Australia literally on fire

The Australian bureau of meteorology was forced to add a new color to their weather map because of astonishing heat. Purple was placed on the map to represent the head of 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 54 degrees Celsius. "The scale has just been increased today and I would anticipate it is because the forecast coming from the bureau's model is showing temperatures in excess of 50 degrees," said David Jones, head of the bureau's climate monitoring and prediction unit. This heat also comes with a high risk of fire, which has already struck. Australian officials are labeling these risks and threats as “catastrophic”

Up to half of all food produced is wasted

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers reported that anywhere between 1.2 and 2 billion tons of food is wasted each year, which means that it is possible that half of the food produced on this planet is wasted. “Due to poor practices in harvesting, storage and transportation, as well as market and consumer wastage, it is estimated that 30–50% of all food produced never reaches a human stomach” the institute reports. The major cause of this wastage is inadequate engineering and agricultural knowledge, another is the demand from supermarkets for always perfect produce, causing much produce to be thrown away, and their influencing customers to buy more food than is needed.

Under Construction: The World's Largest Thermal Solar Plant

In the middle of the Mojave Desert there is a massive concentrated solar thermal power plant being built, and if everything goes successfully, will be the largest in the world. The plan for this power plant is to have 300,000 mirrors directing the sun’s energy toward three towers, which will create 392 megawatts of electricity, which is enough electricity to power 140,000 U.S. homes.  The complication is that even though solar power is cleaner and a more sustainable energy to say coal, creating a power plant of this scale will forever alter the natural environment.

New material harvests energy from water vapor

                MIT engineers have created a new polymer film that generated electricity by absorbing water vapor. The film absorbs tiny amounts of water vapor allowing it to curl up and own, and if we harness this continuous motion, we could drive robotic limbs or generate enough electricity to power micro- and nonelectric devices. “With a sensor powered by a battery, you have to replace it periodically. If you have this device, you can harvest energy from the environment so you don't have to replace it very often,” says Mingming Ma, a postdoc at MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Mingming is also the lead author of a paper describing this new material.

Beijing air pollution soars to hazard level

                Last Saturday and Sunday the residents of Beijing have refused to step outdoors in fear of the air pollution. The air pollution recorded was 30-45 times the safety level. The average concentrations of the tiniest pollution particles, called PM2.5, should be no more than 25 micrograms per cubic meters, at 300, children and elderly should stay indoors. Official Beijing city reading recorded pollution levels of over 400, unofficial recordings from the U.S embassy recorded 800. Two of the major pollutants are the coal dust and car fumes. Heavy smog has smothered Beijing for many days said one of the news reporters.

Sea level rise of more than 3 feet plausible by 2100

Melting glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland may cause sea levels to rise by more than 3 feet by the end of this century. This rise in sea level would force millions of people in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, swamp atolls in the Pacific Ocean, cause dikes in Holland to fail, and cost coastal mega-cities from New York to Tokyo billions of dollars for construction of sea walls and other tools to stop the tides from coming in. Although there is only a 5% chance of this occurring, it is still a very bad situation. The other 95% is estimated at the sea level rising about 1 foot.