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Apollo News Snipets – May 2012
- In recent months, I have read about many breakthroughs in solar technology that suggest a bright future for this renewable energy source. At Washington University in Saint Louis, researchers in the Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center (PARC) have designed a solar antenna that utilizes a technology similar to what green bacteria use that can produce energy with photosynthesis even in dimly lit ocean depths. By copying light-harvesting chlorosomes, the ‘technology’ that these bacteria use, the researchers hope to herald in the next generation of high efficiency solar panels.
Dr. Peter Bermel and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are taking a different approach to improving solar efficiency by creating a sun trap. Dr. Bermel starts with a thin sheet of tungsten and creates a series of micro-pits lined with indium gallium arsenide. When sun hits the treated surface, radiation is reflected in multiple directions and re-absorbed, creating more heat (i.e. energy) than is possible with a plain sheet of metal.
Another leap in solar technology was reported by scientists at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) who created the first working multiple exciton generation (MEG) cell. This MEG cell can absorb one photon of energy from the sun and emit more than one electron through the use of quantum dots which convert energy normally lost as heat. The solar cell they created had an astonishing 114% quantum efficiency rating.
On the power generation side of this business, the largest solar photovoltaic cell (PV) plant came online in April. Using panels built by First Solar, the 100 megawatt (MW) plant is located in Yuma County, Arizona. When completed in 2014, Agua Caliente will feature 290-MW of power generation capabilities. To put this in perspective, the average coal-fired power plant in the US generates 667-MW of power.
- Mental health is an issue that impacts us all but is something we rarely talk about with our friends, family and co-workers. A Canadian non-profit, Partners for Mental Health, is trying to change that with their Not Myself Today campaign. A part of this campaign is a mapping application that shows the moods of the respondents by city. The map is color coded to show the dominant mood in the city and then allows users to drill down and see the percent of respondents that are okay, anxious, hopeful, etc. The map is updated in real-time and can be accessed here.
- And on to another topic that few of us even realize is an issue in our great country – hunger. In 2010, more than 48 million Americans faced food insecurity. An individual is considered food insecure if they have to make hard economic choices between the basic needs of life (such as housing, clothing, medical bills and food) on a frequent to sporadic basis. The term ‘food insecure’ has replaced ‘hunger’ as it reminds us that even though a food insecure individual is not hungry at the given moment, they could (for example) face unforeseen medical bills in the near future that would force them to cut back caloric intake at the risk of damaging their health even more. An interactive map (and frankly disturbing map with the wealth we have in this country) of hunger in the United States can be found here.
- The concept of crowd-sourced GIS continues to be a topic of focus in the geospatial world. It is an intriguing and powerful concept when you consider the amount of effort that can be contributed by a community of users with thousands of eyes and hands to address any mapping project. In Malaysia, the Forest Governance Integrity Programme of Transparency International launched the Forest Watch Project which uses a team of volunteers to comb publically available data on Google Earth and report any possibly illegal activity to the organization. These reports are then made public on the site as well as (apparently) reported to member government agencies. Unfortunately, there is little sense of how successful the effort has been to date to identify and curb illegal activities. OpenStreetMap is a pioneer in crowd-sourced mapping and there Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has already helped in crises such as the 2010 Haitian Earthquake. For the past year, the State Department has investigated how they might be able to employ HOT’s volunteer community for future humanitarian crises. While crowd-sourced mapping can contribute to the ‘common good,’ it can have unintended negative consequences as Google Maps/Places discovered with recent reports of commercial sabotage whereby users registered businesses as closed which were in fact still open.
Brock Adam McCarty
Map Wizard
(720) 470-7988
brock@apollomapping.com
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