In mid-October 2016, officials from China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection counted five illegal trash-burning sites and hundreds of thousands of vehicles exceeding emission standards in Beijing alone. For the first time since last winter’s pollution high season, city officials issued a yellow air-quality alert, which required shutting down power plants and reining in Beijing’s frenetic factories and road traffic. If this winter is anything like past winters, the city will have to pull out the yellow card again—and may even have to reach for its red card.
Read the rest of this news story in the January issue of IEEE Spectrum or the updated online version: [html] [pdf].
Galileo, a global navigation satellite system that will reach more places and work more precisely than today’s GPS services, is now available for free public use. When it is complete, expected by 2020, Galileo will have taken two decades and an estimated $10 billion to build. But the system, created by the European Union, will make your phone run better and offer new possibilities for both corporate and government users. Continue reading Europe’s New Satellite System Will Improve Your Phone→
A few years ago almost two thousand bold households on the Danish island of Bornholm joined a surge pricing experiment run by their electricity utility. It was supposed to empower the utility and consumers with a simple, direct market (“The Smartest, Greenest Grid,”IEEE Spectrum, April 2013).
Why an environmental chemist in Holland is betting that both farming and hospitals might be improved with the use of a fancy form of water.
Something funny happens to water when you spray it through an electrical field: The water can now fight microbes. (Or something in the water can.) Plasma-activated water (PAW) is a fascinating substance that scientists around the world are looking at, in a fast-developing field that’s testing a broad range of uses. Dutch environmental chemist Paul Leenders (TEDxArnhem talk: Plasma-activated water: Nature’s answer to chemical pesticides) hopes to harness PAW to fight microbes in hospitals and on farms. Here’s how it works.