schwit1 quotes Space News: SpaceX plans to build facilities at the Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A for launches and, eventually, landings of its next-generation launch vehicle, according to a newly released report.

An environment assessment prepared by SpaceX, and released by NASA Aug. 1, discusses plans to develop additional facilities at LC-39A, which currently hosts Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, for use by the company's Starship vehicle and its Super Heavy booster.

The plans outlined in the document call for the construction of a new launch mount at the complex near the existing one used by the Falcon 9 and Heavy. The modifications to the pad would also include a tank farm for the methane fuel used by the Raptor engines that power Starship and Super Heavy.

The Super Heavy booster would land at a ship in the ocean downrange from the launch site, although the report noted that SpaceX may later have the booster return to land. The Starship upper stage would initially land at the company's existing Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, but the company plans to build a pad near the new launch mount at LC-39A for to support Starship landings at a future date.

The facilities will be able to support up to 24 Starship/Super Heavy launches a year.

Electric scooter companies like to tout their green credentials, frequently reminding riders that every two-wheeled trip they take can help reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change -- but the truth is much more complicated. From a report: A new study from North Carolina State University found that shared e-scooters may be more environmentally friendly than most cars, but they can be less green than several other options, including bicycles, walking, and certain modes of public transportation. Riders tend to think they're making the right move by hopping on a scooter that's electric and thus carbon-free. But what they don't see are all of the emissions that are produced by the manufacturing, transportation, maintenance, and upkeep of dockless scooters. If you only think about the segment of the life cycle you can see, which would be standing on the scooter where there's no tailpipe, it's easy to make that assumption," said Jeremiah Johnson, corresponding author of the study and an associate professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State. "But if you take a step back, you can see all the other things that are a bit hidden in the process."

In a move intended to de-escalate a standoff between scientists and native Hawaiians blocking the construction of a massive telescope on a mountaintop they believe to be sacred land, Gov. David Ige on Tuesday night rescinded an emergency proclamation that was issued to help remove demonstrators. NPR reports: Ige made the announcement at a press conference saying there are no immediate plans to move heavy construction equipment onto Mauna Kea, the intended site of the Thirty Meter Telescope, which is expected to be the largest in the world, looking farther back into space and time than any other instrument is capable of doing. "Because TMT construction is not imminent, I am withdrawing the emergency proclamation effective immediately," Ige said in a tweet. "I remain committed to moving forward with this project in a peaceful way and will continue efforts to engage the community."

He cautioned the large crowds who have gathered in protest at the base of the mountain since mid-July, when construction was set to start, of hazardous conditions "in light of the potential bad weather." Ige's move followed a decision by the Department of Land and Natural Resources to grant a two-year extension of the Conservation District Use permit deadline for the initiation of construction.

The FCC voted today to collect more accurate data about which parts of the U.S. have broadband and which parts lack high-speed connectivity. "From now on, home Internet providers will have to give the FCC geospatial maps of where they provide service instead of merely reporting which census blocks they offer service in," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The FCC's current broadband mapping system has serious limitations. The Form 477 data-collection program that requires ISPs to report census-block coverage lets an ISP count an entire census block as served even if it can serve just one home in the block. There are millions of census blocks across the US, and each one generally contains between 600 and 3,000 people. Perhaps even worse, ISPs can count a census block as served in some cases where they don't provide any broadband in the block. That's because the FCC tells ISPs to report where they could offer service "without an extraordinary commitment of resources." An ISP could thus count a census block as served if it's near its network facilities, but in practice ISPs have charged homeowners tens of thousands of dollars for line extensions.

Pai's mapping order (full text) says it "will collect geospatial broadband coverage maps from Internet service providers," and create a crowdsourcing system to collect public input on the accuracy of ISP-submitted maps. ISPs could still count homes that aren't currently connected to their networks, but the FCC has tightened the criteria for doing so. ISPs may only count an area as served if the ISP "has a current broadband connection or it could provide such a connection within ten business days of a customer request and without an extraordinary commitment of resources or construction costs exceeding an ordinary service activation fee." The new requirements are limited to fixed broadband providers, those that offer non-mobile service in homes and businesses.

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Guardian about the questionable decision in the 1950s to get rid of Sydney's trams in favor of private cars. From the report: In the late 1950s Sydney ripped up its tram network, once one of the largest in the world. Nearly 1,000 trams -- some only a few years old -- were rolled to the workshops in the city's eastern suburbs and stripped of anything that could be sold, before being unceremoniously tipped on their sides, doused with sump oil and set ablaze. Barely a decade before its closure, Sydney's tram system had carried 400 million passenger journeys a year on a network of more than 250km, primarily serving the eastern, southern and inner-west suburbs, and stretching as far north as Narrabeen at its peak. But the explosion of car traffic in the postwar years persuaded the New South Wales government that urban freeways were the way of the future (the first in Australia, the Cahill Expressway, opened in 1958), and trams were an impediment to that vision.

The destruction of the network from the mid-50s was swift and brutal. In 1958 the bizarre castellated Fort Macquarie depot at Circular Quay was demolished to make way for the Opera House, and the lines along George Street were torn up. The last Sydney tram ran on 25 February 1961 from Hunter Street to La Perouse (along much of the same route now being rebuilt), packed to the rafters and greeted by crowds of people, before it joined the dismal procession to "burning hill" at Randwick. Mathew Hounsell, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, has called the destruction of the network "the largest organized vandalism in our nation's history." He says the decisions made in the 50s had a disastrous long-term effect. "When the trams were removed from Sydney, mass transport patronage plummeted and private car usage soared. Our space-saving trams were replaced with ever-more space-hungry cars, causing ever-worsening traffic. That wasn't how the planners saw it at the time. They were strongly swayed by powerful international influences, which chimed with the unstoppable rise of private car ownership in Australia. The trams are slowly returning, as the city painfully rebuilds a tiny part of its old system. "The construction of 12.8km of light rail from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kingsford will cost $2.7 billion at the latest estimate, has caused untold misery to shops and other businesses in its path and will be almost a year overdue by the time even the first section is open," the report says.

"The new line hardly represents a fundamental shift in Sydney's transport thinking, coming as it does alongside the vast 'congestion-busting' WestConnex freeway project, and further investment in metro rail (a separate light rail link is also under construction at Parramatta). But it is a reminder that the city might have looked very different today but for the decision taken in the 1950s -- and ruthlessly carried out -- to prioritize motor transport."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: A multination project to build a fusion reactor cleared a milestone yesterday and is now six-and-a-half-years away from "First Plasma," officials announced. Yesterday, dignitaries attended a components handover ceremony at the construction site of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in southern France. The ITER project is an experiment aimed at reaching the next stage in the evolution of nuclear energy as a means of generating emissions-free electricity. The section recently installed -- the cryostat base and lower cylinder -- paves the way for the installation of the tokamak, the technology design chosen to house the powerful magnetic field that will encase the ultra-hot plasma fusion core. The entire project is now 65% complete, the officials said. "Manufactured by India, the ITER cryostat is 16,000 cubic meters," ITER officials said in a release. "Its diameter and height are both almost 30 meters and it weighs 3,850 tons. Because of its bulk, it is being fabricated in four main sections: the base, lower cylinder, upper cylinder, and top lid."

Long-time Slashdot reader hyperfine transition writes: The Galileo satellite positioning service is currently unavailable, with all satellites marked as in outage . Galileo is the European-built and operated alternative to GPS. The outage is being attributed to problems at the Precise Timing Facility in Italy. The availability of multiple Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and the relative newness of Galileo (the system is still under construction and only the newest GNSS receivers will track it) means that it is likely that few users will see an impact but the problem highlights our potential vulnerability to the loss of positioning and timing services available through GNSS.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The most astonishing thing about cement is how much air pollution it produces. Manufacturing the stone-like building material is responsible for 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than what comes from all the trucks in the world. And with that in mind, it's surprising that leading cement makers from LafargeHolcim in Switzerland to Votorantim Cimentos in Brazil are finding customers slow to embrace a greener alternative. Their story highlights the difficulties of taking greenhouse gases out of buildings, roads and bridges. After wresting deep cuts from the energy industry, policymakers looking to extend the fight against global warming are increasingly focusing on construction materials and practices as a place to make further reductions. The companies are working on solutions, but buyers are reluctant to pay more.

While architects and developers concentrate on the energy used by their buildings, it's actually the materials supporting the structure that embody the biggest share of its lifetime carbon footprint. Cement's contribution to emissions is especially immense because of the chemical process required to make it. About two-thirds of the polluting gases that come from cement production stem from burning limestone. Kilns are heated to more than 1,400 degrees Celsius (2,600 Fahrenheit), about four times hotter than a home oven set to the self-clean cycle. Inside the kiln, carbon trapped in the limestone combines with oxygen and is released as CO2, the most abundant greenhouse gas.

Boston Dynamics is about to launch its first ever commercial product -- a quadrupedal robot named Spot. The Verge reports: Spot is currently being tested in a number of "proof-of-concept" environments, Boston Dynamics' CEO Marc Raibert told The Verge, including package delivery and surveying work. And although there's no firm launch date for the commercial version of Spot, it should be available within months, said Raibert, and certainly before the end of the year. "We're just doing some final tweaks to the design," said the CEO. "We've been testing them relentlessly."

Rather than selling the robot as a single-use tool, it's positioning it as a "mobility platform" that can be customized by users to complete a range of tasks. A Spot robot mounted with 3D cameras can map environments like construction sites, identifying hazards and work progress. When equipped with a robot arm, it has even greater flexibility, able to open doors and manipulate objects. At Re:MARS, a Spot with a robot arm used it to pick up items, including a cuddly toy that was then offered to a flesh-and-blood police dog. The dog was unimpressed with the robot, but happy, at least, to receive the toy. Raibert says it's this "athletic intelligence" that Boston Dynamics will be selling through its robots. Think of it like Amazon's AWS business, but instead of offering computing power on tap, its robotic mobility. How much will Spot cost? Raibert only said that the commercial version will be "much less expensive than prototypes [and] we think they'll be less expensive than other peoples' quadrupeds."

He did, however, reveal that the company had already found some paying customers, including construction companies in Japan who are testing Spot as a way to oversee the progress of work on sites.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: The Energy Department's most environmentally important and technically ambitious project to clean up Cold War nuclear weapons waste has stalled, putting at jeopardy an already long-delayed effort to protect the Columbia River in central Washington. In a terse letter last week, state officials said the environmental project is at risk of violating key federal court orders that established deadlines after past ones were repeatedly missed. Two multibillion-dollar industrial facilities intended to turn highly radioactive sludge into solid glass at the Hanford nuclear site have been essentially mothballed. Construction was halted in 2012 because of design flaws and Energy Department managers have foundered in finding alternatives, according to the letter that threatens new litigation.

The department has committed to removing and disposing all of the underground tank waste by 2047, though Washington's Department of Ecology director Maia Bellon said the state doesn't think that is possible at current funding levels. The six-page letter was addressed to Anne White, chief of environmental management at the Energy Department. The Times obtained the letter from Hanford Challenge, a watchdog group that has closely monitored the contaminated facility. "This is clearly setting the table for litigation," said Tom Carpenter, executive director of the group. "The Energy Department is going to miss all of these deadlines." Carpenter noted that in February, the Energy Department issued a new cost estimate to remediate the entire Hanford site, taking it from $110 billion to as much as $660 billion, a cost increase that has staggered Congress and has fueled sentiment to cut short the cleanup goals. "They are walking away from important elements of the cleanup," he said. Bellon has a two-part proposal for the Energy Department to consider. "First, there would be a new round of negotiations over the next six to nine months," the report says. "Second, the state wants a low-level treatment system operating by no later than 2023, full production of high-level waste glass by 2036 and renewed commitments to removing all tank waste."

If the Energy Department doesn't accept the state's proposal or the negotiation does not result in an acceptable cleanup program, the state "reserves our right" to pursue action in court, Bellon said in the letter.

A California lobbyist for Chevron is urging retirees of the oil company in Arizona to oppose electric-car policies, saying the vehicles are too expensive for most people and should not be promoted. From a report: A handful of people who either retired from Chevron or from Unocal, which Chevron acquired in 2005, have used the form letter to urge Arizona Corporation Commissioners not to require electric companies here to build electric-car charging stations. Form letters are commonly used to lobby commissioners, but the secretive nature of this campaign has drawn criticism, including from a retiree who alerted commissioners to the lobbyist's effort.

The letters discourage electric-car infrastructure. "Let the electric vehicle industry finance the construction of the infrastructure from which it will benefit, rather than burdening most Arizona ratepayers with the costs of supporting the electric vehicle market," wrote Sel Larsen, the president of the Arizona retirees group. The letter-writing campaign is a response to a March document from the Corporation Commission asking electric companies in Arizona to propose how they will roll out electric-vehicle infrastructure and incorporate electric vehicles into their business.

While the United States is banning the use of Huawei equipment from its fifth-generation infrastructure, the Chinese telecommunications company is working to expand its share in the undersea cable market, which is dominated by the U.S., Europe and Japan. Nikkei Asian Review reports: About a decade ago, Huawei entered the business by setting up a joint venture with British company Global Marine Systems. It expanded its presence by laying short links in regions like Southeast Asia and the Russian Far East. But last September, Huawei surprised industry executives in Japan, the U.S. and Europe by completing a 6,000 km trans-Atlantic cable linking Brazil with Cameroon. This showed Huawei has acquired advanced capabilities, even though it is still far behind the established players in terms of experience and cable volume.

During the 2015-2020 period, Huawei is expected to complete 20 new cables -- mostly short ones of less than 1,000 km. Even when these are finished, Huawei's market share will be less than 10%. Over the long term, however, the company could emerge as a player to be reckoned with. Huawei is estimated to be involved in around 30 undersea cable projects at the moment. It also reportedly has a hand in about 60 projects to enhance cable landing stations to boost transmission capacity. The reality is, even if the U.S. succeeds in shutting out Huawei from 5G networks in major countries, the Chinese company could still thwart American efforts to maintain leadership in handling global data traffic. The report goes on to say that the U.S., Japan and Australia are working to address this potential threat. "Steps they are considering include banning Huawei from laying cables connected to one of the three countries, and urging other governments to prevent the company from getting involved in the construction of any major cables Informed sources."

Elon Musk's Boring Company now has a paying customer. "Late Wednesday, the board of directors of the Las Vegas Conventions and Visitors Authority voted to grant a $48,675,000 contract to the Boring Company to build a 0.83-mile, three-station version of the company's Loop mass-transit system inside of Vegas' sprawling, revamped convention center, which is currently under construction," reports Wired. From the report: As previously outlined by BoCo, the Loop system is made up of 8- to 16-passenger battery-powered autonomous electric vehicles, built to shoot people from station to station at speeds of up to 150 mph. This Las Vegas system is slated to transport at least 4,400 passengers per hour between the center's new exhibit and south halls, about a 20-minute walk by foot. The Boring Company has also pledged to build an escalator or elevator system for each of the three stations, pedestrian entrances and exits, tunnel lighting, power and video surveillance systems, a control room, and cell phone, Wi-Fi, intercom, and ventilation systems. The convention center hopes to time the opening of the Loop with the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show.

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman was the only board member to vote against granting the Boring Company its bid. During the bidding process, Goodman had asked fellow board members to consider a more expensive proposal from another company, Doppelmayr. "Doppelmayr has been in existence for 125 years," Goodman wrote in a letter, according to the Las Vegas Sun. "They already have projects here that are operating successfully. The Boring Co. is 3 years old and has yet to deliver a final package on anything." Goodman's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Friday the Washington Post published an essay by Gregory Jaczko, who served on America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2005 to 2009 and was its chairman from 2009 to 2012. He says he'd believed nuclear power was worth the reduction they produced in greenhouse emissions -- until Japan's 2011 nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima power plant.

"Despite working in the industry for more than a decade, I now believe that nuclear power's benefits are no longer enough to risk the welfare of people living near these plants..." [Non-paywalled version here] The current and potential costs -- personal and economic -- are just too high.... The technology and the safety needs are just too complex and demanding to translate into a facility that is simple to design and build. No matter your views on nuclear power in principle, no one can afford to pay this much for two electricity plants. New nuclear is simply off the table in the United States....

Fewer than 10 of Japan's 50 reactors have resumed operations, yet the country's carbon emissions have dropped below their levels before the accident. How? Japan has made significant gains in energy efficiency and solar power.... What about the United States? Nuclear accounts for about 19 percent of U.S. electricity production and most of our carbon-free electricity. Could reactors be phased out here without increasing carbon emissions? If it were completely up to the free market, the answer would be yes, because nuclear is more expensive than almost any other source of electricity today. Renewables such as solar, wind and hydroelectric power generate electricity for less than the nuclear plants under construction in Georgia, and in most places, they produce cheaper electricity than existing nuclear plants that have paid off all their construction costs...

This tech is no longer a viable strategy for dealing with climate change, nor is it a competitive source of power. It is hazardous, expensive and unreliable, and abandoning it wouldn't bring on climate doom. The real choice now is between saving the planet or saving the dying nuclear industry. I vote for the planet.

Why are there so many five-star reviews for an iPhone charger on Amazon with a voltage irregularity that can cause permanent damage? "It's sad to imagine how many shoppers spotted this $13.99 charger pack on Amazon's first-page results and fell for the thousands of positive reviews and the algorithmically-generated endorsement from a platform that people trust more than religion," reports The Hustle.

A spot-check confirmed that "10 of the 22 first-page results on Amazon for 'iPhone charger' were products with thousands of 5-star reviews, all unverified and posted within a few days of each other," and they've now investigated "the underbelly of Amazon's fake-review economy" and "how such a product, peddled by a ragtag troupe of e-commerce scammers, managed to game one of the world's premier technology companies." The fake Amazon review economy is a thriving market, ripe with underground forums, "How To Game The Rankings!" tutorials, and websites with names like (now-defunct) "amazonverifiedreviews.com." But the favored hunting grounds for sellers on the prowl is Amazon's fellow tech behemoth, Facebook. In a recent two-week period, I identified more than 150 private Facebook groups where sellers openly exchange free products (and, in many cases, commissions) for 5-star reviews, sans disclosures. A sampling of 20 groups I analyzed collectively have more than 200,000 members. These groups seem to be in the midst of an online Gold Rush: Most are less than a year old, and in the past 30 days have attracted more than 50,000 new users... One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables...

Fake reviews have been an issue for Amazon since its inception, but the problem appears to have intensified in 2015, when Amazon.com began to court Chinese sellers. The decision has led to a flood of new products -- a 33% increase, by some accounts -- sold by hundreds of thousands of new sellers. Rooted in manufacturing hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, they use Amazon's fulfillment program, FBA, to send large shipments of electronic goods directly to Amazon warehouses in the US. This rapid influx has spawned thousands of indistinguishable goods (chargers, cables, batteries, etc.). And it has prompted sellers to game the system. "It's a lot harder to sell on Amazon than it was 2 or 3 years ago," says Fahim Naim, an ex-Amazon manager who now runs an e-commerce consulting firm. "So a lot of sellers are trying to find shortcuts." Steve Lee, a Los Angeles-based vendor, is among them: "You have to play the game to sell now," he says. "And that game is cheating and breaking the law...."
The article points out that this is illegal. "Endorsements are required to be truthful," Mary Engel, Associate Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Advertising Practices, tells the site. "If a reviewer has received something of value in exchange for their opinion, they need to clearly disclose that in the review." But instead, the review-watching site "ReviewMeta" analyzed 203 million Amazon reviews and found 11.3% (22.8 million) were untrustworthy -- while another site estimates the fake-review percentage is 30%. (Amazon's own estimate? "Less than 1%") ReviewMeta also spotted more than 2 million "unverified" reviews just in March of 2019 -- 99.6% of which were five-star. "They're almost all for these off-brand, cheap electronic products: Phone chargers, headphones, cables. Generic things that are super cheap to manufacture, have good margins, and get a ton of searches."

Though Amazon has sued over 1,000 fake-review sites to date, "Their way of handling it is reactive, not proactive," says the founder of ReviewMeta. "Amazon is a $900B company with thousands of brilliant engineers. I majored in construction management. It seems like they should be able to figure this one out."

MikeChino writes: The world's first home designed, planned, and built with mainly digital processes just opened its doors in Switzerland. Developed by eight ETH Zurich professors, DFAB House is a pilot project showcasing futuristic building technologies that may someday work their way into our homes. It's topped with a solar array that generates, on average, 1.5 times more energy than the unit needs (an intelligent control system eliminates the risk of load peaks), [and there are waste heat recovery systems to recycle heat from shower trays back into the boiler.] Some of the pioneering ETH-developed construction processes include: "Mesh Mould technology, in which an autonomous 'In Situ Fabricator' robot builds a 3D mesh formwork for concrete load-bearing walls; Smart Slab, a lightweight concrete slab with 3D-printed sand formwork that's less than half the weight of a conventional concrete slab; Smart Dynamic Casting, an automatic robotic slip-forming process; and Spatial Timber Assemblies, a digital prefabrication process that uses a dual robot system to create timber frame modules," reports Dwell, adding that people "manually filled in formwork, bolted CNC-milled and 3D-printed pieces into place, and tweaked the digital design process."

One of the prototypes Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs is working on for its planned neighborhood on Toronto's waterfront is a hexagonal paving system. "The slabs are porous and heated, which may keep snow and ice at bay without salting," reports Engadget. "They're easy to replace, and include LED lights that can, for instance, help direct traffic flow during construction or mark street closures." From the report: Sidewalk will also demonstrate what it's calling a Building Raincoat, an awning it says will help protect sidewalks from wind, rain, sun and snow to make outdoor space usable throughout the year. It attaches to the sides of buildings and is fixed to ground anchors. It's made from a durable, lightweight and transparent plastic called ETFE (Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene).

In addition, Sidewalk will have a number of art installations at the public event, which "use lighting, projection mapping, mud and other techniques to reflect on relationships between humans and animals in public space, and the broader connection of ecology and urbanism." Some of the works will be projected onto the awning. Along with the prototypes, Sidewalk will discuss some of its broader ideas about how to make its neighborhood livable and accessible, in part through affordable housing and its transit system.

The New York Times reported Thursday that an open letter will be published in the Times on Friday that asks Amazon to reconsider its decision to walk away from its plan to build a 25,000-employee campus in Long Island City, Queens. The company pulled the plug on the project, dubbed HQ2, following vocal and persistent opposition to the plan after it was announced three months ago. CNET reports: The letter was signed by the CEOs of Mastercard, Warby Parker, Goldman Sachs, Tishman Speyer and Jetblue, among others. The presidents of the Building & Construction Trades Council of Greater New York and state AFL-CIO, which were expecting thousands of construction jobs to come from the project, also signed, as did U.S. Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Carolyn Maloney. "We know the public debate that followed the announcement of the Long Island City project was rough and not very welcoming," the letter stated. "Opinions are strong in New York -- sometimes strident. We consider it part of the New York charm! But when we commit to a project as important as this, we figure out how to get it done in a way that works for everyone."

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has also had several conversations with Amazon, including CEO Jeff Bezos, about bringing back the project, the Times said. The letter and Cuomo's behind-the-scenes efforts are part of the latest fallout since Amazon abandoned HQ2 in New York. The opposition has celebrated the exit as a victory for grassroots campaigns and a stand against lavish government incentives for new development plans. Amazon was slated to get about $3 billion in tax breaks for building the project. Supporters, who weren't as vocal during the run-up to Amazon leaving, expressed shock and consternation about Amazon's decision and worried that New York would appear unfriendly to new businesses. While the business community was broadly seen as in favor of the project, the letter shows how both the camps supporting and opposing HQ2 included unions and Democratic U.S. congress members.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via NPR: Netflix announced this week that it has acquired the rights to stream Chinese sci-fi blockbuster "The Wandering Earth," which has already grossed more than $600 million globally and hit number two in the all-time Chinese box office rankings since it was released in theaters Feb. 5. Netflix will translate the movie into 28 languages and release it in more than 190 countries. The movie, based on a short story by Hugo award winner Liu Cixin (author of "Three Body Problem" and "Ball Lighting") is set in a distant future in which the earth is about to be devoured by the sun. Using propulsive engines, humans turn earth into a spaceship and try to launch it out of the solar system and the planet is saved by a Chinese hero (rather than American ones as typically seen in Hollywood sci-fi movies.)

For China's film industry, the release marks a major milestone. "Filmmakers in China see science fiction as a holy grail," Raymond Zhou, an independent critic, told The New York Times. "It's like the coming-of-age of the industry." Two sci-fi movies, "The Wandering Earth" and "Crazy Alien," which is also inspired by Liu's work, topped this Chinese New Year movie season. Inkoo Kang wrote at Slate that the film "understands what American blockbusters are still loath to admit: Responding to climate change will pose infrastructural challenges on a massive order and require drastic measures on a planetary scale. Perhaps it takes a country like China, which is accustomed to a manic rate of construction and grandness of organizational possibility, to seriously consider how dramatically humanity will have to reimagine our ways of life to survive such a catastrophic force."

In a blog post today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is building new data centers and offices and expanding several key locations across the U.S., spending $13 billion this year. CNBC reports: Pichai outlined the plans, which include opening new data centers in Nevada, Ohio, Texas and Nebraska, the first time the company will have infrastructure locations in those states. The company is also doubling its workforce in Virginia, providing greater access to Washington, D.C., with a new office and more data center space, and expanding its New York campus at Hudson Square.

Google is showing its willingness to further open its wallet, after a year in which capital spending more than doubled to $25.46 billion. The company didn't say home much each location will cost or provide information on tax incentives from local communities. Pichai said the plans will likely create tens of thousands of construction jobs across Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas and Virginia, as well as Oklahoma and South Carolina, where the company is expanding existing data centers. Google didn't say how many new jobs the data centers and business offices would create. Pichai also said that the company is adding new office buildings in Texas and Massachusetts, building out more space in Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington state and Georgia, and redeveloping California locations near Los Angeles and in the Bay Area, including the Westside Pavillion and Spruce Goose Hangar.