In tropical cities, afternoon thunderstorms can plunge entire neighborhoods into brief moments of darkness. 

When civil engineer Markus Schläpfer moved to Singapore a decade ago, he recognized these thunderstorms as an emerging engineering challenge. For cities that hope to run on solar energy, these short periods without strong sunlight could destabilize urban power grids and undermine reliability.

In a new paper, published April 7 in Nature Communications,  Schläpfer and collaborators explain how tropical cities, which will soon contain half of the global population, can address this problem without expensive infrastructure build-outs. For Schläpfer, the solution lies in connecting electric vehicles to the grid. 

"If you have a thunderstorm moving over an area with solar energy, you can have your electric cars that are parked serve as the energy source and balance out this lack of energy generation," said Schläpfer, assistant professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia Engineering. “When the thunderstorm moves away, the cars are charged again by the photovoltaics.”

Climate change may reduce yields of crops like corn and soybeans, but it can also give some plants an edge. That’s one of the takeaways of a recent study of tall goldenrod, a common wildflower that runs rampant in fields across North America and other parts of the world. New research suggests that climate change can offset some of the harmful effects of tiny insects that use goldenrod as a nursery for their hungry larvae.

Researchers have demonstrated a new class of low-cost, scalable sensors that can be used to monitor electrical activity in human cerebral organoids. Because electrical signals are key to understanding brain function, this advance facilitates research into both neurodevelopment and genetic disorders such as Angelman syndrome.

Researchers from the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the Florida Center for Advanced Aero-Propulsion, or FCAAP, are helping to solve a safety challenge in military aviation: the extreme noise generated by supersonic jets during takeoff and landing.

The research, published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, demonstrates a new model for understanding how supersonic jets of air collide with the ground or other structures to create a resonant feedback loop that produces extreme noise that can reach dangerous volume levels.