The United States has assessed that Russia launched what is likely a counter space weapon last week that's now in the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder confirmed Tuesday. From a report: "What I'm tracking here is on May 16, as you highlighted, Russia launched a satellite into low Earth orbit that we that we assess is likely a counter space weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit," Ryder said when questioned by ABC News about the information, which was made public earlier Tuesday by Robert Wood, deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

"Russia deployed this new counter space weapon into the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite," Ryder continued. "And so assessments further indicate characteristics resembling previously deployed counter space payloads from 2019 and 2022." Ryder added: "Obviously, that's something that we'll continue to monitor. Certainly, we would say that we have a responsibility to be ready to protect and defend the space domain and ensure continuous and uninterrupted support to the joint and combined force. And we'll continue to balance the need to protect our interests in space with our desire to preserve a stable and sustainable space environment." When asked if the Russian counter space weapon posed a threat to the U.S. satellite, Ryder responded: "Well, it's a counter space weapon in the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite."

Major oil companies have in recent years made splashy climate pledges to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and take on the climate crisis, but a new report suggests those plans do not stand up to scrutiny. From a report: The research and advocacy group Oil Change International examined climate plans from the eight largest US- and European-based international oil and gas producers -- BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Eni, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies -- and found none were compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels -- a threshold scientists have long warned could have dire consequences if breached.

"There is no evidence that big oil and gas companies are acting seriously to be part of the energy transition," David Tong, global industry campaign manager at Oil Change International, who co-authored the analysis, said in a statement. The report's authors used 10 criteria and ranked each aspect of each companyâ(TM)s plan on a spectrum from "fully aligned" to "grossly insufficient" and found all eight companies ranked "grossly insufficient" or "insufficient" on nearly all criteria. The US firms Chevron, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil each ranked "grossly insufficient" on all 10 criteria. "American fossil-fuel corporations are the worst of the worst," Allie Rosenbluth, US program manager at Oil Change International, said in a statement.

Alphabet's moonshot factory, X, is scaling back its ambitious projects amid concerns over Google's core search business facing competition from AI chatbots like ChatGPT. The lab, once a symbol of Google's commitment to innovation, is now spinning off projects as startups rather than integrating them into Alphabet. The shift reflects a broader trend among tech giants, who are cutting costs and focusing on their core businesses in response to the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Recent research led by the University of California, Irvine has discovered warm, high-pressure seawater causing significant melting under the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. "There are places where the water is almost at the pressure of the overlying ice, so just a little more pressure is needed to push up the ice," said lead author Eric Rignot, UC Irvine professor of Earth system science. "The water is then squeezed enough to jack up a column of more than half a mile of ice." Interesting Engineering reports: A team of glaciologists led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine employed high-resolution satellite radar data to uncover evidence of the warm, high-pressure seawater intrusion beneath the glacier. A statement by the scientists noted that the widespread contact between ocean water and the glacier -- a process replicated throughout Antarctica and in Greenland -- causes "vigorous melting" and may require a reassessment of global sea level rise projections.

In a bid to comprehend the impact of ocean-water interaction on glacial melting, glaciologists examined data collected between March 2023 and June 2023 sourced from Finland's ICEYE commercial satellite mission. These satellites represent a collection that resembles constellations in polar orbit around the planet. They employ InSAR -- interferometric synthetic aperture radar -- to continuously track changes on the Earth's surface. "When we have a continuous time series and compare that with the tidal cycle, we see the seawater coming in at high tide and receding and sometimes going farther up underneath the glacier and getting trapped," said Rignot. "Thanks to ICEYE, we're beginning to witness this tidal dynamic for the first time."

He explained that seawater entering the base of the ice sheet, along with freshwater from geothermal heat and friction, accumulates and needs to flow. This water moves through natural channels or pools in cavities, creating pressure that lifts the ice sheet. Co-author Christine Dow, professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada alluding to the glacier in question said that the Thwaites is the most unstable place in the Antarctic and contains the equivalent of 60 centimeters of sea level rise. The worry is that we are underestimating the speed at which the glacier is changing, which would be devastating for coastal communities around the world. "At the moment we don't have enough information to say one way or the other how much time there is before the oceanwater intrusion is irreversible, says Dow. The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Blue Origin's tourism rocket has launched passengers to the edge of space for the first time in nearly two years," reports CNN, "ending a hiatus prompted by a failed uncrewed test flight." The New Shepard rocket and capsule lifted off at 9:36 a.m. CT (10:36 a.m. ET) from Blue Origin's facilities on a private ranch in West Texas.

NS-25, Blue Origin's seventh crewed flight to date, carried six customers aboard the capsule: venture capitalist Mason Angel; Sylvain Chiron, founder of the French craft brewery Brasserie Mont-Blanc; software engineer and entrepreneur Kenneth L. Hess; retired accountant Carol Schaller; aviator Gopi Thotakura; and Ed Dwight, a retired US Air Force captain selected by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to be the nation's first Black astronaut candidate... Dwight completed that challenge and reached the edge of space at the age of 90, making him the oldest person to venture to such heights, according to a spokesperson from Blue Origin...

"It's a life-changing experience," he said. "Everybody needs to do this."

The rocket booster landed safely a couple minutes prior to the capsule. During the mission, the crew soared to more than three times the speed of sound, or more than 2,000 miles per hour. The rocket vaulted the capsule past the Kármán line, an area 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth's surface that is widely recognized as the altitude at which outer space begins...
"And at the peak of the flight, passengers experienced a few minutes of weightlessness and striking views of Earth through the cabin windows."

The thinktank InfluenceMap produces "data-driven analysis on how business and finance are impacting the climate crisis." Their web site says their newest report documents "How automaker lobbying threatens the global transition to electric vehicles." This report analyses the climate policy engagement strategies of fifteen of the largest global automakers in seven key regions (Australia, EU, Japan, India, South Korea, UK, US). It shows how even in countries where major climate legislation has recently passed, such as the US and Australia, the ambition of these policies has been weakened due to industry pressure. All fifteen automakers, except Tesla, have actively advocated against at least one policy promoting electric vehicles. Ten of the fifteen showed a particularly high intensity of negative engagement and scored a final grade of D or D+ by InfluenceMap's methodology. Toyota is the lowest-scoring company in this analysis, driving opposition to climate regulations promoting battery electric vehicles in multiple regions, including the US, Australia and UK. Of all automakers analyzed, only Tesla (scoring B) is found to have positive climate advocacy aligned with science-based policy.
CleanTechnica writes that Toyota "led on hybrid vehicles (and still does), so it's actually not surprising that it has been opposed to the next stage of climate-cutting auto evolution — it's clinging on to its lead rather than continuing to innovate for a new era."

More from InfluenceMap: Only three of fifteen companies — Tesla, Mercedes Benz and BMW — are forecast to produce enough electric vehicles by 2030 to meet the International Energy Agency's updated 1.5 degreesC pathway of 66% electric vehicle (battery electric, fuel cell and plug-in hybrids) sales according to InfluenceMap's independent analysis of industry-standard data from February 2024. Current industry forecasts analyzed for this report show automaker production will reach only 53% electric vehicles in 2030. Transport is the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and road transport is failing to decarbonize at anywhere near the rate of many other industries. InfluenceMap's report also finds that Japanese automakers are the least prepared for an electric vehicle transition and are engaging the hardest against it.
"InfluenceMap highlights that these anti-EV efforts in the industry are often coming from industry associations rather than coming directly from automakers, shielding them a bit from inevitable public backlash," writes CleanTechnica.

"Every automaker included in the study except Tesla remains a member of at least two of these groups," InfluenceMap reports, "with most automakers a member of at least five."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the news.

The Washington Post reports that America took "one of its biggest steps yet to keep fossil fuels in the ground," announcing Thursday that it will end new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, "which produces nearly half the coal in the United States...

"It could prevent billions of tons of coal from being extracted from more than 13 million acres across Montana and Wyoming, with major implications for U.S. climate goals." A significant share of the nation's fossil fuels come from federal lands and waters. The extraction and combustion of these fuels accounted for nearly a quarter of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions between 2005 and 2014, according to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey. In a final environmental impact statement released Thursday, Interior's Bureau of Land Management found that continued coal leasing in the Powder River Basin would harm the climate and public health. The bureau determined that no future coal leasing should happen in the basin, and it estimated that coal mining in the Wyoming portion of the region would end by 2041.

Last year, the Powder River Basin generated 251.9 million tons of coal, accounting for nearly 44 percent of all coal produced in the United States. Under the bureau's determination, the 14 active coal mines in the Powder River Basin can continue operating on lands they have leased, but they cannot expand onto other public lands in the region... "This means that billions of tons of coal won't be burned, compared to business as usual," said Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney at the environmental law firm Earthjustice. "It's good news, and it's really the only defensible decision the BLM could have made, given the current climate crisis...."

The United States is moving away from coal, which has struggled to compete economically with cheaper gas and renewable energy. U.S. coal output tumbled 36 percent from 2015 to 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration. The Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign estimates that 382 coal-fired power plants have closed down or proposed to retire, with 148 remaining. In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized an ambitious set of rules in April aimed at slashing air pollution, water pollution and planet-warming emissions spewing from the nation's power plants. One of the most significant rules will push all existing coal plants by 2039 to either close or capture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions at the smokestack.

"The nation's electricity generation needs are being met increasingly by wind, solar and natural gas," said Tom Sanzillo, director of financial analysis at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an energy think tank. "The nation doesn't need any increase in the amount of coal under lease out of the Powder River Basin."

"Albert Einstein was right," reports CNN. "There is an area at the edge of black holes where matter can no longer stay in orbit and instead falls in, as predicted by his theory of gravity."

The proof came by combining NASA's earth-orbiting NuSTAR telescope with the NICER telescope on the International Space Station to detect X-rays: A team of astronomers has for the first time observed this area — called the "plunging region" — in a black hole about 10,000 light-years from Earth. "We've been ignoring this region, because we didn't have the data," said research scientist Andrew Mummery, lead author of the study published Thursday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "But now that we do, we couldn't explain it any other way."
Mummery — also a Fellow in Oxford's physics department — told CNN, "We went out searching for this one specifically — that was always the plan. We've argued about whether we'd ever be able to find it for a really long time. People said it would be impossible, so confirming it's there is really exciting."

Mummery described the plunging region as "like the edge of a waterfall." Unlike the event horizon, which is closer to the center of the black hole and doesn't let anything escape, including light and radiation, in the "plunging region" light can still escape, but matter is doomed by the powerful gravitational pull, Mummery explained. The study's findings could help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of black holes. "We can really learn about them by studying this region, because it's right at the edge, so it gives us the most information," Mummery said...

According to Christopher Reynolds, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, College Park, finding actual evidence for the "plunging region" is an important step that will let scientists significantly refine models for how matter behaves around a black hole. "For example, it can be used to measure the rotation rate of the black hole," said Reynolds, who was not involved in the study.

Michael Kan reports via PCMag: AT&T has struck a deal to bring satellite internet connectivity to phones through AST SpaceMobile, a potential rival to SpaceX's Starlink. AT&T says the commercial agreement will last until 2030. The goal is "to provide a space-based broadband network to everyday cell phones," a spokesperson tells PCMag, meaning customers can receive a cellular signal in remote areas where traditional cell towers are few and far between. All they'll need to do is ensure their phone has a clear view of the sky.

AT&T has been working with Texas-based AST SpaceMobile since 2018 on the technology, which involves using satellites in space as orbiting cell towers. In January, AT&T was one of several companies (including Google) to invest $110 million in AST. In addition, the carrier created a commercial starring actor Ben Stiller to showcase AST's technology. In today's announcement, AT&T notes that "previously, the companies were working together under a Memorandum of Understanding," which is usually nonbinding. Hence, the new commercial deal suggests AT&T is confident AST can deliver fast and reliable satellite internet service to consumer smartphones -- even though it hasn't launched a production satellite.

AST has only launched one prototype satellite; in tests last year, it delivered download rates at 14Mbps and powered a 5G voice call. Following a supply chain-related delay, the company is now preparing to launch its first batch of "BlueBird" production satellites later this year, possibly in Q3. In Wednesday's announcement, AT&T adds: "This summer, AST SpaceMobile plans to deliver its first commercial satellites to Cape Canaveral for launch into low Earth orbit. These initial five satellites will help enable commercial service that was previously demonstrated with several key milestones." Still, AST needs to launch 45 to 60 BlueBird satellites before it can offer continuous coverage in the U.S., although in an earnings call, the company said it'll still be able to offer "non-continuous coverage" across 5,600 cells in the country.

Last month, researchers from the University of Washington started conducting an experiment on a decommissioned naval ship in Alameda to test if spraying salt water into the air could brighten clouds and cool the planet. However, their project was forced to stop this month after the city got word of what was going on. SFGate reports: According to a city press release, scientists were ordered to halt the experiment because it violated Alameda's lease with the USS Hornet, the aircraft carrier from which researchers were spraying saltwater into the air using "a machine resembling a snowmaker." The news was first reported by the Alameda Post. "City staff are working with a team of biological and hazardous materials consultants to independently evaluate the health and environmental safety of this particular experiment," the press release states. Specifically, chemicals present in the experiment's aerosol spray are being evaluated to study whether or not they pose any threats to humans, animals or the environment. So far, there isn't any evidence that they do, the city stated.

The prospect of a city-conducted review was not unexpected, the University of Washington said in a statement shared with SFGATE. "In fact, the CAARE (Coastal Aerosol Research and Engagement) facility is designed to help regulators, community members and others engage with the research closely, and we consider the current interactions with the city to be an integral part of that process," the statement reads. "We are happy to support their review and it has been a highly constructive process so far." The marine cloud brightening (MCB) technique involves spraying fine particles of sea salt into the atmosphere from ships or specialized machines. These sea salt particles are chosen because they are a natural source of cloud-forming aerosols and can increase the number of cloud droplets, making the clouds more reflective. The particles sprayed are extremely small, about 1/1000th the width of a human hair, ensuring they remain suspended in the air and interact with cloud droplets effectively.

By reflecting more sunlight, these brightened clouds can reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface, leading to localized cooling. If implemented on a large scale, this cooling effect could potentially offset some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

You can learn more about the experiment here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting in June of last year, global temperatures went from very hot to extreme. Every single month since June, the globe has experienced the hottest temperatures for that month on record -- that's 11 months in a row now, enough to ensure that 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 will likely be similarly extreme. There's been nothing like this in the temperature record, and it acts as an unmistakable indication of human-driven warming. But how unusual is that warming compared to what nature has thrown at us in the past? While it's not possible to provide a comprehensive answer to that question, three European researchers (Jan Esper, Max Torbenson, and Ulf Buntgen) have provided a partial answer: the Northern Hemisphere hasn't seen anything like this in over 2,000 years. [...]

The first thing the three researchers did was try to align the temperature record with the proxy record. If you simply compare temperatures within the instrument record, 2023 summer temperatures were just slightly more than 2C higher than the 1850-1900 temperature records. But, as mentioned, the record for those years is a bit sparse. A comparison with proxy records of the 1850-1900 period showed that the early instrument record ran a bit warm compared to a wider sampling of the Northern Hemisphere. Adjusting for this bias revealed that the summer of 2023 was about 2.3 C above pre-industrial temperatures from this period. But the proxy data from the longest tree ring records can take temperatures back over 2,000 years to year 1 CE. Compared to that longer record, summer of 2023 was 2.2 C warmer (which suggests that the early instrument record runs a bit warm).

So, was the summer of 2023 extreme compared to that record? The answer is very clearly yes. Even the warmest summer in the proxy record, CE 246, was only 0.97 C above the 2,000-year average, meaning it was about 1.2 C cooler than 2023. The coldest summer in the proxies was 536 CE, which came in the wake of a major volcanic eruption. That was roughly 4 C cooler than 2023. While the proxy records have uncertainties, those uncertainties are nowhere near large enough to encompass 2023. Even if you take the maximum temperature with the 95 percent confidence range of the proxies, the summer of 2023 was more than half a degree warmer. Obviously, this analysis is limited to comparing a portion of one year to centuries of proxies, as well as limited to one area of the globe. It doesn't tell us how much of an outlier the rest of 2023 was or whether its extreme nature was global. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

According to a new study published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior, researchers found that internet use is associated with greater wellbeing in people around the world. "Our analysis is the first to test whether or not internet access, mobile internet access and regular use of the internet relates to wellbeing on a global level," said Prof Andrew Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, who co-authored the work. The Guardian reports: [T]he study describes how Przybylski and Dr Matti Vuorre, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, analysed data collected through interviews involving about 1,000 people each year from 168 countries as part of the Gallup World Poll. Participants were asked about their internet access and use as well as eight different measures of wellbeing, such as life satisfaction, social life, purpose in life and feelings of community wellbeing.

The team analyzed data from 2006 to 2021, encompassing about 2.4 million participants aged 15 and above. The researchers employed more than 33,000 statistical models, allowing them to explore various possible associations while taking into account factors that could influence them, such as income, education, health problems and relationship status. The results reveal that internet access, mobile internet access and use generally predicted higher measures of the different aspects of wellbeing, with 84.9% of associations between internet connectivity and wellbeing positive, 0.4% negative and 14.7% not statistically significant.

The study was not able to prove cause and effect, but the team found measures of life satisfaction were 8.5% higher for those who had internet access. Nor did the study look at the length of time people spent using the internet or what they used it for, while some factors that could explain associations may not have be considered. Przybylski said it was important that policy on technology was evidence-based and that the impact of any interventions was tracked.

The non-profit environmental site Grist reports on "an internal, employee-led effort to raise ethical concerns about Microsoft's work helping oil and gas producers boost their profits by providing them with cloud computing resources and AI software tools." There's been some disappointments — but also some successes, starting with the founding of an internal sustainability group within Microsoft that grew to nearly 10,000 employees: Former Microsoft employees and sources familiar with tech industry advocacy say that, broadly speaking, employee pressure has had an enormous impact on sustainability at Microsoft, encouraging it to announce industry-leading climate goals in 2020 and support key federal climate policies.

But convincing the world's most valuable company to forgo lucrative oil industry contracts proved far more difficult... Over the past seven years, Microsoft has announced dozens of new deals with oil and gas producers and oil field services companies, many explicitly aimed at unlocking new reserves, increasing production, and driving up oil industry profits...

As concerns over the company's fossil fuel work mounted, Microsoft was gearing up to make a big sustainability announcement. In January 2020, the company pledged to become "carbon negative" by 2030, meaning that in 10 years, the tech giant would pull more carbon out of the air than it emitted on an annual basis... For nearly two years, employees watched and waited. Following its carbon negative announcement, Microsoft quickly expanded its internal carbon tax, which charges the company's business groups a fee for the carbon they emit via electricity use, employee travel, and more. It also invested in new technologies like direct air capture and purchased carbon removal contracts from dozens of projects worldwide.

But Microsoft's work with the oil industry continued unabated, with the company announcing a slew of new partnerships in 2020 and 2021 aimed at cutting fossil fuel producers' costs and boosting production.
The last straw for one technical account manager was a 2023 LinkedIn post by a Microsoft technical architect about the company's work on oil and gas industry automation. The post said Microsoft's cloud service was "unlocking previously inaccessible reserves" for the fossil fuel industry, promising that with Microsoft's Azure service, "the future of oil and gas exploration and production is brighter than ever."

The technical account manager resigned from the position they'd held for nearly a decade, citing the blog post in a resignation letter which accused Microsoft of "extending the age of fossil fuels, and enabling untold emissions."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

Slashdot reader sonlas shared this report from the BBC: Australia has announced it will ramp up its extraction and use of gas until "2050 and beyond", despite global calls to phase out fossil fuels. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government says the move is needed to shore up domestic energy supply while supporting a transition to net zero... Australia — one of the world's largest exporters of liquefied natural gas — has also said the policy is based on "its commitment to being a reliable trading partner". Released on Thursday, the strategy outlines the government's plans to work with industry and state leaders to increase both the production and exploration of the fossil fuel. The government will also continue to support the expansion of the country's existing gas projects, the largest of which are run by Chevron and Woodside Energy Group in Western Australia...

The policy has sparked fierce backlash from environmental groups and critics — who say it puts the interest of powerful fossil fuel companies before people. "Fossil gas is not a transition fuel. It's one of the main contributors to global warming and has been the largest source of increases of CO2 [emissions] over the last decade," Prof Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics and author of numerous UN climate change reports told the BBC... Successive Australian governments have touted gas as a key "bridging fuel", arguing that turning it off too soon could have "significant adverse impacts" on Australia's economy and energy needs. But Prof Hare and other scientists have warned that building a net zero policy around gas will "contribute to locking in 2.7-3C global warming, which will have catastrophic consequences".

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: A thick atmosphere has been detected around a planet that's twice as big as Earth in a nearby solar system, researchers reported Wednesday.

The so-called super Earth — known as 55 Cancri e — is among the few rocky planets outside our solar system with a significant atmosphere, wrapped in a blanket of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The exact amounts are unclear. Earth's atmosphere is a blend of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and other gases. "It's probably the firmest evidence yet that this planet has an atmosphere," said Ian Crossfield, an astronomer at the University of Kansas who studies exoplanets and was not involved with the research.

The research was published in the journal Nature.
"The boiling temperatures on this planet — which can reach as hot as 4,200 degrees Fahrenheit (2,300 degrees Celsius) — mean that it is unlikely to host life," the article points out.

"Instead, scientists say the discovery is a promising sign that other such rocky planets with thick atmospheres could exist that may be more hospitable."

"One of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics today is that the forces in galaxies do not seem to add up," write two U.K. researchers in the Conversation: Galaxies rotate much faster than predicted by applying Newton's law of gravity to their visible matter, despite those laws working well everywhere in the Solar System. To prevent galaxies from flying apart, some additional gravity is needed. This is why the idea of an invisible substance called dark matter was first proposed. But nobody has ever seen the stuff. And there are no particles in the hugely successful Standard Model of particle physics that could be the dark matter — it must be something quite exotic.

This has led to the rival idea that the galactic discrepancies are caused instead by a breakdown of Newton's laws. The most successful such idea is known as Milgromian dynamics or Mond [also known as modified Newtonian dynamics], proposed by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1982. But our recent research shows this theory is in trouble...

Due to a quirk of Mond, the gravity from the rest of our galaxy should cause Saturn's orbit to deviate from the Newtonian expectation in a subtle way. This can be tested by timing radio pulses between Earth and Cassini. Since Cassini was orbiting Saturn, this helped to measure the Earth-Saturn distance and allowed us to precisely track Saturn's orbit. But Cassini did not find any anomaly of the kind expected in Mond. Newton still works well for Saturn... Another test is provided by wide binary stars — two stars that orbit a shared centre several thousand AU apart. Mond predicted that such stars should orbit around each other 20% faster than expected with Newton's laws. But one of us, Indranil Banik, recently led a very detailed study that rules out this prediction. The chance of Mond being right given these results is the same as a fair coin landing heads up 190 times in a row. Results from yet another team show that Mond also fails to explain small bodies in the distant outer Solar System...

The standard dark matter model of cosmology isn't perfect, however. There are things it struggles to explain, from the universe's expansion rate to giant cosmic structures. So we may not yet have the perfect model. It seems dark matter is here to stay, but its nature may be different to what the Standard Model suggests. Or gravity may indeed be stronger than we think — but on very large scales only.
"Ultimately though, Mond, as presently formulated, cannot be considered a viable alternative to dark matter any more," the researchers conclude. "We may not like it, but the dark side still holds sway."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: The "world's largest" plant designed to suck planet-heating pollution out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum began operating in Iceland on Wednesday. "Mammoth" is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times bigger than its predecessor, Orca, which started running in 2021... Climeworks plans to transport the carbon underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking up the carbon permanently... The whole operation will be powered by Iceland's abundant, clean geothermal energy....

Climeworks started building Mammoth in June 2022, and the company says it is the world's largest such plant. It has a modular design with space for 72 "collector containers" — the vacuum parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air — which can be stacked on top of each other and moved around easily. There are currently 12 of these in place with more due to be added over the next few months. Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That's equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year...

All the carbon removal equipment in the world is only capable of removing around 0.01 million metric tons of carbon a year, a far cry from the 70 million tons a year needed by 2030 to meet global climate goals, according to the International Energy Agency [7,000x more]... Jan Wurzbacher, the company's co-founder and co-CEO, said Mammoth is just the latest stage in Climeworks' plan to scale up to 1 million tons of carbon removal a year by 2030 and 1 billion tons by 2050. Plans include potential DAC plants in Kenya and the United States.

"Atmospheric levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide aren't just on their way to yet another record high this year," reports the Washington Post.

"They're rising faster than ever, according to the latest in a 66-year-long series of observations." Carbon dioxide levels were 4.7 parts per million higher in March than they were a year earlier, the largest annual leap ever measured at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration laboratory atop a volcano on Hawaii's Big Island. And from January through April, CO2 concentrations increased faster than they have in the first four months of any other year...

For decades, CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa in the month of May have broken previous records. But the recent acceleration in atmospheric CO2, surpassing a record-setting increase observed in 2016, is perhaps a more ominous signal of failing efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and the damage they cause to Earth's climate. "Not only is CO2 still rising in the atmosphere — it's increasing faster and faster," said Arlyn Andrews, a climate scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. A historically strong El Niño climate pattern that developed last year is a big reason for the spike. But the weather pattern only punctuated an existing trend in which global carbon emissions are rising even as U.S. emissions have declined and the growth in global emissions has slowed. The spike is "not surprising," said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at Scripps Institution, "because we're also burning more fossil fuel than ever...."

El Niño-linked droughts in tropical areas including Indonesia and northern South America mean less carbon storage within plants, Keeling said. Land-based ecosystems around the world tend to give off more carbon dioxide during El Niño because of the changes in precipitation and temperature the weather pattern brings, Andrews added. And for CO2 concentrations to fall back below 400 parts per million, it would take more than two centuries even if emissions dropped close to zero by the end of this century, she added.
This year's reading "is more than 50 percent above preindustrial levels and the highest in at least 4.3 million years, according to NOAA."

Longtime Slashdot reader davidwr shares a report from Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC): On Thursday, May 9, 2024, the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center issued a Severe (G4) Geomagnetic Storm Watch. At least five earth-directed coronal mass ejections (CMEs) were observed and expected to arrive as early as midday Friday, May 10, 2024, and persist through Sunday, May 12, 2024. Several strong flares have been observed over the past few days and were associated with a large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster (NOAA region 3664), which is 16 times the diameter of Earth. [The agency notes this is the first time it's issued a G4 watch since January, 2005.] "Geomagnetic storms can impact infrastructure in near-Earth orbit and on Earth's surface, potentially disrupting communications, the electric power grid, navigation, radio and satellite operations," NOAA said. "[The Space Weather Prediction Center] has notified the operators of these systems so they can take protective action." The agency said it will continue to monitor the ongoing storm and "provide additional warnings as necessary."

A visual byproduct of the storm will be "spectacular displays of aurora," also known as the Northern Lights, that could be seen for much of the northern half of the country "as far south as Alabama to northern California," said the NOAA. "Northern Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin and the majority of North Dakota appear to have the best chances to see it," reports Axios, citing the SWPC's aurora viewline. "Forecast models Friday showed the activity will likely be the strongest from Friday night to Saturday morning Eastern time."

UPDATE 6:54 P.M. EDT: G5 conditions have been observed -- the first time since 2003, says Broadcast Meteorologist James Spann.

This is a developing story. More information is available at spaceweather.gov, Google News, and the NOAA.

The number of tornadoes so far in the United States this year is just above average. But their distribution is changing. From a report: Tornadoes tend to travel in packs these days, often with a dozen or more forming in the same region on the same day. On the worst days, hundreds can form at once. More than a dozen tornadoes were reported on both Monday and Tuesday this week across the Great Plains and the Midwest, according to the Storm Prediction Center run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Two weeks ago, on the most active day in April, 105 tornadoes were reported. While outbreaks like these have always happened, they have become more common in recent decades.

The total number of tornadoes in the United States each year has stayed relatively consistent over the last several decades, but they now happen in more concentrated bursts over fewer days during the year. In the 1950s through the 1970s, on average about 69 percent of tornadoes in the United States happened on days with fewer than 10 tornadoes, and about 11 percent happened on days with 20 or more tornadoes. These percentages have shifted significantly in recent decades, according to a 2019 study. The researchers found that since 2000, on average only about 49 percent of tornadoes have happened on less busy days and about 29 percent have happened on days with 20 or more tornadoes.

"Now when tornadoes happen, they often happen in an outbreak environment," said Tyler Fricker, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Louisiana Monroe and one of the authors of the study. While the timing of this trend lines up with the planet's rising temperatures, scientists are hesitant to definitively attribute tornadoes' clustering behavior to human-caused climate change.