Despite having a population of just 1,400, until recently, Tokelau's .tk domain had more users than any other country. Here's why: Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone-- only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything. It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau's country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD -- the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL. Up until that moment, Tokelau, formally a territory of New Zealand, didn't even know it had been assigned a ccTLD. "We discovered the .tk," remembered Aukusitino Vitale, who at the time was general manager of Teletok, Tokelau's sole telecom operator.

Zuurbier said "that he would pay Tokelau a certain amount of money and that Tokelau would allow the domain for his use," remembers Vitale. It was all a bit of a surprise -- but striking a deal with Zuurbier felt like a win-win for Tokelau, which lacked the resources to run its own domain. In the model pioneered by Zuurbier and his company, now named Freenom, users could register a free domain name for a year, in exchange for having advertisements hosted on their websites. If they wanted to get rid of ads, or to keep their website active in the long term, they could pay a fee.

In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant -- but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country's: a staggering 25 million. But there has been and still is only one website actually from Tokelau that is registered with the domain: the page for Teletok. Nearly all the others that have used .tk have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals. Everyone online has come across a .tk -- even if they didn't realize it. Because .tk addresses were offered for free, unlike most others, Tokelau quickly became the unwitting host to the dark underworld by providing a never-ending supply of domain names that could be weaponized against internet users. Scammers began using .tk websites to do everything from harvesting passwords and payment information to displaying pop-up ads or delivering malware.

The U.S. Space Force's shadowy X-37B spaceplane is set to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on Dec. 7. It'll mark the seventh mission for the X-37B, but the first time it'll fly on a heavy-lift launcher. Space.com reports: Little is known about the capabilities and operations of the space plane, but Space Force says the mission will follow previous flights that used the X-37B as a test bed for launching experimental payloads and returning them to Earth. "We are excited to expand the envelope of the reusable X-37B's capabilities, using the flight-proven service module and Falcon Heavy rocket to fly multiple cutting-edge experiments for the Department of the Air Force and its partners," said Lt. Col. Joseph Fritschen, program director for the X-37B, in the statement.

It isn't known why the X-37B is launching atop a Falcon Heavy for the USSF-52 mission. Five of the space plane's previous missions launched on United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets, while its fifth mission, USA-277, took off on top of SpaceX's smaller rocket, the Falcon 9 (Falcon Heavy consists of three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together). Such a change could suggest that the space plane is carrying heavier payloads or is sporting a new hardware configuration. So far, Space Force has only stated that the mission will "expand the United States Space Force's knowledge of the space environment by experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies," according to the statement. However, Space Force's statement adds that the mission will carry a NASA experiment known as Seeds-2 that will test the effects that space-based radiation has on plant seeds during a long-duration spaceflight.

The world is set to have been hotter in 2023 than in any other year on record, scientists have declared, before a landmark climate summit this month. From a report: "We can say with near certainty that 2023 will be the warmest year on record, and is currently 1.43C above the pre-industrial average," said Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. "The sense of urgency for ambitious climate action going into Cop28 has never been higher." The Copernicus scientists found last month was the hottest October on record globally, with temperatures 1.7C above what they were thought to have been during the average October in the late 1800s.

By burning fossil fuels and destroying nature, humans have pumped heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere that have raised the temperature of planet by 1.2C since the Industrial Revolution. The global temperature anomaly for October 2023 was the second highest across all months in its dataset, the scientists found, behind only the month before. "The fact that we're seeing this record hot year means record human suffering," said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. "Within this year, extreme heatwaves and droughts made much worse by these extreme temperatures have caused thousands of deaths, people losing their livelihoods, being displaced etc. These are the records that matter. That is why the Paris agreement is a human rights treaty, and not keeping to the goals in it, is violating human rights on a vast scale."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Scientists have long thought that the glaciers in North Greenland have been stable -- a vital condition, as they contain enough ice to raise the sea level by nearly 7 feet. But a new study published on Tuesday found that ice shelves in the region have lost more than a third of their volume in the last half-century because of rising temperatures -- and if it continues, scientists say there could be "dramatic consequences" for glaciers, and the planet. Using thousands of satellite images and climate modeling, the study, published in Nature Communications, found that North Greenland's ice shelves "have lost more than 35% of their total volume" since 1978.

Ice shelves are the part of ice sheets -- a form of glacier -- that float over water. Three of those shelves in North Greenland have "completely" collapsed, researchers said, and of the five main shelves that remain, they said they have seen a "widespread increase" in how much mass they have lost, mostly due to the warming of the ocean. One of the shelves, called Steenbsy, shrank to just 34% of its previous area between 2000 and 2013. Along with the loss of overall ice shelf volume, scientists said the area of floating ice decreased by more than a third of its original extent since 1978. This observation could pose a major problem, as the Greenland ice sheet is the second-largest contributor to sea level rise. From 2006 to 2018, scientists noted that the single sheet was responsible for more than 17% of sea level rise in that period.

"Slabs of material from an ancient extraterrestrial planet are hidden deep within the Earth," argues a new scientific theory (as described by CNN).

"Scientists widely agree that an ancient planet likely smashed into Earth as it was forming billions of years ago, spewing debris that coalesced into the moon that decorates our night sky today." But then whatever happened to that planet? No leftover fragments from a hypothetical planet "Theia" have ever been found in our solar system.

But the new theory "suggests that remnants of the ancient planet remain partially intact, buried beneath our feet." If the theory is correct, it would not only provide additional details to fill out the giant-impact hypothesis but also answer a lingering question for geophysicists. They were already aware that there are two massive, distinct blobs that are embedded deep within the Earth. The masses — called large low-velocity provinces, or LLVPs — were first detected in the 1980s. One lies beneath Africa and another below the Pacific Ocean.
The study's lead author (Dr. Qian Yuan, a geophysicist and postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology) first proposed the idea for a paper three times in 2021 — and was rejected each time. But "then he came across scientists who did just the type of research Yuan needed." Their work, which assigned a certain size to Theia and speed of impact in the modeling, suggested that the ancient planet's collision likely did not entirely melt Earth's mantle, allowing the remnants of Theia to cool and form solid structures instead of blending together in Earth's inner stew... If Theia were a certain size and consistency, and struck the Earth at a specific speed, the models showed it could, in fact, leave behind massive hunks of its guts within Earth's mantle and also spawn the debris that would go on to create our moon...

The study Yuan published this week includes coauthors from a variety of disciplines across a range of institutions, including Arizona State, Caltech, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and NASA's Ames Research Center.

Smartphones and electric cars are both powered by lithium-ion batteries, notes the Economist. These "Li-ion" batteries "form the guts of a growing number of grid-storage systems that smooth the flow of electricity from wind and solar power stations. Without them, the electrification needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming would be unimaginable." But unfortunately, building them requires scarce metals.

"A clutch of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead..." And the idea of building "Na-ion" batteries at scale is "gaining traction." Engineers are tweaking designs. Factories, particularly in China, are springing up. For the first time since the Li-ion revolution began, lithium's place on the electrochemical pedestal is being challenged... [A]ccording to Rory McNulty, a research analyst at Benchmark, Chinese firms have 34 Na-ion-battery factories built, being built or announced inside the country, and one planned in Malaysia. Established battery-makers in other places, by contrast, are not yet showing much interest. Even without a five-year plan to guide them, though, some non-Chinese startups are seeking to steal a march by developing alternatives to layered oxides, in the hope of improving the technology, reducing its cost, or both.

One of the most intriguing of these neophytes is Natron Energy, of Santa Clara, California... Natron claims that its cells can endure 50,000 cycles of charging and discharging — between ten and 100 times more than commercial Li-ion batteries can manage. The firm has built a factory in Michigan, which it says will begin production later this year. Other non-Chinese firms are less far advanced, but full of hope. Altris, in Sweden, which is also building a factory, employs a material called Prussian white that substitutes some of the iron in Prussian blue with sodium. Tiamat, in France, uses a polyanionic design involving vanadium. And Faradion, in Britain (now owned by Reliance, an Indian firm), intends to stick with a layered-metal-oxide system.
Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the article.

Bill Gates, noted billionaire philanthropist, discussed the need for "impatient optimism" about both climate change and global development last month during an interview at an international affairs think tank: Q: If you go back a decade, are you more or less optimistic about where we are on climate change now, or then?

Bill Gates: I'm certainly more optimistic because in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, there were so many areas of emission where there wasn't any activity...

Q: if you go back a decade, solar and wind were the most expensive energy sources we had. Since then, the price of solar has dropped 90%, and the price of wind has dropped 70%, and electric vehicles are now economically viable... I know you get excited about innovation. What are some of the areas that you're most excited about for innovation?

Bill Gates: Across this portfolio of 100 companies it's hard to pick my favorite. Some are kind of straightforward, like a company that makes windows where the temperature doesn't cross over, but instead, it blocks getting cold in the winter or hot in the summer, which is very cheap. Or there is a company where you leave your home, and you pump this air through, but it's got a chemical in it. When it sees cracks, it actually seals those cracks. You don't have to find the cracks; you just pump the air in. You can reduce the amount of heat loss between the windows and getting rid of those cracks. You can reduce the energy bill by a factor of two, which then means less load on the overall energy system...

The cement and steel ones are the ones, in a way, I'm most impressed by, because I wasn't sure we'd find anything in those spaces...

Q: The problem, I guess, with cement is that you are taking basically limestone, and then you are converting it to calcium oxide. But the byproduct you get in that conversion process is CO2. Basically, you need a way to capture that CO2....

Bill Gates: As you heat the limestone, that releases CO2. It's exactly as you say, it's an equal number amount of emissions. One of our companies doesn't use limestone. They actually go and find another source of calcium, which fortunately turns out to be quite abundant and cheap. They make exactly the same cement that we make today, but not using limestone as the input. I was stunned that you could do that.
Gates also hopes to see nuclear power in an economically viable form. "The nuclear industry basically failed, because their product was too expensive. It wasn't because of the waste or safety-type issues, which we can get into those, but it was economics." Bill Gates: First and foremost, you must have a much different economic proposition. The nuclear reactor I'm involved in, TerraPower, we only generate electricity when the renewable sources that have very little marginal costs aren't generating. We just make heat all day, and then only when the bid price of electricity is high enough, do we actually generate electricity, because otherwise, you have all this capital cost that half the time, the solar bid into that market is going to be very low.

I think fission, we shouldn't give up on it. I'm involved in that company only because it may be able to make a significant contribution to [fighting] climate change... I can't overstate how much easier it is to solve the problem if you can mix in some degree of fission or fusion that are there to fill in the periods where renewables are not generating. Cold snaps or where you have these cold fronts just sitting there, that's when houses need the most heating. That's when neither wind nor solar are generating.

Scientists recently noticed that the chemical fingerprint of meteor particles was starting to change.

And last month Purdue University announced that "The Space Age is leaving fingerprints on one of the most remote parts of the planet — the stratosphere — which has potential implications for climate, the ozone layer and the continued habitability of Earth." Using tools hitched to the nose cone of their research planes and sampling more than 11 miles above the planet's surface, researchers have discovered significant amounts of metals in aerosols in the atmosphere, likely from increasingly frequent launches and returns of spacecraft and satellites. That mass of metal is changing atmospheric chemistry in ways that may impact Earth's atmosphere and ozone layer...

Led by Dan Murphy, an adjunct professor in Purdue's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the team detected more than 20 elements in ratios that mirror those used in spacecraft alloys. They found that the mass of lithium, aluminum, copper and lead from spacecraft reentry far exceeded those metals found in natural cosmic dust. Nearly 10% of large sulfuric acid particles — the particles that help protect and buffer the ozone layer — contained aluminum and other spacecraft metals.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.

Ars Technica reports: In three-and-a-half years of service, one of SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 boosters stands apart from the rest of the company's rocket inventory. This booster, designated with the serial number B1058, has now flown 18 times.

For its maiden launch on May 30, 2020, the rocket propelled NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into the history books on SpaceX's first mission to send people into orbit. This ended a nine-year gap in America's capability to launch astronauts into low-Earth orbit and was the first time a commercial spacecraft achieved this feat... Over the course of its flights to space and back, that white paint has darkened to a charcoal color. Soot from the rocket's exhaust has accumulated, bit by bit, on the 15-story-tall cylinder-shaped booster. The red NASA worm logo is now barely visible.

On Friday night, this rocket launched for the 18th time, breaking a tie at 17 flights with another Falcon 9 booster in SpaceX's fleet... It fired three engines for a braking burn to slow for reentry, then ignited a single engine and extended four carbon-fiber landing legs to settle onto a floating platform holding position near the Bahamas. The drone ship will return the rocket to Cape Canaveral, where SpaceX will refurbish the vehicle for a 19th flight.
Other interesting statistics from the article:

• This single booster rocket has launched 846 satellites into space. (Astrophysicist/spaceflight tracker Jonathan McDowell calculates there are now over 5,000 Starlink satellites in orbit.)

• A SpaceX official told Ars Technica the company might extend the limit on Falcon 9 booster flights beyond 20 for Starlink satellites.

• Friday's launch became the 79th launch so far in 2023 of a Falcon rocket, with SpaceX aiming for a total of 100 by the end of December, and 144 in 2023 (an average of one flight every two-and-a-half days).

• Since 2016, SpaceX has now had 249 consecutive successful launches of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets

Long-time Slashdot reader thepacketmaster writes: Documented in a recent article in the journal Nature, researchers have found an abundance of both helium-4 and helium-3 trapped in the volcanic rocks on Canada's Baffin Island.

As the Earth formed, it is thought that helium-4 and helium-3 flowing on the solar wind became trapped in the minerals of the cooling planet. With heavier elements and minerals sinking to the bottom, this trapped helium was transported to the core, where it would have remained locked in its original forms.

Earth isn't massive enough to hold on to helium in any significant quantities, though. Any that did not get trapped, or that was subsequently released when the minerals melted in the mantle or due to massive impacts, would have eventually seeped up to the surface and floated off into space. So, helium is relatively rare on Earth, and helium-3 is even more so.

Tuesday Orsted cancelled two wind farms near New Jersey that would've generated about 2.2 gigawatts of energy. But the same day America's Interior Department approved plans to install up to 176 wind turbines off the coast of Virginia with an estimated capacity of about 2.6 gigawatts of clean energy.

Located approximately 27 miles from the shores of Virginia Beach, the project will be America's largest offshore wind project, capable of powering over 900,000 homes. In just its first 10 years it should save customers $3 billion in fuel costs, Dominion Energy told the Associated Press: Dominion expects construction to be completed by late 2026... Construction of the project in Virginia is expected to support about 900 jobs each year and then an estimated 1,100 annual jobs during operations, the Interior Department said. The initiative has gained wide support from Virginia policymakers and political leaders, including Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who last week attended a reception marking the arrival of eight monopile foundations for the windfarm.
Two pilot turbines have already been in place since 2020, the article points out. And when finished the new wind farm "would bolster and eventually replace the mostly natural gas-powered electricity that is contributing to costly climate change," reports MarketWatch President Biden, early in his first term, announced a goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes and prevent the spewing of 78 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions... U.S. offshore wind has been helped along by nearly $8 billion in investments since Biden signed his signature, climate-heavy Inflation Reduction Act a little over a year ago... Biden's team has projected that the U.S. could install 110 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2050, a major jump considering there is less than 1 gigawatt installed today. Land-based wind farms across the U.S. already produce more than 140 gigawatts of energy, contributing to about 10% of the nation's energy portfolio...

When measured by announced plans and pledges, the country has been barreling toward its offshore goal. To date, the Department of the Interior has approved four New England-based projects that, together with the new Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, promise to deliver 5 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power 1.75 million homes with average power use. A total of more than 51 gigawatts of wind power capacity is in the works off U.S. shores and the most ambitious 10 coastal states have combined offshore wind goals of generating more than 81 gigawatts.

Jeff Foust reports via SpaceNews: A NASA official opened the door to keeping the International Space Station in operation beyond 2030 if commercial space stations are not yet ready to take over by the end of the decade. Speaking at the Beyond Earth Symposium here Nov. 2, Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said it was "not mandatory" to retire the ISS as currently planned at the end of the decade depending on the progress companies are making on commercial stations. "The timeline is flexible," he said of that transition from the ISS to commercial stations. "It's not mandatory that we stop flying the ISS in 2030. But, it is our full intention to switch to new platforms when they're available." [...]

Bowersox acknowledged that schedule depends on the readiness of those commercial stations. "When it happens is going to depend a lot the maturity of the market," he said, which includes both the status of commercial stations and non-NASA customers for them. He made it clear that NASA does not expect to be the only customer for commercial stations. NASA's current requirements for those stations anticipate having two astronauts at a time on them, less than the ISS. "We looked at what we thought would be reasonable and what would actually give us a cost savings," he said of that requirement. "My biggest concern is if we get too far ahead of where the market and NASA has to carry the full cost of the platforms for longer, and we transition too quickly," he said. That could force NASA to move money from current ISS utilization to support those stations. "If we have a badly managed transition, we could find ourselves getting weak in those areas."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks. For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth's rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.

The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds — pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Universal Coordinated Time. But it's hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world's timekeepers.

"Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy," said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world's clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: "I get a bazillion emails." On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime. The proposal from Levine may face opposition from vested interests and strong opinions in the international community -- notably, the Russians and the Vatican. "The head of the IBWM (or BIPM in French) said in November 2022 that Russia opposed the dropping of leap seconds because it wanted to wait until 2040," reports Ars Technica. "The nation's satellite positioning system, GLONASS, was built with leap seconds in mind, and reworking the system would seemingly be taxing."

"There's also the Vatican, which has concerned itself with astronomy since at least the Gregorian Calendar, and may also oppose the removal of leap seconds. The Rev. Paul Gabor, astrophysicist and vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson, Arizona, has been quoted and cited as opposing the deeper separation of human and planetary time. Keeping proper time, Gabor wrote his 2017 book The Science of Time, is 'one of the oldest missions of astronomy.'"

"In the current Leap Second Debate, there are rational arguments, focused on practical considerations, and there is a certain unspoken unease, emerging from the symbolic substrata of the issues involved," Gabor writes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Ken Mattingly, who orbited the moon and commanded a pair of NASA shuttle missions, but who was remembered as well for the flight he didn't make -- the near-disastrous mission of Apollo 13 -- died on Tuesday in Arlington, Va. He was 87. His death was confirmed by Cheryl Warner, a NASA spokeswoman. She did not specify the cause or say whether he died at home in Arlington or in a hospital there. Mr. Mattingly, a former Navy jet pilot with a degree in aeronautical engineering, joined NASA in 1966. But his first spaceflight didn't come until April 1972, when the space agency launched Apollo 16, the next-to-last manned mission to the moon. Piloting the spacecraft's command module in orbit while holding the rank of lieutenant commander, he took extensive photos of the moon's terrain and conducted experiments while Cmdr.John W. Young of the Navy and Lt. Col. Charles M. Duke Jr. of the Air Force, having descended in the lunar lander, collected rock and soil samples from highlands near the crater known as Descartes.

While the three astronauts were en route back to Earth, Commander Mattingly stepped outside the spacecraft -- which he had named Casper for the resemblance, as least in a child's eye, between an astronaut in a bulky spacesuit and the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost. Maneuvering along handrails while connected to the spacecraft by a tether, he retrieved two attached canisters of film with photos of the moon that he had taken from inside the capsule for analysis back on Earth. When the Apollo program ended, Commander Mattingly headed the astronaut support office for the shuttle program, designed to ferry astronauts to and from an eventual Earth-orbiting International Space Station. In the summer of 1982, he commanded the fourth and final Earth-orbiting test flight of the shuttle Columbia, which completed 112 orbits. He was also the commander of the first space shuttle flight conducted for the Department of Defense, a classified January 1985 mission aboard Discovery.

All those achievements came after he had been scrubbed at virtually the last moment from the flight of Apollo 13 in April 1970. He was to have orbited the moon in the command module while Cmdr.James A. LovellJr. of the Navy and Fred W. Haise Jr. explored the lunar surface. But NASA removed Commander Mattingly from the crew in the final days before launching, when blood tests determined that he had recently been exposed to German measles from training with Colonel Duke, the backup lunar module pilot, who in turn had contracted it from his proximity to an infected child at a neighborhood party. Commander Mattingly was the only one of the Apollo 13 crewmen who were found to lack antibodies against the illness. His backup, John L. Swigert Jr., became the command module pilot, leaving Commander Mattingly to watch the progress ofthe flight from mission control. [...] After his Apollo and space shuttle flights, Mr. Mattingly continued to work for NASA in the 1980s. He retired from the space agency and the Navy as a rear admiral and went on to work for aerospace companies.

A top scientist has proposed a new way to reconcile the two different ways that our clocks keep time. Meet -- wait for it -- the leap minute. From a report: Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks. For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth's rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.

The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds -- pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Universal Coordinated Time. But it's hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world's timekeepers.

"Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy," said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world's clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: "I get a bazillion emails." On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime.

Around 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid caused a mass extinction event, killing three-quarters of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. A new study suggests that fine silicate dust from the asteroid, which remained in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, played a more significant role in causing the impact winter and extinction than previously thought. Phys.Org reports: Fine silicate dust from pulverized rock would have stayed in the atmosphere for 15 years, dropping global temperatures by up to 15 degrees Celsius, researchers said in a study in the journal Nature Geoscience. [...] For the study, the international team of researchers was able to measure dust particles thought to be from right after the asteroid struck. The particles were found at the Tanis fossil site in the US state of North Dakota.

Though 3,000 kilometers (1,865 miles) away from the crater, the site has preserved a number of remarkable finds believed to be dated from directly after the asteroid impact in sediment layers of an ancient lake. The dust particles were around 0.8 to 8.0 -- micrometers -- just the right size to stick around in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, the researchers said.

Entering this data into climate models similar to those used for current-day Earth, the researchers determined that dust likely played a far greater role in the mass extinction than had previously been thought. Out of all the material that was shot into the atmosphere by the asteroid, they estimated that it was 75 percent dust, 24 percent sulfur and one percent soot. The dust particles "totally shut down photosynthesis" in plants for at least a year, causing a "catastrophic collapse" of life, [said Ozgur Karatekin, a researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium].

An anonymous reader shares a report: PFAS stands for "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances," a family of upwards of 15,000 or more human-made and incredibly durable chemical compounds that have been used in countless industrial and consumer applications for decades. Firefighting foams, waterproof hiking boots, raincoats, nonstick frying pans, dental floss, lipstick, and even the ink used to label packaging -- all can contain PFAS. The compounds are ubiquitous in drinking water and soil, even migrating to Arctic sea ice. PFAS are called forever chemicals because once present in the environment, they do not degrade or break down. They accumulate, are transferred throughout the watershed, and ultimately persist. The quest to reduce the amount of PFAS in the environment is what led me to an industrial park in a southern suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The jar of PFAS concentrate in my hand is part of a demonstration arranged by my hosts, Revive Environmental, during a tour of the company's PFAS destruction site, one of the first in the country to operate commercially and at scale. A few yards in front of me sits the company's PFAS "Annihilator" in a white shipping container.

The Annihilator represents just one of several technologies now vying to break down and destroy PFAS. These span the gamut from established processes like electrochemical oxidation and supercritical water oxidation to emerging techniques relying on ultraviolet light, plasma, ultrasound, or catalyst-driven thermal processes. Some are deployed in field tests. Other companies are actively running pilot programs, many with various divisions of the US Department of Defense and other government agencies. And many other technologies are still undergoing laboratory research. There's good reason for this. Not only are PFAS everywhere around us; they're also in us. Humans can't break down PFAS, and our bodies struggle to clear them from our systems. Studies suggest they're in my blood and yours -- the majority of Americans,' in fact -- and they have been linked to increased risks of kidney and testicular cancer, decreased infant birthweights, and high blood pressure. And that's only what we know about now: researchers continue to grapple with the full impacts of PFAS on human and environmental health.

Efforts to curb emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas commonly produced as a by-product of refrigerant manufacture might be falling short, and it seems eastern China is a major culprit. Nature: The hydrofluorocarbon gas, HFC-23, is around 14,700 times as powerful as carbon dioxide at warming the globe and has long been the subject of national and international climate-change mitigation efforts. Those efforts gained new traction nearly a decade ago when China and India -- the world's largest producers of the chemical -- agreed to dial down its emissions. New research, however, confirms that emissions continued to rise in subsequent years, and an analysis of data from atmospheric-monitoring stations suggests that factories in eastern China are responsible for nearly half of the total.

The rogue emissions are one of several air-pollution sources under discussion at the latest meeting of the Montreal Protocol, held in Nairobi, Kenya, this week. Signed in 1987, the Montreal Protocol is generally considered the most effective international environmental treaty in history, having halted the destruction of the ozone layer while also slowing down global warming. But scientists have often played a role, scanning the atmosphere for chemicals, such as ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), that governments have agreed to phase out. "Science has been instrumental in evaluating compliance under the treaty," says Megan Lickley, a climate scientist at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It was always abundantly clear that the leader of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos from 2018 to 2022, Dmitry Rogozin, sought to kowtow to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now we have an anecdote from Putin himself that highlights how much. The story concerns a satellite constellation now known as Sfera (or Sphere, in English), a modestly ambitious constellation of 264 satellites. The Sphere constellation is intended to provide broadband Internet service from middle-Earth orbit to Russia as well as high-resolution Earth observation satellites.

As is usual with Russian space projects, because they tend to be poorly funded, the timeline for Sphere's deployment has been delayed and its scope reduced. It also underwent an unscheduled name change. Prior to 2018, this satellite program was known as Ehfir (Ether), a reference to the invisible substance once thought to fill the universe and the medium through which light waves propagated.

However that changed in 2018 when Putin was publicly announcing the program's creation. He recently recalled this in remarks that were recorded by RIA Novosti's Telegram channel. They were translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell. "At first it was called Ehfir," Putin said. "And at one of my public speeches I was talking and said it was Sfera. I arrived at the Kremlin, and the former Roscosmos head greeted me and said, 'Vladimirovich, you said it was project Sfera, Sfera you said. That's what it is, project Sfera.'"

Rogozin, who was listening to these remarks, acted immediately -- presumably to save his boss from embarrassment. After Rogozin said the constellation was named Sphere, Putin recalled that he asked how's that? Rogozin replied that it had already been renamed Sfera, not to worry. Laughing, Putin added, "So I didn't even make it back and it's already renamed to Sfera. So I said, well, OK then." Rogozin confirmed the anecdote on his Telegram channel this week.

The UK's oil and gas regulator is coming under fire from environmental groups for using lawyers to try to prevent the publication of five key documents relating to the environmental impact of Shell's activities in the North Sea. From a report: At a hearing in December, a legal representative for the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) is expected to argue against the publication of documents that contain details about the risk of pollution as a result of decommissioning the Brent oilfield, which was operated by Shell for more than 40 years. It says it opposes publication "on a matter of process basis." Shell has applied for an exemption from international rules that require all infrastructure to be removed from the field and the UK government is deciding whether it will allow the oil company to leave the 170-metre-high oil platform legs in place for the three platforms known as Bravo, Charlie and Delta.

A total of 64 concrete storage cells are contained in the leg structures, 42 of which have previously been used for oil storage and separation. Most of the cells are the size of seven Olympic swimming pools, and collectively still contain an estimated 72,000 tonnes of contaminated sediment and 638,000 cubic metres of oily water. Environmental groups believe the documents held by the NSTA would reveal new information about long-term environmental dangers that is relevant to other North Sea oil developments, including Equinor's plans to develop Rosebank, the UK's largest untapped field.