Apollo News Snippets – May 2022

Are you ready for our May list of technology advances?! It’s a diverse list this time 😊
Greener idea for recycling wind turbine blades.
Newly discovered diatoms use symbiotic bacteria to produce nutrients they need.
An artificial retina that recognizes text.
Research suggests catalysts to convert methane gas to usable chemicals.
Advance in quantum computing using tiny magnets.
New possible organic replacement for some plastics.
Readily available molecules improve hydrogen fuel cells.
Ultra-thin solar panel energy production record set.
New technology for X-rays in the works.
Retro-fitting solar cells to generate energy at night.
New research more accurately models groundwater loss.
New material could make computers more efficient and faster.

The NOAA extreme weather events map for March 2022 shows the ninth-smallest Artic Ice extent for the month on record and then the second smallest extent in the Antarctic Sea; while it was the fifth-warmest March in Australia and the eighth-warmest in New Zealand.

The March 2022 NOAA Global Climate Report is out and if you guessed it was warm in March, you guessed right, ugh. How warm was it? Well at some 1.71°F (0.95°C) above the 20th Century temperature average, it was the 5th warmest March on record. This month marked the 46th consecutive March and the 447th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th Century average–with the 10 warmest Marches all occurring since 2002.

May 16th is National Mimosa Day, and in honor of this Sunday brunch favorite, our Google search of the month was, “Mimosa and GIS.” And well come on now, we are not going to be mapping out mimosa consumption with GIS (actually I bet someone has), but we did find this academic publication by McIntyre and Menges of Charles Darwin University whereby they use Landsat imagery combined with radar data to map possible outbreaks of Mimosa pigra, which is an invasive plant species in Australia.