A Malaysia airlines plane parked at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, Malaysia, Monday, June 24, 2024. Malaysia Airlines says one of its plane en route to Bangkok made a U-turn back to Kuala Lumpur International Airport after experiencing a “pressurization issue.” Credit: AP Photo/Vincent Thian
A Korean Air flight to Taiwan was forced to return to Incheon airport west of Seoul after a sudden depressurization on the plane, a Boeing 737 Max 8, the transport ministry said Tuesday.
The ministry said 19 of the 133 people aboard the flight Saturday were sent to hospitals due to ear pain and nosebleeds, but none suffered serious injuries.
The airline and the ministry said the cause of the problem was under investigation. The aircraft was grounded and the ministry ordered South Korea’s 11 airlines to examine pressurization systems in all their 400 aircraft.
The sudden depressurization occurred about 50 minutes after the flight’s departure.
Separately, Malaysia Airlines said one of its flights en route to Bangkok on Monday made a U-turn back to Kuala Lumpur after the Airbus A-330 experienced a “pressurization issue.”
Malaysia Airlines said its pilots initiated an emergency descent even though the aircraft had not reached the altitude of 8,000 feet and oxygen masks were not deployed. Flight MH780 was carrying 164 passengers and 12 crew members.
An investigation was underway.
The 737 Max has a troubled history. After Max jets crashed in 2018 in Indonesia and 2019 in Ethiopia, killing 346 people, the FAA and other regulators grounded the aircraft worldwide for more than a year and a half.
Concerns over the company’s best-selling commercial aircraft were renewed after a panel blew out of a 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. No one was seriously injured in the incident.
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Korean Air, Malaysia Airlines flights disrupted by pressurization problems (2024, June 25)
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Greener sensors, circuit boards and other electronic devices are being developed by EU researchers to reduce unsustainably high levels of e-waste.
To develop eco-friendly electronics such as sensors and circuit boards, Dr. Valerio Beni is following the paper trail—literally.
An expert in green chemistry at Swedish research institute RISE, Beni has switched his focus to wood from pulp in a bid to make consumer electronic devices that have no carbon footprint and are easier to recycle.
In the woodwork
He and his colleagues discovered that producing pulp and turning it into paper for a new generation of electronics required burning too much energy for the effort to be as environmentally friendly as they had hoped.
“So we thought, why don’t we take a step back and go to the initial material for making paper?” said Beni. “That is wood.”
He leads a research project to explore ways to make consumer electronics with wood-based materials.
Called HyPELignum, the project runs for four years through September 2026 and brings together research institutes, a university and industry representatives from Austria, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain.
The life cycles of current electronics are unsustainable. In addition to the energy and raw materials needed for production, the gadgets result in mountains of waste once they get discarded.
In 2022, the world generated a record 62 billion metric tons of e-waste—or 7.8 kilograms per person—with Europe producing 17.6 billion metric tons, more than any other region, according to United Nations data.
That worldwide mountain has almost doubled from 34 billion metric tons in 2010 and is projected to increase to 82 billion metric tons by 2030.
In addition to growing fast, e-waste is complex to manage, according to the UN. In 2022, only about a fifth of global e-waste was recycled—although Europe fared better by recycling around 43%.
Better boards
Circuit boards are the main component of e-waste.
As much as 60% of the environmental impact of electronics is caused by a device’s circuit board, according to Beni.
The boards are a layered matrix of materials—usually resins, plastics and copper, which are hard to recycle. They’re etched to imprint metal circuits, onto which electronic components can be soldered.
As an alternative, the HyPELignum team is developing two types of wooden circuit board.
One is made of thin layers of wood, a bit like plywood. The other is constructed from cellulose fibers extracted from wood and wood waste.
“The idea is to try and replace some of the high carbon-intensive materials in electronics with low carbon-intensive material,” Beni said.
The circuits are printed—rather than etched—onto the wooden boards using conductive metal inks developed by the project. These inks also contain cellulose and bio-based plastics produced from wood.
At the end of their life, the wooden boards should be easier to recycle than traditional circuit boards. It might even be possible to compost them.
New layers
A key challenge with recycling electronics is separating the components from the circuit boards.
To tackle this, the HyPELignum researchers are developing thermally and chemically degradable layers that can be placed between the wood and the printed circuits.
When these are destroyed at the end of a product’s life, the circuits and electrical components fall off the wood. The wooden board and the mainly metal circuit and components can then be sent to different recycling streams.
Furthermore, the degradable layers are also derived from wood. The project has been producing them from lignin extracted from wood waste.
Such “green chemistry” emits much less carbon dioxide (CO2) by featuring biogenic materials that can be renewed rather than fossil oil, according to Beni.
“Wood and biogenic materials are more or less zero in terms of CO2 impact,” he said. “They absorb CO2 to grow and then they release the same CO2 when used.”
More and more
The global population’s ever-increasing appetite for digital devices is driving the need for greener versions, according to Dr. Corne Rentrop, an expert in electronics and sustainable production at Dutch research organization TNO.
“We want more data, we want more connectivity, we want to have internet everywhere, so the amount of electronics needed to equip that is growing constantly,” Rentrop said.
At the same time, the lifetime of electronics is decreasing.
“If you look at your electronic devices, they last for four to five years,” Rentrop said. “That is basically it.”
He leads a separate project to reduce the carbon footprint of electronic-device production and improve recycling.
Called ECOTRON, it runs for four years through August 2026 and has a range of participants from Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.
Flexible films
Like its HyPELignum counterpart, the ECOTRON team is seeking to replace traditional circuit boards with ones made from renewable materials.
“We can be more sustainable because the process requires less energy than producing standard circuit boards,” Rentrop said.
But instead of wood, he and his colleagues are creating flexible films from materials like bio-based plastics and paper.
At the end of their life, bioplastic boards could be melted and recycled—and maybe even composted.
“Compostable electronics would be fantastic,” Rentrop said. “Paper is of course a compostable material, but the inks and the electrical components are not.”
To overcome this hurdle, the project is developing reversible interconnects that can be triggered to release the electrical components.
Company cases
The ECOTRON researchers are taking existing products and working to replace them with more sustainable electronics.
A Finnish company named Polar Electro, which makes devices that monitor fitness and athletic training, is participating in an effort to produce a wearable chest strap that measures a person’s heart rate.
The project has replaced an existing Polar Electro chest strap with a bio-based version whose performance is comparable, according to Rentrop.
Working with pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson, the team is developing smart stickers that contain temperature loggers for vaccine packages.
Health care professionals administering vaccines can access this temperature data using a handheld device such as a smartphone to check that each dose has been stored properly.
In this case, the researchers are working with paper, producing devices that can be recycled.
“We are making an electronic device which is regarded as paper,” Rentrop said. “This is recycling by design.”
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Greener electronics being developed to reduce unsustainably high levels of e-waste (2024, June 14)
retrieved 25 June 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-06-greener-electronics-unsustainably-high.html
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If you’re in some spots in Biscayne Bay during the weekend, you might be greeted with an unpleasant sight: dead fish floating on the surface.
That’s the unfortunate aftermath of the relentless rain that South Florida experienced last week—and a reminder of much larger fish kills that have plagued Biscayne Bay in the past few years.
The damage this time seems limited. About 2,000 fish were estimated dead in northern Biscayne Bay, with reports from Morningside to North Bay Village and up to 95th Street. The victims were mostly toadfish, a small species that lives on the bottom in shallow coastal areas that tend to be most dangerous for fish, according to Miami Waterkeeper, a clean-water advocacy group.
Biscayne Bay is no stranger to fish kills. Since 2020, the bay has experienced at least four fish kills. Miami Waterkeeper said the recent heavy rain was likely to blame for the latest one. The surge of freshwater flowing into the bay lowers salinity, which can drive off or even kill some fish.
Little River, which empties into the bay, is one of the county’s most polluted waterways and has been overflowing with storm water since June 11, according to Miami Waterkeeper.
“The freshwater anoxic flow originating from the Little River and Biscayne Canal likely contributed to the conditions that have led to the fish deaths. It’s important to note that there are salinity-control structures in place that release freshwater into the affected area to alleviate flooding and lower the groundwater levels,” said Adriana González Fernández, Miami Waterkeeper’s science and research director.
The Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department said there were several wastewater flows across the region caused by the storms but none made direct contact with surface water. But runoff carries pollutants and animal waste that aren’t helping fish either.
“After storms and flooding, residents should generally expect an increase in pollutants such as bacteria, sediment, chemicals and debris in waterways,” Fernández said. “The safety of waterways after storms can vary depending on the severity of the event and the area affected.”
On one of the days of heaviest rains, June 12, Miami Waterkeeper tested South Florida areas, including Little River, for enterococci, a bacteria that is an indicator of human waste, and found that all water they tested was unsuitable for recreational use. It’s not necessarily always a result of storms, but it definitely can be influenced by them, she said.
Miami-Dade Chief Bay and Water Resources Officer Loren Parra told WPLG-ABC 10 that she was “devastated to see these reports, certainly so early in the rainy season.”
The station shot video of dozens of dead fish floating among debris in murky water in the bay on June 18—days after the region was swamped by up to 20 inches of rain in spots, including Northeast Miami-Dade.
Climate change isn’t helping either. South Florida had a string of fish kills last summer, which was the hottest on record. Researchers blamed it on rising temperatures, which can reduce oxygen in the water and trigger algae blooms that do the same. Climate scientists say It also can turn storm systems wetter.
“Changing climates, characterized by more intense and frequent rain events in South Florida, might exacerbate these fish-kill incidents,” Fernández said. “This trend suggests that such fish kills may become more frequent unless significant climate-mitigation efforts are undertaken.”
2024 Miami Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Citation:
Fish kill reported in Biscayne Bay: Waterkeeper blames it on heavy rain (2024, June 24)
retrieved 25 June 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-06-fish-biscayne-bay-waterkeeper-blames.html
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Imagine walking down the aisle of your local grocery store. The scent of mixed herbs catches your attention, mentally transporting you to a kitchen filled with the aroma of your favorite home-cooked meal.
Suddenly, you’re craving hearty minestrone soup or yearning for homemade beef lasagna. In an instant, your plans for dinner—and your shopping list—change.
This sensory experience is not a new phenomenon. Using scent to sell in retail stores is a well-established strategy. But our new research has found introducing a herbal scent (such as thyme, rosemary, oregano and basil) in supermarkets can encourage shoppers to select and purchase more wholesome foods.
Scents such as rose maroc (considered “masculine”) and vanilla (deemed “feminine”) have been shown to influence shopping behaviors toward gender-specific clothing.
Understanding the influence of certain smells isn’t just about boosting sales. Supermarkets play a pivotal role in shaping food choices. Using scent strategies to nudge consumers toward more wholesome food options is an under-explored opportunity to improve public health outcomes.
So, can the right smell increase choice and sales of nutritious wholesome foods?
Understanding the effect of herbs
Our research was broken into three parts—experiments in the laboratory, field study and online surveys.
We invited participants into our sensory laboratory at Auckland University of Technology. Each person was exposed to the smell of mixed herbs while shopping in a virtual supermarket. Shoppers purchased more wholesome baskets of goods when exposed to the herbal smell compared to the non-herbal smell (baked goods).
For every $155 spent, shoppers exposed to herbal smells bought three more wholefood items compared to those who were given non-herbal scents.
To test if those effects also occurred in-store, we collaborated with a New Zealand supermarket retailer to run a field study. We diffused a herbal scent in two stores and found shoppers exposed to the scent purchased more wholesome fresh food items than those not exposed to any scent.
We also wanted to understand the extent to which scent can influence wholesome food choices. Is the effect of smell strong even if consumers simply imagine the scent? The answer is yes.
In an online survey, we asked participants to imagine walking into their local supermarket and noticing the smell of mixed herbs. Those who imagined the herbal scent showed a stronger desire to buy ingredients for a homemade herb-rich pasta sauce and fresh ingredients for beef stew compared to those imagining no scent.
The research shows smells have the power to help us make better choices at the supermarket—even when they are only imagined.
Why does smell influence choices?
Scent marketing influences human emotions, memories and motivations. This is largely due to the direct link between the olfactory system from our noses and the limbic system—the part of the brain responsible for memory and behavioral responses.
When odors are processed and retrieved, they can activate associations with sensory knowledge, leading to important changes in our behavior. This is fascinating to think about. Past research shows that when participants were exposed to a citrus scent, it triggered cleaning behavior.
That led to more people in the study smelling citrus, and then doing more of the cleaning up after an eating task—compared to participants who didn’t smell citrus.
When it comes to food, participants primed with a fruity scent (like melon and pear) had thoughts about fruit and vegetables, and were more likely to pick starters and desserts with vegetables and fruit.
Our research shows these associations (herbs and Sunday roast, for instance) can drive food choices in supermarkets.
The mere act of smelling or imagining a herbal scent stimulates memories of cooking and eating home-cooked meals prepared from fresh ingredients. We found the association with home-cooking then stimulates a desire to choose and purchase related wholefoods rather than more processed foods.
Whether New Zealand retailers adopt artificial scents to nudge consumers toward more wholesome foods remains to be seen. But the potential for improving food choices, and by extension public health, is significant.
Citation:
Dollars and scents: How the right smells can encourage shoppers to buy healthier foods (2024, June 25)
retrieved 25 June 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-06-dollars-scents-shoppers-buy-healthier.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
![Korean Air, Malaysia Airlines flights disrupted by pressurization problems](https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/800a/2024/korean-air-malaysia-ai.jpg "A Malaysia airlines plane parked at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, Malaysia, Monday, June 24, 2024. Malaysia Airlines says one of its plane en route to Bangkok made a U-turn back to Kuala Lumpur International Airport after experiencing a "pressurization issue." Credit: AP Photo/Vincent Thian")
