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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
The chips in most modern desktop computers have four “cores,” or processing units, which can run different computational tasks in parallel. But the chips of the future could have dozens or even hundreds of cores, and taking advantage of all that parallelism is a stiff challenge.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a new system that not only makes parallel programs run much more efficiently but also makes them easier to code.
When organic chemists identify a useful chemical compound — a new drug, for instance — it’s up to chemical engineers to determine how to mass-produce it.
There could be 100 different sequences of reactions that yield the same end product. But some of them use cheaper reagents and lower temperatures than others, and perhaps most importantly, some are much easier to run continuously, with technicians occasionally topping up reagents in different reaction chambers.
For upcoming climate model studies, scientists can use a new, significantly improved data set for solar forcing. An international science team led by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC) in Granada (Spain) has now published the details of the new reconstruction of this reference dataset in the journal Geoscientific Model Development. A significantly enhanced influence of solar cycle effects is expected, particularly in the stratosphere.
JRC scientists have proposed a new approach for identifying the impacts of climate change and extreme weather on the variability of global and regional wheat production. The study analysed the effect of heat and water anomalies on crop losses over a 30-year period.
The cellulose-based synthetic fiber viscose is a popular fabric of choice for countless apparel companies, and is often touted as a sustainable material. But this textile, often sourced from wood pulp, has generated more than its fair share of controversy over the years. Some high-profile designers, notably Stella McCartney, have pledged to source material that can only be traced to responsibly managed forests; McCartney herself has striven to raise awareness about the links viscose has to deforestation and pollution.
High-resolution earth imagery has provided ecologists and conservationists with a dynamic new tool that is enabling everything from more accurate counting of wildlife populations to rapid detection of deforestation, illegal mining, and other changes in the landscape.
