New research shows how COVID-19 altered Americans' intentions to move

Study reveals pandemic’s impact on individuals’ decisions to relocate

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: XIALU LIU, PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS (MIS), THE FOWLER COLLEGE OF BUSINESS, SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY view more 

CREDIT: SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY

Divorce. Changing jobs. Natural disasters. A change in financial resources. Going away to college. Wanting to be nearer to family members. 

Those are just a handful of traditional reasons Americans choose to pack up and move. 

One non-traditional reason for moving was the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a significant impact on every aspect of Americans’ lives starting in March 2020. With this fact in mind, Xialu Liu, professor of management information systems (MIS) at the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University and Lei Lei, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, analyzed data gathered from Google Trends to assess how the pandemic may have altered American’s’ decisions to change residences. 

Thoughts of Escaping Pandemic Lockdowns Were High
To measure the intentions of those people considering a move, the researchers accessed Google Trends to identify internet searches using keywords or phrases associated with changes in residence (such as “real estate agent,” “house for rent” or “moving company”) or a temporary relocation (such as a trip to Florida or Hawaii) between January 2011 to February 2021.  

They noted that Americans’ thoughts about temporarily relocating surged during the early months of the pandemic lockdown in March through April of 2020. But while the number of Americans thinking about a short-term move may have spiked over 40%, the number of people seeking real estate purchases and housing rentals dropped 20 - 30% during the same period. 

Eventually, The Panic Dies Down
“The lack of knowledge, feelings of uncertainty and fear of the disease may have caused some level of widespread panic, prompting those in high-density areas to escape what they perceived as increased exposure to COVID and societal restrictions,” said Liu. “But these feelings soon subsided as lockdowns and stay-at-home orders were implemented in most states. Additionally, the risk of infection inhibited the home search process in the early months of the pandemic, causing real estate sales and rentals to decline during that same period.”

While the frequency of temporary relocations searches had declined by 30 - 50% at the end of April 2020, it was the exact opposite for those seeking more permanent housing solutions. Starting in June 2020, people seeking both real estate purchases and rentals, saw their numbers increase substantially (22 - 24%) and remain high until the research concluded in February 2021. The only exception was individuals using the search term “apartments for rent” which returned to pre-pandemic levels, while searches for house rentals increased by 15.65%. 

Temporary Escape Give Way to Thought of Permanent Relocation
“In June 2020, the Google Trends data indicated that as Americans became more knowledgeable about the disease — and as businesses and amenities began to adjust and open up again — there was an initial marked increase in searches for housing purchases and rentals,” said Liu. “With the pandemic responses varying in different areas in the country, many people relocated to areas that fit their lifestyles. For example, some people moved to avoid strict lockdowns, while others may have moved to be nearer to necessary medical care.”

The researchers also noted that educational requirements and working conditions also may have driven Americans to consider a permanent relocation as well. “With many people working and learning from home, the constraints binding them to a physical office or school were removed,” said Liu. “This allowed them to consider a broader array of locations and housing options that met their evolving needs.”

Family Ties Run Deep
The only search that never fluctuated after the start of the pandemic was the increase (around 50%) of individuals looking to move in with their parents or other family, which showed no significant change between March 2020 and February 2021. The researchers noted that this may be a result of college students moving home or adult children searching for ways to remove their parents from retirement facilities. 

As their research wrapped up, the two professors concluded while only “move in with family” searches remained consistently higher since March 2020, the fluctuations in the searches for temporary or permanent relocations offers a glimpse into U.S. residents’ thought processes as their housing needs and the regulations surrounding COVID-19 protocols evolved. 

Maybe…Or Maybe Not
Lastly, they also concluded that while Google Trends indicated an intention to relocate, not everyone seeking to move followed through.

“Housing inventory, price, employment factors and other issues factor into relocations intentions vs. an actual move,” said Liu. “Theoretically, scholars view residential mobility as a multi-stage process, though the actual process could be nonlinear and much messier. In other words, desires or intentions to relocate may — or may not — eventually result in actually moving.” 

 

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JOURNAL

Population Space and Place

DOI

10.1002/psp.2581 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

ARTICLE TITLE

The COVID-19 pandemic and residential mobility intentions in the United States: Evidence from Google Trends data

Strict COVID lockdowns in France

improved cardiovascular health

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS USA

A new paper in European Heart Journal - Digital Health, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that social-distancing measures like total lockdown have a measurable impact on vascular health. The study compared the impact on the health of people living in a partial vs. a total lockdown during the beginning of COVID-19. 

Nationwide total home confinement, lockdown, was the most striking measure taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection. Previous research has demonstrated that total lockdown resulted in a 54% reduction in physical activity. This, together with anxiety, financial stress, and difficulty securing appointments with doctors, might have hurt cardiovascular health. Lockdowns do, however, have some beneficial effects on cardiovascular health. The social distancing guidelines imposed on people around the world resulted in a reduction in air pollution and increased home cooking. People reduced their consumption of fast food and ready-made meals. People had less work-related stress and slept better. Lockdown has been applied heterogeneously by different countries, providing a unique opportunity to compare the impact of different social-distancing measures on cardiovascular health in a real-life experiment with a large population sample. 

Researchers here compared the cardiovascular health of people in France, which imposed strict limitations on peoples’ movements, including the shutdown of all non-essential production and commercial activities, to that of people in Germany, which adopted much less stringent social-distancing measures. 

Researchers here selected 53,043 people in France and Germany and tracked their health during the spring of 2020 when France’s lockdown began. Some 21.1% of French patients tracked during lockdown showed an overall improvement in cardiovascular health, with a reduction in vascular stiffness and body weight despite a concomitant reduction in physical activity. In France, the improvement in vascular age during lockdown corresponded to a reduction in vascular age of more than three years.  

The phenomenon was only modestly present in Germany, where lockdown was partial. The reduction in vascular stiffness was significantly steeper in French patients than in Germans. Vascular age reduction during lockdown was steeper in French than in German participants. French participants also showed a slight but greater weight reduction during lockdown than German participants. 

The paper, “Home monitoring of arterial pulse wave velocity during COVID-19 total or partial lockdown using connected smart scales," is available at https://academic.oup.com/ehjdh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ehjdh/ztac027/6645364.

 

Direct correspondence to:  

Rosa Maria Bruno 

Professor of Clinical Pharmacology 

Université Paris Cité,  

Paris Cardiovascular Research Center (PARCC-INSERM) 

F-75015 Paris, FRANCE 

rosa-maria.bruno@inserm.fr 

 

To request a copy of the study, please contact: 

Daniel Luzer  

daniel.luzer@oup.com

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JOURNAL

European Heart Journal - Digital Health

DOI

10.1093/ehjdh/ztac027 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Home monitoring of arterial pulse-wave velocity during COVID-19 total or partial lockdown using connected smart scales

COI STATEMENT

Two of the authors are employees of Withings, a manufacturer of wearable activity tracking systems. One author is a remunerated scientific advisor to Withings. Two more authors are informal unpaid scientific advisors to Withings. The remaining authors have nothing to disclose.

New technique boosts online medical search results

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

ITHACA, N.Y. -- When looking for medical information on the internet, having the precise terminology makes the search fairly straightforward.

But what if the person doing the searching doesn’t know the exact terminology, or wants to see what other information may be available without using technical terms? Will internet queries yield any useful results – or worse, will they produce incomplete or downright incorrect information?

A Cornell-led group of researchers has developed a search method that employs natural language processing and network analysis to identify terms that are semantically similar to those for cancer screening tests, but in colloquial language.

“If the traditional way of searching for information is by using those official names or concepts, then it will lead to some bias in identifying the content because many people on the internet aren’t familiar with official medical vocabularies,” said Chau Tong, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Communication, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Tong is lead author of “Search Term Identification Methods for Computational Health Communication: Word Embedding and Network Approach for Health Content on YouTube,” which published Aug. 30 in the open-access journal JMIR Medical Informatics.

Drew Margolin, associate professor of communication, is the paper’s senior author. Also contributing from was Jeff Niederdeppe, professor of communication; Teairah Taylor, doctoral student in the field of communication; Andy J. King, associate professor at the University of Utah; Rumi Chunara, associate professor of global public health, computer science and engineering at New York University; and Natalie Dunbar, graduate student at Iowa State University.

This research stemmed from a four-year National Institutes of Health grant that Margolin, Niederdeppe and King received in March 2021 to work on ways to monitor and evaluate public information and communication disparities regarding screening for colorectal cancer (CRC). Tong is a member of Niederdeppe’s research lab.

The disease disproportionately affects African Americans; according to a 2019 study by the American Association for Cancer Research, the overall CRC mortality rate in the U.S. was 14.8 deaths per 100,000 people, but the rate was 20.9 per 100,000 for Black people and 14.7 per 100,000 for white people.

“The question we asked with the grant was, ‘Are there messages or aspects of social media that can be used to increase information, increase access, increase screening rates – something that would kind of helped to equal that out?” Margolin said.

Margolin’s group chose YouTube – which more than 80% of Americans use at least sporadically – as the platform for their study. Starting by searching off “colonoscopy,” the group retrieved a set of 250 videos. They then employed word embedding – using neural network modeling to identify words that appear in similar contexts to the main term – to come up with an additional 4,304 related videos.

The group found that colon prep brand names (Miralax, Suprep, Plenvu) were often found in user-generated content, where the word “colonoscopy” may not have been used.

“These findings,” Tong said, “highlight the value of innovative, data-informed research strategies that can expand the conventional data-collection and analysis pipelines, to cover a range of user-generated health content. This can uncover information disparities that could negatively impact important health equity outcomes.”

The group did similar searches using seed terms “FOBT” (fecal occult blood test, another colon cancer screen), “mammogram” and “pap smear,” the latter two being screens for breast and cervical cancer, respectively. They found similar results to the colonoscopy searches, retrieving a range of new videos using words that were semantically close to the seed term.

Margolin said the group’s goal is to adapt this technique in platforms other than YouTube, which suggests related relevant videos based on user behavior, making it more likely that a user will find useful content after an initial search.

Margolin thinks computational health researchers should think about this alternative search protocol.

“We don't need to do computational research on YouTube to find out what hospitals have to say about colonoscopy,” he said. “The whole purpose of this is to find out what someone who’s not certified to talk about colonoscopy will say. For example, a random person is telling you about what happened when they did their ‘prep’ (for a colonoscopy), but maybe they didn’t use the word “colonoscopy.’

“They’re telling a story,” he said. “Now you’re getting what social media can reveal.”

-30-

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JOURNAL

JMIR Medical Informatics

DOI

10.2196/37862 

Restoring movement after spinal cord injury focus of new research

Grant and Award Announcement

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

 

IMAGE: ISMAEL SEÁÑEZ WILL LEAD AN INTERDISCIPLINARY TEAM OF WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS AND PHYSICIANS TO UNDERSTAND THE CHANGES IN THE NEURAL CIRCUITS THAT MAY RESULT IN MOTOR FUNCTION IMPROVEMENTS THROUGH USING SPINAL CORD STIMULATION. view more 

CREDIT: WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

People with spinal cord injuries often experience life-long movement impairment or paralysis, for which there is no cure. When coupled with rehabilitative exercise, electrical spinal cord stimulation can help restore some movement, though the mechanisms of how the nerves in the spinal cord recover are unknown. 

Ismael Seáñez, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, will lead an interdisciplinary team of Washington University researchers and physicians to understand the changes in the neural circuits that may result in motor function improvements through using spinal cord stimulation with a five-year, $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Seáñez, also an assistant professor of neurological surgery at the School of Medicine, plans to begin a clinical trial with patients with spinal cord injuries as well as those without spinal cord injuries as controls. He will use commercially available, noninvasive spinal cord stimulation devices that engage movement in the patients with spinal cord injury to determine how the central nervous system changes with the stimulation and movement.

While the spinal cord stimulation devices are attached externally by the patient or a caregiver, they only work when attached to the patient, so any movement that might take place while the devices are attached cannot be repeated when they are removed, Seáñez said.

“We’ve been first working on optimizing the way we can stimulate the spinal cord and using different stimulation parameters to more selectively target different muscle groups to look at how the stimulation interacts with the brain,” he said. “Now, we are looking at how the pathways are changing and whether different exercises used in physical therapy can accelerate the excitement of different neuropathways,” Seáñez said.

Technology transfer deficits jeopardize climate targets

by Bianca Schröder, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies e.V.

Number of initiatives operating per country. Source: own data, N = 71 initiatives

 operating across multiple locations.

 Credit: Energy Policy (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113192

Many developing countries have made their nationally determined climate contributions submitted under the Paris Agreement conditional on receiving climate finance, technology transfer, and capacity-building support. However, developed countries have so far failed to deliver tech transfer to the extent promised. According to a new study in Energy Policy, public-private partnerships and other energy initiatives can only partially make up for this shortfall. While their role in supporting the growth of low-carbon energy systems in the Global South is proving crucial, their contribution in terms of technology transfer is insufficient.

Developed countries have pledged to provide US$100 billion annually from public and private sources for climate finance starting in 2020. Technology transfer is an important part of this: While developing and emerging countries need climate finance to build out clean energy solutions, knowledge is pivotal to harnessing their benefits.

This has not been achieved to date—and not only because climate financing is lacking. "Most patents for low-carbon technologies are held by companies in the Global North. This gives them a significant competitive advantage. They only share their knowledge when it is beneficial for them," explains co-author Andreas Goldthau (IASS/University of Erfurt). China is the only emerging market that has successfully attracted technology transfer through foreign direct investment. In order to tap into the Chinese market, companies were willing to "transfer" their technologies, i.e. share their knowledge.

China's recipe for success is not easily transferable

China's success in building a low-carbon technology sector can be broadly attributed to the high innovation capacity of Chinese industry as well as various policy measures. "These include the promotion of joint ventures and knowledge transfer, but also local content requirements that compel foreign investors to use products or services made in China. China was able to push through these measures by leveraging its large and profitable market," says lead author Silvia Weko (IASS/University of Erfurt). In other developing and emerging economies, similar efforts have proven ineffective or even counterproductive.

There, foreign investment in low-carbon energy systems and associated knowledge transfer remains critically insufficient. As a consequence, many developing countries continue to invest in predominantly fossil fuel technologies. There are concerns that countries may become locked in to high-carbon energy systems as a result.

A stronger focus on promoting low-carbon technology transfer is needed

What options are available to countries that want to increase the transfer of technology but are unable to achieve this through market mechanisms or policy? Technology transfer initiatives, such as public-private partnerships or platforms like the United Nations Climate Technology Center and Network (CTCN) work to advance energy transitions in the Global South. Such initiatives were intended to fill the gap in the market, but their track record is mixed, according to the IASS researchers' analysis.

Weko and Goldthau identified 71 initiatives that include technology transfer among their goals. Many of these are active in countries where only a small proportion of the population has access to electricity. Their efforts to support the development of sustainable energy systems in these countries are largely successful. However, just 26 of the 71 initiatives studied actually pursue technology transfer activities.

In order to increase knowledge transfer to developing countries and emerging economies, industrialized countries must keep their funding promises and provide greater support to the United Nations Climate Technology Center and Network, the researchers argue. The transfer gap cannot be closed with the current patchwork approach. Trade and regional cooperation also offer opportunities for countries to pool resources and demand in order to negotiate better terms.Creating the conditions for a globally just energy transition

More information: Silvia Weko et al, Bridging the low-carbon technology gap? Assessing energy initiatives for the Global South, Energy Policy (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2022.11319

Journal information: Energy Policy 

Provided by Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies e.V.

Privacy advocates demand rules for mobile providers on data use

by Keith Lewis

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Privacy advocates are demanding standards for mobile service providers' handling of sensitive customer information, especially location data, after a Federal Communications Commission inquiry into the top 15 carriers revealed a huge variation within the industry's data retention and consumer privacy protocols.

T-Mobile U.S. Inc. stores customer data, including location information, for up to 24 months, it told the regulator. AT&T Mobility, including its subsidiary Cricket Wireless, stores locations and most other user data for 13 months, but it stores some call records for up to five years, it reported.

Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest carrier, stores users' personal data, including locations, for one year, although it said its on-board vehicle diagnostic application stores it for up to five years. Mint Mobile LLC, the prepaid budget virtual mobile provider, stores data, including location information, for up to 18 months, it said.

Not all carriers sell location data to third party marketing firms, but those that do outlined unique processes that consumers have to navigate to opt out of authorizing their data to be sold, sometimes with different rules applying to call record details and location data.

The carriers' responses were "all over the map," according to Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a Washington public interest group focused on digital privacy.

"The only 'industry standard' appears to be that there is no standard at all for how long carriers retain data, how they protect it, or how hard they make it for their customers to invoke their rights," Feld added.

Public Knowledge is urging the commission to pass strong data privacy regulations to protect so-called customer proprietary network information.

'Mobile phones know a lot about us'

"Customer proprietary network information," as defined by Section 222 of a 1996 law (PL 104-104), includes any data that mobile carriers are required to safeguard, such as numbers dialed, call duration, and, perhaps most sensitive, the locations the user visited while their device was pinging a cell tower.

"Our mobile phones know a lot about us," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in an Aug. 25 statement. "That means carriers know who we are, who we call, and where we are at any given moment. This information and geolocation data is really sensitive. It's a record of where we've been and who we are."

"That's why the FCC is taking steps to ensure this data is protected," she added.

Rosenworcel, a Democrat, appears poised to crack down on data policies for mobile carriers and follow through on her sharp dissent in a 2020 FCC decision to fine the four largest carriers at the time. She argued the commission's collective $200 million fine against T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon for selling users' data to third parties without their consent didn't resolve the problems.

The then-Republican-controlled commission reduced the fine from a potential $40,000 per day fine for the duration of the violation to $2,500 per day. Rosenworcel wrote in dissent that the commission's "bureaucratic math" aiming to ease the punishment was unwarranted.

With Rosenworcel now at the commission's helm and a Democratic majority in sight if Biden's controversial FCC pick Gigi Sohn is confirmed by the Senate, the FCC is now more likely to tighten the rules around mobile carriers' management and authority to sell consumer data.

Congress could beat them to it, but only if it overcomes a dispute about the interaction of federal and state authority on privacy regulation.

The House is working on bipartisan legislation that would establish clearer standards for data privacy, but its provisions may not satisfy the staunchest privacy advocates unless it clearly allows states like California the ability to be more strict, according to some lawmakers.

A bill was approved, 53-2, by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on July 20. It is sponsored by Chairman Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., and co-sponsored by ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. Leaders of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce, Chair Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and ranking member Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., are also backing it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Sept. 1 that lawmakers would need to work on the bill, saying it doesn't provide the same consumer protections as existing California law.

The House bill, with more than 20 amendments adopted in committee, may also not gain the approval of Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. Cantwell and some progressive Democrats don't want federal law to preempt states from passing stricter data privacy laws.

Republicans, on the other hand, are worried that a state-by-state patchwork of rules, rather than a national standard, could make compliance too onerous on businesses.

Partisan division means the bill faces a slim chance of passage in the evenly split Senate.

Provisions of the House legislation include ensuring a "clear and conspicuous, easy-to-execute means" for customers to easily withdraw their consent to the sale of their personal data.

Carriers would be entirely banned from selling data related to minors under age 17 or using children's information for any targeted marketing purposes.

It would also require the Federal Trade Commission to adopt regulations within two years that establish more specific data privacy safeguards that include certain minimum standards, training obligations and requirements for written retention and corrective action plans. Carriers would have a duty under the law to mitigate "reasonably foreseeable risks or vulnerabilities."

Reproductive privacy

Privacy concerns grew more urgent in the eyes of many after the Supreme Court overturned a constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case in June. For Democrats, the ruling encouraged them to back stronger privacy protections amid fears that user locations and other data could be used to spy on individuals seeking abortion services in states that restrict it.

Many privacy advocates raised alarms in the wake of the Dobbs decision about the sensitive nature of personal data stored on menstrual-tracking applications used by millions of women.

Cantwell is among a dozen co-sponsors of a bill introduced after a draft of the Dobbs opinion leaked in May. The bill would prohibit organizations that collect information about individuals' sexual or reproductive health from disclosing it to third parties unless doing so is essential for medical care.

The bill, which includes a private right to sue, would apply to a broad range of companies, including mobile communications providers and technology companies that operate menstrual-tracking apps.

Even though Congress may be unable to agree on robust data privacy protection legislation right now, the FCC "can and should do more" to protect consumers, according to Public Knowledge's Feld.

"Right now, customers must negotiate a confusing maze of carrier practices and notifications," Feld said. "The FCC is more than an enforcer; it is a regulator. The FCC should set new rules of the road so that subscribers have the privacy we need and deserve."

Amazon, Oracle shrug off lawmaker fears of abortion data sales

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2022 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Filtered ferry engines hailed for tackling air pollution

by Julie PACOREL

The ferry will link Marseille and the French island of Corsica.

A French ferry company has launched what it claims is the first vessel that uses filters to capture almost all air pollutants from the boat's exhaust fumes, sparking praise from campaigners and local authorities.

La Meridionale, based in the southern French port of Marseille, showed off its innovative ship on Monday to the media.

"It's an unprecedented solution, a world first," company chairman Marc Reverchon told reporters on board the blue-and white Piana which sails between Marseille and the French island of Corsica.

The company said the filters captured 99 percent of sulphur oxides emitted by the ferry's four engines, as well as 99.9 percent of particulate matter created from the burning of its heavy fuel.

The filters use technology already found in power stations or incineration plants in which sodium bicarbonate is injected into the exhaust fumes, causing a chemical reaction with the tiny particles produced during the combustion process.

The pollutants can then be captured by a type of industrial air filter that has been around for more than 30 years, company technical director Christophe Seguinot told reporters.

"We didn't have to look too far. We didn't invent anything," Seguinot explained. "The challenge for us was to make it suitable for a marine setting."

The ferry group has an agreement with chemicals supplier Solvay, which will dispose of the toxic filter residue—with a view to recycling it in the future, Seguinot said.

Heavy fuel oil, also known as bunker fuel, is one of the cheapest but most polluting transportation fuels, resulting in the thick plumes of dirty brown smoke seen above most ships.

It is also high in sulphur which can cause respiratory problems and acid rain.

Regulation

Regulations on the amount of sulphur authorised vary, with ultra-clean fuel mandated in areas such as the North Sea and Baltic Sea in Europe, as well as around North American ports.

Marseille, which hosts cruise and container ships as well as ferries, has struggled with increased smog in recent years and the shipping sector is thought to be responsible for a large part of the problem.

"Let's hope that the big polluters follow the example of La Meridionale," Marseille's Socialist mayor Benoit Payan tweeted on Monday after attending the company event.

He has been battling ship operators over the summer with a petition calling for the dirtiest vessels to be barred during peak pollution times.

Shipping companies are under pressure from regulators and tightening industry standards to tackle their emissions of greenhouse gases as well as atmospheric pollutants, but campaigners want faster action.

La Meridionale "is going much further than current regulations require by treating all of their particulate matter," Damien Piga from Atmosud, a regional air quality surveillance group, told AFP.

Some ship owners favour the use of so-called "scrubbing" technology which sees water sprayed into the exhaust fumes, which captures some of the pollutants.

Environmentalists point out that in many cases the water is then discharged into the sea, however.

Other groups are experimenting with engines that run on cleaner liquefied natural gas (LNG) or methanol, while electric and sail powered vessels are also being developed.

French court fines P&O captain over polluting fuel

© 2022 AFP

Cryptocurrency must be made less energy intensive to protect the planet

by Laura Singleton, Imperial College London

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Cryptocurrency mining must be less energy intensive to limit the impact on the climate, according to a new report from the Imperial College London Business School.

Despite the financial benefits of cryptocurrencies, such as their potential to offer a financial system that is safe from bankruptcy or crisis, continued investment in more energy intensive cryptocurrency is likely to increase the probability of a global climate crisis, according to the report "Damage Limitation: Cryptocurrencies and Climate Change."

The report is authored by Carmine Russo, a visiting researcher at the Centre for Climate Finance & Investment at Imperial College Business School, who is also a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Naples Federico II.

In the report, Russo argues that the main pollution caused by cryptocurrency is generated by its mining procedures. The majority of cryptocurrencies are mined using the Proof PoW approach, an energy intensive process that makes cryptocurrency mining environmentally unsustainable.

The mining process is a "race" among the miners in solving complex algorithms through high performance machines to track the source of the money spent, checking for double-spending, and unlocking the new coins.

According to Russo, only the fastest miner who can solve the puzzle receives the rewards, whilst the others are just polluters. The more powerful the machines are, the more energy they need, which increases the environmental cost. In 2021, the energy usage to mine the most popular PoW cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), was higher than the overall energy usage of the UK as well as Italy in 2020.

Cryptocurrencies are often used as a safe haven asset—a type of investment that is expected to retain or increase in value during times of market turbulence. However, Russo warns that ignoring the environmental damage created by the mining process would be "a grave mistake".

"The question becomes a dubious trade-off: are we more scared of the predictable consequences of a financial crisis or the unpredictable ones of a climate crisis?" said Russo.

He added: "Cryptocurrency has become a popular trend, with an ever-increasing number of users. However, the picture of digital currency is far from uniformly positive. Behind the decentralized cryptocurrency system there are significant concerns, especially with respect to environmental damage."

A greener alternative

The report suggests that a shift to more climate-friendly methods for cryptocurrency trading would not only be advantageous but necessary. The report highlights how the Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism for cryptocurrency mining is a "greener alternative" due to its design.

Russo argues that in a PoS world, since the entire coin supply is immediately available, there are no complex algorithms to solve because there is no need to unlock new coins. Therefore, the powerful computer machines are not required, making the process less energy intensive. Furthermore, the stakers (the miners of the PoS) involved are chosen randomly by the system and only the selected ones can stake, which takes away the "race" element, which reduces energy waste and makes the process more energy efficient.

Acknowledging efforts made by a number of countries to regulate the cryptocurrency market, Russo makes a number of recommendations, including forcing cryptocurrency miners to disclose the climate-related impacts of their activities, and advertising more environmentally friendly practices to foster awareness. This could help investors in their decision-making process by reducing the asymmetric information between them and the market.

"In doing this, legislators may be able to maximize the positive financial role that cryptocurrencies can play in the economic system, while also addressing the environmental damage caused by their creation and usage," said Russo.The most important cryptocurrency event in years is about to begin, and the biggest windfall goes to the planet

More information: Report: www.imperial.ac.uk/business-sc … -and-climate-change/

Provided by Imperial College London 

Revolutionizing image generation through AI: Turning text into images

by Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Image generated from the text "Happy vegetables waiting for supper.". 

Credit: Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Creating images from text in seconds—and doing so with a conventional graphics card and without supercomputers? As fanciful as it may sound, this is made possible by the new Stable Diffusion AI model. The underlying algorithm was developed by the Machine Vision & Learning Group led by Prof. Björn Ommer (LMU Munich).

"Even for laypeople not blessed with artistic talent and without special computing know-how and computer hardware, the new model is an effective tool that enables computers to generate images on command. As such, the model removes a barrier to ordinary people expressing their creativity," says Ommer. But there are benefits for seasoned artists as well, who can use Stable Diffusion to quickly convert new ideas into a variety of graphic drafts. The researchers are convinced that such AI-based tools will be able to expand the possibilities of creative image generation with paintbrush and Photoshop as fundamentally as computer-based word processing revolutionized writing with pens and typewriters.

In their project, the LMU scientists had the support of the start-up Stability.Ai, on whose servers the AI model was trained. "This additional computing power and the extra training examples turned our AI model into one of the most powerful image synthesis algorithms," says the computer scientist.

The essence of billions of training images

A special aspect of the approach is that for all the power of the trained model, it is nonetheless so compact that it runs on a conventional graphics card and does not require a supercomputer such as was formerly the case for image synthesis. To this end, the artificial intelligence distills the essence of billions of training images into an AI model of just a few gigabytes.

"Once such AI has really understood what constitutes a car or what characteristics are typical for an artistic style, it will have apprehended precisely these salient features and should ideally be able to create further examples, just as the students in an old master's workshop can produce work in the same style," explains Ommer. In pursuit of the LMU scientists' goal of getting computers to learn how to see—that is to say, to understand the contents of images—this is another big step forward, which further advances basic research in machine learning and computer vision.

The trained model was recently released free of charge under the "CreativeML Open RAIL-M" license in order to facilitate further research and application of this technology more widely. "We are excited to see what will be built with the current models as well as to see what further works will be coming out of open, collaborative research efforts," says doctoral researcher Robin Rombach.A model to generate artistic images based on text descriptions

More information: Robin Rombach et al, High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models, Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2022)

Provided by Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich 

Easing pain at the pump with food waste: New method for making biodiesel fuel

by Jack Levy, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Graphical abstract. Credit: iScience (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104916

With gas prices soaring and food costs pinching family budgets, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at WPI is looking at ways to use food waste to make a renewable and more affordable fuel replacement for oil-based diesel. The work, led by Chemical Engineering Professor Michael Timko, is detailed in a new paper in the journal iScience

"By creating a biodiesel through this method, we've shown that we can bring the price of gas down to $1.10 per gallon, and potentially even lower," said Timko.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, in 2018 in the United States, about 81% of household food—about 20 tons—ended up in landfills or combustion facilities. Food waste is also a major contributor to climate change: once it's placed in landfills, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas.

Timko said, "Converting food waste to diesel also has the potential to offset up to 15.3 million tons of CO2 every year, lowering greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by 2.6%."

The work is part of a multi-year project supported by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and it builds on and refines research previously published in 2018. Timko and his team have now focused on finding a way to make the conversion process easier to scale and bring to the commercial market.

To make the fuel, the researchers employed a process called hydrothermal liquefaction, which uses heat and water to break down the food waste into a liquid. It's a method that has been used widely in converting other materials into biofuel, including algae. However, using food waste removes the need to grow and cultivate algae—an expensive and time-consuming process—while also leading to similar results for the amount of fuel that is extracted. The team also used a catalyst made of a naturally occurring mineral found in bones to get as much as 30% more energy out of the food waste.

Assistant Professor Andrew Teixeira and Ph.D. student Heather LeClerc played key roles in the research as well. LeClerc has spent the past year conducting research in Denmark, as part of a Fulbright scholarship, and is in the middle of a three-year NSF graduate research fellowship.

For this latest work on food waste and biofuel, LeClerc also worked with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod to gain a better understanding of the biocrudes the WPI team was producing, using equipment the Woods Hole researchers normally use to determine how an oil spill is affecting the ocean environment and changing it over time.

The researchers will continue their efforts to refine the fuel even further, and develop ways to use the process to make home heating oil and marine diesel to power ships.

Cutting waste, fossil fuel use, and greenhouse gas emissions by turning unused food into biofuel

More information: Heather O. LeClerc et al, Hydroxyapatite catalyzed hydrothermal liquefaction transforms food waste from an environmental liability to renewable fuel, iScience (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104916

Journal information: iScience 

Provided by Worcester Polytechnic Institute