Apollo News Snippets – July 2022

It’s always my favorite piece of writing each month, so without further ado, here’s our technology advances for the past month we found of interest!
Strong, lightweight 3D printed material developed from carbon and plastics.
A new way to break-down plastics using sunlight and an iron-based catalyst.
And this technique breaks plastics down into their core components for reuse.
This computer chip is powered by algae.
More environmentally-friendly solar panels developed.
Solar panels could generate energy from infrared light too.
Wearable solar panels are one step closer to reality.
New technique to extract fertilizers from wastewater.
Low-cost, on-site hydrogen gas production.
Most efficient solar panel ever developed.
A way to make plastics degrade in nature much quicker than they do now.
New way to breakdown lignin into renewable fuels.
Another low-cost catalyst for hydrogen fuel production.

The NOAA extreme weather events map for May 2022 shows the 14th-smallest and 5th-smallest recorded ice extents in the Artic and Antarctic Seas (respectively) for the month. South America experienced its coolest May since 2008 while New Zealand had its 3rd warmest May on record.

The May 2022 NOAA global climate report is out and well it was warm, of course. How warm? Well shockingly this was the ‘coolest’ May since 2013 at some 1.39°F (0.77°C) above the 20th Century average, but that was still warm enough to make it the 9th warmest May on record. All ten of the warmest May’s have happened since 2010–that seems like some pretty sound evidence that global climate change is real and accelerating, scary.

July 1st is Ghana’s Republic Day so in honor of this holiday, our Google search of the month was, “Ghana and GIS.” And, of course, we found an excellent paper by Basommi et al. about the intersection of satellite imagery, GIS and the mining industry. In their study, Landsat satellite imagery along with automated classification techniques were used to map land-use changes from 1991 to 2014.