Materials that change temperature in response to electric fields could keep computers–and kitchen fridges–cool.

Thin films of a new polymer developed at Penn State change temperature in response to changing electric fields. The Penn State researchers, who reported the new material in Science last week, say that it could lead to new technologies for cooling computer chips and to environmentally friendly refrigerators.

Changing the electric field rearranges the polymer’s atoms, changing its temperature; this is called the electrocaloric effect. In a cooling device, a voltage would be applied to the material, which would then be brought in contact with whatever it’s intended to cool. The material would heat up, passing its energy to a heat sink or releasing it into the atmosphere. Reducing the electric field would bring the polymer back to a low temperature so that it could be reused. [ read more ]

Climate scientists keep testing that turbulent world between data and society — an arena far less safe than the laboratory or field camp, where a researcher becomes a potential target for both darts and laurels from those threatened or bolstered by his or her views. One new experiment is a nascent blog at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with a fresh contribution by Josh Willis, whose work on ocean temperature trends has been discussed here. Dr. Willis says those who grasp at short-term wiggles in ocean or atmospheric conditions as evidence of global warming or cooling are like gamblers seduced by a hot streak into thinking they can beat the house. [ read more ]

Michael Glantz, the social scientist whose program was recently cut by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, is in Libya at the moment working with the meteorological service there on education programs for North Africa. Before he left, he sent me an open letter calling on the center and its main source of money, the National Science Foundation, to “tear down” the wall between physical science and the social sciences that could help insure that knowledge is applied productively outside the walls of supercomputer centers. The letter is posted below. [ read more ]

Even Jules Verne did not foresee this one. Deep down at the very bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, geochemist Andrea Koschinsky has found something truly extraordinary: “It’s water,” she says, “but not as we know it.”

At over 3 kilometres beneath the surface, sitting atop what could be a huge bubble of magma, it’s the hottest water ever found on Earth. The fluid is in a “supercritical” state that has never before been seen in nature.

The fluid spews out of two black smokers called Two Boats and Sisters Peak. [ read more ]

Scientists have made an important advance in their efforts to predict earthquakes, the journal Nature says.

A team of US researchers has detected stress-induced changes in rocks that occurred hours before two small tremors in California’s San Andreas Fault. The observations used sensors lowered down holes drilled into the quake zone.

The team says we are a long way from routine tremor forecasts but the latest findings hold out hope that such services might be possible one day. [ read more ]

Environmental groups have been warning for years that tense parts of the world could get even worse with the advent of global climate change, and even spark whole new conflicts. Now, the nation’s spies are saying pretty much the same thing.

The U.S. intelligence community has finished up its classified assessment of how our changing weather patterns could contribute to “political instability around the world, the collapse of governments and the creation of terrorist safe havens,” Inside Defense reports. Congress was briefed on the report last week. And on Wednesday, leading spies — including National Intelligence Council chairman Dr. Thomas Fingar and Energy Department intelligence chief Rolf Mowatt-Larsen — will testify on the Hill about the 58-page document, “The National Security Implications of Global Climate Change Through 2030.” [ read more ]

The legendary venture firm is going green - and leaving Internet deals to the competition.

In the past decade Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has doled out $10 billion to its major investors, all of which are university endowments, philanthropic foundations, or public pension funds. Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms never divulge their actual performance. Yet this tidbit comes directly from John Doerr, Kleiner’s preeminent partner, who is so intent on ensuring that I’m correctly processing the significance of that figure that he helps me with the math. “That’s $1 billion a year on average,” he says. “Those are great gains. That’s not a couple university chairs, and it’s not a building or two. That’s whole quadrants of a campus.” [ read more ]

Efforts to repair a giant breach in the stratosphere could make global warming worse.

Decades of chemical pollution have damaged the ozone layer of the upper atmosphere that shields Earth from the harmful effects of the sun’s ultraviolet rays, each summer eating a hole over the South Pole that expands to nearly the size of Antarctica. But since 1996, when an international treaty banned the culprit chemical refrigerants and propellants (known as CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons), the size of the seasonal tear has been shrinking—and scientists predict it may stop forming by the end of this century.

You would think that was good news. But atmospheric scientists caution in a new study published in Science that sewing up the rift in the ozone (a type of oxygen) layer may exacerbate another environmental woe: climate change. [ read more ]

Weighing our own prosperity against the chances that climate change will diminish the well-being of our grandchildren calls on economists to make hard ethical judgments

What should we do about climate change? The question is an ethical one. Science, including the science of economics, can help discover the causes and effects of climate change. It can also help work out what we can do about climate change. But what we should do is an ethical question.

Not all “should” questions are ethical. “How should you hold a golf club?” is not, for instance. The climate question is ethical, however, because any thoughtful answer must weigh conflicting interests among different people. If the world is to do something about climate change, some people—chiefly the better-off among the current generation—will have to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases to save future generations from the possibility of a bleak existence in a hotter world. When interests conflict, “should” questions are always ethical. [ read more ]

A catastrophic water shortage could prove an even bigger threat to mankind this century than soaring food prices and the relentless exhaustion of energy reserves, according to a panel of global experts at the Goldman Sachs “Top Five Risks” conference.

Nicholas (Lord) Stern, author of the Government’s Stern Review on the economics of climate change, warned that underground aquifers could run dry at the same time as melting glaciers play havoc with fresh supplies of usable water. [ read more ]