After nearly 11 years as CNN's space correspondent, Miles O'Brien found himself in 2003 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida covering the launch of the space shuttle Columbia: As part of the post-launch routine, NASA began sharing several replays of the launch from various cameras trained on the vehicle. And that was when we saw it. Producer Dave Santucci called me into our live truck, and said, "You got to look at this." It was kind of a grainy image of what looked like a puff of smoke, as if someone dropped a bag of flour on the ground and it broke open. We played it over and over again, and it did not look good at all. The giant orange fuel tank was filled with super cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen, so it was enveloped in insulating foam. A big piece of the foam had broken away near a strut called the "bipod," striking the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing. It was made of reinforced carbon to protect the aluminum structure of the spacecraft from the searing heat of re-entry from space.

I reached out to some of my sources inside the shuttle program. Everyone had seen it, of course, but the people I spoke with cautioned me not to worry. The foam was very light, and it had fallen off on earlier missions and nothing of concern had happened as a result... I wish I hadn't taken my eye off the ball. Space was my beat, and I was uniquely positioned to put this concerning event into the public domain. Like NASA's leadership, I went through a process of convincing myself that it was going to be okay. But I had this sinking feeling. It didn't feel right. A spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere at 17,500 miles an hour — much faster than a rifle bullet — is enveloped in a glowing inferno of plasma...

[As it returned to earth 16 days later] the communication between the ground and the orbiter became non-routine. Producers in the control room realized the gravity of the situation, and we cut to a commercial break to get me off the couch. As I was making my way across the newsroom, I started heaving. I knew in an instant that they were all gone. There was no survivable scenario. I was sickened. It was like a body blow. Somehow I got my act together and started talking. I felt like it was my responsibility to mention the foam strike, to get the information out there to the public. About an hour after Columbia had disintegrated, I shared with a huge global audience what I knew... "That bipod is the place where they think a little piece of foam fell off and hit the leading edge of that wing."

During the mission, I could have easily done a story about the foam strike, spreading the word that some NASA engineers believed there may be some reason for concern. What if I had done that? It might have made a difference.
"A rescue mission would not have been impossible," the article concludes, "and I feel certain that if NASA managers saw that gaping hole in Columbia's wing, they would've tried.

"We will never know for sure, but I do know how so many of us on the ground failed to do our jobs during that mission. It still haunts me."


CNN broadcasts the last two episodes of its four-part series Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST). CNN's web site offers a "preview" of its live TV offerings here.

The news episodes (along with past episodes) will also be available on-demand starting Monday — "for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps." It's also available for purchase on Amazon Prime.

An anonymous reader shared this report from ScienceAlert: The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the 'Great Filter.' The Great Filter is a hypothesized event or situation that prevents intelligent life from becoming interplanetary and interstellar and even leads to its demise....

[H]ow about the rapid development of AI?

A new paper in Acta Astronautica explores the idea that Artificial Intelligence becomes Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) and that ASI is the Great Filter. The paper's title is "Is Artificial Intelligence the Great Filter that makes advanced technical civilizations rare in the universe?"
"Upon reaching a technological singularity, ASI systems will quickly surpass biological intelligence and evolve at a pace that completely outstrips traditional oversight mechanisms, leading to unforeseen and unintended consequences that are unlikely to be aligned with biological interests or ethics," the paper explains... The author says their projects "underscore the critical need to quickly establish regulatory frameworks for AI development on Earth and the advancement of a multiplanetary society to mitigate against such existential threats."

"The persistence of intelligent and conscious life in the universe could hinge on the timely and effective implementation of such international regulatory measures and

Popular Science reports that early last week, researchers at the U.S. Energy Department's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory revealed their new "MUSE" stellarator — "a unique fusion reactor that uses off-the-shelf and 3D-printed materials to contain its superheated plasma."

The researchers' announcement says the technique suggests "a simple way to build future devices for less cost and allow researchers to test new concepts for future fusion power plants." Stellarators typically rely on complicated electromagnets that have complex shapes and create their magnetic fields through the flow of electricity. Those electromagnets must be built precisely with very little room for error, increasing their cost. However, permanent magnets, like the magnets that hold art to refrigerator doors, do not need electric currents to create their fields. They can also be ordered off the shelf from industrial suppliers and then embedded in a 3D-printed shell around the device's vacuum vessel, which holds the plasma.

"MUSE is largely constructed with commercially available parts," said Michael Zarnstorff, a senior research physicist at PPPL. "By working with 3D-printing companies and magnet suppliers, we can shop around and buy the precision we need instead of making it ourselves." The original insight that permanent magnets could be the foundation for a new, more affordable stellarator variety came to Zarnstorff in 2014. "I realized that even if they were situated alongside other magnets, rare-earth permanent magnets could generate and maintain the magnetic fields necessary to confine the plasma so fusion reactions can occur," Zarnstorff said, "and that's the property that makes this technique work." [...]

In addition to being an engineering breakthrough, MUSE also exhibits a theoretical property known as quasisymmetry to a higher degree than any other stellarator has before. It is also the first device completed anywhere in the world that was designed specifically to have a type of quasisymmetry known as quasiaxisymmetry. Conceived by physicist Allen Boozer at PPPL in the early 1980s, quasisymmetry means that although the shape of the magnetic field inside the stellarator may not be the same around the physical shape of the stellarator, the magnetic field's strength is uniform around the device, leading to good plasma confinement and higher likelihood that fusion reactions will occur. "In fact, MUSE's quasisymmetry optimization is at least 100 times better than any existing stellarator," Zarnstorff said.

"The fact that we were able to design and build this stellarator is a real achievement," said Tony Qian, a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, which is based at PPPL.
Also covered by Gizmodo. Thanks to Slashdot reader christoban for sharing the news.

Aboard the deck of a World War II-era aircraft carrier, University of Washington scientists flicked the switch on a glorified snow-making machine," reports the Seattle Times. They describe the scientists "blasting a plume of saline spray off the coast of Alameda, California... trying to perfect a shot of salty particles that would make clouds better at reflecting sunlight back toward space, and help cool the Earth.

"It's called marine cloud brightening." Compressed air was pumped at hundreds of pounds per square inch through a nozzle full of a salty mix with a similar composition to seawater housed in an apparatus similar to a snow-making machine. The New York Times reported the machine produced a deafening hiss, releasing a fine mist that traveled hundreds of feet through the air. The scientists wanted to see if the machine could generate a consistent spray of the right size salt aerosols, taking samples downwind with instruments mounted on scissor lifts, commonly used in construction.
"This study is not yet large enough to affect local weather," the article points out. Yet "the idea of interfering with nature is so contentious, organizers of Tuesday's test kept the details tightly held, concerned that critics would try to stop them," reported the New York Times.

If it works, the next stage would be to aim at the heavens and try to change the composition of clouds above the Earth's oceans..."I hope, and I think all my colleagues hope, that we never use these things, that we never have to," said Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington and the manager of its marine cloud brightening program. She said there were potential side effects that still needed to be studied, including changing ocean circulation patterns and temperatures, which might hurt fisheries. Cloud brightening could also alter precipitation patterns, reducing rainfall in one place while increasing it elsewhere. But it's vital to find out whether and how such technologies could work, Doherty said, in case society needs them. And no one can say when the world might reach that point.
More from the Seattle Times: Some scientists warn that human influence on natural phenomena has rarely yielded the desired outcome, and often comes with unintended consequences. But, as the fossil-fueled world hurtles toward the internationally approved global warming limit to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, some argue there's a need to study backup plans.

"When I started graduate school in 1995, climate change, global warming was on the horizon, but there was still time to do something like reduce emissions at a scale that would allow us to avoid serious climate disruption," program manager Sarah Doherty said in an interview. "I think it's come to the point where the science community recognizes that a fairly significant degree of climate disruption and damage and suffering is pretty inevitable...." Doherty and the team are not advocating that anyone try cloud brightening now, but instead are hoping to develop a foundation for research that future decision-makers could rely on if they are evaluating geoengineering as a means of reducing suffering.
More info here from Politico and San Francisco Chronicle.

The New York Times notes that Bill Gates began funding early research in 2006.

Andrew Jones reports via IEEE Spectrum: The European Space Agency will launch a mission late this year to demonstrate precision formation flying in orbit to create artificial solar eclipses. In a press conference last week, the agency announced details of the mission and the technology the orbiters will use to pull off its exquisitely-choreographed maneuvers. ESA's Proba-3 (PRoject for On-Board Autonomy) consists of a pair of spacecraft: a 300-kilogram Coronagraph spacecraft and a 250-kilogram Occulter. The pair are now slated to launch on an Indian PSLV rocket in September and ultimately enter a highly elliptical, 600-by-60,530-kilometer orbit. The aim, the agency says, is to move the separate spacecraft to some 144 meters apart, with the Occulter, as a disc, blocking out the sun.

Achieving this formation will allow the Coronagraph to study our star's highly ionized, extremely hot atmosphere -- but also demonstrate the technology as a precursor for more ambitious, future, formation-flying endeavors. [...] ESA has science objectives for Proba-3, using observations made in space to study solar astrophysics without any intervention of the Earth's atmosphere. The agency's Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun (ASPIICS) coronagraph will help to discern why the solar corona is significantly hotter than the Sun itself. This could further our understanding of the Sun and assist solar weather predictions. However, it is the precision formation flying that Proba-3 aims to demonstrate which could help unlock future breakthroughs. [...]

Precisely-controlled Occulter spacecraft could be used with space telescopes to block light from a star in order to directly detect potential orbiting planets, while a constellation of spacecraft can, through interferometry, create large-scale observatories, achieving large apertures and long focal lengths than possible with large solo satellites. Further applications include Earth observation, space-based gravitational wave detection, and a range of missions in which two or more spacecraft need to interact, such as rendezvous, docking, and in-orbit servicing.

China is rapidly advancing its space capabilities to challenge the United States' dominance in space, as evidenced by its significant increase in on-orbit intelligence and reconnaissance satellites and the development of sophisticated counterspace weapons. Space.com reports: "Frankly, China is moving at a breathtaking speed. Since 2018, China has more than tripled their on-orbit intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites," Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, said here on Tuesday, during a talk at the 39th Space Symposium. "And with these systems, they've built a kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and, yes, target United States and allied military capabilities," he added. And that's not all. China has also "built a range of counterspace weapons, from reversible jamming all the way up to kinetic hit-to-kill direct-ascent and co-orbital ASATs," Whiting said.

Indeed, China demonstrated direct-ascent ASAT, or anti-satellite, weapon technology back in January 2007, when it destroyed one of its defunct weather satellites with a missile. That test was widely decried as irresponsible, for it generated thousands of pieces of debris, many of which are still cluttering up Earth orbit. Such activities show that China is now treating space as a war-fighting domain, Whiting said. And so, he added, is Russia, which has also conducted ASAT tests recently, including a destructive one in November 2021. Russia has also been aggressively building out its orbital architecture; since 2018, the nation has more than doubled its total number of active satellites, according to Whiting. The U.S. government has taken notice of these trends.

"We are at a pivotal moment in history," Troy Meink, principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites, said during a different talk on Tuesday here at the symposium. "For the first time in decades, U.S. leadership in space and space technology is being challenged," Meink added. "Our competitors are actively seeking ways to threaten our capabilities, and we see this every day." The U.S. must act if it wishes to beat back this challenge, Meink and Whiting stressed; it cannot rely on the inertia of past success to do the job. For example, Meink highlighted the need to innovate with the nation's reconnaissance satellites, to make them more numerous, more agile and more resilient. U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu also emphasized the importance of increasing resilience, a goal that she said could be achieved by diversifying the nation's space capabilities. "We must assess ways to incorporate radiation-hardened electronics, novel orbits, varied communication pathways, advancements in propulsion technologies and increased cooperation with our allies," Shyu said in another talk on Tuesday at the symposium.

Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice told Yahoo Finance it plans to go public within the next 18 months at a valuation of $5.3 billion. Since being spun out of defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation in 2021, the company has "placed its bets on building out the growing space economy, from developing rocket propulsion technology to a commercial space station with Blue Origin." From the report: Its ambitions have fueled the development of its cargo space plane, the Dream Chaser, set to have its inaugural mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in the second half of this year. Built to land on any commercial runway, the plane will lower the barrier to entry into low-earth orbit and open up business opportunities, Vice said. "Since the 1960s, every science experiment or human being that's come back to earth from space, even today, is still landing in a capsule in the ocean," he said. "We think changing and revolutionizing the way that we bring things back from space, both humans and cargo, and landing [the spacecraft] back at a commercial runway will completely accelerate the new space economy."

"We believe that the next big breakthrough products in oncology, longevity, and industrialized components like glass will be produced in low Earth orbit," Vice said, noting that many of those opportunities are likely to come from the development of commercial space stations to replace the decades-old ISS. Sierra Space has partnered with Blue Origin to build out the Orbital Reef, a commercially owned and operated space station, though recent reports have hinted at tension between the corporate partners. "We're transitioning from decades of government-run space stations with just a handful of government-trained astronauts to the full commercialization of low Earth orbit," Vice said. "We think that's going to create, we believe, probably the most profound industrial revolution and grow that space economy well over a trillion dollars by 2040."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It was billed as a glass-walled city of the future, an ambitious centerpiece of the economic plan backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to transition Saudi Arabia away from oil dependency. Now, however, plans for the mirror-clad desert metropolis called the Line have been scaled down and the project, which was envisaged to stretch 105 miles (170km) is expected to reach just a mile and a half by 2030. Dreamed up as a linear city that would eventually be home to about 9 million people on a footprint of just 13 sq miles, the Line is part of a wider Neom project. Now at least one contractor has begun dismissing workers. The scaling down of Prince Mohammed's most grandiose project was reported by Bloomberg, which said it had seen documents relating to the project.

According to the European Union, Earth has reached its warmest March on record, capping a 10-month streak in which every month set a new temperature record. Reuters reports: Each of the last 10 months ranked as the world's hottest on record, compared with the corresponding month in previous years, the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin. The 12 months ending with March also ranked as the planet's hottest ever recorded 12-month period, C3S said. From April 2023 to March 2024, the global average temperature was 1.58 degrees Celsius above the average in the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period.

C3S' dataset goes back to 1940, which the scientists cross-checked with other data to confirm that last month was the hottest March since the pre-industrial period. Already, 2023 was the planet's hottest year in global records going back to 1850. El Nino peaked in December-January and is now weakening, which may help to break the hot streak toward the end of the year. But despite El Nino easing in March, the world's average sea surface temperature hit a record high, for any month on record, and marine air temperatures remained unusually high, C3S said. "The main driver of the warming is fossil fuel emissions," said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London's Grantham Institute. Failure to reduce these emissions will continue to drive the warming of the planet, resulting in more intense droughts, fires, heatwaves and heavy rainfall, Otto said.

Fairphone, the Dutch smartphone maker known for its user-repairable smartphones, is bringing its ultra-repairable design philosophy to their "Fairbuds" wireless earbuds. Liliputing reports: The Fairbuds have the sort of features we've come to expect from premium earbuds. They're noise-cancelling Bluetooth 5.3 earbuds with support for wind noise reduction and an environmental noise-cancelling feature that sets noise reduction depending on your environment. Fairphone's earbuds have six microphones, 11mm drivers, and an IP54 rating for water (and sweat) resistance. They also support multipoint connectivity, which means you can connect the earbuds to two different devices at the same time (like your phone and your laptop).

The earbuds offer up to 6 hours of battery life and they come with a charging case that gives you another 20 hours of use between charges. And Fairphone offers iOS and Android apps that let you adjust EQ, install firmware updates, and make other changes. Other features include automatic play and pause when the Fairbuds are removed from your ears, capacitive touch controls, and three different ear tips sizes included in the box.

But the key thing that makes these earbuds different from the competition is that they're designed to be repairable rather than replaceable. Lose just one earbud? Fairphone will let you buy a single earbud without paying again for a full set with a case. Is your battery life degrading a few years after purchase? Fairphone will sell battery replacements and let you swap out the batteries in your earbuds or charging case. All told, the company offers seven repairable/replaceable components for the Fairbuds. The company also offers a 3-year warranty for its new Fairbuds and notes that they're manufactured using:

- 70% of all materials used in production are fair and recycled (fair = ethically sourced).
- 100% of rare earth elements used are recycled.
- Plastics used in the Fairbuds and their charging case are recycled. The Fairbuds are currently only available in Europe for 149 euros.

England could produce 13 times more renewable energy than it does now, while using less than 3% of its land, analysis has found. The Guardian: Onshore wind and solar projects could provide enough electricity to power all the households in England two and a half times over, the research by Exeter University, commissioned by Friends of the Earth (FoE), suggested. Currently, about 17 terawatt hours of electricity a year comes from homegrown renewables on land. But there is potential for 130TWh to come from solar panels, and 96TWh from onshore wind. These figures are reached by only taking into account the most suitable sites, excluding national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty, higher grade agricultural land and heritage sites.

Some commentators have argued that solar farms will reduce the UK's ability to grow its own food, but the new analysis suggests there is plenty of land that can be used without impairing agricultural production. More land is now taken up by golf courses than solar farms, and developers can be required to enhance biodiversity through simple measures such as maintaining hedgerows and ponds. Onshore windfarms were in effect banned in 2015 by the then prime minister, David Cameron. Rishi Sunak last year claimed to make moves towards lifting the ban, through small changes to the planning regulations, but campaigners say they were ineffectual and real planning reform is needed. No plans were submitted for new windfarms in England last year, and few new developments are coming forward, despite high gas prices, rising bills and onshore wind being the cheapest form of electricity generation.

When Disneyland opened in 1955, its car-themed attraction Autopia "represented the future of what would become America's multilane limited-access highways," according to Wikipedia, " which were still being developed. President Eisenhower had yet to sign the Interstate Highway legislation..."

Wikipedia adds that the cars "generate a moderate level of exhaust from the Honda GX gasoline engines that propel the cars." But that may change, according to a climate-oriented newsletter from the Los Angeles Times: If anyone could get away with defending the toxic odor, it might be Bob Gurr. He designed the original Autopia cars in the mid-1950s, working closely with Walt himself. He's proud of what they built together. But today the 92-year-old Disney legend says the polluting motors need to go. "Get rid of those God-awful gasoline fumes," he told me.

Disney is finally preparing to do just that. In news shared exclusively with The Times ahead of this column's publication — after several weeks of my prodding the company for answers on the future of Autopia — Disney officials revealed that pure gasoline engines are on their way out... "As the industry moves toward alternative fuel sources, we have developed a roadmap to electrify this attraction and are evaluating technology that will enable us to convert from gas engines in the next few years," spokesperson Jessica Good said in an email. Good wouldn't confirm whether that means electric vehicles, or if hybrids are a possibility...

[Gurr] also expressed a grander vision for Tomorrowland as a hub for stories about renewable energy, public transit and other sustainable technologies that will help us create a better tomorrow... [H]ow about using the former Innoventions building, which once displayed futuristic technologies but is now closed to most guests, to showcase solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and other clean energy devices that guests might want in their homes...? Why not switch to electric cooking at the Alien Pizza Planet restaurant, and offer induction stove demos for diners? Maybe start screening some National Geographic films (Disney owns NatGeo) at the largely unused Magic Eye Theater...? Add some infotainment-style signs and voice-overs about the wonders of clean energy and public transit, and boom, you've got a Tomorrowland that should leave kids and their parents excited to help build a safer, happier, more sustainable world...

[Gurr] told me that if he could, he'd tear out everything in Tomorrowland except the Monorail and rebuild it as a version of the public transit-oriented futuristic city that Walt once planned for Florida — only with clean energy at the core of its storytelling... At the very least, he said it's time for an Autopia where guests "don't smell the fumes, don't hear that racket of the little motor going putt-putt-putt."
The newsletter agrees electric vehicles for Autopia are "the obvious starting point" for remodeling Tomorrowland with "a buzz of optimism and futuristic energy." ("Solar-panel shade structures over the line would be great too.") They even add that "it's not that it's my job to make money for Disney, but I'm sure the company could find sponsors for this vision of Tomorrowland. There are plenty of renewable energy companies, electric utilities and environmental groups eager to tout their causes and their credentials."

And it shares this observation from climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe (paraphrasing another scientist who studies climate communications): "Showing people what climate solutions look like is one of the most effective ways to get them to support action." The newsletter's conclusion? "This is where Tomorrowland could prove especially valuable in the fight to save the planet."


Some additional context... Disney's current CEO once said he was "particuarly proud" of the 270-acre, 50+-megawatt solar facility the company brought online in Orlando." And the Washington Post reports that Disney's plans to electrify Autopia "comes as the park is taking steps to decarbonize as part of an effort to reach a goal of net-zero emissions by 2030."

"Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding," reports TechCrunch, "just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit."

Varda has now raised $145 million to date, the article points out, and the $90 million in new Series B funding "marks an inflection point for the company, which is now gearing up to scale from the initial demonstration mission to a regular set of missions carrying customer payloads, Varda founder Delian Asparouhov told TechCrunch." El Segundo-based Varda was founded in 2021 by Asparouhov, who is also a partner at Founders Fund, and Will Bruey, a spacecraft engineer who cut his teeth at SpaceX. The pair had an audacious goal to commercialize what until very recently was promising but ultimately small-scale research into the effects of microgravity on pharmaceutical crystals... Astronauts have been conducting protein crystallization experiments in space for decades on the International Space Station and before that, the Space Shuttle. But the business case for expanding this research has never materialized — until now...

Part of the reason Varda is possible today is due to the availability of regular, low-cost rideshare launches from SpaceX and Rocket Lab's innovations in satellite bus manufacturing. Even beyond these external partnerships, the startup has made significant headway in its own right, as the success of the first mission showed: Their reentry capsule appears to have performed flawlessly and the experiment to reformulate the HIV medicine ritonavir was executed without a hitch, it says. Varda has also started publishing the results of its internal R&D efforts, including a scientific paper on its hyper-gravity (as opposed to microgravity) crystallization platform, which the startup developed as a sort of screening method prior to sending drugs to space. [The paper is titled "Gravity as a Knob for Tuning Particle Size Distributions of Small Molecules."] It's an entirely new field of research that takes advantage of the ability to truly unlock gravity as a variable in scientific experiments. "Over time, we will be able to generate data sets between both hyper-gravity and microgravity and start to show correlations," he said....

In a recent podcast appearance, he specified that the all-in initial mission cost around $12 million, which will drop to $5-6 million by mission 4 and $2.5 million or less by mission 10.) Larger capsules are also in the longer-term pipeline, though also not until the 2027 time frame. Asparouhov also confirmed that pharmaceuticals will be Varda's sole focus for the next 10-20 (or more) years, based on the company's conviction that pharmaceutical products will generate more economic value compared to other materials. A lot of that comes down to the fact that there are a significant set of drugs that require only a "seed" of the material that can only be made in microgravity, and the rest of the drug formulation can be completed here on Earth...

The company is also aiming to improve the processing capabilities of the on-board pharmaceutical reactor. The first mission carried just one drug protein, but in the future the company hopes to process multiple drug products that could be run through different processing regimes. In the future, other missions could carry larger reactors for drugs that do need more than the "seed" crystal, and those mission profiles would be closer to something like mass manufacturing.
Varda already has "a handful" of signed contracts with biotech companies, according to the article — and Varda's next manufacturing mission "will launch later this year."

This week America's Department of Energy announced "a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from buildings by 65% by 2035 and 90% by 2050." The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) led the Blueprint's development in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies. The Blueprint is the first sector-wide strategy for building decarbonization developed by the federal government... "America's building sector accounts for more than a third of the harmful emissions jeopardizing our air and health..." said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "As part of a whole-of-government approach, the Department of Energy is outlining for the first time ever a comprehensive federal plan to reduce energy in our homes, schools, and workplaces — lowering utility bills and creating healthier communities while combating the climate crisis."

Buildings account for more than one third of domestic climate pollution and $370 billion in annual energy costs... The Blueprint projects reductions of 90% of total greenhouse gas emissions from the buildings sector, which will save consumers more than $100 billion in annual energy costs and avoid $17 billion in annual health costs.
Just for example, the Department of Energy's Affordable Home Energy Shot program "aims to reduce the upfront cost of upgrading a home by at least 50% and reduce energy bills by 20% within a decade." (Meanwhile, the federal government's role in making more change happen faster includes financing, funding R&D on lower-cost technologies, expanding markets, and "supporting the development and implementation of emissions-reducing building codes and appliance standards.")

Besides the national blueprint, the Department also announced an expansion of its Better Buildings Commercial Building Heat Pump Accelerator initiative. In this program, "manufacturers will produce higher efficiency and life cycle cost-effective heat pump rooftop units and commercial organizations will evaluate and adopt next-generation heat pump technology."

U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said the program "builds on more than a decade of public-private partnerships to get cutting edge clean technologies from lab to market, helping to slash harmful carbon emissions throughout our economy." On average, between 20% and 30% of the nation's energy is wasted, presenting a significant opportunity to increase energy efficiency. Through the Better Buildings Initiative, DOE partners with public and private sector stakeholders to pursue ambitious portfolio-wide energy, waste, water, and/or emissions reduction goals and publicly share solutions. By improving building design, materials, equipment, and operations, energy efficiency gains can be achieved across broad segments of the nation's economy.

The Accelerator initiative was developed with commercial end users like Amazon, IKEA, and Target, and already includes manufacturers AAON, Carrier Global Corp., Lennox International, Rheem Manufacturing Co., Trane Technologies, and York International Corp. The Accelerator aims to bring more efficient, affordable next-generation heat pump rooftop units to market as soon as 2027 — which will slash both emissions and energy costs in half compared to natural gas-fueled heat pumps. If deployed at scale, they could save American businesses and commercial entities $5 billion on utility bills every year.

"America's honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high," reports the Washington Post: We've added almost 1 million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn't count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over...

Much of the explosion of small producers came in just one state: Texas. The Lone Star State has gone from having the sixth-most bee operations in the country to being so far ahead of anyone else that it out-bees the bottom 21 states combined... [A]ll 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example, six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break...

When the census was taken in December 2022, California had more than four times as many bees as any other state. We emailed pollination expert Brittney Goodrich at the University of California at Davis, who explained that pollinating the California almond crop "demands most of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year...

Sadly, however, this does not mean we've defeated colony collapse. One major citizen-science project found that beekeepers lost almost half of their colonies in the year ending in April , the second-highest loss rate on record. For now, we're making up for it with aggressive management. The Texans told us that they were splitting their hives more often, replacing queens as often as every year and churning out bee colonies faster than the mites, fungi and diseases can take them down. But this may not be good news for bees in general. "It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators," said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at Binghamton University, who noted that domesticated honeybees are a threat to North America's 4,000 native bees, about 40% of which are vulnerable to extinction...

Many of the same forces collapsing managed beehives also decimate their native cousins, only the natives don't usually have entire industries and governments pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting them.
So while Texas bee exemptions "have become big business," the article ends with this quote from Mace Vaughan, who leads pollinator and agricultural biodiversity at Xerces, an expanding insect-conservation outfit. "The way you support both honeybees and beekeepers — and the way you save native pollinators — is to go out there and create beautiful flower-rich habitat on your farm or your garden."

The European Space Agency has a Planetary Defence Office, which includes its Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre. "It has come to our attention," they wrote in the April edition of their monthly newsletter, "that a recent trend among journalists has been to come up with creative comparisons to convey the size of an asteroid to the public."

So then, as explained by RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) "they propose a number of standardised units of comparison for journalists describing 'death from the skies'".

An excerpt from that April 1 newsletter: In the absence of a handy skyscraper, animals commonly used have included giraffes, corgis and an entire colony of penguins. But how do these comparisons stack up? Let's look at some of our favourite unusual suspects:

- Corgi: At around 30 cm tall, a space rock the size of a corgi wouldn't pose much of a threat.

- Half a giraffe: An adult giraffe can reach up to 5.5 metres in height, so half a giraffe would be about 2.75 metres. While not as impressive as a full skyscraper, an asteroid that size could certainly destroy a building or two...

- Elephants: An adult African elephant can reach 7 metres at the shoulder. Ninety elephants stacked on top of each other would form a staggering pile over 630 metres high, creating a devastating but probably not planet-ending event.

As this menagerie of animals can cause a lot of confusion, we at the NEOCC recommend the use of a Standardised Giraffe Unit (SGU, 1 SGU = 5 penguins) for ease of comparison.
RockDoctor shares this additional thought in his original submission about the newly proposed standardized unit.

"The world may be turtles all the way down, but it's giraffes all the way up."

Thursday America's Environmental Protection Agency "awarded $20 billion to help finance clean-energy projects across the country," reports the Washington Post. The money comes from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established by President Biden's signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The fund seeks to leverage public and private dollars to invest in clean-energy technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps and more.

The program is potentially one of the most consequential — yet least understood — parts of the climate law...

Simply put, the program allows people to access low-interest loans for clean-energy projects that they might not otherwise have received. Imagine a community group that wants to install electric vehicle charging stations at its neighborhood recreation center but can't get a loan from a bank or a lender. As is often the case, potential lenders say they're hesitant to support a novel green technology or a business without a track record of success. Low-income and minority communities have long encountered such obstacles in trying to attract private capital. The program aims to overcome this problem by providing a huge influx of federal cash — $27 billion in total — for nonprofit organizations to dole out to clean-energy projects nationwide. Each nonprofit will serve as a "green bank" that offers more favorable lending rates than commercial banks. "It's just really hard to get banks to bring capital into low-income communities, especially for these new projects that they're not used to financing," said Adrian Deveny, the founder of the firm Climate Vision and the former director of energy and environmental policy for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key architect of the Inflation Reduction Act....

The EPA is awarding money to eight nonprofits, which have committed to leverage nearly $7 in private capital for every $1 of federal investment. The nonprofits have also pledged to ensure that at least 70 percent of the funds will benefit disadvantaged communities, and that the financed projects will reduce up to 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 9 million gasoline-powered cars... [The nonprofit] Coalition for Green Capital, will use a $5 billion award to establish a "national green bank," co-founder and CEO Reed Hundt said. "We're going to be able to cause about $100 billion of total additional investment over a seven-year time period with that number, because we can leverage it," Hundt said.

NASA engineers have traced the Voyager 1 spacecraft's transmitted gibberish to corrupted memory hardware in its flight data system (FDS). "The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn't working," NASA wrote in an update. Gizmodo reports: FDS collects data from Voyager's science instruments, as well as engineering data about the health of the spacecraft, and combines them into a single package that's transmitted to Earth through one of the probe's subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), in binary code. FDS and TMU have been having trouble communicating with one another. As a result, TMU has been sending data to mission control in a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes. NASA's engineers aren't quite sure what corrupted the FDS memory hardware; they think that either the chip was hit by an energetic particle from space or that it's just worn out after operating for 46 years. [...] The engineers are hoping to resolve the issue by finding a way for FDS to operate normally without the corrupted memory hardware, enabling Voyager 1 to begin transmitting data about the cosmos and continue its journey through deep space.

According to the latest data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere reached historic highs last year, growing at near-record fast paces. The Associated Press reports: Carbon dioxide, the most important and abundant of the greenhouse gases caused by humans, rose in 2023 by the third highest amount in 65 years of record keeping, NOAA announced Friday. Scientists are also worried about the rapid rise in atmospheric levels of methane, a shorter-lived but more potent heat-trapping gas. Both jumped 5.5% over the past decade. The 2.8 parts per million increase in carbon dioxide airborne levels from January 2023 to December, wasn't as high as the jumps were in 2014 and 2015, but they were larger than every other year since 1959, when precise records started. Carbon dioxide's average level for 2023 was 419.3 parts per million, up 50% from pre-industrial times.

Last year's methane's jump of 11.1 parts per billion was lower than record annual rises from 2020 to 2022. It averaged 1922.6 parts per billion last year. It has risen 3% in just the past five years and jumped 160% from pre-industrial levels showing faster rates of increase than carbon dioxide, said Xin "Lindsay" Lan, the University of Colorado and NOAA atmospheric scientist who did the calculations. [...] The third biggest human-caused greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, jumped 1 part per billion last year to record levels, but the increases were not as high as those in 2020 and 2021. Nitrous oxide, which lasts about a century in the atmosphere, comes from agriculture, burning of fuels, manure and industrial processes, according to the EPA.
"Studies of the specific isotopes of methane in the air show much of the increased methane is from microbes, pointing to spiking emissions from wetlands and perhaps agriculture and landfills, but not as much the energy industry, Lan said."

Elizabeth Rayne reports via Ars Technica: Led by planetary researcher Lonneke Roelofs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, a team of scientists has found that the sublimation of CO2 ice could have shaped Martian gullies, which might mean the most recent occurrence of liquid water on Mars may have been further back in time than previously thought. That could also mean the window during which life could have emerged and thrived on Mars was possibly smaller. "Sublimation of CO2 ice, under Martian atmospheric conditions, can fluidize sediment and creates morphologies similar to those observed on Mars," Roelofs and her colleagues said in a study recently published in Communications Earth & Environment. [...]

To recreate a part of the red planet's landscape in a lab, Roelofs built a flume in a special environmental chamber that simulated the atmospheric pressure of Mars. It was steep enough for material to move downward and cold enough for CO2 ice to remain stable. But the team also added warmer adjacent slopes to provide heat for sublimation, which would drive movement of debris. They experimented with both scenarios that might happen on Mars: heat coming from beneath the CO2 ice and warm material being poured on top of it. Both produced the kinds of flows that had been hypothesized. For further evidence that flows driven by sublimation would happen under certain conditions, two further experiments were conducted, one under Earth-like pressures and one without CO2 ice. No flows were produced by either. "For the first time, these experiments provide direct evidence that CO2 sublimation can fluidize, and sustain, granular flows under Martian atmospheric conditions," the researchers said in the study.

Because this experiment showed that gullies and systems like them can be shaped by sublimation and not just liquid water, it raises questions about how long Mars had a sufficient supply of liquid water on the surface for any organisms (if they existed at all) to survive. Its period of habitability might have been shorter than it was once thought to be. Does this mean nothing ever lived on Mars? Not necessarily, but Roelofs' findings could influence how we see planetary habitability in the future.