. These kelp forests provide food and habitat for a wide variety of animals including fish, sea otters and seals. Researchers hope the new findings will allow them to restore sea star populations -- and regrow the kelp forests that Thurber compares to 'the rainforests of the ocean.' The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Scientific American
4 hours ago
- Scientific American
How Teen Mathematician Hannah Cairo Disproved a Major Mathematical Wave Conjecture
When Hannah Cairo was 17 years old, she disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a long-standing guess in the field of harmonic analysis about how waves behave on curved surfaces. The conjecture was posed in the 1980s, and mathematicians had been trying to prove it ever since. If the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture turned out to be true, it would illuminate many other significant questions in the field. But after hitting wall after wall trying to prove it, Cairo managed to come up with a counterexample: a circumstance where the waves don't behave as predicted by the conjecture. Therefore, the conjecture can't be true. Cairo got hooked on the problem after being assigned a simpler version of the conjecture to prove as a homework assignment for a class she was taking at the University of California, Berkeley. 'It took me a while to convince [course instructor] Ruixiang Zhang that my proposal was actually correct,' she says. Now, under Zhang's advisement, she has a paper on the preprint server and was invited to present her results at the International Conference on Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations in El Escorial, Spain. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Cairo says she loves talking about her research and giving presentations with colorful and descriptive slides (see examples below). When asked what she studies, Cairo says, in short, 'points, lines and waves.' Born and raised in the Bahamas, Cairo moved to California at the age of 16, where she began to take classes at U.C. Berkeley. Now, at 18 years old, she is on to a Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland to continue her research in Fourier restriction theory. Cairo has faced many difficulties in her journey, but she has found comfort and belonging in the field of mathematics and in the work itself. Scientific American spoke to Cairo about the way harmonic analysis is like dropping stones into a still pond, her transgender identity and the reasons she loves mathematics. [ An edited transcript of the interview follows. ] Beyond 'points, lines, and waves,' how would you explain your field of study, harmonic analysis? Imagine that you're at a pond, and it's a very still pond, and you drop a stone into it. You see these circular waves spreading out. If you drop two stones in the pond, then you might notice this pattern called an interference pattern: instead of looking like circles, they overlap. You get high points, low points. And you get these interesting shapes [where they intersect]. What if you were to use a whole bunch of ripples—then what would you get? In harmonic analysis, you can actually prove that if you drop your stones in the right place in the pond, you can get any shape that you want. My specialty is known as Fourier restriction theory, which is the subdiscipline of harmonic analysis that I work in, where we ask what kind of objects can we build if we're only allowed to use certain kinds of waves. What if we're only allowed to drop the stones in certain parts of the pond? You won't be able to get just any object. In fact, you're only going to be able to get a relatively small family of objects. What the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture says is that the shape of the objects that we get are concentrated along lines. What does it mean to be 'concentrated along lines'? One way to think of the shape of objects is to ask: What is curvature? There are a few different ways you can define it. One possible way is to take a thin, long rectangle and ask how much of your circle can lie in this thin rectangle. What you'll find is that not very much of it can because it bends away, right? On the other hand, if you take something flat like the edge of a square, then you can get a whole side of that square just on one thin tube. So that means that the square is not as 'curved' as a circle. For the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, we say, consider this object that we're building out of these waves. And we want to say that not very much is going to lie on shapes that do not contain very many lines or thin rectangles. So how did you manage to disprove this conjecture? I looked at these shapes, and one thing that I realized is that the specific kind of waves that are used are concentrated along thick rectangles. This is actually something that is well known. So you end up looking at these waves that are concentrated on rectangles: You take these waves, and they intersect each other, and they make these certain shapes, but here [instead of circle waves] we use rectangle waves. So then we have all of these rectangle waves meeting each other. What I realized is that the shape of where they meet is not quite at the right angle to agree with the direction that these rectangles are pointing in. And so this led me to a rather complicated construction using fractals to arrange these rectangles. The original fractal construction doesn't actually show up in your paper though. What was your final counterexample? What I found out is that if you arrange these waves by taking a high-dimensional hypercube and projecting it down into smaller-dimensional space and then taking only those waves that lie in your region, then this is how you can determine where to put them [to break the conjecture]. What first got you interested in math? I've always been interested in math. I think that, for me, mathematics is an art. In my childhood, I was somewhat lonely. Math was sort of there as a friend almost. I think that art cannot necessarily be a friend in every way that a friend can be, but I think art is like a friend. And so, for as long as I can remember, I've always loved mathematics. Tell me more about how math was a friend to you. I think a lot of people don't think of math as very friendly. There's an analogy that I like to make, which is to another form of art: painting. And I think that if one were to take a class on paint, you could memorize the dates and times at which various forms of paint were developed—and maybe even which paints were used by which painters. And then you can figure out what processes you can use to determine what type of paint it is. I imagine this is useful in art history, but this is not art.... I shouldn't say that. Maybe there is an art to learning about paint. I'm not going to claim that there isn't because I don't study paint. But I think that math is a little bit like that—in school, people learn about [the mathematical version of] paint; they're not learning about painting. Mathematics is comforting to me because it's a way of exploring—to explore ideas and to think about them and to build more ideas out of other ideas. What's comforting about that is that it's independent of the world in some ways. If I'm having a sad day, a happy day, if I move to Maryland (I did just move to Maryland), mathematics is still there, and it is still the same thing. It's also just something that can occupy my mind. You've mentioned to me that you're transgender. How has that affected your journey? I think that it's probably more relevant in my journey as a person than as a mathematician. Being trans has forced me to see things about the world that I maybe otherwise wouldn't have seen. It's made me see the world differently and made me see people differently and made me see myself differently. Fortunately, in the math community, I think that most mathematicians are fine with trans people. I think that it used to be more significant [in my day to day] than it is now. These days it doesn't really make much of a difference. Why have you decided to go on the record now as being trans? Trans visibility is important. People have ideas about who trans people are, and I think that it's best to broaden that. Maybe I'm also hoping that people who think that trans people are 'less' than cisgender people might find themselves questioning that. The other thing is that it's good for trans people to know that they're not alone. I think that part of what helps trans people realize that they're trans is to know that there are more options for who you can be as a trans person. That's important to me. Thank you so much for sharing that. Where is your favorite place to do math? If I'm trying to be productive in writing something down, then I like to be at my desk, and I like to listen to Bach. If I am just trying to think about ideas, then my favorite place to do that is somewhere where I don't have to pay attention to very much else. I could just be sitting down somewhere thinking about stuff, or I could be going for a walk outside. I also like to talk to other people about math, which is another kind of doing math. I really like to give presentations about mathematics. I have these handwritten slides with all these colors and drawings. Luckily, in harmonic analysis, I can give a presentation like this, and then everybody is so happy, and they tell me my slides are cute. What's next for your research? I'm working on a research project with my adviser on Mizohata-Takeuchi and adjacent stuff and about a sort of different thing: the local Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. The process of learning more about this kind of mathematics is pretty exciting—not just for me learning more about what's out there but for the math community as a whole to try to understand these kinds of things better. [That's] something that I'm excited about.
CBS News
3 days ago
- CBS News
California clean energy push exemplified by Stanford professor's zero net energy home
Clean, renewable energy is powering California to levels never seen before, and a Stanford professor's home is the blueprint for the near future. Last month, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the Golden State had reached a historic milestone. According to the latest data, in 2023, the state was powered by two-thirds clean energy. A leading climate scientist not only believes the state is heading in the right direction, but he also practices what he preaches. Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, lives in a two-story, 3,200 square-foot home with large picture windows that to any passerby might appear prohibitively expensive to heat and cool. But, it's not. "To run it, it costs nothing. I have not paid an electric bill in eight years," Jacobson said. Jacobson built from scratch what's called a "zero net energy house." It's all-electric with no gas on the property. The home generates as much energy as it consumes, and all the energy generated is clean and renewable, with no polluting fossil fuels. "My whole goal of my career has been to understand and solve large-scale air pollution and climate problems through clean renewable energy systems," Jacobson said. The house is a light steel frame structure with airtight insulation. On the roof are solar panels. In the garage, he installed a home battery system. "I'm generating my electricity with solar on the roof, and that solar generates during the day, peaks at about noon, and there's a lot of excess," Jacobson said. "I mean, I use a lot less energy than I produce, and so that energy first gets stored in batteries. And then that excess beyond that gets sent to the grid." As for California's electric grid, it's undergoing a major transition to clean, renewable sources. According to California ISO, since 2021, about 25,000 megawatts of renewables have been added to the supply. That's enough to power nearly a quarter-million homes. Jacobson's research shows that, so far this year, California has run on 100% wind, water, and solar for 164 of 209 days and for an average of 4.8 hours a day. "So, wind, water and solar this year has supplied 57.4% of all of California's electricity," added Jacobson. "And that's an increase from about 53% last year, and 48% the previous year." Those calculations, as well as Cal ISO's data, don't include private homes equipped with solar and battery systems. "These are sufficient to provide electricity for my home from solar for 24 hours a day for most of the year," said Jacobson, as he gestured to his garage Powerwall. Jacobson also drives electric vehicles. In addition, he uses energy-efficient electrical devices. "Electricity is the future for everything. It's much more efficient. It's cleaner and it's cheaper, and it does far less damage to the environment than gas or other types of fossil fuels," he said. Among his devices: an induction stove which uses 60% less energy than gas, and a heat pump that transfers heat between the indoors and outdoors. Jacobson's heat pump uses a ductless "mini split" model that uses 75% less energy than a gas heater because, as he explained, it doesn't create the heat. The pump simply moves it around. As for hot water, the home uses a heat pump electric water heater. The temperature was set at 129 degrees Fahrenheit. "It's got plenty of water for showers, and it reheats pretty rapidly," he said. Jacobson received a 30% federal tax credit and a state subsidy when he installed his system. He has generated about 120% of what he has used on average and sold the extra 20% back to the grid under the net metering program. He is also studying his home and collecting data to use in a class that he teaches. He has also published the data in a textbook with the goal of informing others about a combustion-free future.
