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The signage is an emblem of the former resort destination’s decline. In the 1950s and ’60s, vacationers flocked to the Golden State’s largest lake for water sports, outdoor recreation and entertainment by the likes of Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys.

Today, the sea is shrinking, exposing areas of dusty lake bed, or playa, at its edges. The shoreline is crowded not with sunbathers but with thousands of hay bales — part of a strategy to reduce windblown dust from the playa that sickens nearby residents.

Fish bones and barnacle shells crunch underfoot. The sea’s increasing salinity and toxic runoff from the region’s agricultural industry have devastated marine life and made the water unsafe for human recreation. On hot, humid days, when the sea releases hydrogen sulfide gas, a “rotten egg” stink permeates the air.

In towns adjacent to the sea, where a resort “riviera” was once envisioned, run-down mobile home communities are signs of profound economic despair among the predominantly Latino community. Poverty and unemployment rates in the area exceed state averages. Opportunities beyond low-wage, seasonal work at local farms — which supply up to two-thirds of the United States’ winter fruits and vegetables — are few.

Yet approximately a mile below the surface of the Salton Sea’s south shore area lies a resource so sought-after that it has the potential to radically transform the area’s fortunes, the sea’s health — and the country’s electric future…

Continue reading the full article in USC Trojan Family Magazine

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The scorcher is just one example of how heat waves are becoming more intense and longer lasting due to global warming. By 2050, nearly half the world may live in areas where the mercury rises to dangerously high levels for at least a month each year, threatening human health and ways of life.

In warm regions, demand for air conditioning is on the rise. The number of A/C units is estimated to reach 5.6 billion globally by 2050, up from around 2 billion units today. But populations without the means to obtain and maintain these costly systems will be left out in the cold — or, rather, heat.

Traditional vapor-compressor air conditioners also have considerable environmental costs. They are energy guzzlers, and if fossil fuels are burned to obtain that energy, more planet-warming emissions are released into the air. The toxic refrigerants many of these systems rely on are also potent greenhouse gases that can leak into the atmosphere.

In its current form, A/C is no panacea for beating the climate-change heat. But how else can we keep cool?

The most promising solutions on the horizon leverage technology — some of it cutting-edge, some of it downright ancient…

Continue reading the full article in USC Dornsife Magazine

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Imagine you wanted to plug a device into an outlet on your wall, but you didn’t have a cord that reached all the way. Instead, all you had were short snippets of wire that, put together, weren’t enough to cover the distance between the device and the wall. Say you spread them out so they weren’t touching each other but traced a dotted line that spanned the whole distance. How would you overcome the gaps between the snippets to get electricity flowing?

According to scientist Moh El-Naggar, that’s a conundrum that the Shewanella oneidensis species of bacteria faces for its very existence. He and his team at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences think they’ve discovered how the bacteria have solved it.

These single-celled organisms are known as “electric bacteria” because transferring electrons from their cell interiors to the external surfaces where they live — such as rocks deep underneath the Earth’s surface — is fundamental to their survival. Similar to how humans transfer electrons to oxygen inhaled in the lungs, the bacteria must pass electrons to the outside world in order to “breathe.”

Over the past decade, El-Naggar and his interdisciplinary team have been studying how the bacteria are able to reach into their external environment and get charge to flow across long distances — at least “long” for microbes whose length is a hundred times shorter than the width of a human hair.

Their paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the first to reveal the “molecular dance” that allows the bacteria to get this electronic job done without a continuous “wire” …

Continue reading the full article in USC Dornsife News

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