How a Doorbell Camera Can Save Water

The report from the Energy Department was submitted as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a proposed rule last week to repeal the Endangerment Finding made in 2009 that said greenhouse gas emissions, like CO2 and methane, are dangerous to public health.

Included in the new report were conclusions that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good for plants and that sea level rise is not accelerating, which have been widely criticized by scientists for being full of errors and cherry-picked data. The Energy Department’s report was drafted by five researchers, who the Washington Post said are known for questioning mainstream climate science. 

One of the mistakes in the new report, according to scientists, is the statement that extreme storms such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, as well as droughts, are not increasing over the long term. Jim Kossin, who was employed at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told the Post that the opposite is happening. Such trends are particularly true for hurricanes, which have been shown to quickly intensify, stay stronger, and longer, and move faster.  If anything, climate models are probably underestimating the effect of human-caused warming on extreme events, according to Mann.

Another mistake in the Energy Department report is the statement that, while there have been increases in temperatures in the U.S. West, there have been decreases in the daily warmest temperatures in locations east of the Rocky Mountains. Kristie Ebi, of the University of Washington, told the Post that the report cherry-picks geographic regions and assumes that with climate change every place has to have the same increase in temperature and the same increase in extreme events, which has never historically been true.

The Trump administration’s report will be used to support the administration’s efforts to eviscerate regulations aimed at curbing global warming. Dave White of Arizona State University told the New York Times that the report is a “coordinated, full-scale attack on science.”

Forests provide food and shelter to wildlife, but researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say it’s a two-way street. Animals eat fruits and nuts, and then poop them out far from the tree, helping to germinate the seeds and extend the forest to new areas. However, fewer animals could mean fewer seeds being dispersed, which could weaken the climate-mitigating power of woodlands. Research has shown that biodiversity worldwide is declining, so how much of an impact is the loss of wildlife having on carbon storage? 

To find out, the team used data from more than 17,000 vegetation plots to analyze where wildlife disperse seeds and how many they spread. They concluded that where animals had declined, forests lost the ability to absorb 1.8 metric tons of carbon per hectare, per year. Reforestation is often cited as a way to mitigate the effects of climate change, but the authors say that planting trees costs money and also leads to less diverse forests. Animals, on the other hand, naturally plant trees for free.

In a nutshell, so to speak, to protect forests and their climate benefits, we need to preserve the habitats of seed-dispersing animals and provide wildlife corridors to reduce the impacts of human activities.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Home irrigation systems are often programmed to automatically go on and off at set times and days, but when it rains, it’s not uncommon for sprinklers to run even when not needed. An innovation called “ERIC” developed by researchers at Texas A&M University claims to cut down on excess watering by turning doorbell cameras into rainfall monitors. 

It works by analyzing the camera footage using machine learning models to determine how much rain has fallen and automatically adjusts both the duration and day that the irrigation controller waters a lawn. 

The researchers say in a statement that their more precise irrigation schedule cuts down on excess watering and provides accurate rain data.  Some commercial irrigation systems do monitor if it rains but not how much. Their new AI-enhanced tool measures how much water has fallen in that precise location. The system was praised recently as being an incredibly creative method to utilize existing hardware.

The researchers published a paper on their innovation, saying it can save homeowners up to 9,000 gallons of water a month, using just the camera and a low-cost irrigation controller.

A team led by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences together with experts at the Natural History Museum in London says potatoes are the result of a chance encounter between ancestors of the modern tomato and a group of plants known as Etuberosum, a potato-like species. Back then, the two plants lived in very different environments in South America. The tomato liked hot and dry places while the potato predecessor preferred temperate conditions.

According to a press release by the Natural History Museum, the stage was set for the two to meet when the Andes mountains rose rapidly during an era when tectonic plates were actively shifting—in this case when the Atlantic plate was pushing beneath the South American plate. 

While neither of the parent plants on their own could make tubers—the underground organ that stores water and nutrients and that we like to eat—the combination of their genes meant their offspring could. This new tuber lineage—that would eventually become our modern potato—also used its parent’s traits to survive in the colder and drier conditions arising at the time.

Tubers reproduce without seeds or pollination, which allowed them to rapidly spread from mild grasslands to high and cold alpine meadows in Central and South America. There are now more than 100 wild potato species plus our common potato Solanum tuberosum that originated in South America. 

Understanding how potatoes evolved could ultimately help scientists breed more resilient versions that are resistant to disease and shifting climatic conditions. Better than that? We may now finally understand why some people like ketchup on their fries. 

The paper was published in the journal Cell.