Apollo News Snippets – April 2019

Tech time, tech time, tech time, woot woot! We are always excited to share the new tech ideas we have seen in the past month. So here we go!
Two-sided solar panels are coming to a new installation project by you soon!
Is super-human skin the next big trend in medicine?
An Earth-friendly technique developed to produce paper that can harvest residual heat.
Natural sugar-based herbicide extracted from freshwater blue-green algae.
Flags that generate power too? That is a beautiful and sustainable idea!
This tech produces water from thin air.
Metal nanowires combined with sunlight could produce a major source of green energy in the near future.
From wood to bioplastic to grocery shelf packaging.

The February 2019 temperature departure map shows a more mixed bag of weather this month, with marked pockets of cooler weather in the north and then large pockets of record warmth over the southern oceans.

The February 2019 NOAA Global Climate report is out, and well as you predicted, it was a hot month. In fact, it was the 5^th hottest February in the 140 years of records with temperatures some 0.79 degrees Celsius (1.42 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20^th Century average. That said, the global pattern was quite variable as the Southern Hemisphere was consistently hot while the Northern Hemisphere had pockets of cold, for example over the USA and parts of central and northern Asia. And as expected, the cool weather in the USA has Trump doubting climate change, shocking…

It’s time to celebrate Americans’ least favorite holiday, Tax Day! And in honor of this yearly unpopular ‘holiday’, my Google search of the month was, “GIS and tax day.” And okay this one is not academic in any way other than being published on the Penn State University website, but it is still an interesting look at the issue of GIS and taxation. While this talk was given in 2003, all of the issues about shifting jurisdictions and inaccurate geocoding seem even more relevant today in the dawning era of (universal) internet taxation.