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Microsoft’s million-tonne carbon dioxide removal purchase — lessons for net zero

Microsoft’s million-tonne carbon dioxide removal purchase — lessons for net zero

Lucas Joppa et al write: In January this year, Microsoft made a major announcement: it had paid for the removal of 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Among its purchases were projects to expand forests in Peru, Nicaragua and the United States, as well as initiatives to regenerate soil across US farms. Microsoft will pay the Swiss firm Climeworks to operate a machine in Iceland that pulls CO2 from the air and injects it into the ground,…

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How Miami seduced Silicon Valley

How Miami seduced Silicon Valley

Benjamin Wallace writes: The flood of new Miamians who have arrived, full or part time, during the pandemic includes tech investors (Peter Thiel, David Sacks), cryptocurrency bulls (Anthony Pompliano, Ari Paul), new-media tycoons (Bryan Goldberg, Dave Portnoy), start-up founders (Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Steven Galanis), and many more who aren’t yet billionaires but think the Magic City will give them their best shot. They’re breaking sales records for dock-accessed mansions by day and packing the new branches of Carbone and Red…

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Belonging among the beasts and the gods in Mayan cosmology

Belonging among the beasts and the gods in Mayan cosmology

Jessica Sequeira writes: Animals are everywhere in the Popol Vuh. They leap and lick and crawl and bite and squawk and hoot and screech and howl. They are considered sacred, not as disembodied beings in some faraway place, but in their coexistence with humans, day by day in the forests. The Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, with its gorgeous blue-green plumage, birthed the world from a vast and placid ocean. The Popol Vuh provides the narrative of this creation of humankind…

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Why Biden is patient as Democrats panic

Why Biden is patient as Democrats panic

Peter Nicholas writes: Defeating the pandemic may matter more politically than passing any bill. Last week, I observed a focus group made up of five white women, three of whom voted for Biden in 2020, the other two for Trump. How much do you follow news about the pandemic? the moderator asked. “It’s literally the first thing that everybody talks about,” said an independent voter from the Atlanta suburbs who backed Trump in 2016 and then switched to Biden in…

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We’re already barreling toward the next pandemic

We’re already barreling toward the next pandemic

Ed Yong writes: A year after the United States bombed its pandemic performance in front of the world, the Delta variant opened the stage for a face-saving encore. If the U.S. had learned from its mishandling of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, it would have been better prepared for the variant that was already ravaging India. Instead, after a quiet spring, President Joe Biden all but declared victory against SARS-CoV-2. The CDC ended indoor masking for vaccinated people, pitting two of…

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Kyrsten Sinema’s positions have angered some Democrats in Arizona

Kyrsten Sinema’s positions have angered some Democrats in Arizona

The New York Times reports: Jade Duran once spent her weekends knocking on doors to campaign for Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the stubbornly centrist Democrat whose vote could seal the fate of a vast Democratic effort to remake America’s social safety net. But no more. When Ms. Sinema famously gave a thumbs down to a $15 minimum wage and refused to eliminate the filibuster to pass new voting rights laws this year, Ms. Duran, a Democrat and biomedical engineer from Phoenix,…

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Fox News embraces white nationalism and these advertisers embrace Fox News

Fox News embraces white nationalism and these advertisers embrace Fox News

Judd Legum writes: For months, Tucker Carlson has been promoting the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. The concept, which is embraced by white nationalists and neo-Nazis, is that there is a secret plot to “replace” whites with non-white immigrants. It has been cited by mass murderers — in El Paso, New Zealand, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere — to justify violence. Its roots can be traced to a French novel, Le Camp des Saints, the urtext of modern white supremacist discourse. Carlson…

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Gibraltar cave chamber discovery could shed light on Neanderthals’ culture

Gibraltar cave chamber discovery could shed light on Neanderthals’ culture

The Guardian reports: Researchers excavating a cave network on the Rock of Gibraltar have discovered a new chamber, sealed off from the world for at least 40,000 years, that could shed light on the culture and customs of the Neanderthals who occupied the area for a thousand centuries. In 2012, experts began examining Vanguard Cave, part of the Gorham’s Cave complex, to determine its true dimensions and to see whether it contained passages and chambers that had been plugged by…

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‘Impossible’ particle discovery adds key piece to the strong force puzzle

‘Impossible’ particle discovery adds key piece to the strong force puzzle

Charlie Wood writes: This spring, at a meeting of Syracuse University’s quark physics group, Ivan Polyakov announced that he had uncovered the fingerprints of a semi-mythical particle. “We said, ‘This is impossible. What mistake are you making?’” recalled Sheldon Stone, the group’s leader. Polyakov went away and double-checked his analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, which the Syracuse group is part of. The evidence held. It showed that a particular set of four fundamental particles…

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Trump might not have to steal 2024

Trump might not have to steal 2024

David Frum writes: Are constitutionally committed Americans doing all they can to prevent a pro-Trump plot to pervert the 2024 election? Maybe not. But along with that question, here’s another: Are constitutionally committed Americans doing all they can to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2024 election fair and square? The Biden administration’s numbers are slumping in the fall of 2021, opening the way for Republican gains in 2022 and the return of the twice-impeached ex-president as a presidential nominee….

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A radical group of centrists is wasting our best – and maybe last – chance to save the planet from climate change

A radical group of centrists is wasting our best – and maybe last – chance to save the planet from climate change

Dan Pfeiffer writes: There is no global solution to climate change without the United States; and our best chance to save the planet may be slipping through our fingers. John Podesta, the wisest of Washington wisemen, recently sent an urgent memo to every Democrat in the House and in the Senate, pleading with them to stop bickering and start legislating. Podesta spearheaded climate policy in the Obama White House during the second term and has been pushing the Democratic Party…

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As California burns, much of America breathes toxic smoke

As California burns, much of America breathes toxic smoke

Inside Climate News reports: Western wildfires pose a much broader threat to human health than to just those forced to evacuate the path of the blazes. Smoke from these fires, which have burned millions of acres in California alone, is choking vast swaths of the country, an analysis of federal satellite imagery by NPR’s California Newsroom and Stanford University’s Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab found. The months-long analysis, based on more than 10 years of data collected by the…

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131 federal judges broke the law by hearing cases where they had a financial interest

131 federal judges broke the law by hearing cases where they had a financial interest

The Wall Street Journal reports: More than 130 federal judges have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that judges have improperly failed to disqualify themselves from 685 court cases around the nation since 2010. The jurists were appointed by nearly every president from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump. About two-thirds of federal district judges disclosed holdings of individual stocks, and…

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Facebook’s effort to prey upon children goes beyond Instagram Kids, documents show

Facebook’s effort to prey upon children goes beyond Instagram Kids, documents show

The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook Inc. has come under increasing fire in recent days for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future. Internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the company formed…

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