- Technology time – oh how I love thee! Let’s check out what I found for this month’s review of technology then:
Huge tethered sails could reduce shipping costs by 20%.
Advance in use of abundant (and cheap) sodium ions in batteries.
Climate change mitigating battery invented.
Eco-friendly nanomaterial created to produce hydrogen gas from water and sunlight.
New polymer can reduce surface temperatures of buildings by up to 6 degrees Celsius.
Major breakthrough in printable perovskite solar panels could be gateway to commercial production.
Large-scale energy production from wind farms could warm the USA.
The September 2018 temperature percentile departure map shows pockets of record warmth over every continent other than Australia with marked cold over northern North America.- I bet you are surprised to find out that the September 2018 NOAA Global Climate Change report shows the warming trend continues. The month marked the 4th hottest September on record since 1880 which means the five hottest Septembers on record have all occurred in the past five years – any interesting trend to say the least. But you know, American Senators like to try to prove there is no climate change by pointing to freak regional weather – give me a break…
- I bet you did not know that November 16 is National Fast Food Day? And in honor of this unhealthy holiday, my Google Search of the month was, “fast food restaurants and GIS.” If you check out the hits you get, you might find this Master’s Thesis by Kesha Patrice of California State University (Sacramento) where she uses GIS to analyze the relationship of fast food restaurant accessibility and a slew of mental/physical health indicators. Definitely a timely study with the prevalence of ‘fast-food lifestyles’ in the USA.
- In October we checked out the online GIS resources for Massachusetts’ second largest city, and this month we move to Michigan doing the same here, with a look at Grand Rapids. When you hit the very simple GIS page for Grand Rapids, look in the picture header for a collection of some themed ArcGIS web maps. And if you follow this link, you can download (some of?) their GIS data in a spatial format.
Brock Adam McCarty
Map Wizard
(720) 470-7988
brock@apollomapping.com
This entry was posted in The Geospatial Times and tagged geography matters, News, News Snippets, The Geospatial Times Bookmark the permalink.
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved - 
Leave a Reply