Shipping
If you were shipping, say... a cargo container of pineapples from Hawaii to Poland, you would probably want to know what was happening to those pineapples along the way. For instance, were they allowed to get too hot or too cold? Did they clear customs? Did they follow the planned route? Using wireless radio frequency identification sensors recently developed at Spain’s Public University of Navarre (UPNA ), you could know all these things and more, in real time. Read More
Ships are big polluters and one of the key reasons for this is the energy lost due to friction as they move through the water. Numerous innovations in marine paint technology have sought to address this issue and now a group of German material research scientists have unlocked a secret that could radically improve fuel consumption... and it's all down to the marvelous properties of one small plant. Read More
Brighter, whiter clouds could fight global warming
Scientists in the US have been cloud-spotting over shipping lanes and have noticed something more interesting than teddy-bear shapes and faces. They have detected that rising steam from passing ships has caused brightening in the clouds which they theorize alters the reflectivity of the cloud and prevents the energy from reaching the Earth. They propose that if this could be achieved artificially via geoengineering it could be an effective defense against global warming. Read More
It’s just over 50 years since the shipping container took its first trip. Though it has changed little in the subsequent half century, standardised containerisation has dramatically reduced global transportation costs and supercharged international trade. Containerisation remains a beacon of efficiency only because it exists within the obscenely inefficient, environmentally irresponsible and otherwise resistant-to-change shipping industry. Now a new collapsible composite container is being trialled which is ingeniously more efficient, lighter, cheaper, more easily trackable, more accountable in terms of its contents and more environmentally-friendly. Despite a raft of advantages, it might not go into service because ... Read More
