Apollo News Snippets – March 2022

Are you ready for a nice, long list of technology advances announced recently? Even if not, here we go 😊
Have you heard of strange metals? Nor have we!
New way to grow waste-eating algae.
Improved catalyst for green hydrogen production.
The water-metal interface can store energy.
New solar cell efficiency record set.
From banana peel to hydrogen gas.
Improved material for small-scale quantum computing.
New artificial leaf could help reduce greenhouse gases.
Stride forward for commercialization of seawater batteries.
New wireless charging system developed.
Can we store energy using complex computations?
New material can absorb and release large amounts of energy.
Sustainable biofuel one step closer to commercialization.
Significant improvement in carbon dioxide capture.

The NOAA extreme weather events map for January 2022 shows mixed polar conditions with the Arctic Sea seeing its largest January ice extent since 2009, while in the Antarctic, the sea ice extent was the second-smallest for the month–only 2017 had less ice coverage. And then in North America we saw the coldest January since 2009, while South America saw its second warmest January–behind only 2016.

The NOAA Global Climate report is out for January 2022, and, yep, the warming trend continues. Even with the presence of a La Niña episode in the Pacific Ocean, which typically cools global temperatures, January 2022 was still 1.60°F (0.89°C) above the 20th Century global average, making it the sixth warmest January on record, and it also marked the 445th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th Century average.

March 6th is Dentist’s Day so in honor of these important healthcare professionals, our Google search of the month was, “Dentist and GIS.” And of course we found a great paper on the topic by Kelvin Chen of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he uses GIS to map countywide access to dental professionals. As you might expect, Chen found large discrepancies in access to dentists particularly between rural and urban residents.