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Natalie Portman cosying up in beautiful Hunter Valley architectural wonder

<p>Reports have claimed A-lister actress Natalie Portman has been seen wondering through the picturesque wine region of Hunter Valley, Australia.</p> <p><em>The Post<span> </span></em>claimed the 39-year-old and her husband, Benjamin Millepied, were seen standing in ankle-high grass as they peered into the blue-roofed brick, stone and wood getaway home in the Hunter Valley.</p> <p>Their hour-long tour appeared to be guided by the famed architect Glenn Marcus Murcutt, who is the only Australian to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2002).</p> <p>His modern designs focus on creating living spaces that have low impacts on the environment and priorities indoor-outdoor living.</p> <p>The house is a sight to see, and one that amplifies his environmental ethos, with its horizontal lines and perfect blend of wood and glass.</p> <p>The house appears to have hardly any protection from the elements, but seamlessly creates the perfect balance between integrated design and environmentally friendly.</p> <p>The actress is rumoured to be cosying up into the stunning retreat which offers mountains as a staggering backdrop behind the house.</p> <p>“Layering and changeability: this is the key, the combination that is worked into most of my buildings. Occupying one of these buildings is like sailing a yacht; you modify and manipulate its form and skin, according to seasonal conditions and natural elements, and work with these to maximise the performance of the building,” said Murcutt in 1996.</p> <p>Natalie Portman and her husband have been married since 2012 and have two children, Amalia and Aleph.</p> <p>Portman is in Australia filming her role as Jane Foster in the anticipated Marvel movie “Thor: Love and Thunder.”</p>

Real Estate

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Man reveals why he hasn’t taken his bins out in three years

<p>One Australian man has revealed he has not put his rubbish out for collection in more than three years.</p> <p>Gary Moran, from South Australia says his bins have not been put out because he makes calculated choices about the items he purchases.</p> <p>Mr Moran, from Gawler admitted he avoids most items at the supermarket.</p> <p>"I grow some veggies myself and do some shopping at bulk stores and farmer markets, but I'm also careful at the supermarket as to make sure that anything that I do purchase, that the packaging is recyclable," Mr Moran said to <em>Yahoo News Australia.</em></p> <p><img style="width: 500px; height: 281.25px;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7840943/rubbish.jpg" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/ac54d60472c540f48e24978682f06ead" /></p> <p>He also said he recycles his soft plastic through REDcycle, making it a much simpler to reduce his overall waste.</p> <p>"It's been an ongoing thing that I've built on," he said.</p> <p>Mr Moran says he cut down his general waste drastically when he began crunching all of his aluminium foil into a large ball and combing smaller bits of metal and plastic into individual containers.</p> <p>He says he didn’t feel like he had to sacrifice anything to become more environmentally friendly.</p> <p>"I can't say that I really sacrificed anything, it's just about making a more intelligent choice about what you buy. I don't feel like I miss out on anything," he said.</p> <p>Mr Moran encourages those hoping to get into the minimal-waste lifestyle to make small changes to their daily habits.</p> <p>"When you want to start on a similar journey, you can make a small station at home where you can separate your things at the source," he said.</p> <p>"It's so easy when there's something in your hand that needs to be put somewhere, and it's no harder than throwing it in the bin."</p> <p>He also warned consumers to think about where their rubbish ends up going when they are done with it and to be wary of what they purchase.</p> <p><em>Image: Yahoo</em></p>

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Bingeing Netflix under lockdown? Here’s why streaming comes at a cost to the environment

<p>Coronavirus lockdowns have led to a <a href="https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2020/COVID-19-puts-brakes-on-global-emissions">massive reduction</a> in global emissions, but there’s one area where energy usage is up – way up – during the pandemic: <a href="https://which-50.com/an-extraordinary-period-in-internet-history-akamai-data-shows-30-per-cent-surge-in-internet-traffic/">internet traffic</a>.</p> <p>Data-intensive <a href="https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/04/cdn-traffic-update.html">video streaming</a>, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gaming-usage-up-75-percent-coronavirus-outbreak-verizon-reports-1285140">gaming</a> and <a href="https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/">livestreaming</a> for business, university and school classes, is <a href="https://theshiftproject.org/en/lean-ict-2/">chewing up energy</a>.</p> <p>Estimates can be <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-on-netflix">notoriously difficult</a> and depend on the electricity source, but six hours of streaming video may be the equivalent of burning one litre of petrol, due to emissions from the electricity used to power the <a href="https://theconversation.com/wheres-your-data-its-not-actually-in-the-cloud-its-sitting-in-a-data-centre-64168">data centres</a> which deliver the video.</p> <p>In fact, the energy associated with the global IT sector – from powering internet servers to charging smartphones – is estimated to have the <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160811090046.htm">same carbon footprint</a> as the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y">aviation industry’s fuel emissions</a> (before planes were grounded).</p> <p>But Australia is a global leader in research to lower the energy used in IT, which is vital for meeting the streaming demand without the environmental cost.</p> <p><strong>Where does the data come from?</strong></p> <p>Video requires huge amounts of data, and accounts for around <a href="https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-02.pdf">80% of the data</a> transmitted on the internet. Much of the energy needed for streaming services is consumed by data centres, which deliver data to your computer or device. Increasingly housed in vast factory-sized buildings, these servers store, process and distribute internet traffic.</p> <p>Research in 2015 found data centres may consume as much as <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/6/1/117">13% of the world’s electricity by 2030</a>, accounting for about 6% of global carbon dioxide emissions. And the European Commission-funded Eureca project <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/major-milestone-driving-energy-efficiency-data-rabih-bashroush/">found</a> data centres in EU countries consumed 25% more energy in 2017 compared with 2014.</p> <p>Imagine what those figures will look like at the end of this year of home-bound internet use.</p> <p><strong>Meeting demands with Moore’s law</strong></p> <p>The growth in IT is often taken for granted. In contrast to the old days of dial-up internet, we now demand a three-hour movie, in high definition, to download immediately. We want phones that can take video like a pro.</p> <p>None of this is free. Nor is it sustainable. Every year the number of computations, or transmission of information through space, done globally, <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6025/60">increases by 60%</a>, according to 2011 research.</p> <p>All this computation uses “transistors”. These are tiny switches that amplify electrical signals, and are made using silicon-based technology.</p> <p>For the past 40 years, our ever-increasing need for more computing was largely satisfied by incremental improvements in silicon-based computing technology – ever-smaller, ever-faster, ever-more efficient chips. We refer to this constant shrinking of silicon components as “Moore’s law”.</p> <p>For example, since the late 1970s the length of transistors reduces by about 30%, and the area by about 50%, every two years. This shrinks the energy used in switching on and off each transistor by about 50%, which is better for the environment.</p> <p>While each transistor uses only a tiny amount of energy, there are billions of transistors in a typical computer chip, each switching billions of time per second. This can add up to a vast amount of energy.</p> <p><strong>We need better chips</strong></p> <p>Recently it has become much <a href="https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/when-the-chips-are-down/">harder</a> (and much more <a href="https://www.economist.com/news/2013/11/18/no-moore">expensive</a>) to pursue such trends, and the number of companies pursuing smaller components is dropping off rapidly.</p> <p>Globally, four companies manufactured chips with 14 nanometre (nm) transistors in 2014, but in recent years they’ve struggled to continue shrinking the size of silicon transistors. Global Foundries dropped out of this race altogether in <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-all-7nm-development">2018</a>, and Intel experienced enormous <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/15580/intel-cfo-our-10nm-will-be-less-profitable-than-22nm">problems</a> with manufacturing at 10 nm. That leaves only two companies (Samsung and TSMC) making 7 nm transistors today.</p> <p>So the answer isn’t to switch off Netflix. The answer is to create <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/24/905789/were-not-prepared-for-the-end-of-moores-law/">better computer chips</a>.</p> <p>But we’ve got everything we can out of silicon, so we need to use something else. If we want computing to continue to grow, we need new, energy-efficient computers.</p> <p><strong>Australia is a leader in low-energy solutions</strong></p> <p>Australia is leading the world in this new field to replace conventional electronics. The ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (<a href="http://www.fleet.org.au/">FLEET</a>) was established in 2017 to address exactly this challenge.</p> <p>Michael Fuhrer explains topological materials and why they might change the world.</p> <p>Last year scientists at FLEET published research in Nature <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0788-5">revealing</a> the discovery that the “topological” material sodium-bismuthide could be the key to achieving ultra-low energy electronics.</p> <p>These so-called topological insulators, which led to a <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2016/summary/">2016 Nobel Prize in Physics</a>, conduct electricity only along their edges, and in one direction, without loss of energy due to resistance.</p> <p>This discovery is a first step towards the development of a low-energy replacement for conventional silicon-based electronics.</p> <p>Other top research centres in Australia are addressing different parts of this challenge. For example, <a href="https://tmos.org.au/">one centre</a> is working to reduce the energy used in ubiquitous communication of digital data. Another two are taking a different tack, developing an entirely new <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/29/66141/what-is-quantum-computing/">quantum technology for computing</a> which promises to enormously speed up, and improve the efficiency of, certain difficult computing tasks.</p> <p>Quantum computing expert Michelle Simmons explains why this research is so important.</p> <p>Other countries are equally focused on developing alternatives to the unsustainable need for better and faster electronics, since we cannot sustain the energy needed for these existing and future technologies.</p> <p>All of these technologies are still confined to specialised laboratories and are probably at least a decade away from finding their way into everyday devices. But we don’t expect the demand for computing to go away, and the energy problem in IT will only become more urgent.</p> <p><em>Written by Michael Fuhrer and Errol Hunt. Republished with permission of <a href="https://theconversation.com/bingeing-netflix-under-lockdown-heres-why-streaming-comes-at-a-cost-to-the-environment-143190">The Conversation.</a> </em></p>

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