Music: MonoNeon — ‘Hot Cheetos’ ft. Larnell Lewis & Isaiah Sharkey
‘Catastrophic’ loss: Huge colonies of emperor penguins saw no chicks survive last year as sea ice disappears
CNN reports: As rapidly warming global temperatures help push Antarctica’s sea ice to unprecedented lows, it’s threatening the very existence of one of the continent’s most iconic species: emperor penguins. Four out of five emperor penguin colonies analyzed in the Bellingshausen Sea, west of the Antarctic Peninsula, saw no chicks survive last year as the area experienced an enormous loss of sea ice, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment. This widespread “catastrophic…
What happens when the heat repeats?
Kylie Mohr writes: For two years now, scientists, shellfish managers, and tribes have been working to understand how the heat dome that settled over the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021 affected the places where the ocean and land meet. That heat wave was like nothing in memory. Temperatures soaring as high as 121 degrees Fahrenheit buckled roads, melted power cables, and scorched forests. By the time the heat subsided, 650 people had died in the U.S. and Canada,…
Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’
The Guardian reports: Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as scientific evidence shows many offsets they have bought have no environmental worth and have become stranded assets. Amid growing evidence that huge numbers of carbon credits do nothing to mitigate global heating and can sometimes be linked to alleged human rights concerns, there is a growing pile of carbon credits equivalent to the annual emissions of Japan, the world’s fifth largest polluter, that are unused in the unregulated voluntary market,…
‘Climate change agenda is a hoax,’ says surging GOP candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, at debate
Rolling Stone reports: Vivek Ramaswamy presents himself as a man for this political moment — a 38-year-old entrepreneur without the baggage of a politician, who is not a “SuperPAC puppet” (as he calls Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) and can tell the truth. But faced with an unexpected question about climate change at the first GOP presidential primary debate, Ramaswamy chose to lie. “The climate-change agenda,” he declared, “is a hoax.” Republicans being wrong on climate change is nothing new, of…
Mark Meadows, a Jan. 6 ‘ringleader,’ released on $100,000 bond; Trump mugshot released
CNBC reports: Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was booked and released from an Atlanta jail Thursday in connection with the Georgia criminal case accusing ex-President Donald Trump and his allies of illegally trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. Meadows is charged with racketeering and soliciting a violation of an oath by a public officer. His bond was set at $100,000 earlier Thursday. The same day, the bond for Jeffrey Clark, a pro-Trump former Department of…
U.S. officials see missile strike, other theories, behind crash of Prigozhin plane
Reuters reports: The United States is looking at a number of theories over what brought down the plane presumed to be carrying mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, including a surface-to-air missile hitting it, U.S. officials told Reuters on Thursday. Russian air authorities have said Prigozhin, his right-hand man Dmitry Utkin and eight other people were on the private plane that crashed with no survivors north of Moscow on Wednesday. Two U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that it…
Why the empty atom picture misunderstands quantum theory
Mario Barbatti writes: The camera zooms in on the person’s arm to reveal the cells, then a cell nucleus. A DNA strand grows on the screen. The camera focuses on a single atom within the strand, dives into a frenetic cloud of rocketing particles, crosses it, and leaves us in oppressive darkness. An initially imperceptible tiny dot grows smoothly, revealing the atomic nucleus. The narrator lectures that the nucleus of an atom is tens of thousands of times smaller than…
Music: Jazzbois — ‘Admas’
Prigozhin’s death heralds even more spectacular violence
Anne Applebaum writes: Vladimir Putin’s Russia has long been a land of mysterious deaths. In 1998, soon after he had been appointed head of the security services, Galina Starovoitova, a parliamentarian who believed in bringing democracy to Russia, was gunned down in the stairwell of her apartment building in St. Petersburg. In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had learned too much about the Chechen wars that Putin used to propel himself to power, met the same fate in the…
Wagner boss Prigozhin killed in jet ‘crash’ in Russia
Brian Klaas writes: Initial reports suggest that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ruthless mercenary leader of the Wagner Group, has been killed. Although confirmed details are scant, his private plane has allegedly crashed or been shot down, an event that many have interpreted as an assassination. Prigozhin probably knew to stay away from windows in high buildings, so it seems plausible that Vladimir Putin took him out at 28,000 feet instead. Coup plotters rarely die of old age. Prigozhin sealed his fate…
Federal judge rejects bids to halt Georgia prosecution of Trump aides over 2020 election
Politico reports: A federal judge quickly shot down bids Wednesday by two former Trump administration officials — Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark — to derail the criminal proceedings against them in Fulton County, where they’re charged alongside Donald Trump with a sprawling racketeering conspiracy to subvert the results of the 2020 election. In two six-page rulings by Atlanta-based U.S. District Court Judge Steve Jones effectively ensures that Meadows and Clark will face arrest this week, a result both men attempted…
Emails reveal Secret Service liaising with Oath Keepers
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reports: Internal Secret Service emails obtained by CREW show special agents in close communication with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, while failing to acknowledge the group’s ties to white nationalists and clashes with law enforcement. In September 2020, a Secret Service agent sent an email to others within the agency, informing them that he had just spoken to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes about an upcoming visit by then-President Trump to Fayetteville,…
South Carolina’s all-male Supreme Court upholds abortion law, reversing earlier decision
The New York Times reports: The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the state’s new near-total ban on abortion by a 4-1 vote, reversing a decision it had made in January that struck down a similar ban and declared that the State Constitution’s protections for privacy included a right to abortion. The court’s decision was not unexpected, because the makeup of the bench had changed, and Republicans in the State Legislature had passed a new abortion law in the…
It may be time to break out the masks against Covid, some experts say
CNN reports: If you’re at high risk of serious illness or death from Covid-19, it’s time to dust off those N95 masks and place them snugly over your nose and mouth to protect yourself from a recent uptick of the virus, according to a growing number of experts. That advice should go all the way up to 80-year-old President Joe Biden, said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist. “Octogenarians comprise the highest-risk group for complications following Covid infection,” Reiner said. “At…
If AI becomes conscious, how will we know?
Science reports: In 2021, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines—and got himself fired—when he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he’d been testing, was sentient. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially so-called large language models such as LaMDA and ChatGPT, can certainly seem conscious. But they’re trained on vast amounts of text to imitate human responses. So how can we really know? Now, a group of 19 computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers has come up with an approach: not a single definitive…