After promising early dumps of snow in some areas of Europe this autumn, the pattern of recent years resumed and rain and sleet took over. From a report: In the ski resorts of Morzine and Les Gets in the French Alps, the heavy rainfall meant that full opening of resorts was delayed until two days before Christmas, leaving the industry and the millions of tourists planning trips to stare at the sky in hope. But no amount of wishing and hoping will overcome what is an existential threat to skiing in the Alps, an industry worth $30bn that provides the most popular ski destination in the world.

The science is clear, and is spelled out in carefully weighed-up peer reviewed reports. The most recent, this year, warned that at 2C of global heating above pre-industrial levels, 53% of the 28 European resorts examined would be at very high risk of a scarce amount of snow. Scarce snow has been defined as the poorest coverage seen on average every five years between 1961 and 1990. If the world were to hit 4C of heating, 98% of the resorts would be at very high risk of scarce snow cover. Another study has revealed the way in which snow cover in the Alps has had an "unprecedented" decline over the past 600 years, with the duration of the cover now shorter by 36 days.

In Brazil's Amazon, armed men with a rogue police unit overseeing illegal mining operations intimidated journalists investigating regional violence and trafficking surges. Though Brazil's 2023 deforestation decreased, fires and attacks continued as governments deprioritized crime reduction. Illegal mining finances threats to the climate-critical rainforest, yet improving security was absent from the 2023 UN climate summit agenda. With complex criminal networks forging cross-border alliances and violence escalating, addressing this dilemma is pivotal to safeguarding the Amazon and its Indigenous peoples. Nature: Solutions to these multifaceted issues might not be simple, but practical steps exist. Nations must cooperate to guard against this violence. They must support local communities -- by increasing the state's presence in remote areas and promoting health care, education and sustainable economic development -- and help them to safeguard the rainforest. For example, Indigenous peoples in Peru and Brazil are using drones and GPS devices to monitor their land and detect threats from violent invaders.

Indigenous peoples are the Amazon's best forest guardians, but they need more legally demarcated lands and protective measures, such as funding for Indigenous guards and rapid response and emergency protocols. In 2022, Colombia and Brazil saw the most deaths of environmental and land defenders worldwide. Developing effective strategies to enhance cooperation between law enforcement and local populations must also be a priority. To prevent irreversible damage to the rainforest and the climate, security in the Amazon must be added to the global climate agenda.

"What would you like OpenAI to build/fix in 2024?" the company's CEO asked on X this weekend.

But "Amid all the hysteria about ChatGPT and co, one thing is being missed," argues the Observer — "how energy-intensive the technology is." The current moral panic also means that a really important question is missing from public discourse: what would a world suffused with this technology do to the planet? Which is worrying because its environmental impact will, at best, be significant and, at worst, could be really problematic.

How come? Basically, because AI requires staggering amounts of computing power. And since computers require electricity, and the necessary GPUs (graphics processing units) run very hot (and therefore need cooling), the technology consumes electricity at a colossal rate. Which, in turn, means CO2 emissions on a large scale — about which the industry is extraordinarily coy, while simultaneously boasting about using offsets and other wheezes to mime carbon neutrality.

The implication is stark: the realisation of the industry's dream of "AI everywhere" (as Google's boss once put it) would bring about a world dependent on a technology that is not only flaky but also has a formidable — and growing — environmental footprint. Shouldn't we be paying more attention to this?
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

With everyone worrying about climate change, CNN shares a list of reasons to feel positive: The year 2023 is on track to see the biggest increase in renewable energy capacity to date, according to the International Energy Agency. China, the world's biggest climate polluter, has made lightning advances in renewables, with the country set to shatter its wind and solar target five years early. A report published in June found that China's solar capacity is now greater than the rest of the world's nations combined, in a surge described by the report's author, Global Energy Monitor, as "jaw-dropping...."

The popularity of electric vehicles has surged this year, with American sales at an all-time high. People in China and Europe are snapping up EVs in large numbers as well... Americans purchased 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2023, an annual record, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Electric vehicles accounted for about 8% of all new vehicles sales in the US during the first half of 2023, according to the report. In China, EVs accounted for 19% of all vehicle sales, and worldwide, they made up 15% of new passenger vehicle sales. EV sales in Europe were up 47% in the first nine months of 2023, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (EAMA)
Other positive developments from the article:

• "For more than six days straight, between October 31 to November 6, the nation of more than 10 million people relied solely on renewable energy sources — setting an exciting example for the rest of the world."

• "Deforestation in Brazil fell by 22.3% in the 12 months through July, according to data from the national government, as President Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva started to make progress on his pledge to rein in the rampant forest destruction that occurred under his predecessor..."

• "The Earth's ozone layer is on track to recover completely within decades, a UN-backed panel of experts announced in January, as ozone-depleting chemicals are phased out across the world."

"The age of the dinosaurs ended 66 million years ago when a city-size asteroid struck a shallow sea off the coast of what is now Mexico," writes CNN.

"But exactly how the mass extinction of 75% of the species on Earth unfolded in the years that followed the cataclysmic impact has remained unclear." Previous research suggested that sulfur released during the impact, which left the 112-mile-wide (180-kilometer-wide) Chicxulub crater, and soot from wildfires triggered a global winter, and temperatures plunged. However, a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience suggests that fine dust made from pulverized rock thrown up into Earth's atmosphere in the wake of the impact likely played a greater role. This dust blocked the sun to an extent that plants were unable to photosynthesize, a biological process critical for life, for almost two years afterward.

"Photosynthesis shutting down for almost two years after impact caused severe challenges (for life)," said lead study author and planetary scientist Cem Berk Senel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. "It collapsed the food web, creating a chain reaction of extinctions."

To reach their findings, scientists developed a new computer model to simulate the global climate after the asteroid strike. The model was based on published information on Earth's climate at that point in time, as well as new data from sediment samples taken from the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota that captured a 20-year period during the aftermath of the strike.

"I'm optimistic about the world's climate progress," Bill Gates wrote this week — but he also explained why.

"In 2024 and beyond, I predict we will see lots of new innovations coming into the marketplace — even in very complicated areas like nuclear. The climate crisis can feel overwhelming, but I find it easier to stay optimistic when you focus on all the progress we're making. If the world continues to prioritize funding innovation, I'm hopeful we can make good progress on our climate goals."

And elsewhere Gates writes that "AI is about to supercharge the innovation pipeline." My work has always been rooted in a core idea: Innovation is the key to progress. It's why I started Microsoft, and it's why Melinda and I started the Gates Foundation more than two decades ago. Innovation is the reason our lives have improved so much over the last century. From electricity and cars to medicine and planes, innovation has made the world better. Today, we are far more productive because of the IT revolution. The most successful economies are driven by innovative industries that evolve to meet the needs of a changing world.

My favorite innovation story, though, starts with one of my favorite statistics: Since 2000, the world has cut in half the number of children who die before the age of five. How did we do it? One key reason was innovation. Scientists came up with new ways to make vaccines that were faster and cheaper but just as safe. They developed new delivery mechanisms that worked in the world's most remote places, which made it possible to reach more kids. And they created new vaccines that protect children from deadly diseases like rotavirus.

In a world with limited resources, you have to find ways to maximize impact. Innovation is the key to getting the most out of every dollar spent. And artificial intelligence is about to accelerate the rate of new discoveries at a pace we've never seen before.

One of the biggest impacts so far is on creating new medicines. Drug discovery requires combing through massive amounts of data, and AI tools can speed up that process significantly. Some companies are already working on cancer drugs developed this way. But a key priority of the Gates Foundation in AI is ensuring these tools also address health issues that disproportionately affect the world's poorest, like AIDS, TB, and malaria. We're taking a hard look at the wide array of AI innovation in the pipeline right now and working with our partners to use these technologies to improve lives in low- and middle-income countries...

I feel like a kid on Christmas morning when I think about how AI can be used to get game-changing technologies out to the people who need them faster than ever before. This is something I am going to spend a lot of time thinking about next year.
Gates notes that researchers are already exploring questions like "Can AI combat antibiotic resistance?"

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: If you've ever seen a cow staring vacantly across a field, or a pig rolling around in its own filth, you might not think there's a lot going on in their head. You wouldn't be alone. People haven't given much credence to the intelligence of farm animals, and neither have scientists. But that's starting to change.

A growing field of research is showing that—when it comes to the minds of goats, cows, and other livestock—we may have been missing something big. Studies published over the past few years have shown that pigs show signs of empathy, goats rival dogs in some tests of social intelligence, and cows can be potty trained.

Much of this work is being carried out at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Dummerstorf, Germany, one of the world's leading centers for investigating the minds of creatures that often end up on our dinner plate. From cows making friends to goats exhibiting signs of altruism, farm animals are upending popular—and scientific—conceptions of what's going on in their minds.

The work may not just rewrite our thinking about livestock, it might also change how we treat them. As Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at FBN told says, 'If we don't understand how these animals think, then we won't understand what they need. And if we don't understand what they need, we can't design better environments for them.'

During a meeting of the National Space Council, Vice President Kamala Harris said an international astronaut will land on the Moon during one of NASA's Artemis missions. "Today, in recognition of the essential role that our allies and partners play in the Artemis program, I am proud to announce that alongside American astronauts, we intend to land an international astronaut on the surface of the Moon by the end of the decade," Harris said. Ars Technica reports: Although the National Space Council is useful in aggregating disparate interests across the US government to help form more cohesive space policies, public meetings like the one Wednesday can seem perfunctory. Harris departed the stage soon after her speech, and other government officials read from prepared remarks during the rest of the event. Nevertheless, Harris' announcement highlighted the role the space program plays in elevating the soft power of the United States. It was widely assumed an international astronaut would eventually land on the Moon with NASA. Harris put a deadline on achieving this goal.

NASA has long included astronauts from its international partners on human spaceflight missions, dating back to the ninth flight of the space shuttle in 1983, when West German astronaut Ulf Merbold joined five Americans on a flight to low-Earth orbit. This was seen by US government officials as a way to foster closer relations with like-minded countries. The inclusion of foreign astronauts on US missions also repays partner nations who make financial commitments to US-led space projects with a high-profile flight opportunity for one of their citizens.

Among the international partners contributing to Artemis, it seems most likely a European astronaut would get the first slot for a landing with NASA. ESA funded the development of the service modules used on NASA's Orion spacecraft, which will ferry astronauts from Earth to the Moon and back. These modules provide power and propulsion for Orion. ESA is also developing refueling and communications infrastructure for the Gateway mini-space station to be constructed in orbit around the Moon.

A Japanese astronaut might also have a shot at getting a seat on an Artemis landing. Japan's government has committed to providing the life-support system for the Gateway's international habitation module, along with resupply services to deliver cargo to Gateway. Japan is also interested in building a pressurized rover for astronauts to drive across the lunar surface. In recognition of Japan's contributions, NASA last year committed to flying a Japanese astronaut aboard Gateway. Canada is building a robotic arm for Gateway, but a Canadian astronaut already has a seat on NASA's first crewed Artemis mission, albeit without a trip to the lunar surface.

The politics of solving climate change may, paradoxically, require producing more fossil fuels for a while. Roge Karma, writing for The Atlantic: By boosting domestic oil supply, the Biden administration seems to be contributing to the very problem it claims to want to solve. The reality is more complicated. "Pushing for reductions in U.S. oil production is like squeezing a balloon -- the production will 'pop out' somewhere else," writes Samantha Gross, an energy-and-climate expert at the Brookings Institution. The world's energy needs are growing rapidly, which means oil companies are going to supply it regardless of what the White House does. If the U.S. were to cut back tomorrow, prices would rise. In the short term, this would lead to less consumption and lower emissions. But those high prices would only entice producers in other countries to step in, as many did in the months after Russia's invasion.

For that reason, reductions in U.S. oil production could actually result in higher overall emissions. The U.S. has one of the least emissions-intensive oil industries on the planet. Shifting production to countries with looser standards would likely be worse for the climate. But the deeper explanation for the Biden administration's actions has to do with the politics of climate change. Put simply, pursuing a decarbonization agenda requires Biden to maintain political support, and there is no surer way to lose political support than by presiding over high gas prices. Biden's approval rating has tracked gas prices for most of his presidency (although he hasn't yet benefited from recent improvements), and the drop in prices in the months leading up to the 2022 midterms may have contributed to Democrats' unexpectedly strong performance in those elections. Plus, when the price of energy goes up, the price of everything else tends to rise as well, sparking further inflation.

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.