Hey there, in today’s weekly roundup, we find out how a college dining hall makes a dent when it comes to climate change. Jill Horst, the director of residential dining services at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says they stopped using trays in their dining hall.
"It just overall was this big, huge impact. The food waste per person, per tray, reduced by 50 percent. That’s a lot! That’s a significant impact to help with not only the food waste, but food cost."
Psychology was definitely at play here, as people naturally want to load up a large tray with food, so by removing it, people were carrying their food to the table and their portions adjusted accordingly. Next, as we’re about to hit the triple digits this weekend in parts of the Bay Area, we spoke to Ronnen Levinson, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has been studying how lighter, more reflective pavements lessen the phenomenon called ‘urban heat islands’, where dark-colored roads and buildings bring a city’s air temperature up. But in a new study, Levinson found there are some trade-offs.
"We found that in many cases, switching to a more reflective pavement technology for example, a light grey cement concrete pavement in place of a black asphalt concrete pavement, requires much more energy and carbon."
So Levinson suggests that city officials bear this in mind when choosing pavements. Meanwhile, at another national lab – this time, the Livermore Lab – computer scientists describe a tool they’ve developed to improve the computer network security of government agencies, along with state and local agencies. Domingo Colon says their network mapping system called NeMS, gives network managers a comprehensive view of their computer network environments.
"So there are a lot of tools out there that provide different vantage points of network security, but what we needed was something a lot more specific that told us behaviorially what’s happening on our network, and also structurally, how is the composition of our network put together at any point in time. These things provide what’s called “attack surface” for someone from the external world and what you want, as an enterprise, is to reduce that surface."
Well, that’s it for now. You can hear these full episodes and more by subscribing to Science Today on iTunes or following us on Soundcloud. Thanks for tuning in; I’m Larissa Branin.
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Stories mentioned in this roundup:
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/trayless_dining
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/reflective_pavement
https://soundcloud.com/sciencetoday/computer_networks
