As Princeton senior Daniel Petticord was conceptualizing his thesis on animal movement in the African savanna, he could have chosen to study elephants, zebras, giraffes, impalas or any of the iconic animals that inhabit central Kenya. He chose the ubiquitous leopard tortoise.
It’s a classic policy dispute: How much should the current generation invest in reducing carbon emissions for the benefit of future generations?
A study published in Nature Communications helps answer this question by quantifying whether reducing carbon emissions — which will have global benefits in the future — also improves air quality now. Preventing many of the human health burdens that result from air pollution would be a powerful positive incentive to act sooner than later.
Research projects that explore energy-saving technologies, sustainable farming and resource reuse have been selected to receive Dean for Research Innovation Funds for the Campus as a Lab.
As the planet continues to warm, multi-day heat waves are projected to increase in frequency, length and intensity. The additive effects of these extreme heat events overwhelm emergency service providers and hospital staff with heat-related maladies, disrupt the electrical grid and can even cause delays in air travel.
But existing studies do not consider the increased loss of life and economic hardship that could come from back-to-back — or compound — heat waves, which bring cycles of sweltering temperatures with only brief periods of normal conditions in between.
Each year, the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) supports senior-thesis research by students from departments across the University. Tess Jacobson kept within the realm of her physics major for her junior year research paper by examining dark matter-electron scattering. For her senior thesis, however, she turned to climate change.
Hydrogen is a critical component in the manufacture of thousands of common products from plastic to fertilizers, but producing pure hydrogen is expensive and energy intensive. Now, a research team at Princeton University has harnessed sunlight to isolate hydrogen from industrial wastewater.
Dense rainforests, maple-blanketed mountains and sweeping coniferous forests demonstrate the growth and proliferation of trees adapted to specific conditions. The regional dominance of tree species we see on the surface now, however, might actually have been determined underground long ago.
Health care-associated infections — illnesses that people contract while being treated in a hospital or other health care facility — sicken millions of people each year and cost billions of dollars in additional treatment. While there has been some improvement over the years, on any given day, about 3 percent of the hospitalized population in the United States has at least one health care-associated infection, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Funds spur innovation and benefit for society Molly Sharlach, Office of Engineering Communications Mar 6, 2019 faculty A new method to combat antibiotic resistance; a way to use computer science to limit misinformation; and a plan to better understand the impacts of land use and climate change on flooding are among 19 projects awarded Innovation Research Grants this year through the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Engineering professor Lynn Loo, director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, says the dangers of climate change are so pressing that it’s time for all hands on deck to decarbonize the U.S. and global economies. She praises the issue awareness behind legislation introduced in Congress to implement a “Green New Deal,” but stresses that solar and wind technologies, by themselves, are not yet sufficient to fuel the nation. “We’re always racing against time,” explains Loo.
