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Category: Technology

How wind, sun and water can power the world

How wind, sun and water can power the world

The Guardian reports: “Combustion is the problem – when you’re continuing to burn something, that’s not solving the problem,” says Prof Mark Jacobson. The Stanford University academic has a compelling pitch: the world can rapidly get 100% of its energy from renewable sources with, as the title of his new book says, “no miracles needed”. Wind, water and solar can provide plentiful and cheap power, he argues, ending the carbon emissions driving the climate crisis, slashing deadly air pollution and…

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New data show that light pollution is rapidly obscuring the night sky

New data show that light pollution is rapidly obscuring the night sky

Science News reports: The night sky has been brightening faster than researchers realized, thanks to the use of artificial lights at night. A study of more than 50,000 observations of stars by citizen scientists reveals that the night sky grew about 10 percent brighter, on average, every year from 2011 to 2022. In other words, a baby born in a region where roughly 250 stars were visible every night would see only 100 stars on their 18th birthday, researchers report…

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Human noise drowns out communication between dolphins

Human noise drowns out communication between dolphins

The New York Times reports: Mammals in the ocean swim through a world of sound. But in recent decades, humans have been cranking up the volume, blasting waters with noise from shipping, oil and gas exploration and military operations. New research suggests that such anthropogenic noise may make it harder for dolphins to communicate and work together. When dolphins cooperated on a task in a noisy environment, the animals were not so different from city dwellers on land trying to…

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Iran says face recognition will identify women breaking hijab laws

Iran says face recognition will identify women breaking hijab laws

Wired reports: Last month, a young woman went to work at Sarzamineh Shadi, or Land of Happiness, an indoor amusement park east of Iran’s capital, Tehran. After a photo of her without a hijab circulated on social media, the amusement park was closed, according to multiple accounts in Iranian media. Prosecutors in Tehran have reportedly opened an investigation. Shuttering a business to force compliance with Iran’s strict laws for women’s dress is a familiar tactic to Shaparak Shajarizadeh. She stopped…

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Complex supply chains may have appeared more than 3,000 years ago

Complex supply chains may have appeared more than 3,000 years ago

Science News reports: Long-distance supply chains, vulnerable to disruptions from wars and disease outbreaks, may have formed millennia before anyone today gasped at gas prices or gawked at empty store shelves. Roughly 3,650 to 3,200 years ago, herders and villagers who mined tin ore fueled long-distance supply chains that transported the metal from Central Asia and southern Turkey to merchant ships serving societies clustered around the Mediterranean, a new study finds. Remote communities located near rare tin deposits tapped into…

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A single Iranian attack drone found to contain parts from more than a dozen U.S. companies

A single Iranian attack drone found to contain parts from more than a dozen U.S. companies

CNN reports: Parts made by more than a dozen US and Western companies were found inside a single Iranian drone downed in Ukraine last fall, according to a Ukrainian intelligence assessment obtained exclusively by CNN. The assessment, which was shared with US government officials late last year, illustrates the extent of the problem facing the Biden administration, which has vowed to shut down Iran’s production of drones that Russia is launching by the hundreds into Ukraine. CNN reported last month…

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80% of new cars sold in Norway are now electric vehicles

80% of new cars sold in Norway are now electric vehicles

CBS News reports: Electric vehicles accounted for almost four out of every five new car registrations in Norway last year, setting a new record, according to figures released Monday. Led by U.S. carmaker Tesla, which topped the list with a 12.2% market share, 138,265 new electric cars were sold in the Scandinavian country last year, representing 79.3% of total passenger car sales, the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said in a statement. In doing so, Norway, which is both a major…

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Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance

Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance

Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel write: Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite. As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and capitalists, it has also provoked critics who suspect that the peddlers of innovation radically overvalue innovation. What happens after innovation, they argue, is more important. Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures,…

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The Webb Telescope is just getting started

The Webb Telescope is just getting started

The New York Times reports: So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, named for James Webb, the NASA administrator during the buildup to the Apollo moon landings, is a joint project of NASA, the European…

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The end of the Silicon Valley myth

The end of the Silicon Valley myth

Brian Merchant writes: The dramatic, multidimensional implosion of Meta; the nuclear train wreck of Elon Musk’s Twitter; the momentous labor uprising against Amazon—it wasn’t just an unusually disastrous year for America’s biggest tech companies. It was a reckoning. The tech giants that have shaped our lives, online and off, over the course of the 21st century have at last hit a wall. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple all saw their valuations fall, sometimes precipitously. Many slashed their workforces; at…

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U.S. scrambles to stop Iran from providing drones for Russia

U.S. scrambles to stop Iran from providing drones for Russia

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration has embarked on a broad effort to halt Iran’s ability to produce and deliver drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine, an endeavor that has echoes of its yearslong program to cut off Tehran’s access to nuclear technology. In interviews in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, a range of intelligence, military and national security officials have described an expanding U.S. program that aims to choke off…

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Can Apple make the iPhone without China?

Can Apple make the iPhone without China?

Chris Miller writes: Long before it reached your home, even before its tiny components were pieced together in an assembly plant, your phone was already one of the most complex gadgets in the world. It is the product of a delicate supply chain whose every link is forged by competing business and political interests. That chain is starting to rattle and even break, as the global tech industry works to become less dependent on China. Earlier this month, Taiwan Semiconductor…

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Can geoengineering fix the climate? Hundreds of scientists say not so fast

Can geoengineering fix the climate? Hundreds of scientists say not so fast

The Guardian reports: As global heating escalates, the US government has set out a plan to further study the controversial and seemingly sci-fi notion of deflecting the sun’s rays before they hit Earth. But a growing group of scientists denounces any steps towards what is known as solar geoengineering. The White House has set into motion a five-year outline for research into “climate interventions”. Those include methods such as sending a phalanx of planes to spray reflective particles into the…

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The Energy Department’s fusion breakthrough: It’s not really about generating electricity

The Energy Department’s fusion breakthrough: It’s not really about generating electricity

John Mecklin writes: This week’s headlines have been full of reports about a “major breakthrough” in nuclear fusion technology that, many of those reports misleadingly suggested, augurs a future of abundant clean energy produced by fusion nuclear power plants. To be sure, many of those reports lightly hedged their enthusiasm by noting that (as The Guardian put it) “major hurdles” to a fusion-powered world remain. Indeed, they do. The fusion achievement that the US Energy Department announced this week is…

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Why Elon Musk is admired by lots of Silicon Valley bosses

Why Elon Musk is admired by lots of Silicon Valley bosses

Kevin Roose writes: It may seem obvious, to most people outside Silicon Valley, that Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has been an unmitigated disaster. In less than two months since taking over, Mr. Musk has fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, scared away many of its major advertisers, made (and unmade) a series of ill-advised changes to its verification program, angered regulators and politicians with erratic and offensive tweets, declared a short-lived war on Apple, greenlit a bizarre “Twitter…

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After fusion energy breakthrough, ‘a few decades of research’ before commercial application

After fusion energy breakthrough, ‘a few decades of research’ before commercial application

Inside Climate News reports: By training 192 lasers onto a capsule the size of a peppercorn, U.S. government scientists last week were able to ignite fusion with a net energy gain—a long-sought milestone in the quest for a carbon-free energy future. But emphasis was on the word “future,” as the team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California on Tuesday announced the breakthrough in replicating the energy that powers the sun. The successful experiment, which built on generations of prior…

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