by Bea Kylene Jumarang These days, words like protocell belong in biology laboratories. Even words like carbon cycle confuse the majority of people. Still, you may be asking, why is protocell being described in relation to architecture? In biology, and as Biology-Online puts it, a protocell is a large, ordered structure enclosed by a membrane, […]
Safer Infrastructure
The Economic Impact of Extreme Weather in the US
May 4, 2012
A team of social scientists and economists from Colorado and California recently completed a study on the United States economy’s sensitivity to weather variability: extreme heat, extreme cold, droughts, and floods. This study marked the first time that US economic susceptibility to extreme weather had been explicitly quantified. Seventy years of atmospheric data were used […]
Recent Solar Storm Floods Earth’s Upper Atmosphere
April 17, 2012
By Pennell Paugh Though the Earth is constantly bombarded by charged particles from the Sun, which emits material in all directions in a process known as the solar wind, sometimes the Sun ramps up magnetic activity on its surface, triggering huge flares of insidious plasma. NASA Science News announced that a huge solar storm occurred […]
Google’s Role in Public Hurricane Preparedness
February 17, 2012
A recent study by researchers at Mississippi State University and the University of Alabama sought to identify the behavior of the general public in advance of landfalling hurricanes by examining Google search data. Using publically accessible data from Google Trends, Google Insights, and Google Hot Trends, patterns in keyword searches shed light on how the […]
Planning Energy in Times of Climate Change
February 5, 2012
Luisa Cristini, PhD., University of Hawaii at Manoa Energy systems are vulnerable to climate change. Assessing the various scenarios that could occur is a great challenge, due to the number of climate variables and the interconnection between the various energy sectors. A review of the scientific literature on this topic that was just been published, […]