Category: Blog

The University of Manchester in association with The Fine Bedding Company have derived an equation that estimates Sleep Quality. The formula scores the person’s sleep quality from ‘great’ to ‘tossing and turning all night’. The formula is: sleep quality = [(T x Bt) + C ] / [ Ha + S + L + (H x D)] where ‘T’ is tiredness [hours] relevant to time awake and load of work, ‘Bt’ is the ratio of bedtime over normal bedtime, ‘C’ is related to the supporting beddings’ quality, ‘Ha’ is the average waking hours, ‘S’ is related to ambient sounds, ‘L’...

MIT students developed this great cooking meat animation for the 2013 edX Science and Cooking course. It demonstrates the heat diffusion through meat over time. This heat diffusion is calculated by modeling the meat using the diffusion constant of water. The heat at each point in the meat is calculated at each time step by using a Crank-Nicolson scheme to solve the heat equation. The temperatures for the different stages of protein denaturization come from Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (pages 152 and 210). It is important to note, however, that these...

Researcher Hans Joachim Schellnhuber’s group published reports that suggest that even modest climate change might drastically affect the living conditions of billions of people, whether through water scarcity, crop shortages or extremes of weather. Regions most at risk from water scarcity include parts of the southern United States, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. By contrast, India, tropical Africa and high latitudes in the Northern Hemi­sphere can expect to receive more water in a warming world. In addition, drought conditions are likely to become more frequent and severe in some parts of South America, western and central Europe, central Africa...

Cameron Beccario presents a visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers, updated every three hours. Weather Data is derived from NCEP / US National Weather Service / NOAA Global Forecast System. Poetry in motion at http://earth.nullschool.net.

The flow of terrestrial groundwater to the sea is an important natural component of the hydrological cycle. This process, however, does not explain the large volumes of low-salinity groundwater that are found below continental shelves. There is mounting evidence for the global occurrence of offshore fresh and brackish groundwater reserves. The potential use of these non-renewable reserves as a freshwater resource provides a clear incentive for future research. But the scope for continental shelf hydrogeology is broader and we envisage that it can contribute to the advancement of other scientific disciplines, in particular sedimentology and marine geochemistry.  

Coastal defenses reduce the risk of floods today, but they also attract population and assets in protected areas and thus put them at risk in case of the defense fails, or if an event overwhelms it.   In terms of the overall cost of damage, the cities at the greatest risk are: 1) Guangzhou, 2) Miami, 3) New York, 4) New Orleans, 5) Mumbai, 6) Nagoya, 7) Tampa, 8) Boston, 9) Shenzen, and 10) Osaka. The top four cities alone account for 43% of the forecast total global losses.

An astonishing warm spell over Russia, up to 14 degrees F above normal, helped Earth achieve its warmest November on record. Global temperatures were 1.4 degrees F above the 20th century average, 0.05 degrees F above the previous record from 2004 according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.