the thoughts we say they're about never getting up every weekend on the double, you know what days we shop online, watch movies online work online. digitalization is everywhere. making our lives easier. but it needs energy. a lot of energy. today's data centers and clouds gobble up around 3 percent of the electricity produced globally and consume more every year. so digitalization is not really sustainable or is it? digital technologies also help us protect the environment and slow climate change.

these questions and much more this week on dw science show. welcome to tomorrow. today, the 2 months on top of the sunny state as they go to work at the institute for ecological economy research in berlin. we meet them at the cities museum of technology, which is home to an exhibition called the network about the history of modern communication. analog systems have given way to digital. once the birth of the internet drove digitalization forward at a frenetic pace, and that's impacted the environment, i think you tell me 0. so it was of toys utilize ation, already accountants to 2 to 4 percent of global c. o. 2 emissions on about 10 percent of the global electricity consumption, evidently attended by research group. once kai could, i did that if the incident where a country it would rank stood world wide electricity demand after china on the us.

that's because the net is much more than just a cloud of ones and zeros in effect. sticking that to bottom line is that behind all these digital applications behind the data streams, they're also very concrete material. infrastructure is data centers, cables and of course all the devices and to get a to which are growing a number by the day. take smartphones, the majority of people have one these days and the average user buys a new phone every 3 years or so. and we're in general buying more and more devices that are meant to make our lives more intelligent, like those integrated into what are called smart homes. but just how climate friendly are those homes actually? that'd be great just to kind of show it in a connected home is with the heating energy and the smoke control certainly can count the amount of energy use sites. the english bought them by automatically reducing the temperature in unused rooms for instance. or if the heating unit

communicates with the windows. but even so overall smart homes are still under performing when it comes to saving energy until beams and fly in the one major problem is the launch number of additional pat. just devices that aren't designed to save energy, like surveillance cameras or smart tvs and speakers and this stuff hands the once you add them to the equation, the impact is no longer positive. and independence. mitch map was a teacher who bought most of the main problem with over equipping with digital devices. is that a piece of hardware is the ecological footprint is mostly dictated by its production. modest done, its useless task. more conscious consumption would help. we should try to buy fewer devices, use them for longer, and pay more attention to whether they were designed with recycling in mind. the few of us do guns, fish dish or to make devices more sustainable. it's crucial to use them longer.

that means i'm having to be built to be more robust above all, with the modular unrepairable design. some companies have to both offer software updates and provide spare thoughts over the long term. tyler uh, tyson. some campaign groups have called for a statutory right to repair an issue. the european union is looking into despite drawbacks and criticism. some applications really are helping us to live more sustainably like mobility. yeah. it's that help you get from a to be in a climate friendly way for those that enable you to trade items or buy used products instead of always purchasing new ones. streaming video is for hours on end, however, is problematic. an estimated 3 and a half 1000000000 people now regularly watch videos online. that's almost half of

the world's population. streaming streaming already account. so 60 to 70 percent of the global data. yvonne, you can transfer williams hours. one way to make streaming a bit more sustainable is to turn down the resolution, especially on smaller display fewer pixels means less power consumed in the data centers that drive the network world. and offer duke energy consumption for things like cloud computing data center. the network infrastructure is old rising rapidly in the front foot region. for example, in the cities international, apple is no longer the top consumer of energy. it's up to date as an those offices . and then, according to estimates they are now responsible for around 20 percent of the cities total power consumption to mine missing today to send his budget. and you need to become truly climate neutral. so sourcing electricity from renewable energy sources and not just selling indulgences to compensations. yeah. and to show up last time

plus funded son needed to ensure more chopping of waste heat from data center. so you know, it's good servers warm up as they work and have to be cold, but the resulting waste heat could itself be used according to the association of the internet industry by 2030, the waste heat from all of frank for its data centers would be enough to in theory heat the entire city, but in practice its potential has barely been tapped so far. the infrastructure is usually lacking. but there are a pilot projects in the works and the future waste heat from one of the city's largest data centers will be siphoned off the heat. a new housing developments. now that's a really smart use of digitalization. another smart idea is heating with water for millennia. people have used the power of moving water to grind,

green and fuel gate feels nowadays we also generate electricity with hydro power plants and one river in central germany is now being harnessed directly to heat homes. the wide else, the river, and the german state of tooling and has energy, good law hidden in its waters and not just the kind that's able to keep the wheels of this meal running. engineer inglenook has installed a heat exchanger in this channel, running through the mail. the river water is used to walnut, the mixture of brian and water flowing through pipes to provide heating. does the brian water mix from the heat pump that flows through these pipes or sometimes minus 2 degrees when it arrives? as it moves through the heat exchangers warmed up to one degree ink. and that temperature difference enables us to produce up to 60 degrees as soon as i caught the quarter til like in geothermal,

heating the brian molten mixture that's been boned by the rid of water, raise vaporized, then transported in case useful to a high efficiency heat pump these guys flies to squeeze this vapor, and this generate t t like with a bicycle air pump. so at the front it warms up when you pump. it looks well for the system to look the reasonable to con, dry up on the white l sta and upstream down guarantees a minimum flow even in dry summer's the device now installed in the river, hates the mill and the accompanying house. oh no alpha just down a isn't worried about his neck stating bill it is my house is really cozy. now if i were to heat with oil or gas, the cost is what the astronomical for me i couldn't afford it. condition is beside currently, almost everyone in this community hates with fossil fuels, but that's set to change. move or the heat exchanges already being planned. so

municipal buildings is that's where you put it right here, which is a really suitable spot like this is. the goal is for the river to one day, provide renewable energy for the entire town. and because most of the homeowners here on tuesday, i stick about the idea of the coughing we by creating a hydrogen in canada and then ship it over the ocean from belt. we have everything we need right here and stop as a poll is heating with river water, a sound sustainable alternative. we ask an independent energy expert or the succubus as part of it has some potential though it has the geographical limit as you need, rivers and lakes and consumers close to those rivers and lakes. but we need to use every available option of these, like you to look at this. so not really a game changer, maybe not put in a town 40 kilometers down stream. the technology is being applied on

a larger scale, some 1200 apartments here, it will soon be heated with river water. the setup is different. the concept behind the system remains the same dimension to your muscle as the vice and it. so here we want to take water from the river and pump pitch to the power plant that will collect it so that we have a continuous water supply. and the power plant will, she goes through the heat pump and it can be used for heating heights looking couldn't the pump from the river to the pallet line will be 250 meters long. the district hating 5 to the 1st, each of the house will stretch another 300 meters push this understood the connected piping network. we can then supply many different residential units and bundle them all together and it's been doing bones and it's that process is designed to minimize interference in the river. how they taught, the water was return to the river after bonuses extracted by the heat pump. there

are no chemicals added and no impact on existing waterway infrastructure. in theory, that makes the heating technology an option in conservation and flood protected areas to but does it make economic sense? divide the mind vickers, a greater distance from the water, means higher engineering cause, but it's more customers also sign up and it's definitely worth developing the river . these it will supply 650 house phones alone. and this housing cooperative built in the 19 sixty's the 1st pipes have already been laid to connect the homes to the future with the water heating plant. let's see, let's. this is the last remaining gap from our 1st phase of construction, your district eating pipes of already being late. and the hot water will then arrive here from the plant and be distributed through the piles of the 4 tires. for

the rooms like this, still use gas bonus, but they'll simply equipped with small connection stations for calculating data and hating needs for individual households. do you guys to talk about some of the central gas heating system also installed in the mid 19 ninety's office. and so it was clear that we needed to think about a new medium term solution. but then, given the size of our core per cent of a solution for the entire district was of course, the most effective. the engineers are also thinking ahead in the future, they want to integrate waste heat into the system into the is to bring more and more renewables into the heat map. so the system we want to implement next is a good one. we have a sewage plan. next to the rivers and sewage plants generate warm from the waste heat that accumulates the end of this, we can use it for heating and by feeding it into the network via the heat positive . what do you mean? i'm a pull the dentist inside splits. i'm surprised on one moment it's removed from

over heated rivers. they cooled down slightly. so in an era of climate change, the plants and animals that live in them could also benefit. let us read why i want to learn more about technologies that could be used to protect the environment or do you have a science question of your own then send it in is a video text or voice mail. if we answer you on here, we'll send you a little surprise as a thank you. this week's question comes from our been an in panama, warsaw condensation trails. the con trails, the artificial clouts that for them from exhausted mission by jets, they appear as long streaks in the sky when airplanes fly. it is that now to shoot . the perfect control forming zone is around 10 kilometers up in the lowest layer

of the atmosphere. all right, miss via comprises 5 layers. the know the lowest is the troposphere, which stretches 7 total matches up at the pulse and $1712.00 inches above the tropics. the temperature drops by about 6 degrees celsius, every kilometer of altitude, not the upper edge of the troposphere. it can get as cold as minus 60 degrees. ideal conditions for contrib to phone. when an across fence fuel it admits carbon dioxide and tiny particles of other compounds, but also large quantities of volts of 8 the h. 2 of these motion molecules attached to the particles and immediate a freeze in the cold to form ice crystals. the is humidity is also very high in the area. the condensation trails form he's in

foster and remain visible for longer. the composition of con trails is very similar to this of natural cirrus clouds. those have made up device crystals and on to favorable conditions they can just keep on growing. and some situations they can create streaks of clouds that have several comb inches wide. cool and con trail service clouts, these can temporarily cover up to 10 percent of the sky. and the regions that see heavy traffic research teams from various space agencies have spent is studying the effects of con trails on the climate. on the one hand cloud school, the surface by reflecting some of the sun's rays, but at the same time they prevent teach absorbed by the surface from radiation back into space. the research indicates the 2nd defective, stronger. so con trails also saw the heat pump, the atmosphere,

the over half the world's population now lives in cities by 2050. that proportion could be as high as 80 percent. but in climate terms, most cities get poor marks. there's precious little greenery on their crowded streets, which are packed with cars, exhaust fumes from vehicles together with air conditioners and heating units pollute the air. cities have an insatiable hunger for energy. could digital technologies make city smarter and in the process more energy efficient? there are many places around the world seeking to become smart city. digital innovations could help make energy supply transport and administration more efficient and cities as a whole, more livable because it doesn't automatically mean they'd be more climate friend.

like a study looking at the danish capital, copenhagen reveals that most smart city innovations bring negligible benefits. one technology, however, clearly makes environmental sense. smart grids, climate friendly power, infrastructures that will have to cope with many future challenges. what are the biggest, is that solar and wind energy are subject to natural fluctuations? we're missing these and again, we have to be able to manage these energy, use it in a that means using these energy, which we generate a different time when they're available in dawson and reducing consumption when they're not available in these. and again, it's perfect, but this is where digitalization can really come into its own. but how exactly the smart grid allows hudson and the germantown of load on mark is looking at the issue and go get on mean heads up. the project in

the energy network of the future will feature many new components if the company and their lunchroom ability will be involved along with heat pumps. so we'll have to integrate imagine new consumers into the great battery storage has grown increasingly important as we seek to make energy available around the clock. and as the ways we generate power change with more and more sources feeding into the grid, the centralized system need intelligent control, especially when energy is tight. that's the problem is he has been measured targeting problem. now, when we have the bitterly cold days, like nice in the winter in horse, i know is that heat pumps will be running an old buildings for all just if the entire street also including electric cars wants to charge up symbol tenuously. that is put, then they'll be problems with the grades this course, because the amount of electricity that has to be provided is too high for them to manage that extra dust into the internet. so in the future, smart grids could make sure that the cause of old charged sometime during the night,

but not when the electricity is available for them to function with them just out. it's about to achieve goals like this. local network stations and sub stations will have to become smarter. for example, by using digital technology to measure and evaluate voltage data. the does is updates the more than the modern kind of local good station, the busy, but sometimes we need to, if we want to see an energy transition and a truly sustainable future energy supply on the path to a sustainable society. digitalization poses some major challenges, but it can help us reach goals if we use it wisely and don't expect it to solve every problem. today's city escapes have been made possible by an incredibly versatile material concrete. back in the ancient world, the romans used it to create majestic works of architecture. now our reinforce structure stretch high into the sky,

but concrete is contributing to climate change because it's production release has lots of carbon dioxide can a new technique involving ultrasound help reduce its impact expos at this, the borrowed tree in the eastern german city of compass developing a special process to produce concrete and a climate friendly fashion. yeah, but we bombard concrete with ultrasound, ultrasound. sounds like a weird idea. the one that is develop a site will help cut the 30 percent of c o 2 emissions in concrete production. here's how it works. concrete is made of sand, gravel and water bound together by cement. cement is very bad for the climate. that's because a chemical reaction occurs during cement production to create lots of carbon dioxide according to the world wide fund for nature. so manufacturers

globally release around $3000000000.00 metric tons of the greenhouse gas every year . that's a whopping 8 percent of all human cost emissions with the figures set to rise, but as a file house university environment. christiane of us, the former doctoral students. like how do ramos develop the process that allows them to reduce how much demand goes into concrete without affecting the building material strengths. the, the trick is to treat the mixture of cement and more to with ultra sound sheesh the that is, and this is a high performance ultrasound machine, similar to the device. some people use at home to clean their glasses and just to

1000 times more powerful. so we generate the ultrasound here and via various stages . it's channeled directly into our cement water mixture and get the filter sound waves create microscopic bubbles of water vapor in the mix. when they 1st in a series of minutes of explosions, it generates extreme temperatures and precious on these ones. when these high pressures and temperatures end up accelerating the crystal forming reaction and this a managed to mole crystals in the form, the better the cement is binding. the ultrasound effect is visible under an electron microscope. the ultra sound sample to the less contains a wealth of small crystals on the conventional sample on the right. only a few launch crystal cell phones. the materials researches use the resulting cement, holt, and make sure to produce the concrete. that's what it's supposed to be mixed together

. well, it ends up with a consistency similar to a normal concrete the process is long since moved from theory into practice. a. it's inventors found that a stock of and have a quick sign to race to produce pre cast concrete elements using that method and encompass the 1st building to incorporate. ultrasound. concrete is already being built. the construction of this high speed train maintenance, whole requests 30 percent less than meant to demonstrate the quality of the concrete. what's the sense of a strength test assemblies pulled into a standard q mode to drive a 24 hours a cube of the same dimensions made of conventional concrete is also port

the next day, the assemblies clumped into the testing machine, which applies increasing pressure until the cube the crux 1st step, the conventional concrete a 1095 killer newtons. that corresponds to a load of a $100.00 tons. plus the in columbus in the concrete cube made with ultrasound technology on 30 percent less cement the shelters of a $1072.00 killer newtons. of course taking standard deviations into account. that's practically the same value. only a 2 percent measured difference in strengths of good results for the developers.

and they're already thinking about how to improve the method is in the north, we might be able to get that out there and making some and saving and 50 percent a sense to split sand about it. but right now we're happy with that. he's a 40 percent. the sports and f bomb is from the innovation from caught bush could benefit not only the climate, but the construction industry as a whole. that's because the new ultra sound method also saves more in cement bills, then it costs to implemented by the way, we're launching a new tick tock channel. and we'll take that the we on to your questions and clips that are fun, accurate into the points, but also based on the latest research one to discover even more from the world of science than follow us that dw science

that's all for this week on tamara today, the science show on dw, thanks for joining us, and see you again next time. bye for now the,

the, the specialties. so it's little unusual sized with luxury, and flavored with the types of color, mary. excellent. all the actually setting up your a to save your own mac coming up on dw the 2023 frank foot book fair

and emotional and the 2 areas. antonio, checking out with moving stories from the short list of the german book prize. we've been especially rich literary scene of this. he is guests of the country and an enrollment of a peace prize winner. in ceci minutes on d w, the day sat rubble out from g is seen in the middle of the day. dasha deacon, sasha organizing reconstruction to the new houses and

renewed us. it's getting cold. the rates of holding sign and the volunteers will winter season mission kids take nursing, rebuild stops. new vendors, dw evelyn charmaya. welcome to my pod cast. last matters that i advised, celebrities, influenza, and experts to talk about all plain love data and the india today. nothing less the south, all these things and more and the new season of the pop. com, make sure to tune and wherever you get your pot costs and join the conversation. because you know, it's last matter which is freedom of the online with young. those koreans fled to south korea where they realize their dreams of becoming social media. but then they disappeared without warning only

to recess as a north korean propaganda video. what's happened from north korea with love starts october 25th on d w. the . this is data the news and these are our top stories. the white highest says president joe biden, and his rarely prime minister benjamin netanyahu have agreed to continue the flow of humanitarian aid and took also this after a 2nd 8 convoy crossed from egypt into the most run territory. the u. n. is wanting that the machine besieged enclave is facing a humanitarian catastrophe with food, water and fuel stocks.