An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After a tease earlier this week, Valve has revealed more details and a new trailer for the first new Half-Life content in over a decade. The "full-length" Half Life: Alyx will hit Steam in March 2020, Valve says, with support for "all PC-based VR headsets." Pre-orders are already available for $59.99, though the game will be free if you own a Valve Index headset. The game, which Valve says is "set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2," has been "designed from the ground up for Virtual Reality" (i.e. you can stop hoping for a 2D monitor release). "Everyone at Valve is excited to be returning to the world of Half-Life," Valve founder Gabe Newell said in a statement. "VR has energized us."

Today's video trailer shows that next year's Alyx-ization of Half-Life is equal parts abstract and concrete. The VR perspective from today's trailer doesn't include any floating body parts or feet; the only part of your virtual self you'll see, at least in today's trailer, is your hands, covered in a pair of gloves. Yet we also hear Alyx's voice, which indicates that this game's protagonist won't be nearly as silent as Freeman in his own mainline adventures. Today's announcement includes video footage that confirms a data-leak examination by Valve News Network earlier this year: a new manipulation system dubbed the Gravity Gloves. And boy do these things look cool. Need to grab or pick something up? Point at whatever that object is (whether it's close or far away) with an open hand until it glows orange, then close your hand and flick your wrist toward yourself to fling the item in your direction. At this point, you get a moment to physically "catch" the object in question. Point, clench, flick, catch.

Today's trailer also confirms bits and pieces of the exciting HLA details I've previously heard about from multiple sources. For instance, the trailer includes teases of the game's approach to VR-exclusive puzzles, particularly those that require moving hands around a three-dimensional space. Some of these puzzles will require scanning and finding clues hidden inside of the virtual world's walls (and moving or knocking down anything hindering your ability to see or touch said walls). Other puzzles will require arranging what look like constellations or grids of stars around a 3D space in order to match certain patterns. And then there's the matter of familiar Half-Life creatures coming to life for the first time in over 12 years, which means they're that much more detailed and gruesome as rendered in the Source 2 engine. The Half-Life website specifies that this game can be played sitting, standing, or with "roomscale" movement. Players can use finger-tracking or trigger-based VR controllers and move around the VR environments by "teleporting" from point A to point B, "shifting" smoothly to a new position, or just walking continuously with an analog stick.

For the first time, astrophysicists have observed a cosmic explosion emit particles that are a trillion times more energetic than visible light, a record-setting measurement from a phenomenon that scientists are still seeking to fully understand. Motherboard reports: The observation of this powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB), as these explosions are known, adds another layer to what scientists think happens when a star implodes. The findings were published on November 20 in two papers in the journal Nature. [...] After the GRB was detected, telescopes on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands quickly adjusted to observe it. The telescopes are overseen by the MAGIC collaboration, weigh 64 tons each, and were designed to measure extremely high-energy emissions from gamma-ray bursts. They automatically process alerts from satellites and adjust to face the bursts in less than a minute. A fast response time is crucial: Gamma-ray bursts can last from a fraction of a second to mere minutes. Elena Moretti was one of the scientists working the night of the GRB's detection, and a co-author of the two studies.

The burst came from a progenitor star that was 4.5 billion light-years away, according to the studies -- relatively close, astronomically speaking. The farther away high-energy particles are from Earth, the more likely they are to be absorbed by extragalactic background light and not reach our telescopes. After verifying that the GRB observed emitted photons in the TeV range, scientists realized the process used to explain and model these bursts could not account for such a high energy. Instead, Moretti said they are nearly certain that the emitted photons were raised to a TeV-level energy after colliding with nearby electrons.

An anonymous reader quotes Quanta magazine: A provocative paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy argues that the universe may curve around and close in on itself like a sphere, rather than lying flat like a sheet of paper as the standard theory of cosmology predicts. The authors reanalyzed a major cosmological data set and concluded that the data favors a closed universe with 99% certainty — even as other evidence suggests the universe is flat.

New research from a duo of environmental engineers at Drexel University is suggesting the decades-old claim that house plants improve indoor air quality is entirely wrong. Evaluating 30 years of studies, the research concludes it would take hundreds of plants in a small space to even come close to the air purifying effects of simply opening a couple of windows. From a report: Back in 1989 an incredibly influential NASA study discovered a number of common indoor plants could effectively remove volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the air. The experiment, ostensibly conducted to investigate whether plants could assist in purifying the air on space stations, gave birth to the idea of plants in home and office environments helping clear the air. Since then, a number of experimental studies have seemed to verify NASA'a findings that plants do remove VOCs from indoor environments. Professor of architectural and environmental engineering at Drexel University Michael Waring, and one of his PhD students, Bryan Cummings, were skeptical of this common consensus. The problem they saw was that the vast majority of these experiments were not conducted in real-world environments.

To better understand exactly how well potted plants can remove VOCs from indoor environments, the researchers reviewed the data from a dozen published experiments. They evaluated the efficacy of a plant's ability to remove VOCs from the air using a metric called CADR, or clean air delivery rate. "The CADR is the standard metric used for scientific study of the impacts of air purifiers on indoor environments," says Waring, "but many of the researchers conducting these studies were not looking at them from an environmental engineering perspective and did not understand how building air exchange rates interplay with the plants to affect indoor air quality." Once the researchers had calculated the rate at which plants dissipated VOCs in each study they quickly discovered that the effect of plants on air quality in real-world scenarios was essentially irrelevant. Air handling systems in big buildings were found to be significantly more effective in dissipating VOCs in indoor environments. In fact, to clear VOCs from just one square meter (10.7 sq ft) of floor space would take up to 1,000 plants, or just the standard outdoor-to-indoor air exchange systems that already exist in most large buildings.

By the end of this century, rising oceans will almost certainly flood the lands where tens of millions of people live as accelerating climate change warms the waters and melts ice sheets. From a report: But precise estimates of the vulnerable populations depend on precise measurements of the planet's topography, to understand just how close to sea level communities have settled. A new study that seeks to correct for known errors in earlier elevation models finds that researchers might have been undercounting the number of people exposed to rising tides by hundreds of millions. That's three to four times more people than previously projected, depending on the specific scenarios. If these higher estimates prove correct, it will dramatically increase the damages and casualties from sea-level rise, swell the costs of adaption efforts like constructing higher seawalls, and escalate mass migration away from the coasts. Many of the estimates to date have relied on essentially a three-dimensional map of the planet produced from a radar system that flew on board NASA's space shuttle Endeavour in 2000.

"An unpiloted Air Force X-37B spaceplane, one of two winged orbiters used to carry out classified research, made a surprise landing at the Kennedy Space Center early Sunday to close out a record 780-day mission," reports CBS News: It was the fifth flight in the secretive Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) program, pushing total time aloft to 2,865 days. "This program continues to push the envelope as the (Air Force's) only reusable space vehicle," Randy Walden, director of the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office, said in a statement. "With a successful landing today, the X-37B completed its longest flight to date and successfully completed all mission objectives."

The unpiloted orbiters, built by Boeing, are based on the same lifting body design used for the space shuttle and they fly a similar re-entry trajectory to a runway touchdown. The X-37B features a small 4-foot by 7-foot payload bay and uses a deployable solar array for power. The spacecraft are believed to fly as orbital test beds for advanced technology sensors and other systems but the program is classified, and the Air Force provides few details. Walden said the latest mission "successfully hosted Air Force Research Laboratory experiments, among others, as well as providing a ride for small satellites...."

The X-37B is one of only two operational spacecraft capable of multiple flights to and from orbit. SpaceX's unpiloted Dragon cargo ship also can be refurbished for additional flights... "This spacecraft is a key component of the space community," Lt. Col. Jonathan Keen, X-37B program manager, said in the Air Force statement. "This milestone demonstrates our commitment to conducting experiments for America's future space exploration. Congratulations to the X-37B team for a job well done."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Soaring deforestation coupled with the destructive policies of Brazil's far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, could push the Amazon rainforest dangerously to an irreversible "tipping point" within two years, a prominent economist has said. After this point the rainforest would stop producing enough rain to sustain itself and start slowly degrading into a drier savannah, releasing billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, which would exacerbate global heating and disrupt weather across South America.

The warning came in a policy brief published this week by Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC. The report sparked controversy among climate scientists. Some believe the tipping point is still 15 to 20 years away, while others say the warning accurately reflects the danger that Bolsonaro and global heating pose to the Amazon's survival. The policy brief noted that Brazil's space research institute, INPE, reported that deforestation in August was 222% higher than in August 2018. Maintaining the current rate of increase INPE reported between January and August this year would bring the Amazon "dangerously close to the estimated tipping point as soon as 2021 beyond which the rainforest can no longer generate enough rain to sustain itself", de Bolle wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes the I-Programmer site: Humans! Rest easy, we still beat the evil AI at the all-important Angry Birds game. Recent research by Ekaterina Nikonova and Jakub Gemrot of Charles University (Czech Republic) indicates why this is so....

"Firstly, this game has a large number of possibilities of actions and nearly infinite amount of possible levels, which makes it difficult to use simple state space search algorithms for this task. Secondly, the game requires a planning of sequences of actions, which are related to each other... For example, a poorly chosen first action can make a level unsolvable by blocking a pig with a pile of objects. Therefore, to successfully solve the task, a game agent should be able to predict or simulate the outcome of it is own actions a few steps ahead."
The researchers also report that the game requires AI to distinguish "between multiple birds, their abilities and optimum tapping times..."

"Despite the fact we have come close to a human-level performance on selected 21 levels, we still lost to 3 out of 4 humans in obtaining a maximum possible total score."

Space scientists are abandoning the heavens to help you decide what to wear and watch and listen to. Whether it's stars or Stitch Fix, it's all about machine learning. Wired: Chris Moody knows a thing or two about the universe. As an astrophysicist, he built galaxy simulations, using supercomputers to model the way the universe expands and how galaxies crash into one another. One night, not long after he'd finished his PhD at UC Santa Cruz, he met up with a few other astrophysicists for beers. But that night, no one was talking about galaxies. Instead, they were talking about fashion. A couple of Moody's astrophysicist pals had recently left academia to work for Stitch Fix, the online personal styling company now valued at $2 billion. Moody gawked at them. "They were like, 'You don't think this is an interesting problem?'" he says. Indeed, he did not. But when his friends described the work they were doing -- sprinkling in phrases like "Bayesian models" and "Poincare space" -- predicting what clothes someone might like started to sound eerily like the work he'd done during his PhD. Quantifying style, he discovered, "turns out to have really close analogues to how general relativity works."

Four years later, Moody works for Stitch Fix too. He belongs to a growing group of astrophysicist deserters, who have stopped researching the cosmos to start building recommendation algorithms and data models for the tech industry. They make up the data science teams at companies like Netflix and Spotify and Google. And even at elite universities, fewer astrophysics PhDs go on to take postdoctoral fellowships or pursue competitive professorships. Now, more of them go straight to work in Silicon Valley. To understand what's driving astrophysicists into consumer product startups, consider the recent explosion of machine learning. Astrophysicists, who wrangle massive amounts of data collected from high-powered telescopes that survey the sky, have long used machine learning models, which "train" computers to perform tasks based on examples. Tell a computer what to recognize in one intergalactic snapshot and it can do the same for 30 million more and start to make predictions. But machine learning can also be used to make predictions about customers, and around 2012, corporations started to staff up with people who knew how to deploy it.

Astronomers have spotted 20 more moons orbiting Saturn, bringing the total number of Saturnian moons to 82, surpassing the 79 that are known to orbit Jupiter. The Guardian reports: The scientists discovered the moons when they set algorithms to work on decade-old images captured from the powerful Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. By comparing images taken over hours and days, the algorithms distinguished between stationary stars and galaxies and moons that hurtled around the planet. Depending on the angle of approach, comets and asteroids straying too close to Saturn in the early solar system would have become locked into radically different orbits around the planet. Only three of the new moons have so-called prograde orbits, meaning they circle Saturn in the same direction that it rotates. The other 17 are in retrograde orbits, meaning they orbit the planet backwards. One is the most distant moon ever spotted from the planet.

The outer moons of Saturn fall into three broad families according to how they orbit the gas giant. Two of the new prograde moons appear to belong to a group that swings around Saturn at an angle of about 46 degrees. The moons, named after Inuit mythology, may once have belonged to one far larger moon that broke apart in the distant past. The new retrograde moons appear to belong to another group named after Norse mythology and are also thought to be fragments of a much bigger parent moon that was smashed to pieces in the solar system's violent past.

dryriver shared this article from NBC News' science blog Mach: Picture this: A hundred million years ago, an advanced civilization detects strange signatures of life on a blue-green planet not so far away from their home in the Milky Way. They try sending signals, but whatever's marching around on that unknown world isn't responding. So, the curious galactic explorers try something different. They send a robotic probe to a small, quiet space rock orbiting near the life-rich planet, just to keep an eye on things.

If a story like this played out at any moment in Earth's 4.5 billion-year history, it just might have left an archaeological record. At least, that's the hope behind a new proposal to check Earth's so-called co-orbitals for signs of advanced alien technology. Co-orbitals are space objects that orbit the sun at about the same distance that Earth does. "They're basically going around the sun at the same rate the Earth is, and they're very nearby," said James Benford, a physicist and independent SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researcher who dreamed up the idea that aliens might have bugged Earth via these co-orbitals while he was at a conference in Houston last year. If he's right, the co-orbitals could be a way to detect alien activity that occurred before humans even evolved, much less turned their attention toward the stars.

To be clear, even SETI researchers who like the idea of checking out Earth's co-orbitals acknowledge that it's a long shot... "How likely is it that alien probe would be on one of these co-orbitals, obviously extremely unlikely," said Paul Davies, a physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in Benford's new paper on the idea, published Sept. 20 in The Astronomical Journal. "But if it costs very little to go take a look, why not? Even if we don't find E.T., we might find something of interest...." Seeking signs of intelligent extraterrestrials close to Earth is informative even if the search comes up empty, Benford said. That no one's heard or seen any extraterrestrial signals in 50 years or so doesn't mean much, given the mind-boggling time span of Earth's history. A lack of evidence spanning hundreds, millions or even billions of years would be much more convincing.

"If we don't find anything, that means no one has come to look at the life of Earth for over billions of years," Benford said. "That is a big surprise, a stunning thing."
The search has already begun. In April China's space agency announced plans to send a probe to Earth's nearest co-orbital.

"Electric flight is becoming a tantalizingly close reality for shorter-range service," writes ZDNet. "But increasing passenger carrying capacity and flight times to economically accommodate longer routes will require a major rethink of crucial components."

pgmrdlm quotes their report: GE is partnering with the NASA Advanced Air Vehicles Program on a new generation of inverter using GE's silicon Carbide technology. The project aims to deliver a next gen inverter that provides significantly increased power density over existing technology but is small enough to support electric flight."We're essentially packing 1 MW of power into the size of a compact suitcase that will convert enough electric power to enable hybrid-electric propulsion architectures for commercial airplanes,"says Konrad Weeber, Chief Engineer of Electric Power at GE Research. "We have successfully built and demonstrated inverters at ground level that meet the power, size and efficiency requirements of electric flight. The next step is to build and demonstrate one that is altitude ready...."

GE makes an ideal development partner for NASA because it's a vertically-integrated, one stop shop. GE designs everything from chips to system level architecture, which makes optimizing a final design to conserve space and weight much more practical over cobbling together a system from multiple contractors.

SpaceX "built its experimental spaceport in and around Boca Chica Village, a decades-old community of about 20 elderly residents," reports Business Insider.

But now "SpaceX is trying to buy as much of Boca Chica Village as it can and move people out...following an accidental brush fire, public-safety notices warning of the possibility for explosions, and a push to have the Federal Aviation Administration approve orbital-class launches with larger rockets." "When SpaceX first identified Cameron County as a potential spaceport location, we did not anticipate that local residents would experience significant disruption from our presence," the letter said. "However, it has become clear that expansion of spaceflight activities as well as compliance with Federal Aviation Administration and other public safety regulations will make it increasingly more challenging to minimize disruption to residents of the Village... SpaceX is offering you three times the independently appraised fair market value of your property," the letter said. "The offer is good through two weeks from the date of this letter...."

For those who commit to a sale, SpaceX said it would cover closing and other real-estate costs. It also comes packaged with an additional perk. "SpaceX recognizes that your close proximity to its operations has offered a unique opportunity to experience at close-hand the development of what will be the world's most advanced rocket. In appreciation of your support, we will offer all residents of the Village who accept the purchase offer the opportunity to continue their connection with the development of Starship by extending an invitation to attend future private VIP launch viewing events that are unavailable to the public."
Homeowner Cheryl Stevens complained to CBS News that the company has encroached on their neighborhood. "They're behaving as if this is Cape Canaveral. And it's not. It's not a military base. It's just a regular neighborhood, and a public beach, and a state highway. And suddenly, because they're here, stop the presses. Everything has to change for SpaceX."

SpaceX issued the following statement to CBS News: "We are entering a new and exciting era in space exploration and Texas is playing an increasingly important role in our efforts to help make humanity multi-planetary.

"As we develop Starship -- the world's most advanced launch system ever -- we are listening and responding to our neighbors' concerns and are striving to minimize disruptions as much as possible. We are working closely with Cameron County to facilitate public safety and provide regular road and beach closure updates to the public through a telephone hotline and on Cameron County's website."

80 minutes from now, an asteroid will pass so close to earth that home astronomers will be able to see it, writes Salon.

Slashdot reader PolygamousRanchKid shares their report: Experts say the asteroid, known as Asteroid 2000 QW7, will miss our planet by about 3 million miles -- around 14 times the distance between the Earth and the moon. And while that distance is astonishingly close on an astronomical scale, it does not suggest that the asteroid is going to hit Earth -- although it has a small chance to strike our planet in the future. The closeness of its pass on Saturday will allow astronomers to hone their measurements of its trajectory, allowing for more accurate calculations of its strike probability in the future.

Gianluca Masi, Scientific Director at The Virtual Telescope, told Salon in a statement that amateur astronomers can view its fly-by, which is at 7:54 pm on the East Coast, but will have to have a telescope with a diameter of at least 250 millimeters. [Heres' the telescope-positioning coordinates.] Masi said a smaller telescope might work if combined with a sensitive imaging device that can also record its apparent motion across the stars...

NASA released a statement this week to the public to emphasize it is not a threat, noting that it is actually one of two asteroids to pass Earth this weekend. The second asteroid, asteroid 2010 C01, is estimated to be 120 to 260 meters in size (400 to 850 feet).
The first asteroid's diamter is between 300 and 600 meters -- so up to 1968 feet, or a little more than one-third of a mile.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Daqri, which built enterprise-grade AR headsets, has shuttered its HQ, laid off many of its employees and is selling off assets ahead of a shutdown, former employees and sources close to the company tell TechCrunch. In an email obtained by TechCrunch, the nearly 10-year-old company told its customers that it was pursuing an asset sale and was shutting down its cloud and smart-glasses hardware platforms by the end of September.

Daqri faced substantial challenges from competing headset makers, including Magic Leap and Microsoft, which were backed by more expansive war chests and institutional partnerships. While the headset company struggled to compete for enterprise customers, Daqri benefited from investor excitement surrounding the broader space. That is, until the investment climate for AR startups cooled. Daqri was, at one point, speaking with a large private-equity firm about financing ahead of a potential IPO, but as the technical realities facing other AR companies came to light, the firm backed out and the deal crumbled, we are told. The report notes that Osterhout Design Group and Meta, an AR headset startup that raised $73 million from VCs, both sold their assets earlier this year.

An anonymous reader quotes Space.com: India's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter attempted to drop a lander named Vikram near the lunar south pole yesterday afternoon (Sept. 6), but mission controllers lost contact with the descending craft when it was just 1.3 miles (2.1 kilometers) above the gray dirt. As of early Saturday morning (Sept. 7), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) still had not officially declared Vikram dead. But comments by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi leave little room for optimism...

But Chandrayaan-2's journey isn't over yet, because the orbiter is still going strong. In fact, its yearlong moon mission has barely begun; the spacecraft slipped into lunar orbit just last month. Since then, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter has been studying Earth's natural satellite with eight different science instruments, from an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers). The probe's data should eventually allow researchers to compile detailed maps of the lunar surface, revealing key insights about the moon's elemental composition, formation and evolution, ISRO officials have said.

Some of these maps will attempt to assess the moon's stores of water ice. A decade ago, Chandrayaan-2's predecessor, the orbiter Chandrayaan-1, showed that water is widespread across the lunar surface, especially at the poles... Vikram was supposed to deploy a rover named Pragyan, which would have mapped out the elemental composition of the landing site, potentially providing up-close information about ice in the area.

A NASA mission to explore the most tantalizing of Jupiter's 79 moons has been given the green light to proceed to the final stages of development. From a report: Europa -- which is slightly smaller than our own moon -- has long been considered a possible candidate in the hunt for alien life. Evidence suggests there is an ocean below the moon's thick, icy crust that might be tens of miles deep. Scientists believe this body of water could contain the right chemical cocktail for life and could even be home to some form of living organisms. Europa appears to have the hat-trick of conditions needed to kick off life: water, possibly chemistry, and energy in the form of tidal heating, a phenomenon arising from gravitational tugs acting on the moon. This could not only drive chemical reactions but also aid movement of chemical substances between rock, surface and ocean, possibly through hydrothermal vents.

It is proposed that the NASA mission, named Europa Clipper, will make a number of close flybys -- it cannot orbit the moon as Jupiter's radiation belt would fry its electronics -- carrying cameras and intruments to measure the moon's magnetic field. The mission will look for subsurface lakes and provide data on the thickness of the moon's icy crust. The team also hope to confirm the presence of plumes of water, previously detected by NASA's Galileo spacecraft and the Hubble space telescope. If confirmed, it would mean scientists would not need to find a way of hacking through the moon's icy crust to explore the makeup of the ocean.

A survey of more than 6,000 firmware images spanning more than a decade finds no improvement in firmware security and lax security standards for the software running connected devices by Linksys, Netgear and other major vendors. The Security Ledger reports: "Nobody is trying," said Sarah Zatko, the Chief Scientist at the Cyber Independent Testing Lab (CITL), a non-profit organization that conducts independent tests of software security. "We found no consistency in a vendor or product line doing better or showing improvement. There was no evidence that anybody is making a concerted effort to address the safety hygiene of their products," she said. The CITL study surveyed firmware from 18 vendors including ASUS, D-link, Linksys, NETGEAR, Ubiquiti and others. In all, more than 6,000 firmware versions were analyzed, totaling close to 3 million binaries created from 2003 to 2018. It is the first longitudinal study of IoT software safety, according to Zatko. CITL researchers studied publicly available firmware images and evaluated them for the presence of standard security features such as the use of non-executable stacks, Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and stack guards, which prevent buffer overflow attacks.

The results were not encouraging. Time and again, firmware from commonly used manufacturers failed to implement basic security features even when researchers studied the most recent versions of the firmware. For example: firmware for the ASUS RT-AC55U wifi router did not employ ASLR or stack guards to protect against buffer overflow attacks. Nor did it employ a non-executable stack to protect against "stack smashing," another variety of overflow attack. CITL found the same was true of firmware for Ubiquiti's UAP AC PRO wireless access points, as well as DLink's DWL-6600 access point. Router firmware by vendors like Linksys and NETGEAR performed only slightly better on CITL's assessment. CITL researchers also "found no clear progress in any protection category over time," reports The Security Ledger. "Researchers documented 299 positive changes in firmware security scores over the 15 years covered by the study... but 370 negative changes over the same period. Looking across its entire data set, in fact, firmware security actually appeared to get worse over time, not better."

On the bright side, the survey found that almost all recent router firmware by Linksys and NETGEAR boasted non-executable stacks. "However, those same firmware binaries did not employ other common security features like ASLR or stack guards, or did so only rarely," says the report.

Several startups and nonprofit organizations are using methane-tracking microsatellites to help companies understand the emissions levels of their business operations, and hold the worst polluters accountable. The satellites focus on tracking methane as it has 80 times the warming power of CO2, and is blamed for more than a quarter of the earth's 0.8 degree Celsius temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution. Scientific American reports: Historically, if scientists wanted detailed readings of emissions, ground-based sensors placed close to a source were the only option. Yet these are limited to particular sites unless teams of scientists drive around conducting time-consuming surveys, which are impractical on a large scale and are only deployed to measure known emitters. Satellites, however, survey large swaths of the planet. Their use of a single sensor also provides more consistency, making measurements from different spots directly comparable. Until recently, though, satellites have been prohibitively expensive and their spectroscopic sensors have lacked the precision of those closer to the ground.

That dynamic started to change within the past decade, as broader industry demands drove the miniaturization of electronics and shrank the costs of rocket launches. This made it possible to develop smaller, cheaper satellites that carry sensors capable of zooming in on individual sites to capture high-resolution methane measurements. Companies and one environmental group have leaped at harnessing such satellite capabilities for industries and policymakers eager to pinpoint individual local methane sources. But governments and large aerospace companies, encumbered by lengthy planning processes, have been slower to pivot away from a focus on measuring methane emissions on a regional and global scale. In 2016 the Montreal-based company GHGSat was the first to get off the ground with a proof-of-concept satellite called Claire, which successfully detected methane emissions from specific sites. A handful of other groups have followed suit. The nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund has enlisted several companies to develop what it calls MethaneSAT, which could provide weekly coverage of up to 80 percent of the world's major oil and gas production sites once it launches in 2021. Its data would be made freely available to policymakers who want reliable, independent emissions measurements. And its wide global coverage means it can complement higher-resolution satellites, such as future ones planned by GHGSat that would focus on particular areas.

A "city killer" asteroid whizzed past earth Thursday that "would have hit with over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima," according to one astronomer professor.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared a Washington Post story that begins with a reaction from Alan Duffy, lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia: "I was stunned," he said. "This was a true shock."

This asteroid wasn't one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from "out of nowhere," Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 metres wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometres (45,000 miles) of Earth. That's less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers "uncomfortably close...."

The asteroid's presence was discovered only earlier this week by separate astronomy teams in Brazil and the United States. Information about its size and path was announced just hours before it shot past Earth, Brown said. "It shook me out my morning complacency," he said. "It's probably the largest asteroid to pass this close to Earth in quite a number of years."

So how did the event almost go unnoticed?
Scientists have spotted 90% of asteroids that more than half a mile wide -- but this asteroid was smaller, faster, and had an unusual orbit.

"It should worry us all, quite frankly," one scientist told the Post. "It's not a Hollywood movie. It is a clear and present danger."