Apollo News Snippets – March 2020

It’s time for a juicy list of tech advances from the past month, so here we go!
Laser-induced fusion could answer the world’s energy needs sustainably.
Constrained perovskite crystals could lead to more efficient solar cells and LEDs.
Producing high-quality airplane parts using carbon blankets and just 1% of normal energy costs.
Could plants offer insight on harvesting the non-visible spectrum emitted by the Sun?
New electrochemical solution to an energy-intensive process of extracting ions from suspension.
Biomass-extracted acetone can be converted to a jet fuel additive using sunlight only.
New stretchable, wearable battery made out of a plastic polymer.

The January 2020 NOAA temperature departure map shows large pockets of record warmth over northern Europe and western Asia, as well as small pockets of record warmth over the other continents–not too much cool weather on this map other than Alaska, a bit of Greenland and a band in eastern Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

If you haven’t lived under a rock for the past decade, you might realize it’s getting warmer, very quickly; in fact, January 2020 was the warmest January in the 141-year record according to the latest NOAA Global Climate report. Let’s all celebrate?! No, no let’s not–in fact the raw figures are scary as we rocketed past one degree Celsius over the 20^th Century average, clocking in at a warm 1.14 degrees Celsius (2.05 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average. As Antarctica logs its warmest day ever, the Trump administration moves to make it easier to emit greenhouse gases–sad…

March 12^th is Girl Scouts Day and in so in honor of this important civic group, our Google search of the month was, “GIS and Girl Scouts.” And okay this is not a research paper as we commonly feature here but it is a feel-good story about bringing GIS into high school curriculums as well as part of a local Girl Scouts STEM program–you can read more about the California initiative here!
In February, we stopped in picturesque Eugene, Oregon with a review of their online GIS resources, and for this month review of the GIS resources for the second largest city in a state, we head to the other side of the country with a review for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Pittsburgh, PA GIS Website
Pittsburgh, PA GIS Contacts
Pittsburgh, PA GIS Web Map
Pittsburgh, PA GIS Map Collections (this is a very cool online historic map viewer for the city)
Pittsburgh, PA GIS Direct Downloads