Beeper is giving up on its mission to bring iMessage to Android after implementing a series of fixes that Apple has knocked down one by one over the past month. From a report: Although the company has issued a complex workaround, it says it has no plans to roll out another one if this one is knocked down by Apple. "Each time that Beeper Mini goes 'down' or is made to be unreliable due to interference by Apple, Beeper's credibility takes a hit," the company wrote in a blog post. "It's unsustainable. As much as we want to fight for what we believe is a fantastic product that really should exist, the truth is that we can't win a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth. With our latest software release, we believe we've created something that Apple can tolerate existing. We do not have any current plans to respond if this solution is knocked offline"

Artificial rain has been used in an attempt to lower pollution levels in Lahore, Pakistan. From a report: The capital city of the eastern province of Punjab, near the Indian border, has some of the worst air quality in the world and has become extremely polluted because of a growing population of more than 13 million people. By early December, the air quality in the city had grown so bad that schools, markets and parks were closed for four days. By last weekend, the city's air quality index (AQI) had reached levels considered extremely hazardous to health.

To try to reduce them, on Saturday the Punjab government used cloud seeding to create rain in 10 locations around the city using a small Cessna plane. To create the clouds, there needs to be enough moisture already present in the clouds in the lower atmosphere. In summer, common table salt mixed with water is sprayed over the cloud patches from planes. After a few hours, the mist integrates with the clouds and produces rain. In winter, the clouds are seeded using flakes of silver iodide, which can be fired from a vehicle or a plane. The practice, also known as "blueskying," has been used to induce precipitation in several countries in the Middle East, as well as China and India.

The future of water may be changing in California. The state Water Resources Control Board has signed off on regulations to turn more recycled wastewater from our homes into drinking water. From a report: The regulations were approved unanimously by the board on Tuesday and now give the go-ahead for local water agencies to plan to turn wastewater into water we can drink through a process called Direct Potable Reuse. Darrin Polhemus, the division of drinking water director with the State Water Resources Control Board, said this approval was a very big step for California. "It really will be the highest quality water delivered in the state when it's done," Polhemus said.

California's new rules would let, but not require, local water agencies to take wastewater from toilets or showers, treat it, and then put it right back into the drinking water system. "Direct potable reuse is just a really critical strategy for our state to have as we move to this new hydrology that we have, and as everyone has already said, increasing our resilience and reducing our reliance on imported water," said Laurel Firestone, board member for the State Water Resources Control Board.

When hurricane Larry made landfall in the Atlantic in 2021, it was depositing over 100,000 microplastics per square meter of land per day. The findings have been published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. Wired reports: As hurricane Larry curved north in the Atlantic in 2021, sparing the eastern seaboard of the United States, a special instrument was waiting for it on the coast of Newfoundland. Because hurricanes feed on warm ocean water, scientists wondered whether such a storm could pick up microplastics from the sea surface and deposit them when it made landfall. Larry was literally a perfect storm: Because it hadn't touched land before reaching the island, anything it dropped would have been scavenged from the water or air, as opposed to, say, a highly populated city, where you'd expect to find lots of microplastics. [...]

The instrument in a clearing on Newfoundland was quite simple: a glass cylinder, holding a little bit of ultrapure water, securely attached to the ground with wooden stakes. Every six hours before, during, and after the hurricane, the researchers would come and empty out the water, which would have collected any particles falling -- both with and without rain -- on Newfoundland. "It's just a place that experiences a lot of extreme weather events," says Earth scientist Anna Ryan of Dalhousie University, lead author of the paper. "Also, it's fairly remote, and it's got a pretty low population density. So you don't have a bunch of nearby sources of microplastics."

The team found that even before and after Larry, tens of thousands of microplastics fell per square meter of land per day. But when the hurricane hit, that figure spiked up to 113,000. "We found a lot of microplastics deposited during the peak of the hurricane," says Ryan, "but also, overall deposition was relatively high compared to previous studies." These studies were done during normal conditions, but in more remote locations, she says. The researchers also used a technique known as back trajectory modeling -- basically simulating where the air that arrived at the instrument had been previously. That confirmed that Larry had picked up the microplastics at sea, lofted them into the air, and dumped them on Newfoundland. [...] The Newfoundland study notes that Larry happened to pass over the garbage patch of the North Atlantic Gyre, where currents accumulate floating plastic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments. This was the first flight of Blue Origin's 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle's pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing.

The flight on Tuesday also didn't carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, lofted 33 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday's launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions. Blue Origin's capsule, mounted on top of the rocket, also flew 38,000 postcards submitted by students through Club for the Future, the company's nonprofit.

For Tuesday's return-to-flight mission, the New Shepard rocket ignited its BE-3PM engine and climbed away from Blue Origin's remote launch site near Van Horn, Texas, at 10:42 am CST (16:42 UTC). The hydrogen-fueled engine fired for more than two minutes, then shut down as scheduled as the rocket continued coasting upward, reaching an altitude of more than 347,000 feet (106 kilometers). The booster returned for a precision propulsive landing a short distance from the launch pad, and Blue Origin's capsule deployed three parachutes to settle onto the desert floor, completing a 10-minute up-and-down flight. Blue Origin has launched 24 missions with its reusable New Shepard rocket, including six flights carrying people just over the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above Earth.

Imported raw materials such as steel and cement will incur a new carbon tax from 2027 under UK plans designed to support domestic producers and reduce emissions, but the government is facing criticism for not moving fast enough. From a report: The Treasury said the tax would help address the phenomenon of "carbon leakage," in which UK manufacturers are undercut on price by foreign rivals whose governments do not impose levies on businesses that emit a lot of carbon. The result is that emissions are simply displaced to other countries, while greener UK producers lose out because they have to pay carbon-related charges. The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said: "This levy will make sure carbon intensive products from overseas -- like steel and ceramics -- face a comparable carbon price to those produced in the UK, so that our decarbonisation efforts translate into reductions in global emissions. "This should give UK industry the confidence to invest in decarbonisation as the world transitions to net zero."

India consumes more groundwater. That's testing India's ability to feed itself and much of the world. From a report: The South Asian nation is already the world's largest guzzler of groundwater. Cheap power has encouraged routine overreliance on finite riches. India overwhelmingly grows some of the thirstiest crops: rice, wheat and sugar cane. Over the last half century, farm productivity has leapt forward, but so, too, has water usage -- up 500% over that period, according to the World Bank. Erratic monsoons and brutal heat waves are only making the problem more acute. Farmers are digging deeper wells because existing ones are no longer refilling. Some regions may run out of groundwater entirely -- Punjab, a major wheat producer, could go dry within the next 15 or so years, according to a former state official. States in southern India are battling over water rights in areas where rampant urban development has drained thousands of lakes.

The government is not blind to the crisis. But with a national election on the horizon next year, there's little to gain in pushing actively for change among farmers, one of the most important voting blocs in the country. Any long-term solution will involve tinkering with farm subsidies or the minimum price set for water-intensive crops. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party is all too aware that farmers from India's grain-growing northern regions dominated months of protests against proposed agrarian reforms from late 2020. Modi was forced to withdraw the proposals. For now, it's clear the water math does not add up.

Modi has promised piped water to all Indian households by 2024. Yet nearly half of India's 1.4 billion residents already face high-to-extreme water stress, and the world's most populous nation is expected to add more than 200 million more people by 2050. Agriculture, meanwhile, accounts for 90% of water use, helping to explain why Indian officials say the clearest strategy for preserving supplies is modernizing the industry. The government has tried to convince farmers to adopt different irrigation technologies, return to traditional rain harvesting and plant less thirsty crops like millets, pulses and oilseeds. Nothing has yet made a substantial difference, in a country where subsidies supporting wheat and rice persist, and farming is dominated by smallholders.

NASA has successfully beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video from a record-setting 19 million miles away. The Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, as it is called, is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming HD video from deep space to enable future human missions beyond Earth orbit. From a NASA press release: The [15-second test] video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system's maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps). Capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals, the instrument beamed an encoded near-infrared laser to the Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, where it was downloaded. Each frame from the looping video was then sent "live" to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time.

The laser communications demo, which launched with NASA's Psyche mission on Oct. 13, is designed to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions today. As Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the technology demonstration will send high-data-rate signals as far out as the Red Planet's greatest distance from Earth. In doing so, it paves the way for higher-data-rate communications capable of sending complex scientific information, high-definition imagery, and video in support of humanity's next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.

Uploaded before launch, the short ultra-high definition video features an orange tabby cat named Taters, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser pointer, with overlayed graphics. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche's orbital path, Palomar's telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater's heart rate, color, and breed are also on display. There's also a historical link: Beginning in 1928, a small statue of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat was featured in television test broadcast transmissions. Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online. "Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections," said Ryan Rogalin, the project's receiver electronics lead at JPL. "In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space. JPL's DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology -- everyone loves Taters."

A volcano in southwestern Iceland began erupting Monday, posing a risk to the nearby Svartsengi Power Plant and the town of Grindavik. "We are looking at a worst-case scenario," said Thorvaldur Thordarson, a volcanologist in Iceland. "The eruption appears big, and only about two kilometers from major infrastructure." The New York Times reports: Thousands of earthquakes had been detected in Iceland since late October, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office. In November, with homes and roads being damaged, the authorities declared a state of emergency and evacuated Grindavik, a town of more than 3,000 people near the volcano. More recently, the Meteorological Office warned of a "significant likelihood of a volcanic eruption in coming days."

Volcanic eruptions are not uncommon in Iceland, which has fewer than 400,000 residents and about 130 volcanoes. Since the 19th century, not a decade has gone by without one, Iceland's tourist website tells interested visitors. The occurrence of eruptions remains "entirely random." The country straddles two tectonic plates, which are themselves divided by an undersea mountain chain that oozes molten hot rock, or magma.

The current seismic activity has not affected one of Iceland's best-known volcanoes, Katla, which some scientists worry is due for an eruption. Katla has erupted five times since 1721, at intervals ranging from 34 to 78 years. The last major one was in 1918. Last month, Icelandic authorities started building defense walls around the geothermal power plant to protect it from lava flows. "Authorities said they were preparing to construct a large dyke designed to divert lava flows around the Svartsengi geothermal power plant, located just over 6 kilometers (4 miles) from Grindavik," reported Reuters in mid November.

"A spokesperson for HS Orka, operator of the power plant, said it supplies power to the entire country, although a disruption would not affect power supply to Reykjavik."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: "(The rocks) in the box right now are about 1,600 degrees Celsius," Andrew Ponec said, standing next to a thermal battery the size of a small building. That is nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, "Hotter than the melting point of steel," he explained.

But what makes his box of white-hot rocks so significant is they were not heated by burning tons of coal or gas, but by catching sunlight with the thousands of photovoltaic solar panels that surround his prototype west of Fresno. If successful, Ponec and his start-up Antora Energy could be part of a new, multi-trillion-dollar energy storage sector that simply uses sun or wind to make boxes of rocks hot enough to run the world's biggest factories. "People sometimes feel like they're insulting us by saying, 'Hey, that sounds really simple," Ponec laughed. "And we say, 'No, that's exactly the point'... The problem is you can't shut down your factory when the sun goes behind a cloud or the wind stops blowing, and that's exactly the problem that we focused on."

While the word "battery" most likely evokes the chemical kind found in cars and electronics in 2023, hot rocks currently store ten times as much energy as lithium ion around the world, thanks to an invention from the 1800s known as Cowper stoves. Often found in smelting plants, these massive towers of stacked bricks absorb the wasted heat of a blast furnace until it heats to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and then provides over 100 megawatts of heat energy for about 20 minutes. The process can be repeated 24 times a day for 30 years, and Antora is among the startups experimenting with different kinds of rocks in insulated boxes or molten salt in cylinders to find the most efficient combination...

Antora has managed to raise $80 million in seed money from investors that include Bill Gates, but their main competitor is another Bay Area startup called Rondo that uses abundant refractory brick, which is cheaper than carbon by weight but not as energy dense. Rondo has attracted even more funding than Antora and its first battery is producing commercial power for an ethanol plant in California... Tesla recently predicted a carbon-free world will need an astonishing 240 terawatt-hours of energy storage — more than 340 times the amount of storage built with lithium-ion batteries in 2022. Rondo CEO John O'Donnell predicts more than half of all that new capacity will come in the form of heat batteries, simply because the raw ingredients are so readily available.

By plugging their factories into as many thermal batteries as they need, manufacturers won't have to wait in a years-long line for grid connections and upgrades.
Ponec tells CNN that when it comes to de-carbonizing today, "we have the tools we need. We just need to deploy them.

"The transition is inevitable. It's going to happen. And if you talk behind closed doors to most of the people in the fossil fuel industry, they'll say the same thing."

A system of lagoons has been discovered in Argentina hosting a rare range of microbial communities previously unknown to scientists. The microbial communities form giant mounds of rock as they grow — like corals building a reef millimeter by millimeter. And the University of Colorado points out that "the communities could also provide scientists with an unprecedented look at how life may have arisen on Mars, which resembled Earth billions of years ago."

"If life ever evolved on Mars to the level of fossils, it would have been like this," said geologist Brian Hynek, a professor in the department of geological sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, who helped document the ecosystem. "Understanding these modern communities on Earth could inform us about what we should look for as we search for similar features in the Martian rocks."
more details from CNN: Stromatolites are layered rocks created by the growth of blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, through photosynthesis. The structures are considered to be one of the oldest ecosystems on Earth, according to NASA, representing the earliest fossil evidence for life on our planet from at least 3.5 billion years ago. "These are certainly akin to some of the earliest macrofossils on our planet, and in really a rare type of environment on modern Earth," said Hynek...

While the stromatolites are in an environment containing oxygen, Hynek said he believes the layers farther down in the rock have little to no access to oxygen and are actively formed by microbes using anoxygenic photosynthesis. This would make the structures similar to the ones found on ancient Earth... "We've identified more than 600 ancient lakes on Mars; there may have even been an ocean. So, it was a lot more Earth-like early on," he said.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of climate hazards at University College London. He also writes on CNN that it's "essential" to laugh in the face of the climate crisis: If you don't laugh, you will cry, and that marks the beginning of a very slippery slope. As civilization faces a threat that dwarfs that of every war ever fought combined, and the outcome of the latest climate COP offers little hope, it's something we need — not only to remember — but to actively adopt as a weapon in our armoury to fight for a better future for our children and their children. They say that laughter is the best medicine, but weaponised comedy has the potential to do more than just make us feel good. Not only can it help inform and educate about global heating and the climate breakdown it is driving, but also to encourage and bolster action...

This is why ventures like "Climate Science Translated," which I took part in earlier this year, are so important. The British-based project — brainchild of ethical insurer Nick Oldridge and the climate communications outfit Utopia Bureau — teams climate scientists up with comedians, who 'translate' the science into bite-sized, funny and pretty irreverent chunks that can be understood, digested and appreciated by anyone.
You can see four of the videos on their web site. "Climate science is complicated," each video begins. "So we're translating it into human."

For example, last month Dr. Friederike Otto, senior lecturer on climate science at London's Imperial College, created a new video with comedian Nish Kumar: Dr. Otto: Human-caused climate change is fundamentally changing the fabric of the weather as we know it. It's leading to events which we've simply never seen before.

Comedian Kumar: Translation: Weather used to be clouds. Now we've made it into a sort of Rottweiler on steroids that wants to chew everyone's head off.

Dr. Otto: The continuing increase in global average temperature is already causing higher probabilities of extreme rainfall and flash flooding, as well more intense storms, prolonged droughts, record-breaking heatwaves, and wildfires.

Kumar: Very soon climate scientists are just going to ditch their graphs and point out the window with an expression that says, "I fucking told you!"

Dr. Otto: This is not a problem just for our children and grandchildren. This is an immediate threat to all our lives.

Kumar: I don't know if you're familiar with the film The Terminator, but if someone came from the future to warn us of this threat, they'd have travelled from next Wednesday.
And three weeks ago a follow-up video came from earth systems science professor Mark Maslin from London's University College, teaming up with comedian Jo Brand: Professor Maslin: We are heading for unknown territory if we trigger tipping points — irreversible threshholds which shift our entire ecosystem into a different state.

Comedian Brand: If you liked climate crisis, you're going to love climate complete fucking collapse...

Professor Maslin: The irony is solar and wind power are now over 10 times cheaper than oil and gas. We can still prevent much of the damage, and end up in a better place for everyone.

Brand: With wind and sun power, we save money, and don't die. It's a pretty strong selling point.

Professor Maslin: Most people actually are in favor of urgent action. The reason governments are not transitioning fast enough is because the fossil fuel industry has a grip on many politicians. In fact, governments subsidize them with our taxpayer money — over $1 trillion a year, according to the IMF.

Brand: We are paying a bunch of rich dudes one trillion dollars a year to fuck up our future. I'd do it for that money. When can I start?
Each video ends with the words "All Hands On Deck Now", urging action by voting, contacting your representative, joining a local group, and protesting.

Climate hazard professor Bill McGuire writes on CNN that he hopes to see a growing movement: As Kiri Pritchard-McLean pointedly observes: "If comedians are helping scientists out, you know things aren't going well...." There is even a "Sustainable Stand-up" course aimed at teaching comedy beginners about how climate and social issues can be addressed in their shows, and which has run in 11 countries.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Scientists have long viewed Saturn's moon Enceladus, which harbors an ocean beneath its thick, icy shell, as one of the best places to search for life beyond Earth. Now, a new analysis of data collected by NASA's Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017, has uncovered intriguing evidence that further supports the idea of Enceladus as a habitable ocean world.

Enceladus initially captured the attention of scientists in 2005 because plumes of ice grains and water vapor were observed rising through cracks in the moon's ice shell and releasing into space. The spacecraft flew through the plumes and "sampled" them, with data suggesting the presence of organic compounds within the plumes, some of which are key for life. The latest data analysis of Cassini's flybys of Enceladus revealed the detection of a molecule called hydrogen cyanide that's toxic to humans but crucial to processes driving the origin of life. What's more, the team also found evidence to support that Enceladus' ocean has organic compounds that provide a source of chemical energy that could potentially be used as powerful fuel for any form of life...

The combination of these elements together suggested a process called methanogenesis, or the metabolic creation of methane, may be at play on Enceladus. Scientists suspect methanogenesis may have also played out on early Earth, contributing to the origin of life. But the new research indicates more varied and powerful chemical energy sources are occurring within Enceladus' ocean... Now, the study authors want to investigate how diluted the organic compounds are within the subsurface ocean because the dilution of these compounds could determine whether Enceladus could support life. In the future, astronomers hope to send a dedicated mission to investigate Enceladus, which could provide a definitive answer as to whether life exists in the ocean world.
"Our work provides further evidence that Enceladus is host to some of the most important molecules for both creating the building blocks of life and for sustaining that life through metabolic reactions," accoding to one of the study's lead authors.

"Not only does Enceladus seem to meet the basic requirements for habitability, we now have an idea about how complex biomolecules could form there, and what sort of chemical pathways might be involved."

In 2020 a NASA spacecraft visited the asteroid Bennu. In October it returned to earth with a sample. Monday scientists got their first data about it at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union — which is a truly big deal.

"Before Earth had biology, it had chemistry," writes the Washington Post. "How the one followed from the other — how a bunch of boring molecules transformed themselves into this special thing we call life — is arguably the greatest unknown in science." The mission's top scientist, Dante Lauretta... showed slides with a long list of intriguing molecules, including carbon-based organics, in the grains and pebbles retrieved from Bennu. They will shine light on the molecular building blocks of the solar system and "maybe — still early phase — maybe insights into the origin of life." This analysis has only just started. The team has not yet released a formal scientific paper. In his lecture, Lauretta cited one interesting triangular, light-colored stone, which he said contained something he'd never seen before in a meteorite. "It's a head-scratcher right now. What is this material?" he said.

In an interview after the lecture, Lauretta said almost 5 percent of the sample is carbon. "That is a very carbon-rich sample — the richest we have in all our extraterrestrial material. ... We're still unraveling the complex organic chemistry, but it looks promising to really understand: Did these carbon-rich asteroids deliver fundamental molecules that may have gone on to contribute to the origin of life...?"

This space dirt has astrobiological import, though. By looking at prebiotic chemistry on Bennu, scientists will have a better idea what they are looking at if and when they find suspicious molecules elsewhere in the solar system, such as on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus. "This is almost the perfect laboratory control from non-biological chemistry," Glavin said. "This better prepares us for our search for life on Mars, or Europa or Enceladus — places that might have had life at one point."
Space.com quotes Lauretta as saying "We definitely have hydrated, organic-rich remnants from the early solar system, which is exactly what we were hoping when we first conceived this mission almost 20 years ago."

"Unlike automobiles, jumbo jets cannot run on batteries," notes the Washington Post.

So Friday the White unveiled a plan for "subsidizing sustainable aviation fuels" — which could also give the U.S. a leg up in a brand new industry: Senior White House officials said the program would make the airline industry cleaner while bringing prosperity to rural America. But environmental groups and some scientists expressed reservations about the plan, which would award subsidies based on a scientific model that has previously been used to justify incentives for corn-based ethanol. Studies have found the gasoline additive is exacerbating climate change.

The new tax credits, created through President Biden's signature climate law, are meant to spur production of jet fuels that create no more than half the emissions of the petroleum-based product. Each gallon of such fuel qualifies for a tax credit up to $1.75 per gallon. "The concern is they will end up subsidizing fuels that take an enormous amount of land to produce," said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University... Administration officials said on a call with reporters Thursday that they are carefully weighing such concerns. Agencies are in the process of updating the scientific model for gauging climate friendliness of jet fuels, they said, and it will be revised to factor in the emissions impact of cropland converted from food to fuel production. Federal agencies plan to complete their revisions by March 1.

"The sustainable aviation fuel industry is a potential 36 billion gallon industry that for all intents and purposes is just getting started," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on the call. "This is a big, big deal."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A NASA telescope has captured the biggest solar flare in years, which temporarily knocked out radio communication on Earth. The sun spit out the huge flare on Thursday, resulting in two hours of radio interference in parts of the U.S. and other sunlit parts of the world. Scientists said it was the biggest flare since 2017. Multiple pilots reported communication disruptions, with the impact felt across the country, said the government's Space Weather Prediction Center.

Scientists are now monitoring this sunspot region and analyzing for a possible outburst of plasma from the sun, also known as a coronal mass ejection, directed at Earth. The eruption occurred in the far northwest section of the sun, according to the center. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the action in extreme ultraviolet light, recording the powerful surge of energy as a huge, bright flash. Launched in 2010, the spacecraft is in an extremely high orbit around Earth, where it constantly monitors the sun. The sun is nearing the peak of its 11-year or so solar cycle. Maximum sunspot activity is predicted for 2025.

In a cavernous theater lit up with the green shapes of camels and palms at COP28 in Dubai, ecologist Thomas Crowther, former chief scientific adviser for the United Nations' Trillion Trees Campaign, was doing something he never would have expected a few years ago: begging environmental ministers to stop planting so many trees. From a report: Mass plantations are not the environmental solution they're purported to be, Crowther argued when he took the floor on December 9 for one of the summit's "Nature Day" events. The potential of newly created forests to draw down carbon is often overstated. They can be harmful to biodiversity. Above all, they are really damaging when used, as they often are, as avoidance offsets-- "as an excuse to avoid cutting emissions," Crowther said.

The popularity of planting new trees is a problem -- at least partly -- of Crowther's own making. In 2019, his lab at ETH Zurich found that the Earth had room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees, which, the lab's research suggested, could suck down as much as two-thirds of the carbon that humans have historically emitted into the atmosphere. "This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date," the study said. Crowther subsequently gave dozens of interviews to that effect. This seemingly easy climate solution sparked a tree-planting craze by companies and leaders eager to burnish their green credentials without actually cutting their emissions, from Shell to Donald Trump. It also provoked a squall of criticism from scientists, who argued that the Crowther study had vastly overestimated the land suitable for forest restoration and the amount of carbon it could draw down. (The study authors later corrected the paper to say tree restoration was only "one of the most effective" solutions, and could suck down at most one-third of the atmospheric carbon, with large uncertainties.)

Crowther, who says his message was misinterpreted, put out a more nuanced paper last month, which shows that preserving existing forests can have a greater climate impact than planting trees. He then brought the results to COP28 to "kill greenwashing" of the kind that his previous study seemed to encourage -- that is, using unreliable evidence on the benefits of planting trees as an excuse to keep on emitting carbon. "Killing greenwashing doesn't mean stop investing in nature," he says. "It means doing it right. It means distributing wealth to the Indigenous populations and farmers and communities who are living with biodiversity."

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is, once again, having trouble transmitting any scientific or systems data back to Earth. "The 46-year-old spacecraft is capable of receiving commands, but a problem seems to have arisen with the probe's computers," reports Space.com. Slashdot readers quonset and ArchieBunker shared the news. From the report: Voyager 1's flight data system (FDS), which collects onboard engineering information and data from the spacecraft's scientific instruments, is no longer communicating as expected with the probe's telecommunications unit (TMU), according to a NASA blog post on Dec. 12. When functioning properly, the FDS compiles the spacecraft's info into a data package, which is then transmitted back to Earth using the TMU. Lately, that data package has been "stuck," the blog post said, "transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros." Voyager's engineering team traced the problem back to the FDS, but it could be weeks before a solution is found. In May 2022, Voyager 1 experienced transmitting issues for several months before a workaround was found. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 experienced an unplanned "communications pause" earlier this year after a routine sequence of commands triggered a 2-degree change in the spacecraft's antenna orientation. This prevented it from receiving commands or transmitting data back to Earth until NASA fixed the issue a week later.

The Economist reports: "Shake, shake, shake, shake," Taylor Swift sings from the stage of Lumen Field in Seattle at 10.35 in the evening on July 22nd. The fans respond, enthusiastically; the stadium duly shakes; a nearby seismometer takes note. To pop aficionados "Shake it off" is an empowering up-tempo anthem played at 160 beats per minute. To the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which is designed to monitor earthquakes, it is a 2.6 hertz signal in which the amplitude of the acceleration was as large as one centimetre per second, per second.

The well-situated seismometer first came to public attention in January 2011, when it recorded the response of fans of the Seattle Seahawks, an American football team, to a magnificent touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, a running back known as "Beast Mode." The "Beast Quake" went down in local sporting history. When Ms Swift came to town for two nights of her Eras tour, Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, used the opportunity to learn more about how events in the stadium shake its surroundings. On December 11th she presented some of her conclusions at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting in San Francisco.

[...] Dr Caplan-Auerbach wanted to see whether such resonant amplification might also be at play elsewhere, and to distinguish between the effect of the music itself and the audience's response. Her concert-night data showed two distinct sets of signals, one in higher frequencies (30-80hz), one in lower frequencies (1-8hz). The higher-frequency signals were present during the sound check, when the band were on stage but the stadium empty, and absent during the concerts' "surprise songs," played without the band by Ms Swift alone. The lower frequencies were absent when the audience had yet to arrive. Clearly those higher frequencies were from the music itself.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Grunge music: a source of validation for a generation of disaffected youth. And a surprising source of scientific inspiration for Earl Bellinger of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. While listening to Soundgarden's 1994 hit Black Hole Sun 2 years ago, he contemplated a curious question: Might itty-bitty black holes from the dawn of time be lurking in the hearts of giant stars? A new study by Bellinger and colleagues suggests the idea is not so far-fetched. Astronomers could detect these trapped black holes by the vibrations they cause on the star's surface. And if there's enough of them out there, they could function as the mysterious dark matter that holds the universe together.

The researchers found that the black holes would sink to the star's core where hydrogen atoms undergo fusion to produce heat and light. At first, very little would happen. Even a dense stellar core is mostly empty space. The most microscopic of the black holes would have a hard time finding matter to consume and its growth would be extremely slow, Bellinger says. "It could take longer than the lifetime of the universe to eat the star." But larger ones, roughly as massive as the asteroid Ceres or the dwarf planet Pluto, would get bigger on timescales of only a few hundred million years. Material would spiral onto the black hole, forming a disk that would heat up through friction and emit radiation. Once the black hole was about as massive as Earth, it would produce significant amounts of radiation, shining brightly and churning up the star's core like pot of boiling water. "It will become a black hole -- powered object rather than fusion-powered object," says study co-author Matt Caplan, a theoretical physicist at Illinois State University. He and his colleagues have dubbed these entities "Hawking stars."

The European Space Agency's Gaia satellite has spotted about 500 such anomalously cool giant stars, known as red stragglers, Bellinger says. To figure out whether these might actually be hiding a black hole, he says, astronomers could tune in to the particular frequencies at which the stars vibrate. Because a Hawking star would churn throughout its interior, rather than just in the topmost layers like an ordinary red giant, it would be expected to thrum with a particular combination of frequencies. Such waves can be detected in the way the star's light pulses and throbs. Bellinger is applying for funding to study the known red stragglers and see whether any display the characteristic vibrations of a black hole. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.