An Indian spacecraft blazed its way to the far side of the moon Friday in a follow-up mission to its failed effort nearly four years ago to land a rover softly on the lunar surface, the country's space agency said. From a report: Chandrayaan-3, the word for "moon craft" in Sanskrit, took off from a launch pad in Sriharikota in southern India with an orbiter, a lander and a rover, in a demonstration of India's emerging space technology. The spacecraft is set to embark on a journey lasting slightly over a month before landing on the moon's surface later in August. Applause and cheers swept through mission control at Satish Dhawan Space Center, where the Indian Space Research Organization's engineers and scientists celebrated as they monitored the launch of the spacecraft. Thousands of Indians cheered outside the mission control center and waved the national flag as they watched the spacecraft rise into the sky.

"Congratulations India. Chandrayaan-3 has started its journey towards the moon," ISRO Director Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said shortly after the launch. A successful landing would make India the fourth country -- after the United States, the Soviet Union, and China -- to achieve the feat. The six-wheeled lander and rover module of Chandrayaan-3 is configured with payloads that would provide data to the scientific community on the properties of lunar soil and rocks, including chemical and elemental compositions, said Dr. Jitendra Singh, junior minister for Science and Technology. India's previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon's little-explored south pole ended in failure in 2019. It entered the lunar orbit but lost touch with its lander that crashed while making its final descent to deploy a rover to search for signs of water.

Equuleus42 (Slashdot reader #723) shares the Washington Post's article on "the latest evidence of the pervasiveness of 'forever chemicals'."

A new study from the United States Geological Survey estimates that these 12,000 "PFAS" contaminants "taint nearly half" of America's tap water: Studies are steadily documenting the ubiquity of this class of chemicals. A 2015 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found PFAS in the blood of over 95 percent of Americans. Exposure to PFAS has been associated with severe health risks, including some kinds of cancers, developmental delays in children and reproductive effects in pregnant people, although the Environmental Protection Agency states that "research is still ongoing to determine how different levels of exposure to different PFAS can lead to a variety of health effects..."

The researchers more frequently detected PFAS in urban areas or places next to potential sources of the chemicals such as airports, industry and wastewater treatment plants, said USGS research hydrologist Kelly Smalling, the study's lead author. Smalling estimated that about 75 percent of urban tap water has at least one type of PFAS present, compared with about 25 percent of rural tap water. The chemicals were also more prevalent in the Great Plains, Great Lakes, Eastern Seaboard and central and Southern California regions, according to the study.
Smalling even tested the water in their own home in New Jersey — and found that it, too, was contaminated. "It's not a surprise," Smalling said, describing New Jersey as "a hot spot for PFAS."

The article also notes that in March America's Environmental Protection Agency proposed the first drinking standard for PFAS in drinking water (though final rules may not arrive before next year). And 3M is paying a $10.3 billion settlement over 13 years for testing for and cleaning up PFAS in water supplies. "States are also stepping up action on PFAS, including through legislation banning or restricting the use of PFAS in everyday products and implementing drinking water standards..."

But Carmen Messerlian, an assistant Harvard professor of environmental epidemiology, argues for regulating companies that produce forever chemicals, since "By the time they hit our water, our food, our children's mouths and our bodies, it really is too late..." In the meantime, consumers can buy water filters that remove PFAS, "though the most effective filters can come at a cost that not everyone can afford, Messerlian said."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: An outbreak of severe storms, including deadly tornadoes, hail bigger than DVDs and life-threatening flooding, has ravaged the South, coming amid a month of wild weather across North America. Texas is baking beneath heat indexes as high as 120 degrees, the coasts are cool and mostly calm and Canadian wildfire smoke is suffocating much of the northern U.S.

If it seems the weather has been a little bit "off" since the calendar flipped to June, you're not imagining it — things have been downright weird. It's all linked to a bizarre jet stream pattern, which is displacing air masses from their typical positions and disrupting the movement of weather systems across the continent.
Among other things, the jet stream created a sprawling heat dome in Canada which "helped sap the landscape of moisture, leaving it ripe to burn," the article points out.

"Meanwhile in the southern U.S., the roaring southern branch of the jet stream has been energizing storms. That's brewed back-to-back rounds of severe weather, complete with strong winds, tornadoes and 'gargantuan' hail — and the pattern doesn't look to budge soon." [El Niño] historically, has been linked to split-flow jet stream patterns like the one driving wild weather across parts of the Lower 48. Natural variability, a.k.a. randomness, is also a big player, but it stands to reason that the two factors, overlapping together, are in large part culpable for what we've been facing.

Some scientific research also suggests human-caused climate change may increase the chances of slow, wonky jet stream patterns such as the one being observed this summer. The idea is that the disproportionate warming of the high latitudes is reducing the temperature contrast between the north and south, weakening the jet stream and thus causing it to take bigger dips and meander more. It remains a controversial idea.

Artificial intelligence means everyone can now be a computer programmer as all they need to do is speak to the computer, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday, hailing the end of the "digital divide." From a report: Speaking to thousands of people at the Computex forum in Taipei, Huang, who was born in southern Taiwan before his family emigrated to the United States when he was a child, said AI was leading a computing revolution. "There's no question we're in a new computing era," he said in a speech, occasionally dropping in words of Mandarin or Taiwanese to the delight of the crowd. "Every single computing era you could do different things that weren't possible before, and artificial intelligence certainly qualifies," Huang added. "The programming barrier is incredibly low. We have closed the digital divide. Everyone is a programmer now -- you just have to say something to the computer," he said. "The rate of progress, because it's so easy to use, is the reason why it's growing so fast. This is going to touch literally every single industry."

Twenty years ago, pinball seemed to be circling the drain. In the 1980s and 1990s video games stole market share from the mechanical sort, and home games-consoles stole market share from arcades. By 2000 WMS, the Chicago-based maker of the Bally and Williams brands of pinball machines, then the biggest manufacturer, closed its loss-making pinball division to focus on selling slot machines. Yet today, pinball is thriving again, both at places like Logan Arcade and in people's homes. Economist: Sales of new machines have risen by 15-20% every year since 2008, says Zach Sharpe, of Stern Pinball, which after WMS closed became the last remaining major maker. "We have not looked back," he says. Next year the firm is moving to a new factory, twice the size of its current one, in the north-west suburbs of Chicago. Sales of used machines are more buoyant still -- some favourites, such as Stern's Game of Thrones-themed game, can fetch prices well into five figures. Josh Sharpe, Zach's brother and president of the International Flipper Pinball Association, says that last year the IFPA approved 8,300 "official" tournaments, a four-fold increase on 2014.

What is driving the boom? Much of it is nostalgia. A generation raised on pinball in arcades in the 1980s and 1990s are now at an age where they have disposable income, and kids with whom they want to play the games they played as children. Marty Friedman, who runs an arcade in Manchester, a tourist town in southern Vermont, says that he and his wife opened their business after he realised it would allow him to indulge his hobby. "I compiled a list of the games I felt were essential to a collection you would deem museum-worthy," he said, and went about acquiring them. But canny marketing is also drawing in fresh blood. Newer Stern machines are now connected to the internet, so players can log in and have their scores uploaded to an online profile. Both Sharpes suggest that the mechanical nature of the games appeals to people bored with purely screen-based play.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An ex-Ubiquiti engineer, Nickolas Sharp, was sentenced to six years in prison yesterday after pleading guilty in a New York court to stealing tens of gigabytes of confidential data, demanding a $1.9 million ransom from his former employer, and then publishing the data publicly when his demands were refused. Sharp had asked for no prison time, telling United States District Judge Katherine Polk Failla that the cyberattack was actually an "unsanctioned security drill" that left Ubiquiti "a safer place for itself and for its clients," Bloomberg reported. In a court document (PDF), Sharp claimed that Ubiquiti CEO Robert Pera had prevented Sharp from "resolving outstanding security issues," and Sharp told the judge that this led to an "idiotic hyperfixation" on fixing those security flaws.

However, even if that was Sharp's true motivation, Failla did not accept his justification of his crimes, which include wire fraud, intentionally damaging protected computers, and lying to the FBI. "It was not up to Mr. Sharp to play God in this circumstance," Failla said. US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, argued (PDF) that Sharp was not a "cybersecurity vigilante" but an "inveterate liar and data thief" who was "presenting a contrived deception to the Court that this entire offense was somehow just a misguided security drill." Williams said that Sharp made "dozens, if not hundreds, of criminal decisions" and even implicated innocent co-workers to "divert suspicion." Sharp also had already admitted in pre-sentencing that the cyber attack was planned for "financial gain." Williams said Sharp did it seemingly out of "pure greed" and ego because Sharp "felt mistreated" -- overworked and underpaid -- by the IT company, Williams said.

Court documents show that Ubiquiti spent "well over $1.5 million dollars and hundreds of hours of employee and consultant time" trying to remediate what Williams described as Sharp's "breathtaking" theft. But the company lost much more than that when Sharp attempted to conceal his crimes -- posing as a whistleblower, planting false media reports, and contacting US and foreign regulators to investigate Ubiquiti's alleged downplaying of the data breach. Within a single day after Sharp planted false reports, stocks plummeted, causing Ubiquiti to lose over $4 billion in market capitalization value, court documents show. Williams had pushed the court to impose a sentence between eight to 10 years, arguing that anything less would be perceived by the public as a "slap on the wrist." Sharp's six-year term is slightly less than that, but in a press release, Williams described the sentence as imposing "serious penalties" for Sharp's "callous crimes." "He was disgruntled at his employer, planning to leave the company, and wanted to extort millions of dollars and cause damage on his way out," Williams said in his sentencing memo.

A group of ten bipartisan lawmakers from Nevada and California have asked the Biden administration to quickly provide federal funding for a private company to construct a high-speed rail line between Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area. The Associated Press reports: All six of Nevada's elected federal lawmakers and four House members from California sent the letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. They said they're on board with a proposal from Brightline West to spend more than $10 billion to lay tracks along the Interstate 15 corridor. The Mojave Desert is largely open space, and the electric-powered trains could potentially cut the four-hour trip in half, carrying passengers at speeds of nearly 200 mph (322 kph). "This project is a major priority because it will make southern Nevada more accessible to millions of visitors each year," said U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, the Nevada Democrat leading the group. She said it "will boost our economy and create more good-paying jobs."

Union labor will be used during construction, the company and the Southern Nevada Building Trades Union have announced in recent weeks. Brightline West is seeking $3.75 billion in federal funding from the Biden administration-backed federal infrastructure law. The project could be "the blueprint for how we can connect major city pairs that are too short to fly and too far to drive," said Mike Reininger, CEO of Florida-based Brightline Holdings LLC, the only privately owned and operated intercity passenger railroad in the United States. The lawmakers' letter pointed to company projections of 35,000 construction jobs, 1,000 permanent jobs and reduced planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: A nuclear power plant in Georgia has begun splitting atoms in one of its two new reactors, Georgia Power said Monday, a key step toward reaching commercial operation at the first new nuclear reactors built from scratch in decades in the United States. The unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co. said operators reached self-sustaining nuclear fission inside the reactor at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta. That makes the intense heat that will be used to produce steam and spin turbines to generate electricity.

A third and a fourth reactor were approved for construction at Vogtle by the Georgia Public Service Commission in 2009, and the third reactor was supposed to start generating power in 2016. The company now says Unit 3 could begin commercial operation in May or June. Unit 4 is projected to begin commercial operation sometime between this November and March 2024.

The cost of the third and fourth reactors was originally supposed to be $14 billion. The reactors are now supposed to cost more than $30 billion. That doesn't include $3.68 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners after going bankrupt, which brings total spending to more than $34 billion. Georgia Power said Unit 3 would continue startup testing to show that its cooling system and steam supply system will work at the intense heat and pressure that a nuclear reactor creates. After that, operators are supposed to link the reactor to the electrical grid and gradually raise it to full power.

New submitter sit1963nz writes: Starbucks has launched a new drink that mixes coffee with olive oil, offering it initially in Italy as an alternative to the more standard espresso or cappuccino. The so-called "Oleato" beverages are made with arabica coffee "infused with a spoonful of Partanna cold pressed, extra virgin olive oil," Starbucks, the world's largest coffee chain, said in a statement. The price is between 4.5 euros and 6.5 euros ($4.80-$6.90) depending on the size of the cup.

[...] Company founder Howard Schultz, who has said a trip to Milan in 1983 inspired him to export Italian drinking habits to the United States, described Oleato as "the next revolution in coffee." The "Oleato" debuted in various forms, including caffe latte, a "deconstructed" option featuring lemon juice, and an "Espresso Martini" with vodka and vanilla bean syrup. The beverages will later be rolled out "in select markets around the world", starting with southern California in the United States in the spring and later this year in Japan, the Middle East and Britain, Starbucks said.

Genetically modified seedlings from biotechnology company Living Carbon have been planted in a low-lying tract of southern Georgia's pine belt. According to a paper that has yet to be peer reviewed, these trees are engineered to grow 50 percent faster than non-modified ones over five months in the greenhouse. The New York Times reports: The poplars may be the first genetically modified trees planted in the United States outside of a research trial or a commercial fruit orchard. Just as the introduction of the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994 introduced a new industry of genetically modified food crops, the tree planters on Monday hope to transform forestry. Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company that produced the poplars, intends for its trees to be a large-scale solution to climate change. "We've had people tell us it's impossible," Maddie Hall, the company's co-founder and chief executive, said of her dream to deploy genetic engineering on behalf of the climate. But she and her colleagues have also found believers -- enough to invest $36 million in the four-year-old company.

The company's researchers created the greenhouse-tested trees using a bacterium that splices foreign DNA into another organism's genome. But for the trees they planted in Georgia, they turned to an older and cruder technique known as the gene gun method, which essentially blasts foreign genes into the trees' chromosomes. In a field accustomed to glacial progress and heavy regulation, Living Carbon has moved fast and freely. The gene gun-modified poplars avoided a set of federal regulations of genetically modified organisms that can stall biotech projects for years. (Those regulations have since been revised.) By contrast, a team of scientists who genetically engineered a blight-resistant chestnut tree using the same bacterium method employed earlier by Living Carbon have been awaiting a decision since 2020. [...]

In contrast to fast-growing pines, hardwoods that grow in bottomlands like these produce wood so slowly that a landowner might get only one harvest in a lifetime, said [Vince Stanley, a seventh-generation farmer who manages more than 25,000 forested acres in Georgia's pine belt]. He hopes Living Carbon's "elite seedlings" will allow him to grow bottomland trees and make money faster. "We're taking a timber rotation of 50 to 60 years and we're cutting that in half," he said. "It's totally a win-win." [...] The U.S. Forest Service, which plants large numbers of trees every year, has said little about whether it would use engineered trees. To be considered for planting in national forests, which make up nearly a fifth of U.S. forestland, Living Carbon's trees would need to align with existing management plans that typically prioritize forest health and diversity over reducing the amount of atmospheric carbon, said Dana Nelson, a geneticist with the service. "I find it hard to imagine that it would be a good fit on a national forest," Dr. Nelson said. Living Carbon is focusing for now on private land, where it will face fewer hurdles. Later this spring it will plant poplars on abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania. By next year Ms. Hall and Mr. Mellor hope to be putting millions of trees in the ground. The report notes that the modified trees are all female, "so they won't produce pollen."

"They're also being planted alongside native trees like sweet gum, tulip trees and bald cypress, to avoid genetically identical stands of trees known as monocultures; non-engineered poplars are being planted as experimental controls."

An international project in nuclear fusion may face years of delays, its boss has said, weeks after scientists in the United States announced a breakthrough in their own quest for the coveted goal. The Guardian reports: The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) project seeks to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy. Installed at a site in southern France, the decades-old initiative has a long history of technical challenges and cost overruns. Fusion entails forcing together the nuclei of light atomic elements in a super-heated plasma, held by powerful magnetic forces in a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak.

Iter's previously stated goal was to create the plasma by 2025. But that deadline will have to be postponed, Pietro Barabaschi -- who in September became the project's director general -- told Agence France-Presse during a visit to the facility. The date "wasn't realistic in the first place," even before two major problems surfaced, Barabaschi said. One problem, he said, was wrong sizes for the joints of blocks to be welded together for the installation's 19 metres by 11 metres (62ft by 36ft) chamber. The second was traces of corrosion in a thermal shield designed to protect the outside world from the enormous heat created during nuclear fusion. Fixing the problems "is not a question of weeks, but months, even years," Barabaschi said.

A new timetable is to be worked out by the end of this year, he said, including some modification to contain the expected cost overrun, and to meet the French nuclear safety agency's security requirements. Barabaschi said he hoped Iter would be able to make up for the delays as it prepares to enter the full phase, scheduled for 2035.

The Royal Bahamas Police Force arrested FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, a press statement said. CoinDesk reports: The arrest came after the U.S. filed criminal charges against Bankman-Fried, the statement said, and the nation expects the U.S. to request The Bahamas extradite Bankman-Fried in short order. "As a result of the notification received and the material provided therewith, it was deemed appropriate for the Attorney General to seek SBF's arrest and hold him in custody pursuant to our nation's Extradition Act," the statement, attributed to Attorney General Ryan Pinder, said. "At such time as a formal request for extradition is made, The Bahamas intends to process it promptly, pursuant to Bahamian law and its treaty obligations with the United States."

A tweet from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York confirmed that prosecutors in the U.S. indicted Bankman-Fried, though the indictment remains under seal. In the Bahamas' statement, Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis said the country would continue pursuing its own investigation into FTX's collapse, alongside the U.S.'s criminal charges. Bankman-Fried was set to testify virtually before the House Financial Services Committee about the exchange's collapse on Tuesday.

Department of Justice, announcing through a press release: Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Tyler Hatcher, the Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation, Los Angeles Field Office ("IRS-CI"), announced today that JAMES ZHONG pled guilty to committing wire fraud in September 2012 when he unlawfully obtained over 50,000 Bitcoin from the Silk Road dark web internet marketplace. ZHONG pled guilty on Friday, November 4, 2022, before United States District Judge Paul G. Gardephe.

On November 9, 2021, pursuant to a judicially authorized premises search warrant of ZHONG's Gainesville, Georgia, house, law enforcement seized approximately 50,676.17851897 Bitcoin, then valued at over $3.36 billion. This seizure was then the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice and today remains the Department's second largest financial seizure ever. The Government is seeking to forfeit, collectively: approximately 51,680.32473733 Bitcoin; ZHONG's 80% interest in RE&D Investments, LLC, a Memphis-based company with substantial real estate holdings; $661,900 in cash seized from ZHONG's home; and various metals also seized from ZHONG's home.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: "James Zhong committed wire fraud over a decade ago when he stole approximately 50,000 Bitcoin from Silk Road. For almost ten years, the whereabouts of this massive chunk of missing Bitcoin had ballooned into an over $3.3 billion mystery. Thanks to state-of-the-art cryptocurrency tracing and good old-fashioned police work, law enforcement located and recovered this impressive cache of crime proceeds. This case shows that we won't stop following the money, no matter how expertly hidden, even to a circuit board in the bottom of a popcorn tin."

"NASA's Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission is mapping the prevalence of key minerals in the planet's dust-producing deserts — information that will advance our understanding of airborne dust's effects on climate," NASA announced this week.

"But EMIT has demonstrated another crucial capability: detecting the presence of methane, a potent greenhouse gas." In the data EMIT has collected since being installed on the International Space Station in July, the science team has identified more than 50 "super-emitters" in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Southwestern United States. Super-emitters are facilities, equipment, and other infrastructure, typically in the fossil-fuel, waste, or agriculture sectors, that emit methane at high rates. "Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming. This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed — quickly," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

"The International Space Station and NASA's more than two dozen satellites and instruments in space have long been invaluable in determining changes to the Earth's climate. EMIT is proving to be a critical tool in our toolbox to measure this potent greenhouse gas — and stop it at the source...."

"These results are exceptional, and they demonstrate the value of pairing global-scale perspective with the resolution required to identify methane point sources, down to the facility scale," said David Thompson, EMIT's instrument scientist and a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. "It's a unique capability that will raise the bar on efforts to attribute methane sources and mitigate emissions from human activities."

Relative to carbon dioxide, methane makes up a fraction of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, but it's estimated to be 80 times more effective, ton for ton, at trapping heat in the atmosphere in the 20 years after release. Moreover, where carbon dioxide lingers for centuries, methane persists for about a decade, meaning that if emissions are reduced, the atmosphere will respond in a similar timeframe, leading to slower near-term warming.... "Some of the plumes EMIT detected are among the largest ever seen — unlike anything that has ever been observed from space," said Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at JPL leading the EMIT methane effort. "What we've found in a just a short time already exceeds our expectations."

For example, the instrument detected a plume about 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) long southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Permian Basin. One of the largest oilfields in the world, the Permian spans parts of southeastern New Mexico and western Texas. In Turkmenistan, EMIT identified 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar. Blowing to the west, some plumes stretch more than 20 miles (32 kilometers).... With wide, repeated coverage from its vantage point on the space station, EMIT will potentially find hundreds of super-emitters — some of them previously spotted through air-, space-, or ground-based measurement, and others that were unknown.

"As it continues to survey the planet, EMIT will observe places in which no one thought to look for greenhouse-gas emitters before, and it will find plumes that no one expects," said Robert Green, EMIT's principal investigator at JPL.

Sunnova is one of America's largest rooftop solar companies, according to the New York Times. But they've now applied to California's Public Utilities Commission for permission to become the state's first solar (and storage) micro-utility, initiating formal steps to qualify and "request a certificate to construct and operate microgrids," targetting new home developments that aren't yet connected to the grid.

"We see a future where communities, neighborhoods, and businesses can operate independently from the legacy grid with sustainable energy sources that provide uninterrupted power," says the company's founder and CEO. "We believe microgrids address a strong need in the market for more robust energy solutions and better connectivity...." But he's also offering touting another possible benefit: "relief that the existing transmission and distribution system will experience given that most of the power that will be consumed by these communities will be generated locally from renewable resources."

The company likes to point out that America's recently-passed climate bill included tax incentives to encourage microgrids. But the New York Times describes it as "a business model that is illegal in much of the United States." Sunnova said it would offer those residents electricity that was up to 20 percent cheaper than the rates charged by investor-owned utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. If approved by regulators, the micro-utility model, also known as a microgrid, could undermine the growth of those larger utilities by depriving them access to new homes or forcing them to lower their rates to keep that business. Sunnova executives argue that the approach they are seeking approval for was authorized under a California law passed almost two decades ago for a resort just south of Lake Tahoe. In addition, the company says advances in solar and battery technology mean that neighborhoods can be designed to generate more than enough electricity to meet their own needs at a lower cost than relying on the grid.

"If they don't want to choose me, that should be their right; if they don't want to choose you, that should be their right, too," said John Berger, the chief executive of Sunnova.

A small number of homeowners have gone off the grid as the cost of solar panels and batteries has fallen. But doing so can be hard or impossible. Some local governments have rejected permits for off-grid homes on health and safety grounds, arguing that a connection to the grid is essential. But connecting a single home to the grid can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, which means an off-grid system may actually be cheaper — especially for properties in remote areas, or in places where the local grid is at its capacity and would require significant upgrades to serve more homes. Off-grid setups can also be appealing because once a system is paid off, the cost of operating and maintaining it is often modest and predictable, whereas utility rates can move up sharply.... The nationwide average retail electricity rate increased 11 percent in June from a year earlier, according to the Energy Information Administration.

But the kind of micro-utilities that Sunnova hopes to create have also had problems. The utopian visions of generating electricity where it is used have often run into maintenance and other problems. Many tiny utilities created under such models in the United States and Canada were later swallowed up by larger power companies.... Sunnova's microgrid approach could suffer a similar fate. But the costs of solar panels and batteries have tumbled over the last decade, making the energy that off-grid systems generate much more affordable....

Utilities have been pressing regulators to reduce the compensation homeowners receive for the excess solar energy their rooftop systems send to the grid. The companies have argued that customers with solar panels are being offered generous credits for power that they are not contributing adequately toward the cost of maintaining power lines and other grid equipment....

Building and operating microgrids could provide a steady source of income to companies like Sunnova. That could essentially transform the rooftop solar companies into the kinds of utilities that they have long fought against.
Sunnova bills itself as an "Energy as a Service" company, and they expect their microgrids to experience 30 minutes or less of outages each year, the Times points out, "compared with an average of two hours a year at California's large investor-owned utilities."

In the article, the chief executive of home-building company Lennar says they've already formed a partnership with Sunnova. "We value the current electric grid and we're intrigued by new microgrid solutions that can supplement and support the traditional utility grid and help solve reliability during extreme weather and peak demand."

Mismanagement, waste and lack of transparency are making the cleanup in the Niger Delta's Ogoniland anything but exemplary, UN reports indicate. From a report: In the more than a quarter century since Shell Plc left Ogoniland in southern Nigeria, oil has continued to ooze from dormant wellheads and active pipelines, leaving the 386-square mile kingdom's wetlands shimmering with a greasy rainbow sheen, its once-lush mangroves coated in crude, well-water smelling of benzene and farmlands charred and barren. So when the $1 billion Ogoniland cleanup began in 2019, backed by Shell's funding pledge and support from the United Nations, it was heralded as the most ambitious initiative of its kind anywhere in the world. But now, UN Environmental Programme documents seen by Bloomberg and reported for the first time indicate that the project -- far from being exemplary -- is making one of the earth's most polluted regions even dirtier.

"We had hoped that the Ogoniland cleanup process would set the standard for the cleanup that will have to take place in the Niger Delta as a whole," said Mike Karikpo, an Ogoni attorney with Friends of the Earth International. "But we've not seen any impact. There ought to be some impact on the lives and livelihoods of people whose lands and rivers were impacted by this oil." In a scathing review of the Ogoniland cleanup efforts, led by the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, or Hyprep, the UN body paints a picture of rampant mismanagement, incompetence, waste and lack of transparency. It highlights the haphazard storage of oil-soaked soil that lets chemicals seep into uncontaminated grounds and creeks, contracts awarded to firms with little environmental-cleanup experience and proposals for millions of dollars in unneeded work.

U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan on Wednesday unveiled an indictment accusing a product manager at OpenSea, the largest online marketplace for non-fungible tokens, of insider trading. From a report: Nathaniel Chastain was accused of secretly buying 45 NFTs based on confidential information that they would soon be featured on OpenSea's home page, and later selling them at a profit, typically two to five times what he paid. According to an indictment filed in Manhattan federal court, the scheme ran from June to September 2021, and Chastain transacted through anonymous digital currency wallets and accounts at OpenSea. Chastain was arrested this morning in New York, New York and will be presented today in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He is charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm shares this surprising report from Nature. "Salaries for PhD students in the biological sciences fall well below the basic cost of living at almost every institution and department in the United States, according to data collected by two PhD students." The crowdsourced findings, submitted by students, faculty members and administrators and presented on an interactive dashboard, provide fresh ammunition for graduate students in negotiations for higher salaries as economies across the world grapple with rising inflation. As this article went to press, just 2% of the 178 institutions and departments in the data set guaranteed graduate students salaries that exceed the cost of living.

The researchers used the living-wage calculator maintained by the Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a widely used benchmark that estimates basic expenses for a given city, such as the costs of food, health care, housing and transport. Most institutions fall far short of that standard. At the University of Florida in Gainesville, for example, the basic stipend for biology PhD students is around US$18,650 for a 9-month appointment, about $16,000 less than the annual living wage for a single adult in the city with no dependents. At a handful of institutions — including the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg and the University of South Dakota in Vermillion — the guaranteed minimum stipend is less than $15,000 for 9-month appointments.

RED filed a lawsuit yesterday suing (PDF) Nikon for infringing on its video compression patents. PetaPixel reports: The lawsuit was filed in a southern California federal court today and asserts that the Japanese camera manufacturer and its United States subsidiaries have illegally infringed on seven patents that deal specifically with "a video camera that can be configured to highly compress video data in a visually lossless manner."

In the filing, RED notes a type of compression that it says it has patented and is in use by Nikon in the Z9: "The camera can be configured to transform blue and red image data in a manner that enhances the compressibility of the data. The data can then be compressed and stored in this form. This allows a user to reconstruct the red and blue data to obtain the original raw data for a modified version of the original raw data that is visually lossless when demosaiced. Additionally, the data can be processed so the green image elements are demosaiced first, and then the red and blue elements are reconstructed based on values of the demosaiced green image elements."

This compression comes thanks to a partnership with intoPIX's TicoRAW which was announced last December. [...] The TicoRAW feature has been in the news for months, but RED was likely waiting for it to be implemented into a competitor's camera before filing a lawsuit. RED's lawsuit says Nikon's infringement on its patent was "willful" and claims Nikon would have known about RED's patents. [...] RED then cites multiple lawsuits it has filed against Kinefinity, Sony, and Nokia over the years. RED is seeking damages or royalties for the infringement as well as an injunction to ban Nikon from further infringing.

The Drive's Adam Kehoe noticed something during this week's UFO hearings in the U.S. Congress. "After intense public speculation, stacks of official documents obtained via the Freedom Of Information Act, ambiguous statements from top officials, and an avalanche of media attention, it has now been made clear that the mysterious swarming of U.S. Navy ships off the Southern California coast in 2019 was caused by drones, not otherworldly UFOs or other mysterious craft.

"Raising even more questions, a similar drone swarm event has occurred off another coast, as well." These revelations came from top Department of Defense officials during a recent and much-anticipated house hearing on UFOs, which you can read all about here.

The strange series of events in question unfolded around California's Channel Islands in July of 2019. On multiple evenings, swarms of unidentified drones were spotted operating around U.S. Navy vessels. In numerous instances, the drones flew within close proximity to ships, even crossing directly over their decks. The behavior provoked defensive reactions from the ships, including the deployment of emergency security teams... Deck logs demonstrate that the Navy appears to have drilled and implemented a variety of counter-drone techniques in response to these incidents. This eventually included the deployment of Northrop Grumman's Drone Restricted Access Using Known EW (DRAKE) platform. The DRAKE system is a man-portable backpack that allows sailors to use radio frequency signals to interrupt the control links of drones. The DRAKE system appears to have been actually deployed in one of the incidents....

It is entirely unclear where the drones were operating from, how they were controlled, or who was controlling them. Still, the Navy could identify the objects as drones without those questions being fully answered at this time.... The Department of Defense's open acknowledgment of these drone swarm events just off U.S. shores shows that the threat is not theoretical. It is also not a future threat. Significant drone swarm events have occurred in the last three years, unknown to the public, and evidently unresolved by defense authorities. Judging by what is known to date about the 2019 incident, it is clear that the United States is not well-positioned to detect, identify and neutralize such threats. It remains to be seen what level of priority these issues will receive by lawmakers in relation to more speculative questions surrounding UAP.

If anything else, top confirmation that adversaries are operating swarms among America's most powerful weapons in training areas where their most sensitive capabilities are put to use should make national headlines, but because it was buried in sensationalism around UFOs, it clearly did not.