Media Watch
Natural News
States are emulating California’s “clean air” mandate by BANNING gas-powered vehicles -
(UCI) researchers have been conducting much of that study, learning what exactly will be needed to make all cars zero emissions over the next decade. “The grid does not currently have the capability to add millions of battery electric or even fuel-cell electric vehicles today,” said Jack Brouwer, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCI. “So, we have some time to make reasonable investments in the grid to enable this to actually happen and to happen well.” Read More
How to Save a Forest by Burning It
The New York Times -
“Fire has made us civilized, but we still don’t understand it fully,” said Tirtha Banerjee, [UCI engineering assistant professor] …. “Scientists have been “just completely caught off guard about how fast things are changing,” said James T. Randerson, [UCI Chancellor’s Professor, Earth system science]. … Banerjee and his team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers flew their drone repeatedly over the area, mapping it ….. By comparing images from before, during and after the burn, Banerjee’s team could pinpoint exactly how the fire had transformed the forest floor. [Subscription required, campus-wide access provided by UCI Libraries. Sign-up here: https://guides.lib.uci.edu/nytimes] Read More
Combined force of fire and water
Nature -
Ariane Jong-Levinger [engineering graduate student] and colleagues from the University of California, Irvine used stochastic modelling to study the effects that changes in extreme rainfall and wildfires have on flood-protection infrastructure such as flood channels and debris basins in a mountain watershed similar to those found in southern California. They find that more frequent and severe fires lead to more events that exceed the capacity of the protective infrastructure. Read More
Other materials stories that may be of interest
American Ceramic Society -
Engineers push nanostructure properties to new extremes. Researchers at University of California, Irvine increased the energy absorption and strength of nanoarchitected structures by fabricating interpenetrating phased composites. Read More
How About Hydrogen?
Society of Women Engineers -
Iryna Zenyuk, Ph.D., is a researcher, associate professor of [chemical] and biomolecular engineering, and associate director of the University of California, Irvine National Fuel Cell Research Center. … Dr. Zenyuk also sees a major shift toward fuel cells for trucks. “For long-haul truck drivers and their employers, time and every pound of payload is money,” she said. “Heavy-duty trucks are virtually impossible to decarbonize with batteries. They would need batteries so heavy they would reduce the payload by about one-third, and recharging those batteries would take too long.” Read More
A treasure hunt for microbes in Chile’s Atacama desert
Knowable Magazine -
Other microbes take an active role in seeking out water. In 2020, a group of scientists from the United States described in PNAS a bacterium living within gypsum rocks that secreted a substance to dissolve the minerals around it, releasing individual water molecules sequestered inside the rock. “They’re almost like miners … digging for water,” says [[Professor] David Kisailus, a chemical and environmental engineer at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the study’s authors. “They can actually search out and find the water and extract the water from these rocks.” Examples like these are just a taste of what Atacama’s microbes might teach us about survival at extremes, Kisailus says. Read More
Experts say significant grid investments needed to phase out gas-powered vehicles in California
KCBS -
On Thursday, the California Air Resources Board voted to phase out gas-powered cars by 2035, but experts say significant investments in grid infrastructure will need to happen to make this a reality. Experts at the University of California, Irvine have been conducting much of that research, learning what exactly will be needed to make all cars zero emissions in little more than a decade. "The grid does not currently have the capability to add millions of battery electric or even fuel-cell electric vehicles today," [said] Jack Brouwer, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering [and director, Advanced Power and Energy Program] at UCI. "So, we have some time to make reasonable investments in the grid to enable this to actually happen and to happen well." Read More
Cities Brace for This Season's Colliding Climate Disasters
Bloomberg -
“In cascading events, the sequence, timing and order of events really matter,” says Amir AghaKouchak, a professor of environmental and civil engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He adds that some events can take place over years, making it harder for scientists to model or predict their risks. … The upcoming challenge is to turn science into policy, says AghaKouchak. “I think cities and states need to spend more resources on planning for future extreme scenarios, exploring potential grey swan events,” he said. Read More
Optics+Photonics 2022: Opening plenary honors the late Michael W. Berns
Optics.org -
On Sunday evening, SPIE 2022 President Anita Mahadevan-Jansen opened this year’s SPIE Optics + Photonics plenary program with her welcome to both the attendees and the return to full in-person operations of the event. However Dr. Mahadevan-Jansen, who is Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, also had the solemn duty to announce that the scheduled speaker – Dr. Michael Berns, founder of the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic at the University of California at Irvine – had passed away at the age of 79 only a week before, on August 13th. “Mike” Berns was due to receive the highest honor of SPIE – the SPIE Gold Medal – which will now be awarded posthumously in his name. Read More
Photon scissors and tweezers: A cell surgeon’s story
SPIE -
A professor of biomedical engineering, surgery, and developmental and cell biology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and cofounder and founding director of the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic (BLIMC), [Michael] Berns is also this year’s recipient of the SPIE Gold Medal in recognition of his work in bioengineering research and his distinguished career that has brought together engineers, physicists, biologists, and physicians to collaborate on groundbreaking discoveries and innovations. Today, Berns is widely known as the “the father of laser microbeams” thanks, in part, to his groundbreaking work in delineating how the laser can perform subcellular surgery on chromosomes. Read More