In a new paper published in the journal Science Progress, author Joseph Merz argues that climate issues are symptoms of ecological overshoot, driven by exploited human behaviors such as overconsumption, waste, and population growth. The paper emphasizes the need to change societal norms and behaviors through various means, including using marketing and media strategies to promote sustainable living, rather than solely focusing on technological or policy solutions. The Guardian reports: Merz and colleagues believe that most climate "solutions" proposed so far only tackle symptoms rather than the root cause of the crisis. This, they say, leads to increasing levels of the three "levers" of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. They claim that unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster. "We can deal with climate change and worsen overshoot," says Merz. "The material footprint of renewable energy is dangerously underdiscussed. These energy farms have to be rebuilt every few decades -- they're not going to solve the bigger problem unless we tackle demand."

"Overshoot" refers to how many Earths human society is using up to sustain -- or grow -- itself. Humanity would currently need 1.7 Earths to maintain consumption of resources at a level the planet's biocapacity can regenerate. Where discussion of climate often centers on carbon emissions, a focus on overshoot highlights the materials usage, waste output and growth of human society, all of which affect the Earth's biosphere. "Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behavior," says Merz. "For decades we've been telling people to change their behavior without saying: 'Change your behavior.' We've been saying 'be more green' or 'fly less', but meanwhile all of the things that drive behavior have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction -- and we've been wondering why nothing's changing."

The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signaling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviors which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one's status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies to create behaviors incompatible with a sustainable world. "People are the victims -- we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction," says the evolutionary behavioral ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. "Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?" Just one-quarter of the world population is responsible for nearly three-quarters of emissions. The authors suggest the best strategy to counter overshoot would be to use the tools of the marketing, media and entertainment industries in a campaign to redefine our material-intensive socially accepted norms. "We're talking about replacing what people are trying to signal, what they're trying to say about themselves. Right now, our signals have a really high material footprint -- our clothes are linked to status and wealth, their materials sourced from all over the world, shipped to south-east Asia most often and then shipped here, only to be replaced by next season's trends. The things that humans can attach status to are so fluid, we could be replacing all of it with things that essentially have no material footprint -- or even better, have an ecologically positive one."

With everyone worrying about climate change, CNN shares a list of reasons to feel positive: The year 2023 is on track to see the biggest increase in renewable energy capacity to date, according to the International Energy Agency. China, the world's biggest climate polluter, has made lightning advances in renewables, with the country set to shatter its wind and solar target five years early. A report published in June found that China's solar capacity is now greater than the rest of the world's nations combined, in a surge described by the report's author, Global Energy Monitor, as "jaw-dropping...."

The popularity of electric vehicles has surged this year, with American sales at an all-time high. People in China and Europe are snapping up EVs in large numbers as well... Americans purchased 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2023, an annual record, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Electric vehicles accounted for about 8% of all new vehicles sales in the US during the first half of 2023, according to the report. In China, EVs accounted for 19% of all vehicle sales, and worldwide, they made up 15% of new passenger vehicle sales. EV sales in Europe were up 47% in the first nine months of 2023, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (EAMA)
Other positive developments from the article:

• "For more than six days straight, between October 31 to November 6, the nation of more than 10 million people relied solely on renewable energy sources — setting an exciting example for the rest of the world."

• "Deforestation in Brazil fell by 22.3% in the 12 months through July, according to data from the national government, as President Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva started to make progress on his pledge to rein in the rampant forest destruction that occurred under his predecessor..."

• "The Earth's ozone layer is on track to recover completely within decades, a UN-backed panel of experts announced in January, as ozone-depleting chemicals are phased out across the world."

Remember those researchers who generated electricity from the energy in air humidity?

"To be frank, it was an accident," the study's lead author, Prof Jun Yao, tells the Guardian: "We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power." The UMass Amherst team were surprised to find that the device, which comprised an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless. Each nanowire was less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, wide enough that an airborne water molecule could enter, but so narrow it would bump around inside the tube. Each bump, the team realised, lent the material a small charge, and as the frequency of bumps increased, one end of the tube became differently charged from the other. "So it's really like a battery," says Yao. "You have a positive pull and a negative pull, and when you connect them the charge is going to flow..."

"The beauty is that the air is everywhere," says Yao. "Even though a thin sheet of the device gives out a very tiny amount of electricity or power, in principle, we can stack multiple layers in vertical space to increase the power." That's exactly what another team, Prof Svitlana Lyubchyk and her twin sons, Profs Andriy and Sergiy Lyubchyk, are trying to do. Svitlana Lyubchyk and Andriy are part of the Lisbon-based Catcher project, whose aim is "changing atmospheric humidity into renewable power", and along with Sergiy they have founded CascataChuva, a startup intended to commercialise the research... Catcher and related projects [received] nearly €5.5m (£4.7m) in funding from the European Innovation Council. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across. According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day — roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024...

The Lyubchyks estimate that the levelised cost of energy — the average net present cost of electricity generation for a generator over its lifetime — from these devices will indeed be high at first, but by moving into mass production, they hope to lower it significantly, ultimately making this hygroelectric power competitive with solar and wind... The team accept that it may take years to optimise a prototype and scale up production, but if they're successful, the benefits are clear. Unlike solar or wind, hygroelectric generators could work day and night, indoors and out, and in many places.
Yao explains to the Guardian that "Lots of energy is stored in water molecules in the air. That's where we get the lightning effect during a thunderstorm.

"The existence of this type of energy isn't in doubt. It's about how we collect it."

Thanks to Slashdot reader j3x0n for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A magical material that could effortlessly conduct electricity at room temperatures would likely transform civilization, reclaiming energy otherwise lost to electrical resistance and opening possibilities for novel technologies. Yet a claim of such a room-temperature superconductor published in March in the prestigious journal Nature, drew doubts, even suspicion by some that the results had been fabricated. But now, a group of researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago reports that it has verified a critical measurement: the apparent vanishing of electrical resistance. This result does not prove that the material is a room-temperature superconductor, but it may motivate other scientists to take a closer look.

Ranga P. Dias, a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the University of Rochester in New York and a key figure in the original research, had reported that the material appeared to be a superconductor at temperatures as warm as 70 degrees Fahrenheit -- much warmer than other superconductors -- when squeezed at a pressure of 145,000 pounds per square inch, or about 10 times what is exerted at the bottom of the ocean's deepest trenches. The high pressure means the material is unlikely to find practical use, but if the discovery is true, it could point the way to other superconductors that truly work in everyday conditions. The claim was met with skepticism because several scientific controversies have swirled around Dr. Dias, and other scientists trying to replicate the results had failed to detect any signs of superconductivity.

Dr. Dias has founded a company, Unearthly Materials, to commercialize the research, raising $16.5 million in financing so far from investors. The new measurements, revealed in a preprint paper posted this month, come from a team led by Russell J. Hemley, a professor of physics and chemistry at the University of Illinois Chicago. Dr. Hemley declined to comment because the paper had not yet been accepted by a scientific journal. Nonetheless, he is well regarded in the field, and his report could lead to a more positive reconsideration of Dr. Dias's superconducting claim. "It may convince some people," said James J. Hamlin, a professor of physics at the University of Florida who has been a persistent critic of Dr. Dias's research. "It makes me think there might be something to it."

The Indian government will not consider any proposals for new coal plants for the next five years and focus on growing its renewables sector, according to an updated national electricity plan released Wednesday evening. From a report: The temporary pause in the growth of the dirty fuel was hailed by energy experts as a positive step for a country that is currently reliant on coal for around 75% of its electricity. Updated every five years, the plan serves as a guideline for India's priorities in its electricity sector.

India is the world's third highest emitter and most populous country. It plans to reach net zero emissions by 2070, which would mean significantly slashing coal use and ramping up renewable energy. In a draft of the plan released in September, the Central Electricity Authority, which is in charge of planning for India's electricity needs, projected that nearly 8,000 megawatts of new coal capacity was required by 2027. But Wednesday's strategy proposes the build out of more than 8,600 megawatts of battery energy storage systems instead. Battery storage is crucial for round-the-clock use of renewable energy.

A group of venture capital firms including Tiger Global and Union Square Ventures on Tuesday set up an alliance aimed at making private tech investing more climate-friendly. From a report: Called the Venture Climate Alliance (VCA), the coalition of more than 20 climate tech and generalist funds seeks to get the VC industry to increase its commitments to climate tech, a branch of technology devoted to finding solutions to the climate crisis. The alliance lays out guidance that its VC members and their portfolio companies must follow to ensure they meet the requirements to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

According to a statement, the VCA's stated aim is to "ensure that methodology and metrics are at the heart of how we determine what is a good climate investment, and what investment will have the greatest positive effect on the mission to build tech for a regenerative world." Portfolio companies are given guidance on how they should decarbonize their operations, such as using emission-free data centers, deploying less energy-intensive software in their tech stack, or rebuilding supply chains around low-carbon alternatives, the statement said. Other funds signed up to the VCA include climate VCs World Fund, 2150, and Prelude Venture. Collectively, the investment firms involved manage a combined $62.3 billion in assets, according to Crunchbase figures. [...] The U.N. approved the VCA as part of its Race to Zero campaign aimed at mobilizing climate action. The alliance will fall under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a group formed during the COP26 climate conference.

A new study on added sugars (also known as "free sugars") concluded they're bad for your health, reports NBC News.

"The research, published in the journal BMC Medicine, found that diets higher in free sugars — a category that includes sugar added to processed foods and sodas, as well as that found in fruit juice and syrups — raise one's risk of heart disease and stroke." The study relied on data about the eating habits of more than 110,000 people ages 37 to 73 in the United Kingdom, whose health outcomes were then tracked over about nine years. The results suggested that each 5% increase in the share of a person's total energy intake that comes from free sugars was associated with a 6% higher risk of heart disease and a 10% higher risk of stroke.

An author of the study, Cody Watling, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, said the most common forms of sugar the study participants ate were "preserves and confectionary," with the latter category including cookies, sugary pastries and scones. Fruit juice, sugar-sweetened beverages and desserts were also common, he added.... The people found to have the highest risk of heart disease or stroke consumed about 95 grams of free sugar per day, or 18% of their daily energy intake, Watling said. By comparison, U.S. guidelines suggest that added sugars should make up no more than 10% of one's daily calories.

"Avoiding sugar-sweetened beverages is probably the single most important thing we can be doing," said Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. Willett added that although there are some health benefits to drinking a small glass of orange juice occasionally, its sugar content means "a glass of fruit juice is the same thing as Coke...."

The Oxford researchers found a positive relationship when it comes to fiber, unlike sugar intake: Consuming 5 grams of fiber a day was associated with a 4% lower risk of heart disease, the study suggested, although that did not hold true when researchers controlled for participants' body-mass indexes.... Watling said, the study demonstrates that the types of carbs people choose to eat may matter more than the total amount. "What's really important for overall general health and well-being is that we're consuming carbohydrates that are rich in whole grains," he said, while "minimizing the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, as well any kind of confectionary products that have added sugars."
It's a point underscored by CNN: After over nine years of follow-up, the researchers found total carbohydrate intake wasn't associated with cardiovascular disease. But when they analyzed how outcomes differed depending on the types and sources of carbohydrates eaten, they found higher free sugar intake was associated with a higher risk for cardiovascular disease and greater waist circumference. The more free sugars some participants consumed, the greater their risk of cardiovascular disease, heart disease and stroke was....

"This study provides much needed nuance to public health discussions about the health effects of dietary carbohydrates," said Dr. Maya Adam, director of Health Media Innovation and clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, via email. Adam wasn't involved in the study. "The main takeaways are that all carbs are not created equal...."
CNN adds that the mechanism seems to be that sugar intake "can promote inflammation," according to an assistant cardiology professor at Columbia's medical center. "This can cause stress on the heart and blood vessels, which can lead to increased blood pressure..."

AmiMoJo writes: A research project that saw a four-day working week being trialled across 12 businesses has been deemed a success by both the companies and employees involved. The project, backed by the trade union Forsa and carried out in partnership by Four-Day Week Ireland, UCD and Boston College, examined the financial, social, and environmental impact that a four-day working week would have on businesses and employees in Ireland. Nine of the 12 companies that took part in the six-month trial said they were committed to continuing with the four-day-week schedule. The other three said they were also planning to continue but did not commit to keeping it long-term.

Seven companies provided data on revenue and of those, six reported monthly revenue growth, with one seeing a decline. Two companies that tracked energy usage found reductions. In general, management of the companies were said to have been very pleased with the outcome of the trial in terms of productivity and overall experience. On a scale of 1-10, from very negative to very positive, the companies' average rating for the trial was 9.2.

"We have reestablished reliable communications with Ingenuity," reported the team lead for NASA's Mars helicopter, Teddy Tzanetos, in a blog post last week. As detailed in our last blog post, for the first time in our yearlong extended mission we had a loss of communications with Ingenuity from the downlink of May 3 (Sol 427) and May 4 (Sol 428). After a week of anomaly investigation, two sols dedicated to data collection, and the heroic efforts of the Perseverance and Ingenuity operations teams, I am very happy to report that we have reestablished reliable communications with Ingenuity.

Based on all available telemetry, the helicopter appears healthy, and we have resumed a modified form of operations. Assuming winter recommissioning activities complete nominally, Ingenuity's 29th flight may occur in the next few sols.... All telemetry downlinked so far suggests that Ingenuity is healthy, with no signs of damage from the overnight cold cycles.
That's the good news.

The bad news? Telemetry from Ingenuity confirmed that the loss of communications was due to insufficient battery state-of-charge (SOC) going into the night, which resulted in a reset of our mission clock. This daily state-of-charge deficit is likely to persist for the duration of Martian winter (until September/October).

Challenges like these are to be expected: After hundreds of sols and dozens of flights beyond the five flights originally planned, the solar-powered helicopter is in uncharted terrain. We are now operating far outside our original design limits. Historically, Mars is very challenging for spacecraft (particularly solar-powered spacecraft). Each sol could be Ingenuity's last....

We have reached the point in Martian late fall/early winter at which Ingenuity can no longer support the energy demands of nominal operations. Starting on the evening of Sol 426, we believe Ingenuity started experiencing overnight battery brownouts (drops in the battery's voltage), which reset the electronics. Due to the seasonal decrease in available solar energy, increases in airborne dust density, and the drop in temperatures, the energy demand to keep the electronics powered and warm throughout the night has surpassed Ingenuity's available energy budget.... We expect to be in this challenging winter energy paradigm until around Sol 600, at which point we expect to return to being power-positive from sol to sol.
The blog post says NASA can cope with a resetting mission clock. But the helicopter's battery (and other electronics) are now facing overnight ambient temperatures of about minus 80 degrees C (minus 112 degrees F), "a lifetime risk to our electronic components." Although component failure has always been a risk that we have carried since rover deployment, that risk is now magnified... We do have limited electronics core module (ECM) component testing to suggest that select components may survive through the winter, but we cannot predict how the entire ECM will fare throughout winter. Cold-soaking electronics is believed to have caused the end of the Opportunity and Spirit Mars rover missions.

Given our elevated risk posture, our focus in the last several sols has been to prioritize data downlink from Ingenuity to the Helicopter Base Station (HBS). We have a handful of Heli-to-HBS transfer activities left before all unique data are copied from Ingenuity to the HBS. Specifically, we are copying flight performance logs, electronics logs, and high-resolution color images from the last eight flights that are still onboard Ingenuity.

After all critical logs are transferred, the team will proceed with a recommissioning phase during which we will reestablish Ingenuity's flight-readiness given our ongoing overnight cold-cycling. Like during the technology demonstration phase, we will perform a high-speed spin before proceeding to flight. Should Ingenuity receive a clean bill of health, we would be ready to execute a short sortie to the southwest in Flight 29. This flight will improve our radio link for approximately the next four to six months while Perseverance samples at the river delta.

In the meantime, the Ingenuity flight software team will be preparing a series of upgrades to enable advanced navigation features. These new capabilities will help Ingenuity ascend the river delta and continue its missions as a forward scout for Perseverance past winter.
Mashable notes that Ingenuity recently sent back new footage showing its April 8th flight — calling it Ingenuity's "farthest and fastest flight yet." Flying 33 feet above the surface of Mars on April 8, "it traveled 2,310 feet — a bit less than half a mile — at 12 mph." The whole record-breaking feat lasted a little over 2.5 minutes, but that's much longer than its first flight of 39 seconds in the spring of 2021. NASA increased the new video's speed fivefold, reducing its runtime to less than 35 seconds.

Coinbase is testing a practice where it asks employees to frequently rate each other. Some employees at the company have been using a real-time evaluation app invented by Bridgewater Associates, the well-known hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio, which helped enforce a culture of "radical transparency" that encourages blunt honesty, The Information reported Monday, citing two people with direct knowledge. From the report: The app, Dot Collector, is sold by Principles, a company Dalio founded. Coinbase's version lets employees evaluate co-workers, including their managers, on how well they exemplify the crypto firm's 10 cultural tenets -- which include clear communication, efficient execution and positive energy -- during meetings and other interactions, these people said. After an interaction, an employee can give their colleague a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or neutral rating.

Two hours. That's about how much time elapsed between the discovery of asteroid 2022 EB5 and when it reached Earth's atmosphere. The asteroid is only the fifth one to have been detected before impact. CNET reports: Astronomer Krisztian Sarneczky first spotted the asteroid on March 11 with a telescope at the Piszkesteto observatory in Hungary. He reported the sighting to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, which tracks near-Earth objects and comets. News of the asteroid spread from there, and calculations showed the space rock had a 100% chance of impact north of Iceland. Fortunately, the asteroid was very small, roughly 1 meter (3.3 feet) in diameter -- that's half the height of basketball superstar Michael Jordan. An asteroid that small will safely burn up in our planet's atmosphere, but the dainty size also makes it hard to spot.

The thought of an asteroid discovery mere hours before reaching us might make you think "yikes," but the European Space Agency described the news as "rather positive." Researchers have done an excellent job tracking bigger asteroids, so it's impressive they're now finding some of the smaller, sneakier ones. "All five asteroids, spotted before impact, were found since 2008, illustrating how much asteroid observation technologies have improved in the last years," ESA said in a statement. While 2022 EB5 was relatively tiny, infrasound detectors picked up on the likely impact, which ESA said suggested an energy release equivalent to a magnitude 4.0 earthquake. As detection systems get more sophisticated, it might be possible to warn communities when a small asteroid is inbound.

2021 was actually cooler than 2020, points out Wired science journalist Matt Simon. So is that good news?

No. One reason for cooler temperatures in 2021 was likely La Niña, a band of cold water in the Pacific. It's the product of strong trade winds that scour the ocean, pushing the top layer of water toward Asia, causing deeper, colder waters to rush to the surface to fill the void. This in turn influences the atmosphere, for instance changing the jet stream above the United States and leading to more hurricanes in the Atlantic. The sea itself cools things off by absorbing heat from the atmosphere.

The Covid-19 pandemic may have had an additional influence, but not in the way you might think. As the world locked down in 2020, fewer emissions went into the sky, including aerosols that typically reflect some of the sun's energy back into space. "If you take them away, you make the air cleaner, then that's a slight warming impact on the climate," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, during a Thursday press conference announcing the findings. But as economic activity ramped back up in 2021, so did aerosol pollution, contributing again to that cooling effect. The 2021 temperature drop "may be possibly due to a resumption of activity that produces aerosols in the atmosphere," Schmidt said...

Today's findings are all the more alarming precisely because 2021 managed to overcome these cooling effects and still tally the sixth-highest temperature. And while global temperatures were cooler in 2021 than the year before, last year 1.8 billion people lived in places that experienced their hottest temperatures ever recorded, according to a report released today by Berkeley Earth. This includes Asian countries like China and North and South Korea, African nations like Nigeria and Liberia, and in the Middle East places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. "We talk a lot about global average temperatures, but no one lives in the global average," says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. "In fact most of the globe, two-thirds of it, is ocean, and no one lives in the ocean — or very few people at least. And land areas, on average, are warming much faster than the rest of the world...."

Last summer in western Canada and the US Pacific Northwest, absurd temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit killed hundreds of people. According to Hausfather, the heat wave in Portland, Oregon, would have been effectively impossible without climate change, something like a once-every-150,000-year event.
It's a fascinating article, that looks at trouble spots like Antarctica's sea level-threatening "Doomsday Glacier" and a warming Gulf of Mexico, mapping the intensity of 2021's temperature anomalies along with trend graphs for both global temperatures and land-vs-ocean averages. It touches on how climate change is impacting weather — everything from rain and floods to wildfires and locusts — as Bridget Seegers, an oceanographer at NASA, points out that "Extremes are getting worse. People are losing their homes and their lives and air quality, because the wildfires are bad."

But Seegers somehow arrives at a positive thought. "There's just a lot going on, and I want people to also feel empowered that we understand the problem. It's just this other issue of deciding to take collective action....

"There's a lot of reasons for optimism. We're in charge. This would be a lot worse if we're like, 'Oh, it's warming because we're heading toward the sun, and we can't stop it.'"

(Thanks to Slashdot reader Sanja Pantic for sharing the article!)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The recently passed $1 trillion infrastructure package is jam-packed with initiatives but sprinkled in there alongside $17 billion in funding for road safety programs is a mandate requiring carmakers to implement monitoring systems to identify and stop drunk drivers. The mandate, first noted by the Associated Press could apply to new vehicles sold as early as 2026. Courts have ordered some drunk drivers to use breathalyzers attached to ignition interlocks to start their vehicles for years, but the technology noted in this bill would take that concept much further and would need to be capable of "passively monitor[ing] the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired."

Though the Department of Transportation has yet to put its foot down on the exact type of technology it will use for this program, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and 17 automakers have been working on something called the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADSS) since 2008. DADSS is exploring both a breath and touch-based system to detect whether or not a driver has a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) at or above 0.08%. The breath-based system aims to measure alcohol readings based on a driver's breath with the goal of distinguishing between the driver and passengers. The touch-based system meanwhile would shine an infrared light through a driver's fingertip to measure blood alcohol levels under the skin's surface. [...]

The new mandate struck a positive note with some car safety groups, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving which has advocated for more detection tech in the past. "It's monumental," Alex Otte, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving told the AP. Otte went on to describe the package as the "single most important legislation" in the group's history. At the same time though, the mandate has drawn concerns from safety experts and digital rights groups that warn driver monitoring technology could have knock-on privacy implications. In a letter sent last year by the American Highway Users Alliance, the organization urged support of the NHTSA's DADSS Research Program but expressed concerns that the technology could potentially infringe on driver's civil liberties. "The group also expressed concerns over how the collection and storage of driver data would work and who would have the rights to that data," adds Gizmodo. Others have also expressed concerns over the accuracy of driving monitoring technology and potential risks of bias.

During the first three months of 2021, the United States installed its 100,000th EV charger. Ars Technica reports on the important electric vehicle milestone: Of course, the actual composition of those chargers is important. It's no good having half a million places to plug in if they're all level 1 (120 V AC) chargers that take days to top up a battery EV. But a new report (PDF) from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has dug into the data, looking at trends to see whether the nation is on track to meet its goals. At first glance, the news is positive. We added 4,566 new chargers during Q1 2021 for a total of 100,709. That means the US is already 20 percent of the way to Biden's 2030 goal. Most of those were level 2 (240 V AC) chargers, which saw 5.4-percent growth. The number of level 1 chargers actually decreased by 2.4 percent, mostly as ChargePoint decommissioned them in favor of level 2 devices.

Because a level 2 charger usually takes 8-10 hours to fully recharge a 250-300 mile BEV, drivers (particularly those who have yet to convert to an electric car) are probably more interested in the number of the faster level 3 (usually known as DC fast) chargers. Depending upon the car and the power output of the DC fast charger, these can charge a battery to 80 percent in 20-50 minutes. There was essentially no growth in DC fast chargers between Q4 2020 and Q1 2021. After multiple quarters of rapid expansion, the number of public DC fast charging ports grew by just 0.4 percent. The NREL attributes this to the integration between ChargePoint's and Greenlots' APIs [...].

Level 2 chargers can recharge any electric car, but not all BEVs can plug in to all DC fast chargers. All US Teslas use a proprietary charging plug, and 56.7 percent of all public DC fast chargers in the US are part of the Tesla Supercharger network. The various charging network APIs don't all report exactly the same information in exactly the same way, so the NREL was only able to determine the charging power for a limited number (6,821) of DC fast chargers. That led to a rather scary-looking pie chart on the Department of Energy's website showing that 40 percent of DC fast chargers were only able to supply 50 kW or less. However, the chart is based on only 6,821 chargers and excludes almost the entire Tesla Supercharger network from its data set.

The US overtook China as the world's biggest source of bitcoin mining two months after Beijing banned crypto mining this year, new data have revealed. From a report: China's share of the global hashrate -- the computational power required to create bitcoin -- fell from 44 per cent to zero between May and July, showed figures published by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance on Wednesday. The country accounted for three-quarters of the global hashrate in 2019. The US share of the global hashrate increased from 17 per cent in April to 35 per in August, while Kazakhstan rose 10 percentage points to 18 per cent in the same period.

China's State Council, or cabinet, banned cryptocurrency mining and trading in May, citing environmental and financial concerns. The decision prompted an exodus of miners in search of cheap energy and crypto-friendly politicians. China's bitcoin mining ban resulted in the "great mining migration," said Sam Tabar, chief strategy officer at Bit Digital, a New York-based bitcoin miner. The company suspended its operations in China, which it had been winding down since October 2020, after the prohibition. Michel Rauchs, digital assets lead at the closely watched Cambridge tracker, noted that "the effect of the Chinese crackdown is an increased geographic distribution of hashrate across the world," adding that it could be seen as "a positive development for network security and the decentralised principles of bitcoin."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Every jobseeker welcomes an invitation to a second interview, because it signals a company's interest. A third interview might feel even more positive, or even be the precursor to an offer. But what happens when the process drags on to a fourth, fifth or sixth round -- and it's not even clear how close you are to the 'final' interview? That's a question Mike Conley, 49, grappled with earlier this year. The software engineering manager, based in Indiana, US, had been seeking a new role after losing his job during the pandemic. Five companies told him they had to delay hiring because of Covid-19 -- but only after he'd done the final round of interviews. Another three invited him for several rounds of interviews until it was time to make an offer, at which point they decided to promote internally. Then, he made it through three rounds of interviews for a director-level position at a company he really liked, only to receive an email to co-ordinate six more rounds. "When I responded to the internal HR, I even asked, 'Are these the final rounds?,'" he says. "The answer I got back was: 'We don't know yet.'"

That's when Conley made the tough decision to pull out. He shared his experience in a LinkedIn post that's touched a nerve with fellow job-seekers, who've viewed it 2.6 million times as of this writing. Conley says he's received about 4,000 public comments of support, and "four times that in private comments" from those who feared being tracked by current or prospective employers. [...] In fact, the internet is awash with similar stories jobseekers who've become frustrated with companies -- particularly in the tech, finance and energy sectors -- turning the interview process into a marathon. That poses the question: how many rounds of interviews should it take for an employer to reasonably assess a candidate before the process veers into excess? And how long should candidates stick it out if there's no clear information on exactly how many hoops they'll have to jump through to stay in the running for a role? Google recently determined that four interviews was enough to make a hiring decision with 86% confidence, noting that there was a diminishing return on interviewer feedback thereafter.

"John Sullivan, a Silicon Valley-based HR thought leader, says companies should nail down a hire-by date from the start of the recruitment process, because the best candidates only transition the job market briefly," reports the BBC. "According to a survey from global staffing firm Robert Half, 62% of US professionals say they lose interest in a job if they don't hear back from the employer within two weeks -- or 10 business days -- after the initial interview. That number jumps to 77% if there is no status update within three weeks. "

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Today, the LHCb experiment at CERN is presenting a new discovery at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP). The new particle discovered by LHCb, labeled as Tcc+, is a tetraquark -- an exotic hadron containing two quarks and two antiquarks. It is the longest-lived exotic matter particle ever discovered, and the first to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks. Quarks are the fundamental building blocks from which matter is constructed. They combine to form hadrons, namely baryons, such as the proton and the neutron, which consist of three quarks, and mesons, which are formed as quark-antiquark pairs. In recent years a number of so-called exotic hadrons -- particles with four or five quarks, instead of the conventional two or three -- have been found. Today's discovery is of a particularly unique exotic hadron, an exotic exotic hadron if you like.

The new particle contains two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Several tetraquarks have been discovered in recent years (including one with two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks), but this is the first one that contains two charm quarks, without charm antiquarks to balance them. Physicists call this "open charm" (in this case, "double open charm"). Particles containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark have "hidden charm" -- the charm quantum number for the whole particle adds up to zero, just like a positive and a negative electrical charge would do. Here the charm quantum number adds up to two, so it has twice the charm! The quark content of Tcc+, has other interesting features besides being open charm. It is the first particle to be found that belongs to a class of tetraquarks with two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks. Such particles decay by transforming into a pair of mesons, each formed by one of the heavy quarks and one of the light antiquarks. According to some theoretical predictions, the mass of tetraquarks of this type should be very close to the sum of masses of the two mesons. Such proximity in mass makes the decay "difficult," resulting in a longer lifetime of the particle, and indeed Tcc+, is the longest-lived exotic hadron found to date.

"Well before China decided to kick out all of its bitcoin miners, they were already leaving in droves, and new data from Cambridge University shows they were likely headed to the United States," reports CNBC: The U.S. has fast become the new darling of the bitcoin mining world. It is the second-biggest mining destination on the planet, accounting for nearly 17% of all the world's bitcoin miners as of April 2021. That's a 151% increase from September 2020. "For the last 18 months, we've had a serious growth of mining infrastructure in the U.S.," said Darin Feinstein, founder of Blockcap and Core Scientific. "We've noticed a massive uptick in mining operations looking to relocate to North America, mostly in the U.S."

This dataset doesn't include the mass mining exodus out of China, which led to half the world's miners dropping offline, and experts tell CNBC that the U.S. share of the mining market is likely even bigger than the numbers indicate... "500,000 formerly Chinese miner rigs are looking for homes in the U.S," said Marathon Digital's Fred Thiel. "If they are deployed, it would mean North America would have closer to 40% of global hashrate by the end of 2022."

America's rising dominance is a simple case of luck meeting preparation. The U.S. has quietly been building up its hosting capacity for years... It also helps that the U.S. is also home to some of the cheapest sources of energy on the planet, many of which tend to be renewable. Because miners at scale compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy, they are incentivized to migrate to the world's cheapest sources of power.

Thiel expects most new miners relocating to North America to be powered by renewables, or gas that is offset by renewable energy credits. While Castle Island Ventures founding partner, Nic Carter, points out that U.S. mining isn't wholly renewable, he does say that miners here are much better about selecting renewables and buying offsets. "The migration is definitely a net positive overall," he said. "Hashrate moving to the U.S., Canada, and Russia will mean much lower carbon intensity."

A data center can easily use up to 1.25 million gallons of water each day — and "More data centers are being built every day by some of America's largest technology companies," reports NBC News, "including Amazon, Microsoft and Google and used by millions of customers." Almost 40 percent of them are in the United States, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft account for more than half of the total. The U.S. also has at least 1,800 "colocation" data centers, warehouses filled with a variety of smaller companies' server hardware that share the same cooling system, electricity and security, according to Data Center Map. They are typically smaller than hyperscale data centers but, research has shown, more resource intensive as they maintain a variety of computer systems operating at different levels of efficiency.

Many data center operators are drawn to water-starved regions in the West, in part due to the availability of solar and wind energy. Researchers at Virginia Tech estimate that one-fifth of data centers draw water from moderately to highly stressed watersheds, mostly in the Western United States, according to a paper published in April...

The growth in the industry shows no signs of slowing. The research company Gartner predicts that spending on global data center infrastructure will reach $200 billion this year, an increase of 6 percent from 2020, followed by 3-4 percent annually over the next three years. This growth comes at a time of record temperatures and drought in the United States, particularly in the West. "The typical data center uses about 3-5 million gallons of water per day — the same amount of water as a city of 30,000-50,000 people," said Venkatesh Uddameri, professor and director of the Water Resources Center at Texas Tech University. Although these data centers have become much more energy and water efficient over the last decade, and don't use as much water as other industries such as agriculture, this level of water use can still create potential competition with local communities over the water supply in areas where water is scarce, he added...

Sergio Loureiro, vice president of core operations for Microsoft, said that the company has pledged to be "water positive" by 2030, which means it plans to replenish more water than it consumes globally. This includes reducing the company's water use and investing in community replenishment and conservation projects near where it builds facilities.

Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, according to new research, described as an "unprecedented" increase amid the climate crisis. From a report: Scientists from NASA, the US space agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), reported in a new study that Earth's "energy imbalance approximately doubled" from 2005 to 2019. The increase was described as "alarming." "Energy imbalance" refers to the difference between how much of the Sun's "radiative energy" is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and surface, compared to how much "thermal infrared radiationâ bounces back into space.

"A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up," NASA said in a statement about this study. Scientists determined there was an energy imbalance by comparing data from satellite sensors -- which track how much energy enters and exits Earth's system -- and data from ocean floats. This system of data-gathering floats, which stretches across the globe, allows for "an accurate estimate of the rate at which the world's oceans are heating up." Because about 90% of excess energy from an imbalance winds up in the ocean, the satellite sensors' data should correspond with temperature changes in oceans.