An anonymous reader shared this report from USA Today: A nationwide analysis by USA TODAY shows local governments are banning green energy faster than they're building it.

At least 15% of counties in the U.S. have effectively halted new utility-scale wind, solar, or both, USA TODAY found. These limits come through outright bans, moratoriums, construction impediments and other conditions that make green energy difficult to build... In the past decade, about 180 counties got their first commercial wind-power project. But in the same period, more than twice as many blocked wind development. And while solar power has found more broad acceptance, 2023 was the first year to see almost as many individual counties block new solar projects as the ones adding their first project.

The result: Some of the nation's areas with the best sources of wind and solar power have now been boxed out. Because large-scale solar and wind projects typically are built outside city limits, USA TODAY's analysis focuses on restrictions by the county-level governments that have jurisdiction. In a few cases, such as Connecticut, Tennessee and Vermont, entire states have implemented near-statewide restrictions. While 15% of America's counties might sound like a small portion, the trend has significant consequences, says Jeff Danielson, a former four-term Iowa state senator now with the Clean Grid Alliance. "It's 15% of the most highly productive areas to develop wind and solar," he said. "Our overall goals are going to be difficult to achieve if the answer is 'No' in county after county...."

[T]he number of new wind projects opening annually peaked in the early 2010s, according to inventory data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and has slowed since then. Wind power is expected to grow 11% by 2025 from last year's levels. In the past 10 years, 183 counties saw their first wind project come online. However, USA TODAY's analysis found that in the same period, nearly 375 counties have essentially blocked new wind development. That's almost as many as the 508 counties — out of 3,144 total in the U.S. — currently home to an operational wind turbine....

Of the 116 counties implementing bans or impediments to utility-scale solar plants, half did so in 2023 alone. This surge in obstacles is unprecedented since green-energy technology gained broad acceptance...
The article points out that counties sometimes also limit the size of solar farms — making them impractical to build. "Other jurisdictions create shadow bans of sorts. Projects might not technically be banned, but officials simply reject all green energy plans on a case-by-case basis..."

"USA TODAY's findings were supported by research published in late January by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Energy developers reported one third of the wind and solar siting applications they had submitted in the past five years were canceled, while about half were delayed for six months or more. Zoning issues and community opposition were two of the top reasons."

The article also quotes an Ohio farmer who complained that "You live in the country, and you want to be away from all the hustle and bustle. I kind of look at it as if they're sticking a warehouse or a factory here." Last September, his county's commissioners banned all new large-scale wind and solar projects.

The Guardian reports: The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world's most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called "Keeling curve" that has charted the upward march of the Earth's carbon dioxide levels. A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today's money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling's earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal...

Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis. "They contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth's climate on a scale significant to human civilization," said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in historic climate disinformation at the University of Miami. "These findings are a startling confirmation that big oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years — for twice my lifetime — and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of the oil industry's denial of basic climate science decades later...."

The oil and gas industry was initially concerned with research related to smog and other direct air pollutants before branching out into related climate change impacts, according to Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law. "You just come back to the oil and gas industry again and again, they were omnipresent in this space," he said. "The industry was not just on notice but deeply aware of the potential climate implications of its products for going on 70 years." Muffett said the documents add further impetus to efforts in various jurisdictions to hold oil and gas firms legally liable for the damages caused by the climate crisis.

"These documents talk about CO2 emissions having planetary implications, meaning this industry understood extraordinarily early on that fossil fuel combustion was profound on a planetary scale," he said. "There is overwhelming evidence the oil and gas industry has been misleading the public and regulators around the climate risks of their product for 70 years."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat for sharing the article.

"Japan's first moon mission has likely come to an end after a surprising late-game comeback," reports Mashable, "with the spacecraft taking one last photo of its surroundings before the deep-freeze of night... showing ominous shadows cast upon a slope of the Shioli crater, its landing site on the near side of the moon." Since Monday, the spacecraft has analyzed rocks around the crater with a multi-band spectral camera. JAXA picked the landing spot because of what it could tell scientists about the moon's formation... The special camera completed its planned observation, able to study more targets than originally expected, according to an English translation of a news release from the space agency... "Based on the large amount of data we have obtained, we are proceeding with (analyses) to identify rocks and estimate the chemical composition of minerals, which will help solve the mystery of the origin of the moon," JAXA said in a statement translated by Google...

The spacecraft has now entered a dormant state, prompted by nightfall on the moon. Because one rotation of the moon is about 27 Earth days, the so-called "lunar night," when the moon is no longer receiving sunlight, lasts about two weeks. Not much can survive the -270 degrees Fahrenheit brought on by darkness — not even robots. In this freezing temperature, soldered joints on hardware and mechanical parts break, and batteries die. But rest assured, the JAXA team will try to communicate with its scrappy moon lander when the sun rises again.
In mid-week Japan's space agency posted that "Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM's solar cells."

Later they posted that they'd sent a command to turn on SLIM's communicator again "just in case, but with no response, we confirmed SLIM had entered a dormant state. This is the last scene of the Moon taken by SLIM before dusk."

The New York Times reports on a potential fix for global warming being proiposed by "a small but growing number of astronomers and physicists... the equivalent of a giant beach umbrella, floating in outer space. " The idea is to create a huge sunshade and send it to a far away point between the Earth and the sun to block a small but crucial amount of solar radiation, enough to counter global warming. Scientists have calculated that if just shy of 2% of the sun's radiation is blocked, that would be enough to cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit, and keep Earth within manageable climate boundaries. The idea has been at the outer fringes of conversations about climate solutions for years. But as the climate crisis worsens, interest in sun shields has been gaining momentum, with more researchers offering up variations. There's even a foundation dedicated to promoting solar shields.

A recent study led by the University of Utah explored scattering dust deep into space, while a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is looking into creating a shield made of "space bubbles." Last summer, Istvan Szapudi, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, published a paper that suggested tethering a big solar shield to a repurposed asteroid. Now scientists led by Yoram Rozen, a physics professor and the director of the Asher Space Research Institute at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, say they are ready to build a prototype shade to show that the idea will work.

To block the necessary amount of solar radiation, the shade would have to be about 1 million square miles, roughly the size of Argentina, Rozen said. A shade that big would weigh at least 2.5 million tons — too heavy to launch into space, he said. So, the project would have to involve a series of smaller shades. They would not completely block the sun's light but rather cast slightly diffused shade onto Earth, he said. Rozen said his team was ready to design a prototype shade of 100 square feet and is seeking between $10 million and $20 million to fund the demonstration. "We can show the world, 'Look, there is a working solution, take it, increase it to the necessary size," he said...

Rozen said the team was still in the predesign phase but could launch a prototype within three years after securing funds. He estimated that a full-size version would cost trillions (a tab "for the world to pick up, not a single country," he said) but reduce the Earth's temperature by 1.5 Celsius within two years. "We at the Technion are not going to save the planet," Rozen said. "But we're going to show that it can be done."

NASA is starting to take its first steps toward opening a commercial pathway to Mars. From a report: This week, the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a new solicitation to the industry titled "Exploring Mars Together: Commercial Services Studies." This is a request for proposals from the US space industry to tell NASA how they would complete one of four private missions to Mars, including delivering small satellites into orbit or providing imaging services around the red planet.

"The Mars Exploration Program Draft Plan through the next two decades would utilize more frequent lower cost missions to achieve compelling science and exploration for a larger community," the document states. "To realize the goals of the plan, government and US industry would partner to leverage current and emerging Earth and lunar products and commercial services to substantially lower the overall cost and accelerate leadership in deep space exploration."

NASA will pay proposers $200,000 for a study of one of the reference missions or $300,000 for a maximum of two studies. The space agency said it intends to award "multiple" contract awards. In its 496-page solicitation, NASA outlines four "design reference missions" that companies can bid on. Basically, the space agency is asking companies how they would go about fulfilling these tasks.

SpaceX's Starship rocket has been selected by Starlab to launch its private space station into orbit. "SpaceX's history of success and reliability led our team to select Starship to orbit Starlab," Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of Voyager Space, said in a statement. "SpaceX is the unmatched leader for high-cadence launches, and we are proud Starlab will be launched to orbit in a single flight by Starship." Space.com reports: Today's announcement didn't give a target launch date. But NASA and Starlab's developers want the four-person commercial station to be up and running before 2030, when the International Space Station (ISS) is expected to cease operations (though that retirement date is apparently not set in stone). [...] The 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, capable of hauling up to 150 tons to low Earth orbit. It will send the fully outfitted Starlab up in just one launch, as Taylor noted above.

"Starlab's single-launch solution continues to demonstrate not only what is possible, but how the future of commercial space is happening now," Tom Ochinero, senior vice president of commercial business at SpaceX, said in the same statement. "The SpaceX team is excited for Starship to launch Starlab to support humanity's continued presence in low Earth orbit on our way to making life multiplanetary," Ochinero added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Stretching thousands upon thousands of miles under your feet, a web of fibrous ears is listening. Whether you walk over buried fiber optics or drive a car across them, above-ground activity creates a characteristic vibration that ever-so-slightly disturbs the way light travels through the cables. With the right equipment, scientists can parse that disturbance to identify what the source was and when exactly it was roaming there. This quickly proliferating technique is known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, and it's so sensitive that researchers recently used it to monitor the cacophony of a mass cicada emergence. Others are using the cables as an ultra-sensitive instrument for detecting volcanic eruptions and earthquakes: Unlike a traditional seismometer stuck in one place, a web of fiber optic cables can cover a whole landscape, providing unprecedented detail of Earth's rumblings at different locations. Now scientists are experimenting with bringing DAS to a railroad near you.

When a train runs along a section of track, it creates vibrations that analysts can monitor over time -- if that signal suddenly changes, it might indicate a problem with the rail, like a crack, or a snapped tie. Or if on a mountain pass a rockslide blasts across the track, DAS might "hear" that too, warning railroad operators of a problem that human eyes hadn't yet glimpsed. More gradual changes in the signal might betray the development of faults in track alignment. It just so happens that fiber optic cables already run along many railways to connect all the signaling equipment or for telecommunications. "You're utilizing the already available facilities and infrastructure for that, which can reduce the cost," says engineer Hossein Taheri, who is studying DAS for railroads at Georgia Southern University. "There could be some railroads where they don't have the fiber, and you need to lay down. But yes, most of them, usually they do already have it."

To tap into that fiber, you need a device called an interrogator, which fires laser pulses down the cables and analyzes the tiny bits of light that bounce back. So, say a rock hits the track 20 miles away from the interrogator. That creates a characteristic ground vibration that disturbs the fiber optics near the track, which shows up in the light signal. Because scientists know the speed of light, they can precisely measure the time it took for that signal to travel back to their interrogator, pinpointing the distance to the disturbance to within 10 meters, or about 30 feet. For a given stretch of track, you'd have already analyzed the DAS signals for a length of time, building a vibration profile for a normal, healthy railway. When the DAS data suddenly starts showing something different, you might have an issue, which shows up like an EKG picking up a problem with a human heartbeat. "What we're doing is profiling the track, looking for changes in the acoustic signature," says Daniel Pyke, a rail expert and spokesperson for Sensonic, which develops DAS technology for railroads. "We know what track should sound like, we know what a train should sound like. And we know that if it's changing -- so let's say this joint is coming loose -- that needs someone to go and fix it before it becomes a problem."

SpaceX revealed that it's delivering over 42 petabytes of data for customers per day, according to engineer Travis Brashears. "We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers," Brashears said today at SPIE Photonics West, an event in San Francisco focused on the latest advancements in optics and light. "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window." PCMag reports: Although Starlink uses radio waves to beam high-speed internet to customers, SpaceX has also been outfitting the company's satellites with a "laser link" system to help drive down latency and improve the system's global coverage. The lasers, which can sustain a 100Gbps connection per link, are especially crucial to helping the satellites fetch data when no SpaceX ground station is near, like over the ocean or Antarctic. Instead, the satellite can transmit the data to and from another Starlink satellite in Earth's orbit, forming a mesh network in space.

Tuesday's talk from Brashears revealed the laser system is quite robust, even as the equipment is flying onboard thousands of Starlink satellites constantly circling the Earth. Despite the technical challenges, the company has achieved a laser "link uptime" at over 99%. The satellites are constantly forming laser links, resulting in about 266,141 "laser acquisitions" per day, according to Brashears' presentation. But in some cases, the links can also be maintained for weeks at a time, and even reach transmission rates at up to 200Gbps.

Brashears also said Starlink's laser system was able to connect two satellites over 5,400 kilometers (3,355 miles) apart. The link was so long "it cut down through the atmosphere, all the way down to 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth," he said, before the connection broke. "Another really fun fact is that we held a link all the way down to 122 kilometers while we were de-orbiting a satellite," he said. "And we were able to downstream the video." During his presentation, Brashears also showed a slide depicting how the laser system can deliver data to a Starlink dish in Antarctica through about seven different paths. "We can dynamically change those routes within milliseconds. So as long as we have some path to the ground [station], you're going to have 99.99% uptime. That's why it's important to get as many nodes up there as possible," he added.

"Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope observed the smallest exoplanet where water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere," writes SciTechDaily.

"At only approximately twice Earth's diameter, the planet GJ 9827d could be an example of potential planets with water-rich atmospheres elsewhere in our galaxy." "This would be the first time that we can directly show through an atmospheric detection, that these planets with water-rich atmospheres can actually exist around other stars," said team member Björn Benneke of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets at Université de Montréal. "This is an important step toward determining the prevalence and diversity of atmospheres on rocky planets."

"Water on a planet this small is a landmark discovery," added co-principal investigator Laura Kreidberg of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "It pushes closer than ever to characterizing truly Earth-like worlds."

However, it remains too early to tell whether Hubble spectroscopically measured a small amount of water vapor in a puffy hydrogen-rich atmosphere, or if the planet's atmosphere is mostly made of water, left behind after a primeval hydrogen/helium atmosphere evaporated under stellar radiation... Because the planet is as hot as Venus, at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, it definitely would be an inhospitable, steamy world if the atmosphere were predominantly water vapor...

"Observing water is a gateway to finding other things," said Thomas Greene, astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "This Hubble discovery opens the door to future study of these types of planets by the James Webb Space Telescope.

"Indonesia has been clearing tens of thousands of acres of densely vegetated peatland for farming, releasing massive amounts of carbon that had been sequestered below for centuries," reports the Washington Post, "and destroying one of the Earth's most effective means of storing greenhouse gases." The country is home to as much as half of the planet's tropical peatland, a unique ecosystem that scientists say is vital to averting the worst results of climate change. Government leaders have made halting efforts to protect peatlands over the last two decades, but three years ago, when the pandemic disrupted food supply chains, officials launched an ambitious land-clearance operation in a push to expand the cultivation of crops and cut Indonesia's reliance on expensive imports. By transforming 2,000 to 4,000 square miles of what environmental groups say is predominantly peatland into fields of rice, corn and cassava, the government projects that it will achieve self-sufficiency in food... But disrupting the peatlands comes with devastating, likely irreversible costs for the climate, say environmental experts and activists.

"To restore these vast areas of peat forest being destroyed will take years and huge investments in labor and funds," said David Taylor, a professor of tropical environmental change at the National University of Singapore who has researched peatlands in Asia and Africa. To do it on the timeline that global leaders have set for the world to achieve net-zero emissions? "Near impossible," Taylor said... While peatlands make up just 3 percent of the Earth's land, they store twice as much carbon as all the world's forests combined, according to the United Nations. When peatlands are drained, layers of aged biomass that are exposed to oxygen-rich air decay at an accelerated rate, releasing carbon from bygone eras into the atmosphere.

Even worse, when the weather turns hot, unprotected peat dries out, becoming combustible. Already, environmental activists and villagers in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, say peatlands cleared by the government are fueling more-intense wildfires... Left intact, peatlands are naturally protected against fire. Once degraded, however, they produce infernos that are notoriously difficult to put out because they can travel underground, feeding on dried biomass yards below the surface.
Tropical peatlands are also threatened by development in Peru and Africa's Congo Basin, according to the article. But they add that there's something especially ironic about Indonesia's government project. "Research shows that tropical peatlands tend to be too acidic to grow crops.

"Indonesian environmental groups, including Pantau Gambut and WALHI, said they have documented widespread crop failures in areas targeted by the government's project. Rice planted in some peat-rich areas has had less than a third of the yield of rice planted in mineral soil, according to the groups' analysis."

"A photo of Japan's robotic moon lander shows that though the spacecraft did make the quarter-million-mile journey to the lunar surface, it landed upside down..." reports Mashable. Because of the lander's now-apparent inverted position, its solar panels weren't oriented correctly to generate power, according to the space agency. The team elected to conserve power by shutting down the spacecraft about 2.5 hours after landing.

What's perhaps as surprising as the photo of the lander is how it was taken. Two small rovers separated from the crewless mothership just prior to touchdown. It was one of these baseball-sized robots that was able to snap the image of the spacecraft with its head in the moondust. The rover, built with the help of Japanese toy maker Takara Tomy, is a sphere that splits in half to expose a pair of cameras that point front and back. The two hemispheres also become the rover wheels. "The company is perhaps most famous for originally creating the Transformers, the alien robots that can disguise themselves as machines," said Elizabeth Tasker, who provided commentary on the moon landing in English on Jan. 20.

The space agency still isn't entirely sure what went wrong. At about 55 yards above the ground, the spacecraft performed an obstacle avoidance maneuver, part of the pinpoint-landing demonstration. Just prior to this step, one of the two main engines stopped thrusting, throwing the lander's orientation off. JAXA is continuing to investigate what caused the engine problem... Despite the fact that the spacecraft is now sleeping, the SLIM team hasn't lost hope for a recovery. With solar panels facing west, the lander still has a chance of catching some rays and generating power. If the angle of sunlight changes, SLIM could still be awakened, mission officials said.

That would have to happen soon, though. Night will fall on the moon on Feb. 1, bringing about freezing temperatures. The spacecraft was not built to withstand those conditions.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft has now passed over the landing site at an altitude of about 50 miles (80 km) — and snapped their own photograph which they say shows "the slight change in reflectance around the lander due to engine exhaust sweeping the surface."

UPI reports: New research published Friday offers hope that the sediment samples picked up by the Mars rover Perseverance could reveal traces of life — if it ever existed on the Red Planet.

The rover already has confirmed an ancient lake on Mars. The new research published in Science Advances shows the Jezero Crater, where Perseverance verified lake sediments, is theorized to have been filled with water that deposited layers of sediments on the crater floor. "The delta deposits in Jezero Crater contain sedimentary records of potentially habitable conditions on Mars," the research article's abstract stated. "NASA's Perseverance rover is exploring the Jezero western delta with a suite of instruments that include the RIMFAX ground penetrating radar, which provides continuous subsurface images that probe up to 20 meters below the rover."

The research by UCLA and the University of Oslo shows the lake subsequently shrank and the sediments carried by a river formed a large delta... [R]adar images revealed sediments shaped like lake deposits on Earth. Their existence was confirmed by the new research.

"Parched conditions have crippled a waterway that handles $270 billion a year in global trade," reports Bloomberg. "And there are no easy solutions.

"The Panama Canal Authority is weighing potential fixes that include an artificial lake to pump water into the canal and cloud seeding to boost rainfall, but both options would take years to implement, if they're even feasible. " With water levels languishing at six feet (1.8 meters) below normal, the canal authority capped the number of vessels that can cross. The limits imposed late last year were the strictest since 1989... Some shippers are paying millions of dollars to jump the growing queue, while others are taking longer, costlier routes around Africa or South America. The constraints have since eased slightly due to a rainier-than-expected November, but at 24 ships a day, the maximum is still well below the pre-drought daily capacity of about 38. As the dry season takes hold, the bottleneck is poised to worsen again...

The canal's travails reflect how climate change is altering global trade flows. Drought created chokepoints last year on the Mississippi River in the US and the Rhine in Europe. In the UK, rising sea levels are elevating the risk of flooding along the Thames. Melting ice is creating new shipping routes in the Arctic. Under normal circumstances, the Panama Canal handles about 3% of global maritime trade volumes and 46% of containers moving from Northeast Asia to the US East Coast...

In the long term, the primary solution to chronic water shortages will be to dam up the Indio River and then drill a tunnel through a mountain to pipe fresh water 8 kilometers (5 miles) into Lake Gatún, the canal's main reservoir. The project, along with additional conservation measures, will cost about $2 billion, Erick Córdoba, the manager of the water division at the canal authority estimates. He says it will take at least six years to dam up and fill the site. The US Army Corps of Engineers is conducting a feasibility study. The Indio River reservoir would increase vessel traffic by 11 to 15 a day, enough to keep Panama's top moneymaker working at capacity while guaranteeing fresh water for Panama City...

The country will need to dam even more rivers to guarantee water through the end of the century.

NASA announced Friday that it finally got a canister of asteroid dust open, four months after it parachuted down through the Earth's atmosphere into the Utah desert. The Guardian reports: The space administration announced Friday that it had successfully removed two stuck fasteners that had prevented some of the samples collected in 2020 from the 4.6bn-year-old asteroid Bennu, which is classified as a "potentially hazardous" because it has one in 1,750 chance of crashing into Earth by 2300. Most of the rock samples collected by Nasa's Osiris-Rex mission were retrieved soon after the canister landed in September, but additional material remaining inside a sampler head that proved difficult to access.

After months of wrestling with the last two of 35 fasteners, scientists in Houston managed to get them dislodged. "It's open! It's open!" Nasa's planetary science division posted on Twitter/X. The division also posted a photograph of dust and small rocks inside the canister. According to the Los Angeles Times, the team designed custom tools made from a specific grade of surgical, non-magnetic stainless steel to pry it open -- all without the samples being contaminated by Earthly air. Nasa said it will now analyze the nine-ounce sample.

Exxon Mobil has filed a complaint in a Texas court seeking to block a climate proposal by activist investors from a shareholder vote in May. This marks Exxon's first legal action against such a proposal. Exxon argues the proposal, which urges adoption of emissions targets for Exxon's products, does not serve shareholder interests. The activist investors counter that Exxon is the only major oil company lacking these targets. TechCrunch: The problem Exxon faces is that the "basic rules of society," specifically "those embedded in ethical custom," are changing, and the company now finds itself on the wrong side of them. Two-thirds of Americans say we should prioritize alternative energy over fossil fuels, and 69% say the U.S. should move toward net-zero emissions by 2050, according to the Pew Research Center. Internationally, most people want their governments to do something about climate change.

Exxon would normally take its grievances to the SEC, filing a request with the regulator to omit the proposal from this year's proxy statement. But under the Biden administration, the SEC has been siding more frequently with shareholders. After all, who's the boss?

"Good news..." NASA posted Saturday night on X. "We've reestablished contact with the Mars Helicopter..."

After a two-day communications blackout, NASA had instructed its Perseverance Mars rover "to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity's signal" — and apparently they did the trick. "The team is reviewing the new data to better understand the unexpected comms dropout" during the helicopter's record-breaking 72nd flight.

Slashdot reader Thelasko shared this report from NPR: Communications broke down on Thursday, when the little autonomous rotorcraft was sent on a "quick pop-up vertical flight," to test its systems after an unplanned early landing during its previous flight, the agency said in a status update on Friday night. The Perseverance rover, which relays data between the helicopter and Earth during the flights, showed that Ingenuity climbed to its assigned maximum altitude of 40 feet, NASA said.

During its planned descent, the helicopter and rover stopped communicating with each other...
Even before it came back online, RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) pointed out that the Mars copter has done this before. "Batteries dieing, resulting in a communications re-set, If I remember correctly."

Space.com also noted additional alternatives: "Perseverance is currently out of line-of-sight with Ingenuity, but the team could consider driving closer for a visual inspection," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages both robots' missions, said via X on Friday.

Ingenuity has stayed aloft for more than 128 minutes and covered a total of 11 miles (17.7 kilometers) during its 72 Mars flights, according to the mission's flight log.

"The discovery of a second ultra-large structure in the remote universe has further challenged some of the basic assumptions about cosmology," writes SciTechDaily: The Big Ring on the Sky is 9.2 billion light-years from Earth. It has a diameter of about 1.3 billion light-years, and a circumference of about four billion light-years. If we could step outside and see it directly, the diameter of the Big Ring would need about 15 full Moons to cover it.

It is the second ultra-large structure discovered by University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) PhD student Alexia Lopez who, two years ago, also discovered the Giant Arc on the Sky. Remarkably, the Big Ring and the Giant Arc, which is 3.3 billion light-years across, are in the same cosmological neighborhood — they are seen at the same distance, at the same cosmic time, and are only 12 degrees apart on the sky. Alexia said: "Neither of these two ultra-large structures is easy to explain in our current understanding of the universe. And their ultra-large sizes, distinctive shapes, and cosmological proximity must surely be telling us something important — but what exactly?

"One possibility is that the Big Ring could be related to Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs). BAOs arise from oscillations in the early universe and today should appear, statistically at least, as spherical shells in the arrangement of galaxies. However, detailed analysis of the Big Ring revealed it is not really compatible with the BAO explanation: the Big Ring is too large and is not spherical." Other explanations might be needed, explanations that depart from what is generally considered to be the standard understanding in cosmology...

And if the Big Ring and the Giant Arc together form a still larger structure then the challenge to the Cosmological Principle becomes even more compelling... Alexia said, "From current cosmological theories we didn't think structures on this scale were possible. "
Possible explanations include a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or the effect of cosmic strings passing through...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

The Washington Post looks at "a small but growing group of commercial medium-to-heavy-duty truck drivers who use electric trucks."

"These drivers — many of whom operate local or regional routes that don't require hundreds of miles on the road in a day — generally welcome the transition to electric, praising their new trucks' handling, acceleration, smoothness and quiet operation. "Everyone who has had an EV has no aspirations to go back to diesel at this point," said Khari Burton, who drives an electric Volvo VNR in the Los Angeles area for transport company IMC. "We talk about it and it's all positivity. I really enjoy the smoothness ... and just the quietness as well." Mike Roeth, the executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency, said many drivers have reported that the new vehicles are easier on their bodies — thanks to both less rocking off the cab, assisted steering and the quiet motor. "Part of my hypothesis is that it will help truck driver retention," he said. "We're seeing people who would retire driving a diesel truck now working more years with an electric truck."

Most of the electric trucks on the road today are doing local or regional routes, which are easier to manage with a truck that gets only up to 250 miles of range... Trucking advocates say electric has a long way to go before it can take on longer routes. "If you're running very local, very short mileage, there may be a vehicle that can do that type of route," said Mike Tunnell, the executive director of environmental affairs for the American Trucking Association. "But for the average haul of 400 miles, there's just nothing that's really practical today."
There's other concerns, according to the article. "[S]ome companies and trucking associations worry this shift, spurred in part by a California law mandating a switch to electric or emissions-free trucks by 2042, is happening too fast. While electric trucks might work well in some cases, they argue, the upfront costs of the vehicles and their charging infrastructure are often too heavy a lift."

But this is probably the key sentence in the article: For the United States to meet its climate goals, virtually all trucks must be zero-emissions by 2050. While trucks are only 4 percent of the vehicles on the road, they make up almost a quarter of the country's transportation emissions.
The article cites estimates that right now there's 12.2 million trucks on America's highways — and barely more than 1% (13,000) are electric. "Around 10,000 of those trucks were just put on the road in 2023, up from 2,000 the year before." (And they add that Amazon alone has thousands of Rivian's electric delivery vans, operating in 1,800 cities.)

But the article's overall message seems to be that when it comes to the trucks, "the drivers operating them say they love driving electric." And it includes comments from actual truckers:

• 49-year-old Frito-Lay trucker Gary LaBush: "I was like, 'What's going on?' There was no noise — and no fumes... it's just night and day."

• 66-year-old Marty Boots: Diesel was like a college wrestler. And the electric is like a ballet dancer... You get back into diesel and it's like, 'What's wrong with this thing?' Why is it making so much noise? Why is it so hard to steer?"

"It's the third all-private astronaut mission to the International Space Station," writes NASA — and they're expected to start boarding within the next hour!

Watch it all on the official stream of NASA TV.

More details from Ars Technica: The four-man team lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Thursday, kicking off a 36-hour pursuit of the orbiting research laboratory. Docking is scheduled for Saturday morning. This two-week mission is managed by Houston-based Axiom Space, which is conducting private astronaut missions to the ISS as a stepping stone toward building a fully commercial space station in low-Earth orbit by the end of this decade.

Axiom's third mission, called Ax-3, launched at 4:49 pm EST (21:49 UTC) Thursday. The four astronauts were strapped into their seats inside SpaceX's Dragon Freedom spacecraft atop the Falcon 9 rocket. This is the 12th time SpaceX has launched a human spaceflight mission, and could be the first of five Dragon crew missions this year.
NASA reports that the crew "will spend about two weeks conducting microgravity research, educational outreach, and commercial activities aboard the space station." NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said "During their time aboard the International Space Station, the Ax-3 astronauts will carry out more than 30 scientific experiments that will help advance research in low-Earth orbit. As the first all-European commercial astronaut mission to the space station, the Ax-3 crew is proof that the possibility of space unites us all...."

The Dragon spacecraft will dock autonomously to the forward port of the station's Harmony module as early as 4:19 a.m. [EST] Saturday. Hatches between Dragon and the station are expected to open after 6 a.m. [EST], allowing the Axiom crew to enter the complex for a welcoming ceremony and start their stay aboard the orbiting laboratory.... The Ax-3 astronauts are expected to depart the space station Saturday, February 3, pending weather, for a return to Earth and splashdown at a landing site off the coast of Florida.

Organized crime is mining sand from rivers and coasts to feed demand worldwide, ruining ecosystems and communities. Can it be stopped? Scientific American reports: Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable.

The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons), notes Vince Beiser, author of The World in a Grain. Most sand gets used in the country where it is mined, but with some national supplies dwindling, imports reached $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Harvard's Atlas of Economic Complexity. Companies large and small dredge up sand from waterways and the ocean floor and transport it to wholesalers, construction firms and retailers. Even the legal sand trade is hard to track. Two experts estimate the global market at about $100 billion a year, yet the U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries indicates the value could be as high as $785 billion.

Sand in riverbeds, lake beds and shorelines is the best for construction, but scarcity opens the market to less suitable sand from beaches and dunes, much of it scraped illegally and cheaply. With a shortage looming and prices rising, sand from Moroccan beaches and dunes is sold inside the country and is also shipped abroad, using organized crime's extensive transport networks, Abderrahmane has found. More than half of Morocco's sand is illegally mined, he says.