Clean Technology Meets Data Science: News and Articles

  One of the newest entrants in the clean tech arena is the   field of biomimicry and sustainable materials . Research in nanotechnology and biological systems is driving a lot of innovation in how we design materials so that they can be easily recycled/reused or degraded naturally to return to the environment. And not just material design, but also a whole suite of novel solutions to problems that are based on biological systems. First off – designing monitoring systems that can track and monitor wildlife and natural systems .  An interesting interplay between clean technology and data science lies in biomimicry –where natural systems are used as templates for better design. Often, what happens is that there’s an interesting technological advance that is used to collect large amounts of data – and then, researchers figure out by using data science that there is a natural system that could make it even better! A really interesting   invention out of MIT   looks at how robots can be bui

  After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a question that came up frequently was – how long would it be before the environment recovered? This was a concern both for the ocean surrounding the spill area as well as the marshes and beaches inland where the oil washed up. Not all spills are as bad as the Deepwater Horizon one – but a concern that comes up repeatedly when anything needs to be extracted from the Earth is –   what is the impact on the local environment and how long will it take for it to recover or at least return to a state as close to the original one as possible? This is true whether it’s minerals being extracted or gold or oil and natural gas. The recovery of land after oil and gas wells have been drilled is a question that has been studied for quite a while now. In general, most of the work has looked at individual sites and evaluated how they are doing after the extraction is complete and the system has been shut down, but there are very few studies that have been able

  A fun and exciting area to use data science in clean tech is in monitoring wildlife! This sector uses a combination of computer vision, remote sensing, artificial intelligence among other tools to help us track wildlife across the world. Here are a few examples of the kinds of problems and technologies that are in play these days! First, An interesting   study   came out of California recently, where scientists from the University of Delaware, University of California at Davis and the US Geological Survey partnered to track the movement of waterfowl in the region. My first question when I read the study was – why would people, other than wildlife biologists and conservationists, care about what happened to waterfowl? And it turns out that the answer is really important from the perspective of the agricultural industry as well as from a human health perspective. Looking at how close or how far away waterfowl are from poultry farms can help track the spread of avian influenza or “bird

  Drought and wildfires always seem to go together! The recent drought in California was accompanied by powerful fires that burnt several million acres of forest, including in the iconic Yosemite National Park.   The question that people often ask whenever there’s news of yet another fire resulting in severe damage to the forests is always –   isn’t there a way to figure out which areas of the forest are most vulnerable to the fires?   And until recently, most rangers and naturalists were estimating that vulnerability based on their experience and years of working in the same forest ecosystem.   Scientists from the University of California, Davis   studied aerial imagery from the forests  in California between the years 2012-2015 to predict the areas where most of the trees were dying, either due to a fire or after a fire had struck. What they found was that the areas that were the worst affected with the highest tree mortality were areas that were both dry and dense. From a commonsens

Fact – fifteen of the hottest years have come in the last sixteen years. If you are one of the people who is living through the heat waves and wondering if your asthma is really getting worse or if it’s just your imagination – well congratulations! You’re not alone and you are not imagining things. Scientists at the   University of California, Irvine    wanted to understand what happens to the air pollutants that trigger human health problems like asthma when heat waves occur simultaneously. In other words, if there is already air pollution does having a heat wave at the same time make the pollution worse? And if it does get worse, how badly does it affect people’s health?   In order to answer these questions, they overlaid detailed air pollution maps of the United States and Canada with meterological models and data about heat waves over a 15 year time period. The data was on a very fine 1 degree grid. What they found was that having both a heat wave and existing pollution resulted in