Category: Online

Concerns over geoengineering

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

The latest studies on solar geoengineering to tackle climate change are reinforcing the case for a global governance system and further study before deployment, as they show that the approach may have little effect on preventing rainfall changes in the tropics — and may even lead to widespread drought in Africa.

Several geoengineering initiatives plan to tackle climate change by cutting incoming sunlight, through methods such as spreading reflective aerosols in the stratosphere. But without also removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, such plans would fail to fully mitigate change in rainfall in the tropics, a study published in Nature Geoscience suggests.

Concerns grow over effects of geoengineering,  SciDev.Net, 2 May 2013.

Chemical brewers

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Microbes are principally used by industry to turn larger organic compounds into smaller, more useful ones – fermenting corn sugars to produce ethanol, for instance. More desirable, though, is direct conversion of carbon dioxide into organic compounds. But current methods that use blue-green algae are not attractive.

Now US researchers have engineered a heat-loving microbe to produce a bulk chemical from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Their results may provide a viable industrial alternative to blue-green algae, which have a much lower efficiency for such chemical transformations.

Engineered extremophile brews bulk chemical, Chemistry World, 10 April 2013.

Image credit: Chemistry World

Improving online learning

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

In recent years, massive open online courses (MOOCs), through the likes of Coursera, have attracted hundreds of thousands of students from across the world. But are they really improving learning? The evidence is not fully convincing. Not surprisingly, studies have shown that students suffer from attention lapses when learning through videos.

Given those findings, an improvement in students’ attentiveness is bound to pay significant dividends. To that end, Karl Szpunar, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, might have a rather simple solution to rein in distractions, one that focuses attention in real-world classrooms: intersperse pop quizzes into the online lectures.

Testing students during video lectures improves learning, Ars Technica, 8 April 2013.

Image credit: UPenn