At 'America First Energy Conference', solar power is dumb, climate change is fake
These are among the messages that flowed from the America First Energy Conference in New Orleans this week, hosted by some of the country’s most vocal climate change doubters - and attended by a handful of Trump administration officials.
The second annual conference, organized by the conservative thinktank the Heartland Institute, pulled together speakers from JunkScience, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Center For Industrial Progress, along with officials from the U.S. Department of Interior and the White House for panels that included: “Carbon Taxes, Cap & Trade, and Other Bad Ideas,” “Fiduciary Malpractice: The Sustainable Investment Movement,” and “Why CO2 Emissions Are Not Creating A Climate Crisis.”


The day-long conference reflected the political rise of global warming skeptics in Donald Trump’s America that is occurring despite mounting scientific evidence – including from U.S. government agencies - that burning oil, coal, and natural gas is heating the planet and leading to drought, floods, wildfires, and more frequent powerful storms.
A similar conference blasting the link between fossil fuels and climate change last year drew then-Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, who was appointed by Trump to reverse Obama-era climate initiatives and roll back regulation hindering drillers and miners but who has since resigned in a flurry of ethical controversies.
The U.S. officials who joined included White House Special Assistant Brooke Rollins, Interior Department Assistant Secretary Joe Balash, and Jason Funes, an assistant in the office of external affairs at Interior. They praised the administration’s moves to clear the way for oil industry activity, and steered clear of commenting on climate change.
But their presence gave climate change doubters at the conference a boost: “It’s a step in the right direction,” said self-described climate change doubter Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama, referring to the U.S. officials in attendance.

In an email, Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift said department officials “speak at thousands of conferences every year and share ideas with a diverse group of individuals.” A White House spokesperson did not immediately comment.
Tim Huelskamp, president and CEO of the Heartland Institute, said the views presented at the conference – once on the fringes of U.S. politics – would be proven right.
“The leftist claims about sea level rise are overblown, overstated or frankly just wrong,” he said in an interview. Regarding the United Nations’ findings on climate change, he said it was “fake science” motivated by a desire for “power and control.”
“COMING SOON”
Evidence of sea level rise, however, is strewn across the state that hosted the conference.
New Orleans has been ravaged repeatedly by hurricanes that scientists say will become stronger and more frequent due to climate change. And the rest of Louisiana is losing coastline at one of the fastest rates on the planet due to sea level rise and encroaching industry, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
“It’s a nice world they live in,” said Steve Cochran, campaign director of Restore the Mississippi River Delta, an environmental consortium involved in coastal restoration programs, referring to the attendees of the America First Energy Conference. “It’s not the world we live in.”
The Governor’s Office of Louisiana, a state that has earmarked tens of billions of dollars to fend off coastal erosion and relocate a Native American tribe from a sinking offshore island, did not respond to requests for comment about the conference.

WRITTEN BY DH

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Exclusive: U.S. Army forms plan to test 40,000 homes for lead following Reuters report

The inspection program, if implemented, would begin quickly and prioritize thousands of Army post homes occupied by small children, who are most vulnerable to lead exposure. Ingesting the heavy metal can stunt brain development and cause lifelong health impacts.
The lead inspections would cost up to $386 million and target pre-1978 homes to identify deteriorating lead-based paint and leaded dust, water or soil, according to the military documents.
A draft Army Execution Order says the program’s mission is to mitigate all identified lead hazards in Army post homes in the United States. In homes where dangers are detected, the Army would offer soldiers’ families “temporary or permanent relocation” to housing safe from lead hazards, it says.
The Army's mobilization comes after Reuters published an investigation on August 16 describing lead paint poisoning hazards in privatized military base homes. It documented at least 1,050 small children who tested high for lead at base clinics in recent years. Their results often weren't being reported to state health authorities as required, Reuters found.
Behind the numbers were injured families, including that of a decorated Army colonel, J. Cale Brown, whose son JC was poisoned by lead while living at Fort Benning, in Georgia.
The article drew a quick response from lawmakers, with eight U.S. senators demanding action to protect military families living in base housing.
Read Reuters' reports exposing the hidden hazards of lead poisoning across America.
The Army’s planned response is laid out in military documents, including the draft Execution Order, minutes from a private meeting attended by top Army brass, and other materials.
One priority, detailed by Under Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy in an August 22 meeting, is for the military’s response to counter any sense “that we … are not taking care of children of Soldiers and are not taking appropriate action quickly enough,” meeting minutes say. “The Army will remain focused on the actions to assess, inspect, and mitigate risks to Soldiers and Families,” the minutes say, citing McCarthy and Vice Chief of Staff General James C. McConville.
Army spokeswoman Colonel Kathleen Turner acknowledged plans are being formulated but said no decisions have been made. “Out of an abundance of caution, we are going above and beyond current requirements to ensure the safety of our soldiers and their families who work and live on all of our installations,” Turner said in a statement. “We are currently evaluating all options to address these concerns.”
Old lead-based paint becomes a poisoning hazard when it deteriorates, and poor maintenance of military base homes can leave legions at risk. About 30 percent of service families – including some 100,000 small children – live in U.S. military housing owned and operated by private companies in business with the military.
There are nearly 100,000 homes on U.S. Army bases, and the lead inspections are expected to focus on the approximately 40,000 built before a 1978 U.S. ban on the sale of lead paint.
The plans depart from guidance that appeared on the Army Public Health Center's website as recently as last week, which "discouraged" lead-based paint inspections in Army homes. The website has since been updated and omits that language.
Under the plans, the documents show, the Army would:
- Inspect all pre-1978 Army family housing units nationwide, including visual lead-based paint assessments by certified personnel, swipe-testing for toxic lead paint dust, and testing of tap water. Some homes will also receive soil testing. This phase alone, described as “near term actions,” will cost between $328 million to $386 million, the Army’s Installation Services director estimated.
- Temporarily or permanently relocate families when hazards are found. “If a Family or Soldier are concerned with potential negative impacts from lead; the U.S. Army will offer them a chance to relocate to a new residence,” the documents say. “We must do everything we can to maintain that trust.”
- Conduct town hall meetings on Army posts to address residents’ lead concerns. The Army intends to do so with “empathy,” the meeting minutes say. “Tone is key and can be just as important as the actions we take.”

written by Dhon

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Quantum complications

While we grapple with data safety in the computing systems that we already use, other scientists are developing technology that could completely transform the field of data security for the devices of tomorrow. In contrast to ordinary computers whose logical ‘bits’ can only take values of 0 or 1, quantum computers use ‘qubits’ that can have values of 0, 1 or a combination of both values. This capability opens up an entirely new domain of logic and mathematics, allowing quantum computers to solve complex problems in a fraction of the time it would take a conventional machine. This revolution will arrive with great benefits, but will bring its own problems, as Leonid Krivitsky at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute explains:
“Many cryptography systems rely on hard problems such as prime factorization — the fact that it is very difficult to figure out the prime factors of a given number. However, theoretical work has shown that the factorization problem could be solved very quickly using a quantum computer. So, once a universal quantum computer is built, it could hack ciphers which were previously thought to be unbreakable.”
This might seem alarming, but there is no reason to panic. Functional quantum computers are still a long way off, and to counteract the potential threats, many groups around the world are contributing to the growing field of quantum cryptography, which will redefine our protocols of secure communication. In fact, the new cryptography algorithms made available by quantum computers could provide ultra-high data security long before any risks become a concern.
“I foresee the use of a quantum communication channel as a backup resource for highly sensitive transactions, where security is more important than the transmission speed,” says Krivitsky.
For now, though, the challenge is to physically build a stable quantum computer. Krivitsky and co-workers are exploring the possibility of using tiny defects in synthetic diamonds to act as nodes which process and store quantum information.
“We place several diamonds on a single chip and communicate with optical links, similar to those which form the background of the internet,” says Krivitsky. “Our innovations will enable transmission of quantum information over long distances and contribute to the development of a worldwide quantum network.”
Safeguarding the future
The task of keeping our data secure is clearly a complicated and interdisciplinary challenge. A*STAR researchers are not only developing new technical initiatives, but also working at the forefront of global efforts to raise awareness of data security. By looking for chinks in the armor of global systems like GSM and cloud storage, educating the public about the commercial value of their data, and planning for the future paradigm shift that might be brought about by quantum computers, it is reassuring to know that the brightest minds at A*STAR are focused on keeping our data safe.

WRITTEN BY SABRN

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SKYRMIONS
   Given the exponential consumption of information in society today, there is a growing need for high density memory devices. These data system technologies will require high-density, non-volatile memory (NVM) cells with instantaneous access and energy-efficient readout.
Magnetic skyrmions represent a promising alternative as they can bring down the size of the memory devices to below 10nm. The properties of magnetic skyrmions have tremendous potential in realising future high-density and energy-efficient NVM as well as magnetic logic devices.
SABRN

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DIELECTRIC NANOANTENNAS

   Plasmonics appeared more than a decade ago as a new research direction with high potential for future industrial applications. However, plasmonic materials are not compatible with Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology and experience strong energy losses in the optical spectral range. This strongly limits their real-world application.

In the Dielectric Nanoantennas Pharos Programme, we are working on the development of dielectric and semiconductor nanostructures as a substitute for plasmonics for various optoelectronics applications. A unique advantage of these dielectric and semiconductor nanostructures is that they are almost loss-free and possess strong resonant behaviour at optical frequencies similar to plasmonic nanostructures.

written by sabin

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ELECTRONICS

The Electronics Cluster promotes R&D and innovation to support the Data Systems Technologies, and Semiconductor sectors. With the growth of Big Data and the opportunities going beyond Moore’s Law (“More-than-Moore”), there are many new exciting opportunities to be explored in the electronics field in the years to come. We seed and build up a suite of competitive capabilities within our research community that will be relevant to the local and global electronics industry. These capabilities include advanced packaging, sensors and actuators, memory devices, nanophotonics etc.

The upstream programmes launched under the Electronics Cluster can be categorized under Dielectric Nanoantennas and Skyrmions.

written by Sabina

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Frequency fingerprints increase crime-fighting powerAudio and video recordings are important sources of evidence in criminal investigations, especially as more electronic devices are in use now than ever before. However, for recordings to be admissible, investigators often need to determine the time they were made, which can be difficult. Now, a team led by Vrizlynn Thing at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), in collaboration with the Singapore Police Force, has developed an impressive new system that reliably estimates the time of recordings by identifying small fluctuations in the frequency of the electrical power grid.The ‘electrical network frequency’ (ENF) of power grids is centered around 50 or 60 Hertz, and is picked up in audio recordings as a background hum. The ENF shifts up and down randomly, which provides each recording with a unique fingerprint that can be compared to the long-term records captured continuously and maintained at forensic labs.“The random fluctuations are consistent across different places within the same power grid,” explains team member Lilei Zheng. “As a consequence, recordings captured in different places at the same time will have ENF fingerprints showing the same fluctuations.”By visually inspecting the ENF, human investigators can reliably match recorded fluctuations to a time in the long-term records, but this is a laborious task best done by a computer. In response, the I2R team developed a similarity criterion called bitwise similarity (bSim) that mimics the way humans judge the similarity of two signals.The team tested bSim by using it to identify the timing of 187 audio recordings made around Singapore using various mobile phones.They found that bSim greatly outperformed previous similarity metrics, which were thrown into doubt by small deviations even when the general shapes of the signals were clearly similar. “bSim enables us to focus our attention on the overlapped parts instead of being drawn away by the deviated parts,” says Zheng.WRITTEN By DH DH

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