Australia

Atlassian Co-Founder Wants To Buy Australia's Biggest Polluter To Make It Greener (wsj.com) 92

Mike Cannon-Brookes thought Australia's biggest polluter wasn't doing enough to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, so he sought to buy the company. From a report: Mr. Cannon-Brookes, the co-founder of Nasdaq-listed software company Atlassian teamed up with Canada's Brookfield Asset Management to try to acquire electricity generator AGL Energy Ltd., in a proposal valued at more than $3.5 billion. Central to their ambition is a plan to shut AGL's coal-fired power plants years ahead of schedule and replace them with renewable energy. AGL, which the Australian government's Clean Energy Regulator says is Australia's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, said Monday that it had rejected the takeover proposal as too low.

The company plans to close the last of its coal plants by 2045. Mr. Cannon-Brookes and Brookfield, whose head of investing in low-carbon technology is former Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney, say they can make AGL a net-zero emitter by 2035. "AGL accounts for over 8% of Australia's emissions," Mr. Cannon-Brookes said. That is more than the current emissions of Australia's domestic aviation industry and fleet of jets flying on international routes, or every car on the country's roads, he added.

The Almighty Buck

Amazon Strikes Global Deal To Accept Visa Credit Cards (bbc.com) 45

Amazon will accept Visa credit cards across all of its sites after the two businesses reached a global agreement. From a report: The online retail giant had last year threatened to stop the use of Visa credit cards in the UK due to the fees Visa charged to process payments. Amazon customers in Singapore and Australia also had to pay a surcharge if they used a Visa credit card to purchase goods. However, Amazon and Visa said they have now struck a deal. The Visa surcharge on Amazon's Singapore and Australia websites will be removed from Thursday, 17 February. Amazon had already postponed the ban on using Visa credit cards in the UK while negotiations continued.
Australia

Australia Pays $20 Million To Buy The Copyright Of Aboriginal Flag, But It's Still Not Public Domain (techdirt.com) 66

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: Over a decade ago, we wrote about how Google had to edit out the Australian Aboriginal flag from a logo because of copyright concerns. An 11-year-old girl had won a contest to design a Google logo for Australia Day, and her logo included a simple drawing of the popular Aboriginal flag. Harold Thomas created a (fairly simple) flag design "as a symbol of unity and national identity" for the Aboriginal people in Australia. The flag became quite popular... and then Thomas basically became a copyright landlord, demanding payment for pretty much any usage. In 2019, Thomas did a big licensing deal with a clothing company and proceeded to send out a bunch of cease-and-desist letters to others. It got so bad that the Australian Senate sought to have the government figure out a way to make sure the public could use the flag. Apparently it took over two years, but the "deal" has been worked out -- and it involves the Australian government paying over $20 million to basically buy out the copyright and the former licensing deals, but that still doesn't mean the flag is truly in the public domain: "Mr Thomas will retain moral rights over the flag, but has agreed to give up copyright in return for all future royalties the Commonwealth receives from commercial flag sales to be put towards the ongoing work of NAIDOC. A commercial company will keep its exclusive licence to be able to manufacture Aboriginal flags for commercial use, but the government said the company would not stop people from making their own flags for personal use."
Earth

All Coral Will Suffer Severe Bleaching When Global Heating Hits 1.5C, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 34

Almost no corals on the planet will escape severe bleaching once global heating reaches 1.5C, according to a new study of the world's reefs. From a report: Reefs in areas currently regarded as cooler refuges will be overwhelmed at 1.5C of heating, and just 0.2% of reefs will escape at least one bleaching outbreak every decade, according to the research. The team of scientists from the University of Leeds, Texas Tech University and James Cook University used the latest climate model projections to confirm that 1.5C of global heating "will be catastrophic for coral reefs." Corals bleach when ocean temperatures are too high for too long. Algae that provide corals with much of their food and colour separate from the coral during heat stress.

Severe bleaching can kill corals, but they can recover from milder outbreaks if there are several years with no further heatwaves. The world's oceans are heating due mostly to the burning of fossil fuels. The study comes as the world's biggest coral reef system, the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's Queensland coast, is on the verge of another mass coral bleaching event. In the study, the team analysed climate projections across all of the world's shallow-water coral reefs, which constitute the vast majority of reefs and provide habitat, tourism revenue and coastal protection. About 84% of the world's corals exist in areas that are expected to bleach less than once a decade and are regarded as "thermal refugia," the study said. But the analysis suggests at 1.5C of global heating, only 0.2% of the area covered by reefs is in water cool enough to avoid bleaching at least once every five years -- a frequency considered too short to allow corals to recover.

Australia

Australia PM Morrison Loses Control of WeChat Chinese Account as Election Looms (reuters.com) 27

A little-known Chinese technology company that took over a WeChat social media account set up for Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Monday it wanted to buy an account with a large fanbase in Australia, and was unaware it was his. From a report: Australian politicians said Morrison's office lost access to the account on the platform, owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings, several months ago. The politicians claimed the move represented censorship amid growing diplomatic tensions between Canberra and Beijing with a national election to be held in Australia by May. The account, which bore Morrison's photograph and posted information on his policies in Mandarin targeted at Australian voters of Chinese ethnic origin, had 76,000 followers.

The account was renamed 'Australia China New Life' in January by its new Chinese owner, Fuzhou 985 Technology, based in Fujian province, which notified followers the account would instead promote Chinese life in Australia. An employee from Fuzhou 985 Technology, who only gave his surname as Huang, told Reuters by telephone was not aware the account was previously connected to Morrison. He said the transfer of ownership was conducted with a Chinese male national living in Fuzhou, whose identity he declined to disclose. "We thought this account had a large fanbase, so we decided to buy it," said Huang, adding that the company was looking for an account whose target audience was the Chinese community in Australia. He declined to say how much his company had paid to take over the account.

Australia

1.7 Million People Live for a Week on 100% Renewable Energy (smh.com.au) 126

1.77 million people live in South Australia, speading across 984,321 square kilometres (or 380,048 square miles), according to Wikipedia. Today the Sydney Morning Herald announced that South Australia "sourced an average of just over 100 per cent of the electricity it needed from renewable power for 6 and a half days leading up to December 29 last year."

They're calling it "a record for the state and perhaps for comparable energy grids around the world." The state's previous record was just over three days, says Geoff Eldridge, an energy analyst who runs the website NEMlog.com.au, which tracks the operations of the National Energy Market covering Australia's east-coast states and South Australia.

His analysis shows that for the six days identified, the state produced on average 101 per cent of the energy it needed from wind, rooftop solar and solar farms, with just a fraction of the energy the state used being drawn from gas, in order to keep the grid stable. At times during the period, slightly less renewable energy was available and at other times renewable capacity was higher than needed, he says.

Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre, said he believed that aside from some small island grids such as those in Hawaii and Tasmania, it was likely that South Australia's six-day run on renewables was a record for a grid supporting an advanced economy.

During the unprecedented 156-hour renewable run, the share of wind in total energy supplied averaged 64.4 per cent, while rooftop solar averaged 29.5 per cent and utility-scale solar averaged 6.2 per cent, clean energy website RenewEconomy.com.au reported, using Mr Eldridge's data.

(Thanks to Slashdot reader betsuin for sharing the article)
Earth

Ground Temperatures Hit 129F as Argentina Suffers Blackouts (gizmodo.com) 73

Ground temperatures climbed above 129 degrees Fahrenheit (54 degrees Celsius) in parts of Argentina this week as the country suffers through a shockingly hot start to summer. Air temperatures were equally suffocating, leading to widespread blackouts as the Southern Cone attempts to beat the heat. From a report: Copernicus's Sentinel 3 satellite recorded the extreme ground temperatures. Those temperatures are different than air temperatures, which is our usual way of conveying how hot a place is. The surface of the Earth tend to be hotter than air temperatures, given that heat can more easily dissipate in the air. But air temperatures are still pretty unbearable in Argentina. On Tuesday, temperatures rose to 106.7 degrees Fahrenheit (41.5 degrees Celsius) in Buenos Aires, the second-highest reading in the city in more than 100 years of records. Other parts of the country saw temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius). The heat was so bad in Argentina on Tuesday that it was briefly the hottest place in the world, surpassing parts of Australia that usually have that honor during austral summer. "This is a heat wave of extraordinary characteristics, with extreme temperature values ââthat will even be analyzed after its completion, and it may generate some historical records for Argentina temperatures and persistence of heat," meteorologist Lucas Berengua told Reuters.
Science

Paleontologists Excavate 'Incredibly Detailed' Fossils With Preserved Subcellular Structures (unsw.edu.au) 19

Slashdot reader BoogieChile writes: Details of an important new fossil site has just been published in the first Science Advances journal for the new year. McGraths Flat, in New South Wales, Australia, was once the location of this oxbow lake in a mesic rainforest. Today, superb examples of fossilised animals and plants from the Miocene epoch have been recovered, showing incredible detail, including melanosomes preserved in feathers of birds and the eyes of fossilised fish

"The discovery of melanosomes — subcellular organelles that store the melanin pigment — allows us to reconstruct the colour pattern of birds and fishes that once lived at McGraths Flat," said Dr Michael Frese of the University of Canberra, one of the team's leaders. "Interestingly, the colour itself is not preserved, but by comparing the size, shape and stacking pattern of the melanosomes in our fossils with melanosomes in extant specimens, we can often reconstruct colour and/or colour patterns.

"Over the last three years a team of researchers has been secretly excavating the site, discovering thousands of specimens including rainforest plants, insects, spiders, fish and a bird feather," announced the University of New South Wales: "The fossils we have found prove that the area was once a temperate, mesic rainforest and that life was rich and abundant here in the Central Tablelands," said UNSW Sydney palaeontologist Dr Matthew McCurry [one of the team's leaders]. "Many of the fossils that we are finding are new to science and include trapdoor spiders, giant cicadas, wasps and a variety of fish.

"Until now it has been difficult to tell what these ancient ecosystems were like, but the level of preservation at this new fossil site means that even small fragile organisms like insects turned into well-preserved fossils."

Associate Professor Michael Frese, who imaged the fossils using stacking microphotography and a scanning electron microscope, said that the fossils from McGraths Flat show an incredibly detailed preservation. "Using electron microscopy, I can image individual cells of plants and animals and sometimes even very small subcellular structures," Dr Frese said. "The fossils also preserve evidence of interactions between species. For instance, we have fish stomach contents preserved in the fish, meaning that we can figure out what they were eating. We have also found examples of pollen preserved on the bodies of insects so we can tell which species were pollinating which plants."

Bitcoin

Cryptocurrency Investors Try To Turn Private Islands Into Blockchain Utopias (vice.com) 87

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: For as long as cryptocurrencies have existed, libertarians have dreamed of using them to create communities, seasteads, and cities free from the prying eyes of the state and its tax collectors. We've seen crypto-inspired attempts to claim disputed lands as tax havens, use UFOs and fireworks to christen a new tax-free Bitcoin town, build cities with DAOs, and establish communities inside of U.S. colonies to avoid taxes. But there's now a wave of attempts to buy entire islands and build the next crypto "paradise."

The first one to look at is "Cryptoland," founded by Max Oliver and Helena Lopez, who reportedly have a checkered history with the Spanish YouTuber community mired in allegations of doxxing and the resulting boycott of an awards show linked to the pair. Cryptoland burrowed into the public's mind when its unlisted 18-minute animated sales pitch was found on YouTube in December. It features three sections littered with bombastic rhetoric about what is to come, a manifesto of sorts, a memorial to Bitconnect -- arguably the most infamous scam in Bitcoin history -- and promises to "make crypto enrich a harmonious co-existence with the world energy of its surroundings." Since going viral, Cryptoland has taken down its unlisted sales pitch but a shorter public version is still available to behold. [...]

Cryptoland isn't alone. Satoshi Island is another crypto utopia supposedly in the works, featuring a 32 million square foot island (approx 1.1 square miles) in Vanuatu -- an archipelago of islands between Australia and Fiji. It's slightly larger than Cryptoland, but has substantially less information available on it. Its website states that the island is owned by Satoshi Island Limited, but there's no information on who runs the company or how beyond a Team section listing some individuals involved. It also claims to have "a green light from the Vanuatu Ministry Of Finance and all approvals in place." Motherboard reached out to various Vanuatu offices to confirm this, but has not heard back. Satoshi Island told Motherboard they have owned the island for some years, but when asked about the company's ownership said "Some of the public team and advisors have legal control of the company" and pointed at the Team section.
"It's important to note that, for both islands, almost none of this exists yet," adds Motherboard's Edward Ongweso Jr. "It's not clear if any of it will ever exist, as the details offered are not only relatively scant and nebulous, but it's not clear if it's possible even if tens of millions are not raised through NFTs and other means. And, given that Cryptoland and Satoshi Island are just two examples of a growing trend, it's starting to look like bespoke crypto-utopias are another bubble within a bubble."
Science

New Lava-Like Coating Can Stop Fires In Their Tracks (science.org) 34

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: It takes a lot of science to stop a fire. To prevent homes and workplaces from going up in smoke, manufacturers have added flame retardants to plastic, wood, and steel building materials for decades. But such additives can be toxic, expensive, and sometimes ineffective. Now, researchers in Australia and China have come up with a new flame retardant that, when exposed to extreme heat, forms a ceramic layer akin to hardened lava, squelching the flames before they spread. "This is very good work," says David Schiraldi, a chemist at Case Western Reserve University, who has developed other flame retardants. He notes that the ceramic's starting materials aren't particularly expensive or toxic, making it more likely to see widespread use. "[This] could impact public safety in the long run."

[The researchers] used three components. First, they created a mixture of several metal oxide powders -- including oxides of aluminum, silicon, calcium, and sodium. That mix begins to melt at about 350C (below the temperature of most flames), forming a glasslike sheet. Next, the researchers added tiny flakes of boron nitride, which flow easily and help fill any spaces between the metal oxides as the glass forms. Finally, they added a fire-retardant polymer, which they described in ACS Nano in 2021. The polymer acts as a binder to glue the rest of the mixture to whatever it's coating. That mix dissolved in water into a milky-white solution, which they then sprayed on a variety of surfaces, including rigid foam insulation, wood, and steel. After it dried, they blasted each coated material for 30 seconds with an 1100C butane torch. In each case, the coating melted into a viscous liquid, covering the material in a continuous glassy sheet.

When heated by the torch, coating spewed out nonflammable gases, such as carbon dioxide. As it did, it became more dense and formed a uniform, noncombustible char layer, which blocked flames from spreading to the materials underneath. The novel flame retardant protected rigid polymer foam -- the kind used to insulate homes -- better than more than a dozen commonly used retardants, the researchers report today in Matter. The new coating also excelled at protecting wood and steel. If sprayed on building materials during construction, the new coating could prevent disasters like the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, where 72 people died, the researchers say.

Privacy

FlexBooker Discloses Data Breach, Over 3.7 Million Accounts Impacted (bleepingcomputer.com) 10

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Accounts of more than three million users of the U.S.-based FlexBooker appointment scheduling service have been stolen in an attack before the holidays and are now being traded on hacker forums. The same intruders are offering databases claiming to be from two other entities: racing media organization Racing.com and Redbourne Group's rediCASE case management software, both from Australia. Among FlexBooker's customers are owners of any business that needs to schedule appointments, which is everything from accountants, barbers, doctors, mechanics, lawyers, dentists, gyms, salons, therapists, trainers, spas, and the list goes on.

Claiming the attack seems to be a group calling themselves Uawrongteam, who shared links to archives and files with sensitive information, such as photos, driver's licenses, and other IDs. According to Uawrongteam, the database contains a table with 10 million lines of customer information that ranges from payment forms and charges to driver's license photos. The actor notes that some "juicy columns" in the database are names, emails, phone numbers, password salt, and hashed passwords. FlexBooker has sent a data breach notification to customers, confirming the attack and that the intruders "accessed and downloaded" data on the service's Amazon cloud storage system. "On December 23, 2021, starting at 4:05 PM EST our account on Amazon's AWS servers was compromised," reads the notification, adding that the intruders did not access "any credit card or other payment card information."

Power

World's Largest Coal Port To Be 100% Powered By Renewable Energy (theguardian.com) 61

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's largest coal port has announced it will now be powered entirely by renewable energy. The announcement from Port of Newcastle comes as coal power generation in Australia's national electricity market fell to its lowest level in the final three months of 2021. Though the port continues to export an average of 165Mt of coal a year, the move is part of a plan to decarbonize the business by 2040, and to increase the non-coal portion of its business so that coal only makes up half its revenue by 2030. It has signed a deal with Iberdrola, which operates the Bodangora windfarm near Dubbo in inland New South Wales, for a retail power purchase agreement that provides the port with large scale generation certificates linked to the windfarm.

Chief executive officer Craig Carmody said the Port of Newcastle's title as the largest coal port in the world "isn't as wonderful as it used to be" and that change was necessary to avoid what happened in Newcastle and the steel industry closed. "I would prefer to be doing this now while we have control over our destiny, while we have revenue coming in, than in a crisis situation where our revenue has collapsed and no one will lend us money," Carmody said. "We get 84 cents a tonne for coal shipped through our port. We get between $6 and $8 for every other product. You can see where I'd rather have my money." As part of its transition the port has converted 97% of its vehicles to electric and engaged in other infrastructure projects to decarbonize its operations.
"It's a good thing they're looking at it, but 50% income diversification by 2030, it's still a decade away," said Andrew Stock, climate councillor and retired energy executive who was a founding board member of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. "That's still a lot of coal that's going to go through that port particularly when the IEA and the IPCC have made it clear we have to move. And 50% by 2030 is still 50% coal income."

He went on to say that governments should encourage a "rapid advance in the uptake of renewables" similar to what has occurred in South Australia, which is powered by 100% renewable energy on some days.
Science

People Have Been Having Less Sex (scientificamerican.com) 243

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Human sexual activity affects cognitive function, health, happiness and overall quality of life -- and, yes, there is also the matter of reproduction. The huge range of benefits is one reason researchers have become alarmed at declines in sexual activity around the world, from Japan to Europe to Australia. A recent study evaluating what is happening in the U.S. has added to the pile of evidence, showing declines from 2009 to 2018 in all forms of partnered sexual activity, including penile-vaginal intercourse, anal sex and partnered masturbation. The findings show that adolescents report less solo masturbation as well.

The decreases "aren't trivial," as the authors wrote in the study, published on November 19 in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women. The researchers obtained the self-reported information from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior and used responses from 4,155 people in 2009 and 4,547 people in 2018. These respondents to the confidential survey ranged in age from 14 to 49 years. The study itself did not probe the reasons for this trend.
Scientific American spoke with the study's authors, Debby Herbenick and Tsung-chieh (Jane) Fu, about underlying factors that might explain these changes. Among the young, the researchers say social media, gaming and "rough sex" may contribute to this trend. The grief, health challenges, job loss and financial strain of the pandemic can all influence sexual interest and sex drive, too.
China

How Chinese Police Track Critics on Twitter and Facebook (nytimes.com) 61

The Chinese government, which has built an extensive digital infrastructure and security apparatus to control dissent on its own platforms, is going to even greater lengths to extend its internet dragnet to unmask and silence those who criticize the country on Twitter, Facebook and other international social media. From a report: These new investigations, targeting sites blocked inside China, are relying on sophisticated technological methods to expand the reach of Chinese authorities and the list of targets, according to a New York Times examination of government procurement documents and legal records, as well as interviews with one government contractor and six people pressured by the police. To hunt people, security forces use advanced investigation software, public records and databases to find all their personal information and international social media presence. The operations sometimes target those living beyond China's borders. Police officers are pursuing dissidents and minor critics like Ms. Chen, as well as Chinese people living overseas and even citizens of other nations.

The digital manhunt represents the punitive side of the government's vast campaign to counter negative portrayals of China. In recent years, the Communist Party has raised bot armies, deployed diplomats and marshaled influencers to push its narratives and drown out criticism. The police have taken it a step further, hounding and silencing those who dare to talk back. With growing frequency, the authorities are harassing critics both inside and outside China, as well as threatening relatives, in an effort to get them to delete content deemed criminal. One video recording, provided by a Chinese student living in Australia, showed how the police in her hometown had summoned her father, called her with his phone and pushed her to remove her Twitter account.

Earth

Chile Rewrites Its Constitution, Confronting Climate Change Head On (nytimes.com) 100

Rarely does a country get a chance to lay out its ideals as a nation and write a new constitution for itself. Almost never does the climate and ecological crisis play a central role. That is, until now, in Chile, where a national reinvention is underway. The New York Times: After months of protests over social and environmental grievances, 155 Chileans have been elected to write a new constitution amid what they have declared a "climate and ecological emergency." Their work will not only shape how this country of 19 million is governed. It will also determine the future of a soft, lustrous metal, lithium, lurking in the salt waters beneath this vast ethereal desert beside the Andes Mountains. Lithium is an essential component of batteries. And as the global economy seeks alternatives to fossil fuels to slow down climate change, lithium demand -- and prices -- are soaring.

Mining companies in Chile, the world's second-largest lithium producer after Australia, are keen to increase production, as are politicians who see mining as crucial to national prosperity. They face mounting opposition, though, from Chileans who argue that the country's very economic model, based on extraction of natural resources, has exacted too high an environmental cost and failed to spread the benefits to all citizens, including its Indigenous people. And so, it falls to the Constitutional Convention to decide what kind of country Chile wants to be. Convention members will decide many things, including: How should mining be regulated, and what voice should local communities have over mining? Should Chile retain a presidential system? Should nature have rights? How about future generations?

Space

Scientists Finally Solve the Mystery of Why Comets Glow Green (popsci.com) 13

A team of chemists just solved the mystery of why comets' heads -- but not their tails -- glow green, which had puzzled researchers for decades. From a report: Studying an elusive molecule, which only fleetingly exists on Earth, was the key. Comets are speeding chunks of ice and dust left over from the formation of the solar system, which occasionally venture from the system's cold outer reaches to pass by Earth. Back in the 1930s, Gerhard Herzberg, who later won the Nobel prize for his research on free radicals and other molecules, guessed that the process behind the green comet glow might involve a molecule made from two carbon atoms bonded together, called dicarbon. A new study, published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, put Herzberg's theory to the test.

Dicarbon is so reactive that the team behind the study couldn't get their supply of it from a bottle, says Tim Schmidt, a chemist who oversaw the study at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. In space, it exists inside stars, nebulae, and comets. But when exposed to the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, dicarbon will quickly react and "burn up," Schmidt says. Schmidt says this is the first time scientists have been able to examine precisely how the molecule breaks apart when exposed to powerful ultraviolet rays. In the lab, the team had to simulate the environment of near-Earth space with vacuum chambers and three different ultraviolet lasers. Because dicarbon reacts so quickly, they had to synthesize it on the spot by whittling away a larger molecule with a laser.

Businesses

Microsoft's $19.7 Billion Nuance Acquisition Wins EU Approval (engadget.com) 15

The European Commission has approved Microsoft's $19.7 billion bid to buy Nuance Communications. Engadget reports: The regulator said on Tuesday the proposed acquisition "would raise no competition concerns" within the European Union. In analyzing the bid, it found that "Microsoft and Nuance offer very different products." Moreover, it believes the company will continue to face "strong" competition from other firms in the future. Before today, the US and Australia had both signed off on the purchase, but it's not yet a done deal. On December 13th, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority said it would investigate the transaction. With the regulator accepting public comments until January 10th, 2022, it's unlikely the deal will close by the end of 2021 as Microsoft had said it would when it first announced its intention to buy Nuance. In April, Microsoft agreed to acquire the speech-to-text software company, claiming the acquisition was about increasing its presence in the healthcare vertical.
Businesses

You Can't Lure Employees Back To the Office (zdnet.com) 242

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Months have gone by, and the great resignation keeps rolling along. Some people thought that people would come flocking back to the office once generous unemployment benefits ended. Nope. Wrong. Months after Republican states cut the $300-a-week Federal benefit and other benefits expired, there has been no rush to return to the workforce. There are many reasons for this. People don't want to catch COVID-19; people are sick of bad jobs; early retirement; and the one I care about today, bosses still think they can force skilled workers to return to offices. I've said it before; I'll say it again. That's not going to happen. People with talent and high-value skills, like most technology workers, aren't returning to traditional offices. You don't have to believe me, though. Look at the numbers being reported.

A Hackajob survey of 2,000 UK tech workers and employers found not quite three-quarters (72%) of tech workers said having the ability to do remote work was very important to them. All, and by the way, just over one in five were looking for new jobs with remote work. A more recent Microsoft survey found UK techies felt even stronger about the issue. In this survey, they found over half of the employees would consider quitting if you tried to force them back into the office. It's not just the UK. The Future Forum Pulse survey found IT workers in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan all had one thing in common: Most want to work at least part of the time remotely. To be precise, 75% want flexibility in where they work, while 93% want flexibility in when they work. Why? The top reason: "Better work-life balance."

The problem? Many executives and owners haven't gotten the clue yet. 44% said they wanted to work from the office daily. Employees? 17%. Three-quarters of bosses said they at least wanted to work from the office 3-5 days a week, versus 34% of employees. Can we say disconnect? I can. And, here's the point. Today, for the first time in my lifetime, workers, not employers, are in the driver's seat. [...] But, that doesn't mean that you must give up the traditional office entirely. You don't. In the Dice State of Remote Work report, there's a remote work spectrum. Sure, some workers never want to cross the office transom again, but others like a flexible work schedule where they can work outside of the office a set number of days per week or month. By Dice's count, only one in five workers are bound and determined to never come into the office again. 75% would be fine with flex work. But, pay attention folks, only 3% want to go back to the old-school 9 to 5, every weekday at the office. I repeat a mere 3% want to return to the office as most of you knew it in the 2010s. Indeed, 7% of respondents said they would even take a 5% salary cut to work remotely.

Space

Asteroid Sample Could Reveal Our Solar System's Origin Story (cnn.com) 11

Just over a year after Japan's Hayabusa2 mission returned the first subsurface sample of an asteroid to Earth, scientists have determined that the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu is a pristine remnant from the formation of our solar system. From a report: This was the first material to be returned to Earth from a carbon-rich asteroid. These asteroids can reveal how our cosmic corner of the universe was formed. The organic and hydrated minerals locked within these asteroids could also shed light on the origin of the building blocks of life. Ryugu is a dark, diamond-shaped asteroid that measures about 3,000 feet (1 kilometer) wide. Hayabusa2 collected one sample from the asteroid's surface on February 22, 2019, then fired a copper "bullet" into the asteroid to create a 33-foot wide impact crater. A sample was collected from this crater on July 11, 2019. Then, Hayabusa2 flew by Earth and dropped the sample off in Australia last December.

The C-type, or carbonaceous, asteroid is much darker than scientists originally thought, only reflecting about 2% of the light that hits it, according to one study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. After opening the sample, scientists were surprised to find that the spacecraft collected 5.4 grams from the asteroid -- much more than the single gram they were expecting, said Toru Yada, lead study author and associate senior researcher at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. In the second study, also published Monday in Nature Astronomy, the researchers determined that Ryugu is made of clay and other hydrated minerals, with a number of carbonates and organics inside the sample.

Earth

Scientists Discover Seaweed Species That Stops Cows from Emitting Methane (cbsnews.com) 106

"Globally, methane is responsible for 30% of global warming. Of that, livestock, such as cattle, account for about one-third of all methane emissions," reports CBS News.

But researchers discovered that feeding seaweed to cattle would reduce greenhouse gases by as much as 40%, they're told by a Canadian farmer named Joe Dorgan who first discovered the connection: Digesting roughage requires extra digestion from cows and causes cows to burp more. Those burps emit methane, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that's 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. In a year, a cow emits as much greenhouse gas as a small car. Because animal numbers have skyrocketed to help feed a growing human population, livestock now accounts for 15% of global emissions.

The increase motivated chief scientist at Futurefeed, Rob Kinley, who worked with Dorgan on his organic certification 15 years ago, to find a seaweed species with even more methane-reducing power. "We started testing seaweeds from coastal Australia, and it wasn't long before the Asparagopsis species showed up, and it showed up in a big way. So big that we didn't even believe what we were seeing," Kinley said. "It took multiple runs of testing this before we believed what we were seeing, which was we couldn't find methane anymore." Kinley's research showed Asparagopsis, a common type of red seaweed, has the potential to virtually eliminate methane emissions from livestock.

But there are some obstacles to overcome — it's not easy to harvest from the ocean, so scientists are experimenting with farming it. Kinely's team, along with others like Josh Goldman, project leader at Greener Grazing, are getting much closer to perfecting the techniques.... Still, there's the challenge of encouraging cow owners to use the seaweed supplement. For that, Goldman says there's an incentive: adding seaweed to a cow's diet means they consume less food. And, he says, dairy farmers and cattle ranchers will likely be able to cash in, selling carbon credits for the emissions they reduce.

Eliminating almost all methane from almost all cow's on Earth "would have a tremendous impact, roughly equivalent to eliminating all the emissions from the U.S., or the equivalent of taking every car off the road globally," Goldman said.

"It's clear that methane reduction from seaweed is effective in the short-term," the article concludes, "but there's some fear that its effects may diminish over time as the cow's digestive systems adapt."

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