Posts Tagged ‘Science’
“Food is simply sunlight in cold storage”*…
Increasingly, as Patrick Sisson explains, that’s literally true…
If you had to identify a specific type of real estate that has seen its value increase because of changing consumer eating habits, global demographic shifts, worldwide pandemic preparedness, and US export policy — while its importance to reducing global carbon emissions and adapting to climate change rise in tandem — refrigerated warehouses may not be your first pick.
But there’s a strong case to be made that the expansion and evolution of the cold-storage industry — often called the “cold chain” — will play a significant role in energy, environmental, and economic news in the 21st century. Cold storage facilities aren’t fun places to visit; some are kept so frigid, at minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, that the workers who toil in these windowless spaces rotate in 15-minute shifts, despite their heavy protective gear…
… refrigerated warehouses are great to build and own. Investors and developers expect 8 to 10% annual growth in this specialized real estate, according to Adam Thocher, SVP of Global Programs and Insights at the Global Cold Chain Alliance (GCCA). That’s made it a profitable real-estate niche…
The ability to more easily cool and freeze food for storage, preparation, and distribution has revolutionized grocery shelves, home cooking, and restaurants for decades, and will continue to do so for years because it taps into every trend all at once. Growing fast-casual restaurant chains, last-mile delivery, a surging global middle class seeking more protein, and the explosion in healthy, organic produce and industrialized frozen food, all need cold storage…
The pandemic accelerated these trends, spiking frozen-food sales in the US to over $74 billion in 2023, a $10 billion increase in just three years, and leading to a wave of refrigerator purchases by Chinese consumers. The need to refrigerate Covid vaccines underscored how important these sites are to global health. Even Ozempic and similar blockbuster anti-obesity drugs need to be stored at 46 degrees F. And the rest of the world is increasingly asking why, if you can always get a Granny Smith apple in New York, can’t you get one in Beijing or London?…
The GCCA estimates there is at least 7.4 billion cubic feet of cold storage worldwide, and 3.7 billion in the US alone, but that’s a vast understatement, Thocher said. The alliance only looks at partial data from 92 countries (not including China) and governments tend to be cagey about sharing his kind of data because of economic and food-security concerns, since these sites are crucial parts of food infrastructure and can reveal levels of economic activity…
Food security has become a global challenge with a growing population, Peters said, especially since roughly 30% of global food production is lost, making increasing supply and reducing food waste imperative. That’s extremely tricky when the critical loss of arable land and desertification, due to climate change, strengthens the case for cold-storage warehouses, which, because of their vast energy use, contribute to that very problem. A 2023 Columbia University study found the sector responsible for 3.5% of total global emissions. The cold-storage industry has responded with more energy-efficient designs and less harmful ammonia-based refrigerants, but it adds an additional challenge to efforts to ramp up sustainable energy production.
“This is a real system-level challenge, a wicked problem,” [Toby Peters, professor of the cold economy at the UK’s Birmingham Energy Institute] said. “My exam question is, how do we feed 9 billion people while economically empowering 400 million small farmers, all without using diesel?”…
Diets, demographics, desertification are all fueling “The Hot Business of Cold Storage,” by @patrickcsisson in @sherwood_news.
* John Harvey Kellogg
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As we chill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1903 that Carl von Linde received two U.S. patents for his Linde oxygen process and associated equipment (Nos. 728,173 and 727,650). Linde had already invented the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes, which led to the first reliable and efficient compressed-ammonia refrigerator (in 1876).
In 1901, Linde had began work on a technique to obtain pure oxygen and nitrogen based on the fractional distillation of liquefied air. His 1903 patents were steps in that direction.
Linde founded a company to commercialize access to these pure gases. Now known as Linde plc (but formerly known variously as the Linde division of Union Carbide, Linde, Linde Air Products, and Praxair), it has become the world’s largest producer of industrial gases– and ushered in the creation of the global supply chain for industrial gases that serves the global cold chain.
“X marks the spot”*…
A reprise (because it’s just so much fun): the challenge facing pre-20th century alphabet book authors…
In 1895, the physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays, a groundbreaking moment in medical history which would lead to myriad improvements to people’s health. Perhaps one overlooked benefit though was in relation to mental health, specifically of those tasked with making alphabet books. How did they represent the letter X before X-rays? Xylophones, which have also been a popular choice through the twentieth century to today, are mysteriously absent in older works. Perhaps explained by the fact that, although around for millennia, the instrument didn’t gain popularity in the West (with the name of “xylophone”) until the early twentieth century. So to what solutions did our industrious publishers turn?
As we see… in addition to drawing on names — be it historical figures, plants, or animals, all mostly of a Greek bent (X being there much more common) — there’s also some more inventive approaches. And some wonderfully lazy ones too…
Many more amusing examples: “X is for...” from @PublicDomainRev.
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As we wrestle with representation, we might spare a thought for Thomas Young; he died on this date 1829. A polmath described as “the last man who knew everything,” he made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, musical harmony, and Egyptology. His work influenced that of William Herschel, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein. Young is credited with establishing Christiaan Huygens’ wave theory of light (in contrast to the corpuscular theory of Isaac Newton).
Further, Young was an astute student of languages. He noticed eerie similarities between Indic and European languages. He went further, analyzing 400 languages spread across continents and millennia and proved that the overlap between some of them was too extensive to be an accident. A single coincidence meant nothing, but each additional one increased the chance of an underlying connection. In 1813, Young declared that all those languages belong to one family. He named it “Indo-European.”
And Young was instrumental in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone.
“If someone separated the art of counting and measuring and weighing from all the other arts, what was left of each (of the others) would be, so to speak, insignificant”*…
Mathematics, Bo Malmberg and Hannes Malmberg argue, was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. A new paradigm of measurement and calculation, more than scientific discovery, built industry, modernity, and the world we inhabit today…
In school, you might have heard that the Industrial Revolution was preceded by the Scientific Revolution, when Newton uncovered the mechanical laws underlying motion and Galileo learned the true shape of the cosmos. Armed with this newfound knowledge and the scientific method, the inventors of the Industrial Revolution created machines – from watches to steam engines – that would change everything.
But was science really the key? Most of the significant inventions of the Industrial Revolution were not undergirded by a deep scientific understanding, and their inventors were not scientists.
The standard chronology ignores many of the important events of the previous 500 years. Widespread trade expanded throughout Europe. Artists began using linear perspective and mathematicians learned to use derivatives. Financiers started joint stock corporations and ships navigated the open seas. Fiscally powerful states were conducting warfare on a global scale.
There is an intellectual thread that runs through all of these advances: measurement and calculation. Geometric calculations led to breakthroughs in painting, astronomy, cartography, surveying, and physics. The introduction of mathematics in human affairs led to advancements in accounting, finance, fiscal affairs, demography, and economics – a kind of social mathematics. All reflect an underlying ‘calculating paradigm’ – the idea that measurement, calculation, and mathematics can be successfully applied to virtually every domain. This paradigm spread across Europe through education, which we can observe by the proliferation of mathematics textbooks and schools. It was this paradigm, more than science itself, that drove progress. It was this mathematical revolution that created modernity…
The fascinating story: “How mathematics built the modern world,” from @bomalmb and @HannesMalmberg1 in @WorksInProgMag.
* Plato
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As we muse on measurement, we might recall that it was on this date in 1790, early in the French Revolution, that the French Assembly, acting on the urging of Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, moved to create a new system of weights and measures based on natural units– what we now know as the metric system.
“Topology is precisely the mathematical discipline that allows the passage from local to global”*…
Jordana Cepelewicz on two new topographical results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes…
The central objects of study in topology are spaces called manifolds, which look flat when you zoom in on them. The surface of a sphere, for instance, is a two-dimensional manifold. Topologists understand such two-dimensional manifolds very well. And they have developed tools that let them make sense of three-dimensional manifolds and those with five or more dimensions.
But in four dimensions, “everything goes a bit crazy,” said Sam Hughes, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. Tools stop working; exotic behavior emerges. As Tom Mrowka of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained, “There’s just enough room to have interesting phenomena, but not so much room that they fall apart.”
In the early 1990s, Mrowka and Peter Kronheimer of Harvard University were studying how two-dimensional surfaces can be embedded within four-dimensional manifolds. They developed new techniques to characterize these surfaces, allowing them to gain crucial insights into the otherwise inaccessible structure of four-dimensional manifolds. Their findings suggested that the members of a broad class of surfaces all slice through their parent manifold in a relatively simple way, leaving a fundamental property unchanged. But nobody could prove this was always true.
In February, together with Daniel Ruberman of Brandeis University, Hughes constructed a sequence of counterexamples — “crazy” two-dimensional surfaces that dissect their parent manifolds in ways that mathematicians had believed to be impossible. The counterexamples show that four-dimensional manifolds are even more remarkably diverse than mathematicians in earlier decades had realized. “It’s really a beautiful paper,” Mrowka said. “I just keep looking at it. There’s lots of delicious little things there.”
Late last year, Ruberman helped organize a conference that created a new list of the most significant open problems in low-dimensional topology. In preparing for it, he looked at a previous list of important unsolved topological problems from 1997. It included a question that Kronheimer had posed based on his work with Mrowka. “It was in there, and I think it was a little bit forgotten,” Ruberman said. Now he thought he could answer it…
Read on for the details: “Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions,” from @jordanacep in @QuantaMagazine.
* Rene Thom
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As we savor surprising shapes, we might send carefully-modeled birthday greetings to William Bowie; he was born on this date in 1872. A geodetic engineer who joined the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1895, he investigated isostasy (a principle that dense crustal rocks to tend cause topographic depressions and light crustal rocks cause topographic elevations).
Bowie was the first President of the American Geophysical Union from 1920 to 1922 and served as president a second time from 1929 to 1932. The William Bowie Medal, the highest honor of the AGU, is named in his honor.
“I’m having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!”*…
Your correspondent is still on the road; regular service resumes on or around May 6. Meantime, a colorful update…
Forget about red hot. A new color-coded heat warning system relies on magenta to alert Americans to the most dangerous conditions they may see this summer.
The National Weather Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday — Earth Day — presented a new online heat risk system that combines meteorological and medical risk factors with a seven-day forecast that’s simplified and color-coded for a warming world of worsening heat waves.
“For the first time we’ll be able to know how hot is too hot for health and not just for today but for coming weeks,” Dr. Ari Bernstein, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, said at a joint news conference by government health and weather agencies.
Magenta is the worst and deadliest of five heat threat categories, hitting everybody with what the agencies are calling “rare and/or long-duration extreme heat with little to no overnight relief.” It’s a step higher than red, considered a major risk, which hurts anyone without adequate cooling and hydration and has impacts reverberating through the health care system and some industries. Red is used when a day falls within the top 5% hottest in a particular location for a particular date; when other factors come into play, the alert level may bump even higher to magenta, weather service officials said.
On the other hand, pale green is little to no risk. Yellow is minor risk, mostly to the very young, old, sick and pregnant. Orange is moderate risk, mostly hurting people who are sensitive to heat, especially those without cooling, such as the homeless.
“When red-hot isn’t enough: New government heat risk tool sets magenta as most dangerous level,” from @AP.
* Stephen King, Needful Things
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As we reassess risk, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986 that Russia announced the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, two days after it happened.
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