We Remember

Today is the day that we remember the womenengineering studnets killed at L'Ecole polytechnique in Montreal. Killed for being women. See my previous posts;

December 6 Will Live In Infamy


The Real Crime In Canada

Around the world patriarchy reveals its true face, often masked as cultural or religious traditions used to justify mysoginist hatred.

The war on women continues around the globe.

Gov't rallies 'drown out' victims of violence against women
OTTAWA, Dec. 3 /CNW Telbec/ - "As the National Day of Remembrance andAction on Violence Against Women approaches, Stephen Harper has reason to hanghis head in shame at his government's abysmal track record on women's issues,"says the president of one of Canada's largest unions. "And now to add salt tothe wound, he has planned political rallies on a day meant to mourn victims ofviolence against women," says Dave Coles President of the Communications,Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada.

The problem of violence against women seems to be worsening, say two women’s services managers.Ginette Demers, manager of Violence Against Women Services at the YMCA Genevra House, and Francine Boudreau, program director of the Sudbury Counseling Centre, were speaking to the priorities committee of city council last week at St. Francis School.“Statistics gathered by the Greater Sudbury Police Service since 2003 indicate an increase in the number of incidents being reported, as well as an increase in the charges being laid,” said Demers.In 2006, close to 1,800 cases of domestic violence were reported to police.

Increasing attacks on Jamaica's women are driving down productivity in some sectors that depend heavily on female labour.


... Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, compared women protesters to terrorists because they dared to speak out against politicians in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks. ...

Taliban scatter bombs along route to women’s conference
The women gave a news conference but asked that no one take pictures showing their faces, and one speaker’s office requested that no one print her name. It’s a lot of secrecy for a press event, but it’s a dangerous time to be a powerful woman in Afghanistan. Police Major Colonel Sediqa Rasekh and other high-profile women spoke on Thursday at the event to highlight the continuing threat of violence against females in Afghanistan eight years since the hardline Taliban regime was ousted.

Women's Protective Services provides these free, confidential services to women who are abused and their children. Each year, Women's Protective Services begins with an average $250,000 deficit. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, federal and state monetary support has evaporated. To help offset these deficits, WPS seeks gifts, grants and donations.

Mexican men ask for an end to violence against women Amnesty International reports that nearly one in every four women in Mexico has suffered either physical or sexual aggression at the hands of an intimate partner. Some of the posters for this campaign claim that one in every two women is a victim of physical, emotional or sexual violence.

MEDIAWATCH: Ending rape during wartime

Violence against women is the least punished crime in the world, United Nations officials said today, urging governments to end the widespread impunity and to take measures to ensure that the laws and policies that aim to protect women and girls are enforced.

Palestinians join UN agencies in denouncing honour killings and gender abuse

WOMEN generally continue to be underdogs in a still largely male-led society in Bangladesh. If it were only a question of male leadership either in the family or society, it would not be so much a matter of concern. The concern stems from the fact that this male dominance expresses itself often in cruel oppression of women in different spheres. According to a UN report, Bangladesh ranks fourth highest in the world in violence against women. The report observed that some 40 per cent of women fall victims of violence in Dhaka city alone.

Inside the villages where every woman is victim of hidden war
Chris McGreal explains how rape became a 'weapon of war' in Congo

Women Found Murdered in Chechnya Interfax on November 27 cited Viktor Ledenev, chief investigator with the Investigative Committee’s Chechen branch, as saying that preliminary findings indicated the women may have been targeted because they were seen as leading “amoral lifestyles.” Nezavisimaya Gazeta on November 29 quoted Chechnya’s human rights commissioner, Nurdi Nukhazhiev, as saying of the murders: “Unfortunately, some of our young women have forgotten the mountain woman’s code of behavior. The male relatives of these women feel they have been insulted and sometimes take the law into their own hands.” The newspaper noted that Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov had launched a “sweeping campaign for the moral education of youth.” Indeed, Kadyrov has more than once stressed the need for Chechen women to wear modest traditional clothing, including headscarves (North Caucasus Weekly, January 10; September 13, 2007).

Moreno-Ocampo says more than 5,000 displaced persons continue to die each month in Darfur. He said continued attacks against ethnic groups, rapes in and around camps, and the obstruction of humanitarian efforts are only possible with the compliance of the Sudanese government, headed by President Bashir.

Make Fife safe for all women Fife Today, UK - 4 Dec 2008
Five per cent increase in domestic abuse attacks
DOMESTIC abuse attacks in the Kingdom rose by five per cent in the past year, with 3926 incidents recorded in 2007-8.

Violence against women is a serious issue in Montenegro, where a recent report found that one in two women is a victim of verbal abuse and one in every three is attacked physically.

SOMALIA: One woman’s battle against the war lords “I deal with women who have experienced a wide range of problems. Some have been raped by men from the militia. They rape them in front of their husbands or brothers so that they can displace communities and humiliate the men,” she said.
Worryingly, women in Somalia are being subjected to the worse forms of treatment according to Abdullahi Abdi, who said her organisation has documented 1,000 cases of violence against women.
She told of a recent case where 13-year-old girl who was stoned to death by 50 men despite the fact she had been raped by three men. The victim’s father said when the family tried to report the vicious attack, the girl was accused of adultery and punished under Sharia law by officials. The horrific punishment is a clear example of the plight facing some women in Somalia, Abdullahi Abdi explained. “This never used to happen under the Somali tradition. It’s something new that a certain group of people are carrying out. This case will put women in a more vulnerable position,” she said.

Zimbabwe: The Feminization of Violence In times of war and political crises women and girls, mostly civilians, become targets of violence. "A feature of these conflicts is that the civilian population is increasingly 'caught up' in the conflict or even deliberately targeted by parties to the conflict. In this context women and girls are exposed to acts of violence, often resulting in death and injury from indiscriminate military attacks. During armed conflict, women and children are more likely to be subjected to mysterious disappearances, hostage-taking, torture, imprisonment, sexual- and gender-based violence, forced recruitment into the armed forces and displacement" (Koen, 2006:1). As a consequence, many women are faced with a long term struggle with trauma and HIV/AIDS.
Violations of women's human rights are widespread in a number of countries on the African continent. A distressing example is Zimbabwe, where politically motivated wanton abuse has been more pronounced than in most hot spots on the continent.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Mark Lepine, L'Ecole polytechnique, December 6, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, women, violence, violence against women, women engineering students, patriarchy, gun

 

Machine learning enables viability of vertical-axis wind turbines

EPFL researchers have used a genetic learning algorithm to identify optimal pitch profiles for the blades of vertical-axis wind turbines, which despite their high energy potential, have until now been vulnerable to strong gusts of wind.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FÉDÉRALE DE LAUSANNE

 

IMAGE: 

EXPERIMENTAL VAWT BLADE

view more 

CREDIT: © UNFOLD EPFL CC BY SA

If you imagine an industrial wind turbine, you likely picture the windmill design, technically known as a horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT). But the very first wind turbines, which were developed in the Middle East around the 8th century for grinding grain, were vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWT), meaning they spun perpendicular to the wind, rather than parallel.

Due to their slower rotation speed, VAWTs are less noisy than HAWTs and achieve greater wind energy density, meaning they need less space for the same output both on- and off-shore. The blades are also more wildlife-friendly: because they rotate laterally, rather than slicing down from above, they are easier for birds to avoid.

With these advantages, why are VAWTs largely absent from today’s wind energy market? As Sébastien Le Fouest, a researcher in the School of Engineering Unsteady Flow Diagnostics Lab explains, it comes down to an engineering problem – air flow control – that he believes can be solved with a combination of sensor technology and machine learning. In a paper recently published in Nature Communications, Le Fouest and UNFOLD head Karen Mulleners describe two optimal pitch profiles for VAWT blades, which achieve a 200% increase in turbine efficiency and a 77% reduction in structure-threatening vibrations.

“Our study represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first experimental application of a genetic learning algorithm to determine the best pitch for a VAWT blade,” Le Fouest says.

Turning an Achilles’ heel into an advantage

Le Fouest explains that while Europe’s installed wind energy capacity is growing by 19 gigawatts per year, this figure needs to be closer to 30 GW to meet the UN’s 2050 objectives for carbon emissions.

“The barriers to achieving this are not financial, but social and legislative – there is very low public acceptance of wind turbines because of their size and noisiness,” he says.

Despite their advantages in this regard, VAWTs suffer from a serious drawback: they only function well with moderate, continuous air flow. The vertical axis of rotation means that the blades are constantly changing orientation with respect to the wind. A strong gust increases the angle between air flow and blade, forming a vortex in a phenomenon called dynamic stall. These vortices create transient structural loads that the blades cannot withstand. 

To tackle this lack of resistance to gusts, the researchers mounted sensors onto an actuating blade shaft to measure the air forces acting on it. By pitching the blade back and forth at different angles, speeds, and amplitudes, they generated series of ‘pitch profiles’. Then, they used a computer to run a genetic algorithm, which performed over 3500 experimental iterations. Like an evolutionary process, the algorithm selected for the most efficient and robust pitch profiles, and recombined their traits to generate new and improved ‘offspring’. 

This approach allowed the researchers not only to identify two pitch profile series that contribute to significantly enhanced turbine efficiency and robustness, but also to turn the biggest weakness of VAWTs into a strength.

“Dynamic stall – the same phenomenon that destroys wind turbines – at a smaller scale can actually propel the blade forward. Here, we really use dynamic stall to our advantage by redirecting the blade pitch forward to produce power,” Le Fouest explains. “Most wind turbines angle the force generated by the blades upwards, which does not help the rotation. Changing that angle not only forms a smaller vortex – it simultaneously pushes it away at precisely the right time, which results in a second region of power production downwind.”

The Nature Communications paper represents Le Fouest’s PhD work in the UNFOLD lab. Now, he has received a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) BRIDGE grant to build a proof-of-concept VAWT. The goal is to install it outdoors, so that it can be tested as it responds in real time to real-world conditions.

“We hope this air flow control method can bring efficient and reliable VAWT technology to maturity so that it can finally be made commercially available,” Le Fouest says.

This work benefited from the SNSF's "Assistant Professor (AP) Energy Grants" instrument. The call for proposals, launched between 2013 and 2016 as part of the Swiss government's Energy Strategy 2050, aimed to fund the launch of new energy-related research projects in newly opened laboratories. Read the SNSF press release.

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-024-46988-0 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Optimal blade pitch control for enhanced vertical-axis wind turbine performance

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-Mar-2024

Capturing CO2 from trucks and reducing their emissions by 90%

ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FÉDÉRALE DE LAUSANNE

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS AT EPFL HAVE PATENTED A NEW CONCEPT THAT COULD CUT TRUCKS' CO2 EMISSIONS BY ALMOST 90%. IT INVOLVES CAPTURING CO2 WITHIN THE EXHAUST SYSTEM, CONVERTING IT INTO A LIQUID... view more 

CREDIT: EPFL / FRANÇOIS MARÉCHAL

In Europe, transport is responsible for nearly 30% of the total CO2 emissions, of which 72% comes from road transportation*. While the use of electric vehicles for personal transportation could help lower that number, reducing emissions from commercial transport - such as trucks or buses - is a much greater challenge.

Researchers at EPFL have now come up with a novel solution: capturing CO2 directly in the trucks' exhaust system and liquefying it in a box on the vehicle's roof. The liquid CO2 is then delivered to a service station, where it is turned into conventional fuel using renewable energy. The project is being coordinated by the Industrial Process and Energy Systems Engineering group, led by François Maréchal, at EPFL's School of Engineering. The patented concept is the subject of a paper published in Frontiers in Energy Research.

A complex process onboard the vehicle

Scientists propose to combine several technologies developed at EPFL to capture CO2 and convert it from a gas to a liquid in a process that recovers most of energy available onboard, such as heat from the engine. In their study, the scientists used the example of a delivery truck.

First, the vehicle's flue gases in the exhaust pipe are cooled down and the water is separated from the gases. CO2 is isolated from the other gases (nitrogen and oxygen) with a temperature swing adsorption system, using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) adsorbent, which are specially designed to absorb CO2. Those materials are being developed by the Energypolis team at EPFL Valais Wallis, led by Wendy Queen. Once the material is saturated with CO2, it is heated so that pure CO2 can be extracted from it. High speed turbocompressors developed by Jürg Schiffmann's laboratory at EPFL's Neuchâtel campus use heat from the vehicle's engine to compress the extracted CO2 and turn it into a liquid. That liquid is stored in a tank and can then be converted back into conventional fuel at the service stations using renewable electricity. "The truck simply deposits the liquid when filling up with fuel," says Maréchal.

The whole process takes place within a capsule measuring 2 m x 0.9 m x 1.2 m, placed above the driver's cabin. "The weight of the capsule and the tank is only 7% of the vehicle's payload," adds Maréchal. "The process itself uses little energy, because all of its stages have been optimized."

The researchers' calculations show that a truck using 1 kg of conventional fuel could produce 3kg of liquid CO2, and that the conversion does not involve any energy penalty.

Only 10% of the CO2 emissions cannot be recycled, and the researchers propose to offset that using biomass.

The system could theoretically work with all trucks, buses and even boats, and with any type of fuel. The advantage of this system is that, unlike electric or hydrogen-based ones, it can be retrofitted to existing trucks in order to neutralize their impact in terms of carbon emissions.

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Source: Shivom Sharma and François Maréchal, Carbon Dioxide Capture From Internal Combustion Engine Exhaust Using Temperature Swing Adsorption, Frontiers in Energy Research

Uncertain climate future could disrupt energy systems

by Julie Chao, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Extreme weather events—such as severe drought, storms, and heat waves—have been forecast to become more commonplace and are already starting to occur. What has been less studied is the impact on energy systems and how communities can avoid costly disruptions, such as partial or total blackouts.

Now an international team of scientists has published a new study proposing an optimization methodology for designing climate-resilient energy systems and to help ensure that communities will be able to meet future energy needs given weather and climate variability. Their findings were recently published in Nature Energy.

"On one side is energy demand—there are different types of building needs, such as heating, cooling, and lighting. Because of long-term climate change and short-term extreme weather events, the outdoor environment changes, which leads to changes in building energy demand," said Tianzhen Hong, a Berkeley Lab scientist who helped design the study. "On the other side, climate can also influence energy supply, such as power generation from hydro, solar and wind turbines. Those could also change because of weather conditions."

Working with collaborators from Switzerland, Sweden, and Australia, and led by a scientist at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the team developed a stochastic-robust optimization method to quantify impacts and then use the data to design climate-resilient energy systems. Stochastic optimization methods are often used when variables are random or uncertain.

"Energy systems are built to operate for 30 or more years. Current practice is just to assume typical weather conditions today; urban planners and designers don't commonly factor in future uncertainties," said Hong, a computational scientist leading multi-scale energy modeling and simulation at Berkeley Lab. "There is a lot of uncertainty around future climate and weather."

"Energy systems," as defined in the study, provide energy needs, and sometimes energy storage, to a group of buildings. The energy supplied could include gas or electricity from conventional or renewable sources. Such community energy systems are not as common in the U.S. but may be found on some university campuses or in business parks.

The researchers investigated a wide range of scenarios for 30 Swedish cities. They found that under some scenarios the energy systems in some cities would not be able to generate enough energy. Notably, climate variability could create a 34% gap between total energy generation and demand and a 16% drop in power supply reliability—a situation that could lead to blackouts.

"We observed that current energy systems are designed in a way that makes them highly susceptible to extreme weather events such as storms and heat waves," said Dasun Perera, a scientist at EPFL's Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory and lead author of the study. "We also found that climate and weather variability will result in significant fluctuations in renewable power being fed into electric grids as well as energy demand. This will make it difficult to match the energy demand and power generation. Dealing with the effects of climate change is going to prove harder than we previously thought."

The authors note that 3.5 billion people live in urban areas, consuming two-thirds of global energy, and by 2050 urban areas are expected to hold more than two-thirds of the world's population. "Distributed energy systems that support the integration of renewable energy technologies will support the energy transition in the urban context and play a vital role in climate change adaptation and mitigation," they wrote.

Hong leads an urban science research group at Berkeley Lab that studies energy and environmental issues at the city scale. The group is part of Berkeley Lab's Building Technology and Urban Systems Division, which for decades has been at the forefront of research into advancing energy efficiency in the built environment.

Extreme weather to overload urban power grids, study shows

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More information: A. T. D. Perera et al, Quantifying the impacts of climate change and extreme climate events on energy systems, Nature Energy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-020-0558-0

Engineers uncover secret ‘thinking’ behind dandelions’ seed dispersal

Peer-Reviewed Publication

IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON

Knowing what causes dandelions to spread could help us understand how the plants respond to climate change, and could even help us design new ‘soft’ robots. 

Known for their fluffiness and uncanny ability to help children tell the time, dandelions provide essential early-Spring food for pollinators like bees, birds, butterflies, and moths. 

Their seeds are some of the best flyers in nature, catching the wind and spreading as far as 100 kilometres. Part of how they do this is by tuning their flight depending on the weather.  

Each dandelion seed is tethered by a thin tube to around 100 bristles, which form the parachute-like structure. When seeds break free from the flower head, these bundles of hairs catch the wind and carry their seeds. This hairy parachute closes when the air is humid, which often means the wind is weak. In drier, more windy conditions, dandelions widen their parachutes to better catch the wind so the seeds can fly freely.  

However until now, nobody knew how they sense and respond to their environment so effectively. 

Now an international team including Imperial researchers has uncovered the biomechanical ‘decisions’ behind dandelion seed dispersal.  

Their work, published in Nature Communications, found the seed-carrying parachutes open and close using something like actuators – devices that convert signals into movement – without using energy.  

The centre of the parachutes senses the humidity of their immediate environment by absorbing water molecules from the air. Responding to these humidity signals, they ‘decide’ to either open their parachutes and fly away, or to close their parachutes and stay put. 

They also found that the actuator has a unique radial, tube-like design to which the parachute hairs are attached to ensure simultaneous movement. The actuator changes its shape to either open or close their parachutes. 

Imperial author Dr Naomi Nakayama of the Department of Bioengineering who led the work said: “Our findings reveal how the dandelion ensures the survival of its species by making perhaps the most important decision in a plant’s life – to stay or go seek a better habitat.” 

Researchers at Imperial, the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, Lyon and Ecole Polytechnique de Paris, investigated this using their combination of expertise in plant biology and mechanical engineering. 

They placed dandelions into a bespoke, humidity-controlled chamber to study the effects of humidity on the parachute base. They measured humidity’s effects on the actuator using multiple imaging techniques, including an environmental scanning electron microscope.  

They found that parachute opening is modulated by the level of humidity in the atmosphere: higher humidity triggered swelling in the actuator and mechanical movement of hairs upwards, which closed the parachutes. Some regions of the actuator swelled noticeably, whereas others, such as the vasculature, barely changed. They observed that the actuator shape change was caused by uptake and release of water droplets, creating a crease in the area the parachute hairs are attached. 

They then built a structural computer model of the actuator accounting for these differences and for forces associated with changes in hydration level. Their model agreed quantitatively with most observations, which indicated that differences in capacity to absorb water is key to actuation and therefore parachute opening and closing. 

Plant structures can serve as important inspiration for soft robotics as, like plants, these robots don’t use joints or rigid parts to move appendages. Finding out how dandelion parachutes respond to their environment by moving many appendages simultaneously could help engineers create robots that move multiple fingers and arms with very simple yet functional designs. The way the dandelion actuator changes shape in some regions but not others can also teach us about mechanisms of shaping and movement in soft robots and biological tissues. 

Dandelion dispersal greatly influences urban and rural ecosystems, and knowing how their flight respond to the environment helps us predict the effects of changing climate.   

Dr Nakayama added: “Our work is a great example of what the natural world can teach us about interacting with our environments. It’s also a fantastic piece of multidisciplinary collaboration: bringing varying disciplines together to spark new ways of investigating biological and engineering problems.” 

“Dandelion pappus morphing is actuated by radially patterned material swelling” by Madeleine Seale, Annamaria Kiss, Simone Bovio, Ignazio Maria Viola, Enrico Mastropaolo, Arezki Boudaoud & Naomi Nakayama, published May 2022 in Nature Communications. 

New measurements from Northern Sweden show less methane emissions than feared

GREENHOUSE GASES

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN - FACULTY OF SCIENCE

 

IMAGE: ON THE LEFT IS A POND VEGETATION CONTROLLED BY HIGH WATER LEVELS AND ON THE RIGHT A DRIER TUNDRA VEGETATION, WHICH IS BECOMING MORE PREVALENT IN AREAS WHERE THE WATER LEVEL IS LOW AND THE SOIL DRIES OUT IN SUMMER. IN AREAS WHERE PERMAFROST DISAPPEARS, NEW STUDIES SHOW THAT THE RELEASE OF METHANE CAN BE REDUCED BY A FACTOR OF 10 DUE TO CHANGES IN HYDROLOGY, PLANT COMMUNITY AND THE COMPOSITION OF MICROORGANISMS IN THE SOIL (PHOTO: BO ELBERLING) view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: BO ELBERLING, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN.

It is widely understood that thawing permafrost can lead to significant amounts of methane being released. However, new research shows that in some areas, this release of methane could be a tenth of the amount predicted from a thaw. The research was conducted in Sweden by an international group that includes researchers from the University of Copenhagen. A crucial, yet an open question is how much precipitation the future will bring.

A typical landscape in northern Sweden. On the left is a pond vegetation controlled by high water levels and on the right a drier tundra vegetation, which is becoming more prevalent in areas where the water level is low and the soil dries out in summer. In areas where permafrost disappears, new studies show that the release of methane can be reduced by a factor of 10 due to changes in hydrology, plant community and the composition of microorganisms in the soil (photo: Bo Elberling)

Permafrost runs like a frozen belt of soil and sediment around Earth’s northern arctic and sub-arctic tundra. As permafrost thaws, microorganisms are able to break down thousands of years-old accumulations of organic matter. This process releases a number of greenhouse gases. One of the most critical gasses is methane; the same gas emitted by cattle whenever they burp and fart.

Because of this, scientists and public agencies have long feared methane emissions from permafrost to rise in step with global temperatures. But, in some places, it turns out that methane emissions are lower than once presumed.

In a comprehensive new study by a collaborative from the University of Gothenburg, Ecole Polytechnique in France and the Center for Permafrost (CENPERM) at the University of Copenhagen, researchers measured the release of methane from two localities in Northern Sweden. Permafrost disappeared from one of the locations in the 1980’s, and 10-15 years later in the other.

The difference between the two areas shows what can happen as a landscape gradually adapts to the absence of permafrost. The results show that the first area to lose its permafrost now has methane emissions ten times less than in the other locality. This is due to gradual changes in drainage and the spread of new plant species. The study’s findings were recently published in the journal Global Change Biology.

"The study has shown that there isn’t necessarily a large burst of methane as might have been expected in the wake of a thaw. Indeed, in areas with sporadic permafrost, far less methane might be released than expected," says Professor Bo Elberling of CENPERM (Center for Permafrost), at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management.

Water, plants and microbes all play a role

According to Professor Elberling, water drainage accounts for why far less methane was released than anticipated. As layers of permafrost a few meters deep begin to disappear, water in the soil above begins to drain.

"Permafrost acts somewhat like the bottom of a bathtub. When it melts, it's as if the plug has been pulled, which allows water to seep through the now-thawed soil. Drainage allows for new plant species to establish themselves, plants that are better adapted for drier soil conditions. This is exactly what we’re seeing at these locations in Sweden," he explains.

Grasses typical of very wet areas with sporadic permafrost have developed a straw-like system that transports oxygen from their stems down into to their roots. These straws also act as a conduit through which methane in the soil quickly find its way to the surface and thereafter into the atmosphere.

As the water disappears, so do these grasses. Gradually, they are replaced by new plant species, which, due to the dry soil conditions, do not need transport oxygen from the surface via their roots. The combination of more oxygen in the soil and reduced methane transport means that less methane is produced and that the methane that is produced can be better converted to CO2 within the soil.

"As grasses are outcompeted by new plants like dwarf shrubs, willows and birch, the transport mechanism disappears, allowing methane to escape quickly up through soil and into the atmosphere," explains Bo Elberling.

The combination of dry soil and new plant growth also creates more favorable conditions for soil bacteria that help break methane down.

"When methane can no longer escape through the straws, soil bacteria have more time to break it down and convert it into CO2," Bo Elberling elaborates.

As a result, one can imagine that as microorganisms reduce methane emissions, the process will lead to more CO2 being released. Yet, no significant increase in CO2 emissions was observed by the researchers in their study. This is interpreted as being the result of the CO2 balance, which is more heavily determined by plant roots than the CO2 released from the microorganisms that break down methane. Crucially, even though methane ends up as CO2, it is considered less critical in climate change context as methane is at least 25 more potent greenhouse gas as compared to CO2.

Infobox

Areas of sporadic permafrost cover the southern part of the Arctic around the globe, where the temperature is typically between minus five and zero degrees. This means that a rise in temperature can cause the permafrost to completely disappear.

 

Future precipitation will be decisive

According to Professor Elberling, the future’s greatest unknown is the amount of future precipitation. Because, while thawing permafrost makes it easier for soil to drain in areas with sporadic permafrost, increased rainfall or poor drainage can prevent an area from drying. Where the latter is the case, we shouldn’t expect a corresponding drying out and reduction in methane being released.

"The balance between precipitation and evaporation will be crucial for the release and absorption of greenhouse gases. However, predicting Arctic precipitation is fraught with uncertainty. In some areas we’re seeing increased precipitation, while in others, things are drying out - especially in the summer," says Elberling.

The study focuses on data from two localities in northern Sweden. As such, Professor Elberling is cautious about concluding that analogous conditions extend to other areas with similar permafrost, such as in Canada or Russia.

The study contributes to a new understanding of a process that must be taken into account whenever future methane emissions are assessed in permafrost-affected areas.

"In their most recent report on the Arctic’s future methane budget, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has not considered the conditions highlighted by us in the study. Our study reverses the general perception that thawed permafrost is to be consistently associated with increased levels of methane being released," Professor Elberling concludes. 

Lead author Mats Björkman from University of Göteborg adds:

“Our research shows that methane emissions from areas where permafrost thaws are not the same everywhere. The new observations represent an important component of a more comprehensive picture of the climate impact in the Arctic. Our results also underscore the importance of including hydrological, vegetation, and microbial changes when studying the long-term effects of permafrost thawing and disappearing.”

 In the future Mats Björkman wants to determine which areas will either get wetter or drier and see how they are affected when the permafrost thaws.

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JOURNAL

Global Change Biology

DOI

10.1111/gcb.16137 

ARTICLE TITLE

Reduced methane emissions in former permafrost soils driven by vegetation and microbial changes following drainage

How Big Is the Cyber Insurance Market? Can It Keep Growing?

By Tom Johansmeyer 

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

The cyber insurance market may be small, new, and volatile, but it could also become an important form of economic security. In fact, the Biden administration appears to be counting on that. Cybersecurity strategy could be improved with a better understanding of the basic characteristics of the cyber insurance market, particularly its size, the size of the cyber reinsurance market on which it depends, where future risk capital could come from, and at what price. Publicly available data on the size and reach of the cyber insurance and reinsurance, or re/insurance, market is thin and often dated. Views on how much premium is written or coverage is outstanding often have to be cobbled together from disparate sources, with subsequent projections built on a shaky foundation.

This piece seeks to provide a better starting point for such analysis. Using a mix of formal and informal research methods—hardly ideal but utterly practical—I’ve pulled together industry-wide estimates for cyber re/insurance premiums and coverage outstanding, as well as a view on historical growth. Further, given the strategic role that the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market could play in bringing breadth and depth to the cyber re/insurance market, I’ve included a few thoughts on the scope of cyber ILS so far, as well as how that market could continue its growth trajectory.

Sources and Methods

It’s notoriously difficult to form a comprehensive and accurate view of the global cyber insurance market. At best, publicly available data reports tend to focus on the overall U.S. market, which may represent only 55 to 60 percent of the cyber insurance industry worldwide, according to both formal interviews and private discussions. While the data afforded by the likes of A.M. Best and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners tends to be the best available, it still leaves some nontrivial gaps. Company reports can range from pure propaganda to the high-quality research often produced by the Swiss Re Institute and Munich Re NatCatSERVICE. Again, such reports are helpful but still offer only a partial view.

While the following view of the cyber re/insurance market size and composition is hardly perfect, it aims to advance our collective understanding of the market as it stands today and where it could go tomorrow—while also offering something more than the “anecdata” currently shared by word of mouth. The methods used to compile the data below are mixed, beginning with a review of publicly available sources, as described above, to provide a foundation for the private sources of information gathered. This foundation was supported by interviews with seven cyber insurance executives, 10 cyber reinsurance executives, and 10 ILS managers on a wide range of cyber re/insurance market dynamics. The formal research and interviews focusing on market size and composition are supplemented by informal conversations with re/insurance and ILS market players.

The results below consist of both point estimates and ranges. In an inexact exercise, the latter can help frame the probable, and the included point estimates can be supported sufficiently based on the underlying conversations or publicly available sources. This piece is an attempt to document the side conversations that occur in any market environment and present them in a manner in which they can help with further analysis, cyber insurance market growth, and even improved cybersecurity, given the role of insurance in economic security and the stated reliance on the private sector in the latest U.S. National Cybersecurity Strategy.

(Ecole polytechnique, https://www.flickr.com/photos/117994717@N06/40466246635/; CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode

Global Cyber Insurance Premiums and Limit Outstanding

Global cyber market premiums tend to be easier to ascertain in retrospect, and time adds at least a bit of certainty. As a result, recent estimates are most likely to defy consensus, with those for 2023 being the most volatile by nature. The year is still in progress, and market conditions could influence the final result. Conversations with the market players and experts suggest that global cyber insurance premiums could end this year at up to $15 billion. Recent rapid rate increases, however, have slowed—which isn’t a surprise—meaning that a more modest outcome of around $13 billion is more realistic.

For 2022, it’s also fairly difficult to estimate because it’s so recent, but global cyber insurance premiums range from Swiss Re’s $10 billion to Munich Re’s $11.9 billion to as much as $14 billion. Several private sources put the 2022 estimate at around $10-12 billion. These numbers also square with independently calculated estimates of worldwide reinsurance premiums (more on this below). Even at the low end of the 2022 range, global cyber premiums clearly climbed sharply from the 2021 Swiss Re estimate of $8 billion, itself up from only $5.5 billion in 2020.

The high rate of market concentration may contribute to some of the volatility of industry estimates. Despite the high rate of premium growth recently, the cyber insurance market remains highly concentrated. The five largest insurers account for as much as a third of the worldwide total, according to estimates gathered from formal interviews, in conjunction with the market size estimates above. Market share could vary from the range above, but the point nonetheless remains. Further, focus on cyber insurance premiums masks the fact that revenue growth does not mean an increase in protection for end insureds. In fact, premiums have grown far faster than the protection offered for cyber risks.

The amount of cyber insurance limit outstanding is even harder to estimate than premiums. Informal private conversations yield a 2022 range of around $360-500 billion. The estimates at the higher end come from sources who believe that the market shares of the largest players are relatively low, while the lower estimates reflect a belief that market concentration is quite high. A working estimate of $400-450 billion seems to be the right fit, as it would reflect an average rate on line (ROL)—or cost of insurance—ranging from around two and a half percent to a little more than three percent, which seems indicative of the recent rate increases that led to such significant premium growth. There’s still room for people to disagree reasonably, but the range of the potential 2022 premium suggests a limit outstanding of at least close to $400 billion and pretty far down from $500 billion.

Global Cyber Reinsurance Premiums and Limit Outstanding

Historically, estimating the global reinsurance premium in the cyber market was as easy as halving the insurance estimate. A Swiss Re report put the rate at which insurers cede cyber to reinsurers at 45 to 50 percent, although some private sources say it could be as high as 55 percent. That would put the 2022 global reinsurance premium at $7 billion, 2021 at close to $5 billion, and 2020 at a bit under $3 billion. The year to come is more difficult to forecast, as some structural factors have changed the amount of reinsurance that insurers may consume.

Until this year, insurers have largely relied on quota share structures, through which reinsurers basically share proportionately in the business written by the insurers they cover. On the one hand, some non-proportional reinsurance covers made it into the market, but they represented a small slice of overall cyber reinsurance risk transfer. So-called event covers, which provide reinsurance protection for insurers when there is a single catastrophic cyber loss event, on the other hand, were few and far between. In 2023, however, event covers have begun to gain some traction. Because they consume less capital than quota shares, the move to more event cover may appear to cost the cyber reinsurance sector some growth.

The increased use of non-proportional reinsurance—including event covers—makes it difficult to estimate cyber reinsurance premiums by halving cyber insurance premiums, particularly because some larger cyber insurers have integrated more event covers into their risk transfer strategies. If we take 2022’s cyber insurance premium at $10-14 billion, then the worldwide cyber reinsurance premium would be something less than $5.5-7 billion, and probably closer to $5-5.5 billion. What’s interesting, though, is that nominally smaller cyber reinsurance growth could enable disproportionately faster cyber insurance market growth, since insurers would be able to keep more of their attritional business, hedge out the catastrophic exposure, and use their capital more efficiently.

Market concentration appears to have been alleviated to some extent by the entry of new reinsurers into the sector. The five largest reinsurers accounted for more than 80 percent of worldwide premiums in 2021, and for 2022, that concentration fell to 50-60 percent. The sharp drop is implied by two underlying factors evident especially in the formal interviews. One is the entry of new participants, or reinsurers, into the market. Admittedly, this did little to alleviate the previously high rate of market concentration directly. The second factor is that smaller and mid-sized reinsurers not only saw rate increases from their quota share business but also saw those rate increases as a reason to lean further into the cyber reinsurance market, a move further encouraged by the post-ransomware lull (at least in terms of insured losses, if not actual attacks) beginning in the second half of 2021. However, even these expansionary forces have been dulled by access to additional capital.

Several reinsurers revealed in their formal interviews that they would need access to retrocession (reinsurance for reinsurance companies) to support further growth. While some reinsurers already write retrocession—“retro,” as it’s known colloquially—they don’t offer much capacity. Further, many prospective buyers would like to see retro come from outside the reinsurance sector as a way to protect against systemic risk. Even with the changes over the past year, cyber reinsurance remains highly concentrated. A few changes in business strategy could cause a meaningful chunk of that risk capital to be diverted to other classes of business. That’s why reinsurers need access to a separate source of retro capital, and that points directly to the ILS market.

The Nascent Cyber ILS Market

ILS refers to a segment of the global re/insurance industry that uses capacity from the capital markets. As insurers lay off risk to reinsurers, both insurers and reinsurers may package up risk into a variety of formats to secure protection from these outside sources of capital. Initially seen as an outlet for retro in the property-catastrophe space, the ILS market has evolved to take on additional risks, although natural catastrophe is still the bulk of what the sector covers. In fact, the role that the ILS market initially played in “peak peril” risk transfer—the most difficult systemic risks, such as a hurricane in Florida or a typhoon in Japan—is seen as a model for how it could operate in the cyber re/insurance market, where peak perils could be viewed as cloud outage and self-replicating malware.

The cyber re/insurance market has sought ILS involvement for years, even before my early efforts to help develop the Property Claim Services (PCS) Global Cyber industry loss index in 2017. In fact, the PCS team (which I led at the time) began working on the loss index to support the forms of alternative risk transfer that ILS managers would want to consume. It has taken time for protection buyers to understand some of the quirks of ILS risk transfer—from collateral management to minimum ROLs—with early trading consisting of small, bespoke transactions with little opportunity to scale. But that’s changing—quickly.

The cyber ILS market has achieved a limit outstanding of as much as $1 billion, roughly a 100 percent year-over-year increase. The fact that it is still a hair less than one percent of the $104.9 billion in ILS capital currently under management suggests not just that cyber ILS is still small but also that it has plenty of room for growth. The fact that cyber is a diversifying risk for ILS managers focused heavily on natural catastrophes could make it an increasingly attractive class of business for some.

Further cyber re/insurance market maturation will be necessary to enable access to more ILS capital. Interviews suggest that further improvements to event definition will help, as well as the issuance of liquid instruments (with the recent cyber catastrophe bond being a good first step). Finally, cyber risk and event modeling, according to most interview participants, need to continue to advance in order to more fully meet the needs of ILS managers. The good news is that the market is generally headed in the right direction and simply needs to continue to refine what it already does.

How to Raise the Stakes Responsibly

Cyber re/insurance market growth is certainly important in its own right. It’s possible to claim dismissively—or even derisively—that an expanded cyber re/insurance market is simply a way to drive more profit into the insurance industry. Of course it is. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Successful businesses are good. Successful insurers continue to provide financial protection to society. That’s a worthy enough aim in itself. But the stakes are far higher than commercial success. Cyber re/insurance has emerged as a key pillar for cybersecurity, just as re/insurance has long been a largely unsung contributor to economic security. As the most recent U.S. National Cybersecurity Strategy reveals, cyber re/insurance plays a direct role in economic security and could play a larger one as time passes.

The quantification of the current state of the global cyber re/insurance market explored here—as well as the support offered by the ILS sector—provides a crucial reference point for further strategic planning, be it corporate or state security. Much of the analysis produced has had to rely on tenuous assumptions, optimistic projections, and, frankly, guesswork. It’s tough to operate under those circumstances. With at least a preliminary view of the size and composition of the global cyber re/insurance market, the analysts, scholars, and other stakeholders looking at the cyber re/insurance market hopefully will be able to apply their talent to greater effect.

Tom Johansmeyer is a Ph.D. candidate in international conflict analysis at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he is focused on the cyber insurance protection gap as an economic security problem. He was recently the head of PCS at data/analytics firm Verisk, where he led the development of risk and loss quantification tools for cyber, political violence, and other natural and man-made events.

 THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

Scientists measure the distance to stars by their music

Astronomers has used asteroseismology, or the study of stellar oscillations, to accurately measure the distance of stars from the Earth and check the measurements taken during the Gaia mission to study the near Universe

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FÉDÉRALE DE LAUSANNE

For most of us, the countless bright spots in the nighttime sky all seem to be stars. But in fact, some of those spots are actually planets, or distant suns, or even entire galaxies located billions of light years away. Just what you’re looking at depends on how far it is from Earth. That’s why measuring the exact distance to celestial objects is such an important goal for astronomers – and one of the biggest challenges they’re currently tackling.

It was with this in mind that the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Gaia mission ten years ago. Data collected by the Gaia satellite are opening up a window into the near Universe, providing astronomic measurements – such as position, distance from the Earth and movement – on nearly two billion stars.

At EPFL, the Standard Candles and Distances research group headed by Prof. Richard Anderson is aiming to measure the current expansion of the Universe and sees Gaia as a valuable tool. “Gaia increased by a factor of 10,000 the number of stars whose parallaxes are measured thanks to a massive gain in accuracy over its predecessor, the ESA Hipparcos mission,” he says. Today, scientists use parallaxes to calculate the distance to stars. This method involves measuring parallax angles, with the help of the satellite, through a form of triangulation between Gaia’s location in space, the Sun and the star in question. The farther away a star, the more difficult the measurement because parallax gets smaller the larger the distance.

Despite the resounding success of Gaia, the measurement of parallax is complex, and there remain small systematic effects that must be checked and corrected in order for Gaia parallaxes to reach their full potential. This is what scientists from EPFL and the University of Bologna, in Italy, have been working on, through calculations performed on over 12,000 oscillating red giant stars* – the biggest sample size and most accurate measurements to date.

“We measured the Gaia biases by comparing the parallaxes reported by the satellite with parallaxes of the same stars that we determined using asteroseismology,” says Saniya Khan, a scientist in Anderson’s research group and the lead author of a study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Stellar earthquakes

In the same way that geologists study the Earth’s structure using earthquakes, astronomers use asteroseismology, and specifically stars’ vibrations and oscillations, to glean information about their physical properties. Stellar oscillations are measured as tiny variations in light intensity and translated into sound waves, giving rise to a frequency spectrum of these oscillations.

“The frequency spectrum lets us determine how far away a star is, enabling us to obtain asteroseismic parallaxes,” says Khan. “In our study, we listened to the ‘music’ of a vast number of stars – some of them 15,000 light-years away!”

To turn sounds into distance measurements, the research team started with a simple fact. The speed with which sound waves propagate across space depends on the temperature and density of the star’s interior. “By analyzing the frequency spectrum of stellar oscillations, we can estimate the size of a star, much like you can identify the size of a musical instrument by the kind of sound it makes – think of the difference in pitch between a violon and a cello,” says Andrea Miglio, a full professor at the University of Bologna’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and the study’s third author.

Sophisticated analyses

Having thus calculated a star’s size, the astronomers then determined its luminosity and compared this figure to the luminosity perceived here on Earth. They coupled this information with temperature and chemical-composition readings obtained from spectroscopy and ran these data through sophisticated analyses to calculate the distance to the star. Finally, the astronomers compared the parallaxes obtained in this process with those reported by Gaia in order to check the accuracy of the satellite’s measurements.

“Asteroseismology is the only way we can check Gaia’s parallax accuracy across the full sky – that is, for both low- and high-intensity stars,” says Anderson. And the future of this field is bright, as Khan outlines:

“Upcoming space missions like TESS and PLATO intended to detect and survey exoplanets will employ asteroseismology and deliver the required datasets across increasingly large regions of the sky. Methods similar to ours will therefore play a crucial role in improving Gaia's parallax measurements, which will help us pinpoint our place in the Universe and benefit a plethora of subfields of astronomy and astrophysics.”

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JOURNAL

Astronomy and Astrophysics

DOI

10.1051/0004-6361/202347919 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Scientists measure the distance to stars by their music

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Dec-2023