An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Take a grand tour of the solar system tonight (Dec. 28) as each of the planets in the solar system will be visible at the same time. As 2022 comes to an end, skywatchers can take in the rare sight of all of the planets in our solar system (aside from Earth) together in the sky. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all currently visible simultaneously with the naked eye. The two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, can meanwhile be observed with binoculars or a telescope.

The five planets visible with the naked eye -- Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, in that order -- will line up in the sky starting from the southwestern horizon. Mercury, the smallest planet in the solar system, will be difficult to see with the eye, but it's possible if dark sky conditions are right. Uranus, visible only through binoculars or a telescope, can be found between Mars and Jupiter, while Neptune will be visible through optics between Saturn and Jupiter. The Virtual Telescope Project is hosting a free "grand tour of the solar system" livestream starting at 12:30 p.m. EST (1730 GMT) on Wednesday (Dec. 28). The live webcast is also available on their YouTube channel.

The report notes that this "grand tour" happens roughly every one to two years, on average. "In June 2022, skywatchers were treated to five planets -- Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn -- arranged in a rare alignment the likes of which hadn't occurred since 1864," the report adds.

SpaceX launched the first batch of a new generation of Starlink satellites into orbit early Wednesday (Dec. 28) and nailed a rocket landing at sea to mark a record 60th flight of the year. From a report: A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 54 upgraded Starlink internet satellites -- the first generation 2 (Gen2) versions of the SpaceX fleet -- lit up the predawn sky with a smooth launch at 4:34 a.m. EST (0934 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. "Under our new license, we are now able to deploy satellites to new orbits that will add even more capacity to the network," Jesse Anderson, a SpaceX production and engineering manager, said during live launch commentary. "Ultimately, this enables us to add more customers and provide faster service, particularly in areas that are currently oversubscribed."

About eight minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 first stage returned to Earth with a landing on the SpaceX drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean, where rough recovery weather threatened to delay the launch. The touchdown marked a successful end to SpaceX's 60th launch of SpaceX in 2022, nearly doubling the 31 launches set as a SpaceX record in 2021. The Falcon 9 first stage on this mission made its 11th flight with Wednesday's launch. The booster previously flew five Starlink missions, launched two U.S. GPS satellites, the Nilesat 301 commercial satellite and carried two different private astronaut crews on the Inspiration4 and Ax-1 missions, SpaceX has said. The company will also attempt to recover the two payload fairing halves that made up the Falcon 9's nose cone, which had both flown before, for later reuse, Anderson said.

CNN shares the historic close-up snowflake photos of Wilson Bentley, the first person to capture the details of the individual "snow crystal" ice that makes up snowflakes.

It was 1885, just 69 years after the invention of the camera, and after years of trial and error, "He went on to photograph more than 5,000 of these "ice flowers" during his lifetime — never finding any duplicates — and the images still mesmerize to this day." Every snow crystal shares a common six-sided or six-pointed structure — it's how frozen water molecules arrange themselves — but they will always vary from one another because each falls from the sky in its own unique way and experiences slightly different atmospheric conditions on its travel down to earth. Some of their arms may look long and skinny. Others may appear short and flat or somewhere in between. The possibilities are endless and fascinating....

"He had the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet, and you can see that in his writings," said Sue Richardson, Bentley's great-grandniece who is vice president of the board for the Jericho Historical Society. "He wrote many, many articles over the years for scientific publications and for other magazines like Harper's Bazaar and National Geographic. "He also kept very detailed weather records and very detailed journals of every photograph that he took of a snow crystal — the temperature, the humidity, what part of the storm it came from. He kept very detailed information, and then these weather records that he kept and the theories that he developed about how snow crystals formed in the atmosphere, those were proven true...."

It wasn't easy, however, to get those snow crystals on camera. It took almost three years, Richardson said, for Bentley to figure out how to successfully photograph one — which he did just a month shy of his 20th birthday. The first obstacle was figuring out how to attach the microscope to the camera. And then there was the challenge of getting each crystal photographed before it could melt away. "He worked in an unheated woodshed at the back of the house. He had to," Richardson said. "And the microscope slides, everything, had to be an ambient temperature or they'd melt" the crystal....

A children's book about him won the Caldecott Medal in 1999.
Bentley never had formal education, according to his grandniece (who grew up hearing stories about this famous ancestor). One says that when Wilson Bentley was given an old microscope at age 15, "The first time he looked at a snow crystal under it, he was hooked. Just the beauty, the intricate detail. He was totally hooked."

Reason.com notes NASA's successful completion of its Artemis I mission, calling it "part of NASA's ambitious program to bring American astronauts back to the moon for the first time in half a century. And then on to Mars."

But then they ask if the project is worth the money, with the transportation policy director at the libertarian "Reason Foundation" think tank, Robert W. Poole, arguing instead that NASA "isn't particularly interested in cost savings, and its decision making is overly driven by politics." NASA would have been better off replacing the costly and dated Space Launch System used in the Artemis program. But it didn't. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that it was largely constructed and engineered in Alabama, the home state of Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Richard Shelby, who has a history of strong-arming NASA to preserve jobs for his constituents.
Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared the article, which ultimately asks whether it'd be faster and cheaper to just rely on private companies: In 2009, the private sector saw one of its biggest champions ascend to become the number two person at NASA. Lori Garver pushed to scrap the Constellation program as a way to entice the private sector to fill in the gaps. She also spearheaded the Commercial Crew Program, which continues to employ commercial contractors to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. Today, companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX are launching rockets at a faster pace and for a fraction of what NASA spends. In 2022, the company successfully launched 61 rockets, each with a price tag between $100 million and 150 million.

Private companies already design and lease NASA much of its hardware. Poole says there's no reason NASA can't take it a step further and just use the SpaceX starship to cover the entire journey from Earth to the moon and eventually to Mars. "If the current NASA plan goes ahead to have the SpaceX Starship actually deliver the astronauts from the lunar outpost orbit to the surface of the moon and bring them back, that would be an even more dramatic refutation of the idea that only NASA should be doing space transportation," he says.

Poole says that instead of flying its own missions, NASA should play a more limited and supportive role. "The future NASA role that makes the most sense is research and development to advance science," he says.
But for a contrary opinion, Slashdot reader youn counters that "You can bash NASA all you want but a big reason the private sector is where it is at is because it funded research 12 years ago." They share a CNET article noting the $6 billion NASA budgeted over five years "to kick-start development of a new commercial manned spaceflight capability."

And Slashdot reader sg_oneill argues that "Its gonna be a century before we're really colonizing the moon and/or Mars... because we have a lot of science to do first. How do you do a civilization with zero energy inputs from the rest of humanity? How do we deal with radiation? How do bodies work in low G? (Mars is about 1/3 the gravbity of earth). This needs science, and to get science we need NASA, even if private enterprise is building the rockets."

The nonprofit Linux Foundation not only pays the salary of Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman. It also runs the AgStack Foundation, which seeks more efficient agriculture through "free, re-usable, open and specialized digital infrastructure for data and applications."

And this week that Foundation announced a new open source code base for creating and maintaining a global dataset that's a kind of registry for the boundaries of agricultural fields to enable field-level analytics like carbon tracking, food traceability, and crop production. AgStack's Asset Registry dataset, the first of its kind in the world, is built and continuously updated using data from satellites and actual field registrations that contain information on boundaries, not ownership, which will then train machine learning models to ascertain more boundaries. Precise knowledge of field boundaries can help farmers, agricultural companies, and the public sector to monitor and manage crop production, study management practices (crop rotations, cover cropping, tillage, irrigation), determinants of productivity, pest and disease spread, and species diversity. By sharing reusable agricultural data, new insights can also be gleaned for global food security research and innovation.

Crop field boundaries are the fundamental unit of addressing such datasets.... By leveraging computer science and artificial intelligence, members will create, curate, and maintain global field boundaries as an open source digital public good available for anyone to use. The project has the potential to unlock the next revolution of digital agri-services in public and private sectors, especially for smallholder farmers.... "We think that a public field boundary dataset can help turbocharge a lot of smart people and businesses focused on improving agriculture and food security around the world," said Professor David Lobell at The Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University, who hosted the original research as the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University and the Benjamin Page Professor of Earth System Science. "We're excited to help bring this dataset to life."

All code will be contributed under an open source license and will be governed by the AgStack community within the Linux Foundation, using open source and permissively licensed tools and processes.
It's using code funded in part by the NASA Harvest Consortium.

"As a quick follow-up to yesterday's post about InSight's final photo, the InSight Lander's mission is now officially over after 2 failed communications attempts," writes Slashdot reader davidwr. From a NASA press release: NASA's InSight mission has ended after more than four years of collecting unique science on Mars. Mission controllers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California were unable to contact the lander after two consecutive attempts, leading them to conclude the spacecraft's solar-powered batteries have run out of energy -- a state engineers refer to as "dead bus."

"I watched the launch and landing of this mission, and while saying goodbye to a spacecraft is always sad, the fascinating science InSight conducted is cause for celebration," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The seismic data alone from this Discovery Program mission offers tremendous insights not just into Mars but other rocky bodies, including Earth." You can read more about the InSight Mars Lander at NASA's website.

NASA's InSight lander has probably phoned home for the last time from the planet Mars. From a report: The space agency said the spacecraft did not respond to communications from Earth on Sunday, December 18. The lack of communications came as the lander's power-generating capacity has been declining in recent months due to the accumulation of Martian dust on its solar panels. NASA said that it is "assumed" that InSight has reached the end of its operations but that it will continue to try to contact the lander in the coming days. Also on Monday, the InSight Twitter account shared a photo with a message saying this was probably the last photo it was sending from Mars. UPDATE 12/21/22: NASA's InSight Mission Officially Over

A new study published in Nature Astronomy assessed the viability of turbines as an energy source for future Mars missions, and "the results hint that wind power could be an important pillar of energy generation on the red planet, assuming humans are able to successfully land there in the coming decades," reports Motherboard. From the report: Scientists have generally written off wind power as a key energy source for Mars missions, compared to solar and nuclear power, because Martian winds are extremely weak. Now, a team led by Victoria Hartwick, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, has used global climate models of Mars to show that, contrary to past assumptions, "wind power represents a stable, sustained energy resource across large portions of the Mars surface," according to the study. "Using a state-of-the-art Mars global climate model, we analyze the total planetary Martian wind potential and calculate its spatial and temporal variability," Hartwick and her colleagues said in the study. "We find that wind speeds at some proposed landing sites are sufficiently fast to provide a stand-alone or complementary energy source to solar or nuclear power." "Wind energy represents a valuable but previously dismissed energy resource for future human missions to Mars, which will be useful as a complementary energy source to solar power," the team added.

To assess whether wind power could fill that gap, Hartwick and her colleagues used the NASA Ames Mars global climate model to estimate wind speeds across the planet. Since Mars' atmosphere is very thin, with only 1 percent the density of Earth's atmosphere, Martian winds are pretty wimpy everywhere. Even so, the researchers found that several tantalizing locations could theoretically use wind as the only source of power, and that a combination of solar and wind power would unlock sites across a huge swath of the planet -- including icy locations at the poles.

To that point, the team identified several sites that would be particularly conducive to wind power, including locations within the icy northern regions of Deuteronilus Mensae and Protonilus Mensae. The researchers envision setting up medium-sized turbines, measuring 50 meters (160 feet) tall, to catch the stronger winds in these areas, allowing astronauts to subsist in the strange glacial terrain of an alien world. Turbines could also be effective if placed near topographical gradients, such as crater rims or the slopes of ancient volcanoes, to catch the gusts generated by these landscapes.

Longtime Slashdot reader WindBourne writes: EU is creating a tariff on certain imported goods based on their CO2 emissions that went into production and transportation. While many have opposed this, others have been correctly pointing out that little would change until nations started charging other nations for their polluting the world. In some ways, this already has a number of attributes going for it. With Kyoto, Europe forced that emissions from bio would count at the point where it was harvested and not where it was burned/utilized. This was because Europe is a major importer of bio products for heating and electricity. With this tariff, it will apply any use of bio, including H2, at point of usage, not of production.

What remains to be seen is:
1) How they will apply it to size (Nation? State? City?)?
2) What data will be used (Information from the local government? Satellite?)?
3) How the data will be normalized (GDP? Per capita?)?
4) How to calculate emissions per good (Total emissions? Worst item? Certain parts?)?

This will no doubt cause a number of nations to scream about it, as well as smaller nations, but hopefully, more nations will join in as well. Looks like the world is finally going to get serious about stopping greenhouse gas emissions. "The measure will apply first to iron and steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizers, electricity production and hydrogen before being extended to other goods," notes CNN. "Under the new mechanism, companies will need to buy certificates to cover emissions generated by the production of goods imported into the European Union based on calculations linked to the EU's own carbon price."

Details of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism can be found here.

Scientists working on Australia's Great Barrier Reef have successfully trialled a new method for freezing and storing coral larvae they say could eventually help rewild reefs threatened by climate change. Reuters: Scientists are scrambling to protect coral reefs as rising ocean temperatures destabilise delicate ecosystems. The Great Barrier Reef has suffered four bleaching events in the last seven years including the first ever bleach during a La Nina phenomenon, which typically brings cooler temperatures. Cryogenically frozen coral can be stored and later reintroduced to the wild but the current process requires sophisticated equipment including lasers. Scientists say a new lightweight "cryomesh" can be manufactured cheaply and better preserves coral.

In a December lab trial, the world's first with Great Barrier Reef coral, scientists used the cryomesh to freeze coral larvae at the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS). The coral had been collected from the reef for the trial, which coincided with the brief annual spawning window. "If we can secure the biodiversity of coral ... then we'll have tools for the future to really help restore the reefs and this technology for coral reefs in the future is a real game-changer," Mary Hagedorn, Senior Research Scientist at Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute told Reuters from the AIMS lab.

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms will continue to devote about 20% of its overall costs and expenses to Reality Labs in 2023, despite questions about the business division focused on augmented and virtual reality and the so-called metaverse. From a report: The projection, given by CTO Andrew Bosworth in a blog post Monday, is little changed from the 18% of spending Meta devoted to Reality Labs in the third quarter. Meta stock is down nearly 65% this year, and some have questioned Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's expensive bet on the metaverse which comes as the company has cut other costs, including widespread layoffs. Reality Labs reported a loss from operations of $9.4 billion through the first nine months of the year; Meta's family of apps, by comparison, brought in roughly $32 billion in profit during that same period. A 20% investment in futuristic technologies is a "level of investment we believe makes sense for a company committed to staying at the leading edge of one of the most competitive and innovative industries on earth," Bosworth said. Alternative, non-paywalled source: Axios.

Close to 200 countries reached a watershed agreement early Monday to stem the loss of nature worldwide, pledging to protect nearly a third of Earth's land and oceans as a refuge for the planet's remaining wild plants and animals by the end of the decade. From a report: A room of bleary-eyed delegates erupted in applause in the wee hours after agreeing to the landmark framework at the U.N. biodiversity summit, called COP15. The hope is to turn the tide on an ongoing extinction crisis. About a million species are at risk of disappearing forever, a mass extinction event scientists say is on par with the devastation wrought by the asteroid that wiped out most dinosaurs.

Today's loss of biodiversity is being driven not by a space rock but by one species: humans. The loss of habitat, exploitation of species, climate change, pollution and destruction from invasive species moved by people between continents are all driving a decline in the variety of plants and animals. Nations now have the next eight years to hit their targets for protecting life. With few legal mechanisms for enforcement, they will have to trust each other to protect habitats and funnel hundreds of billions of dollars over conservation. Alternative, non-paywalled sources: The Guardian and Associated Press.

"Earth is in the midst of the worst mass extinction since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago — and this time, the asteroid is us." So says Michael Grunwald, an environmentalist, in an opinion piece for the New York Times.

But his larger point is that "biodiversity loss is not that complicated a mystery." The amount of area on planet earth devoted ot agriculture is now more than twice the size of North America. We're destroying and degrading the habitats of other species to grow food for our own. This means the fate of the world's bugs, bunnies and other creatures and critters — and what's left of the forests, wetlands and other habitats they call home — depends more than anything else on what we put in our mouths and how it gets made....

Humanity needs to start shrinking our agricultural footprint and expanding our natural footprint, after thousands of years of doing the reverse. This will be an extraordinary challenge, because we'll also need to produce more than 7.4 quadrillion additional calories every year to feed our growing population, in an era when climate-fueled droughts, heat waves, floods and blights could make it harder to grow food.... If we are serious about cleaning up the mess we're making for less influential species, there are four things individuals as well as nations and corporations can do. The first is to eat less meat, which would be a lot easier if meat weren't so beloved and delicious....

But the inconvenient truth is that when we eat cows, chickens and other livestock, we might as well be eating macaws, jaguars and other endangered species. That's because livestock chew up far more land per calorie than crops. Producing beef is 100 times as land-intensive as cultivating potatoes and 55 times as land-intensive as peas or nuts. Livestock now use nearly 80 percent of agricultural land while producing less than 20 percent of calories. Cattle are the leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon, followed by soybeans, another commodity, which get fed to pigs and chickens.... If Americans continue to average three burgers a week while the developing world starts to follow our path, it's hard to see how the Amazon survives.

But it's at least possible that we could shrink agricultural footprints by shifting our diets toward meat made without livestock, like the plant-based substitutes offered by companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat or maybe someday cultured meat grown from animal cells.
Grunwald also recommends wasting less food. "About a third of the food grown on Earth is lost or tossed before it reaches our mouths, which means a third of the land (as well as the water, fertilizer and other resources) used to grow that food is also wasted."

The third way to ease the global land squeeze "would be to stop using productive farmland for biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel — and to stop burning trees for power." And finally, "farmers will have to supersize their yields enough to make a lot more food with a lot less land.

An announcement from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: An almost limitless supply of fresh water exists in the form of water vapor above Earth's oceans, yet remains untapped, researchers said. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is the first to suggest an investment in new infrastructure capable of harvesting oceanic water vapor as a solution to limited supplies of fresh water in various locations around the world.

The study, led by civil and environmental engineering professor and Prairie Research Institute executive director Praveen Kumar, evaluated 14 water-stressed locations across the globe for the feasibility of a hypothetical structure capable of capturing water vapor from above the ocean and condensing it into fresh water — and do so in a manner that will remain feasible in the face of continued climate change. Kumar, graduate student Afeefa Rahman and atmospheric sciences professor Francina Dominguez published their findings in the journal Nature Scientific Reports....

"Eventually, we will need to find a way to increase the supply of fresh water as conservation and recycled water from existing sources, albeit essential, will not be sufficient to meet human needs. We think our newly proposed method can do that at large scales," Kumar said.

The researchers performed atmospheric and economic analyses of the placement of hypothetical offshore structures 210 meters in width and 100 meters in height. Through their analyses, the researchers concluded that capturing moisture over ocean surfaces is feasible for many water-stressed regions worldwide. The estimated water yield of the proposed structures could provide fresh water for large population centers in the subtropics....

"The climate projections show that the oceanic vapor flux will only increase over time, providing even more fresh water supply," graduate student Afeefa Rahman said. "So, the idea we are proposing will be feasible under climate change. This provides a much needed and effective approach for adaptation to climate change, particularly to vulnerable populations living in arid and semi-arid regions of the world." The researchers said one of the more elegant features of this proposed solution is that it works like the natural water cycle. "The difference is that we can guide where the evaporated water from the ocean goes," Dominguez said....

The researchers said this study opens the door for novel infrastructure investments that can effectively address the increasing global scarcity of fresh water.
Thanks to Slashdot reader L.Kynes for submitting the news.

On Friday, long-time Slashdot reader NewtonsLaw wrote: Manufacturers of drones made after 16 September 2022 must, from today (16 December), ensure that those drones are "Standard Remote ID" compliant. This means that the drones must broadcast packets of data once per second (using Bluetooth or Wifi) that contain the position speed and path of the drone, a unique identifier and the operator's position including height above ground....

Already, several companies have announced their intention to build networks of receivers that will create a realtime database of all drone activity in the USA, showing the positions of the drones and their operators and flagging any non-compliant craft.

By September 16, 2023, all U.S. hobbyists must fit "broadcast remote ID" modules to their RC model aircraft or older drones which also make them Remote ID compliant (unless they are under 250g in mass or are flown in pre-approved areas called FRIAs)....

Drone and radio-controlled model aircraft users must register with the FAA [unless they weigh less than 0.55 pounds], sit (and pass) a knowledge test and soon have this Remote ID technology installed on all their craft.
"Remote ID helps the FAA, law enforcement, and other federal agencies find the control station when a drone appears to be flying in an unsafe manner or where it is not allowed to fly," argues an FAA web page. This week the top intelligence official at the U.S. Department of Defense told reporters that drones, including drones operated by amateur hobbyists and by foreign adversaries, account for many of the reports of Unidentified Flying Objects, according to the Washington Post.

They quote Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of America's new UFO-tracking agency, as saying that "Some of these things almost collide with planes. We see that on a regular basis...."

Business Insider reports: An official Amazon study run as part of the company's "Earth's Best Employer" initiative showed mounting employee frustration and other challenges around the time the crucial project was getting off the ground.... The 11-page document, created in October 2021 for Amazon's most senior leaders, gives a brutally honest assessment of employee sentiment.... "We learned we are not seen as distinctively innovative and that our innovation culture is not fun. Innovation at Amazon is associated with stress, burnout, churn, and a cut-throat atmosphere," the document said....

A competitive labor market was one of the main drivers for change, according to the report. Amazon anticipated a "tech talent shortage" of 6 million to 8 million workers in the US by 2030. The Amazon Web Services cloud business alone was projected to need 210,000 to 336,000 tech employees by 2031, or at least 123,000 additional workers. Yet, Amazon is not perceived as a particularly attractive workplace even by its own employees, the report found. Corporate employees said they were subject to long hours and exhausting workloads. Sometimes, even finding answers to trivial HR policies led to confusion. For frontline workers, Amazon wants to provide more behavioral health support and reduce injuries like musculoskeletal disorders, which are more common at its warehouses than other similar facilities

. "Neither corporate nor front-line employees feel Amazon is a place they can clearly grow their careers and achieve personal success," the report stated.
The report identified six areas where Amazon sees room for improvement, including work-life balance and compensation and benefits.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A freestanding cylindrical aquarium housing about 1,500 exotic fish burst in Berlin on Friday morning, causing a wave of devastation in and around the tourist attraction. Glass, chairs, tables and other debris were swept out of the DomAquaree complex, which includes a Radisson hotel, a museum, shops and restaurants, as 1 million liters of water poured out of the 14-meter-high (46ft) tank shortly before 6am.

Police said two people sustained injuries from falling shards of glass and had to be taken to hospital. None of the animals inside the saltwater aquarium, which contained clownfish, teira batfish and palette surgeonfish, survived. [...] Material fatigue was the likeliest cause of the incident, Berlin's interior minister said on Friday afternoon. "Investigations are of course not yet complete, but first signs suggest we are dealing with material fatigue," Iris Spranger told the DPA news agency.

First opened in 2003, the aquarium was overhauled as recently as 2020. A spokesperson for the company that owns the structure said additional insulation was added and the glass cylinder polished as part of the maintenance works. Earlier in the day, there had been speculation that overnight temperatures of as low as -10C (14F) had caused a crack in the glass, which is 18cm (7in) thick at the top and 22cm at the bottom of the cylindrical structure. Operators said the aquarium was the biggest cylindrical tank in the world, containing 1,500 tropical fish of 80 different species before the incident. One of the highlights of the attraction was a 10-minute elevator ride through the tank, which would have taken place at 10am. According to the city's fire department, only about 30 of the roughly 1,500 fish were saved after the incident. Berlin's zoo has offered to take them in.

Plastic packaging waste from the online retail giant Amazon ballooned to 709 million pounds globally in 2021 -- equivalent to the weight of some 70,000 killer whales -- according to a new report published Thursday by the nonprofit Oceana. From a report: That's an 18 percent increase over Oceana's estimate of Amazon's plastic packaging for 2020, indicating a growing problem that environmental advocates -- and even Amazon's own shareholders -- say the company is doing too little to address. Amazon's plastic packaging "is a problem for the world's waterways and oceans, and it's an issue they need to be prioritizing," said Dana Miller, Oceana's director of strategic initiatives and an author of the report.

If all the company's plastic from 2021 were converted into plastic air pillows -- the inflated pouches inserted in some Amazon packages to reduce shifting during transit -- and laid side by side, Miller said it would circle the globe more than 800 times. As the largest retailer on the planet, Amazon goes through a lot of plastic. It ships 7.7 billion packages around the world each year, often using plastic air pillows, bags, and protective sleeves to cushion products during transit. Environmental advocates say these are some of the worst kinds of plastics: They can't be recycled, and their light weight makes them prone to drifting into the oceans, where they kill more large marine mammals than any other kind of ocean debris. As the plastics break down, they not only leach harmful chemicals but can also bind with new ones in the environment, posing toxicity risks to the mussels, oysters, whales, and other animals that unintentionally ingest them.

A California startup is pursuing a novel, if simple, plan for ensuring that dead trees keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for thousands of years: burying their remains underground. From a report: Kodama Systems, a forest management company based in the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Sonora, has been operating in stealth mode since it was founded last summer. But MIT Technology Review can now report the company has raised around $6.6 million from Bill Gates's climate fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures, as well as Congruent Ventures and other investors.

In addition, the payments company Stripe will reveal on Thursday that it's provided a $250,000 research grant to the company and its research partner, the Yale Carbon Containment Lab, as part of a broader carbon removal announcement. That grant will support a pilot effort to bury waste biomass harvested from California forests in the Nevada desert and study how well it prevents the release of greenhouse gases that drive climate change. It also agreed to purchase about 415 tons of carbon dioxide eventually sequestered by the company for another $250,000, if that proof-of-concept project achieves certain benchmarks. "Biomass burial has the potential to become a low-cost, high-scale approach for carbon removal, though there is a need for further investigation into its long-term durability," said Joanna Klitzke, procurement and ecosystem strategy lead for Stripe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have discovered a record number of dead fir trees in Oregon, in a foreboding sign of how drought and the climate crisis are ravaging the American west. A recent arial survey found that more than a million acres of forest contain trees that have succumbed to stressors exacerbated by a multi-year drought. Images released by the US forest service show Oregon's lush green expanses dotted with ominous swathes of red. "It is stunning," said Daniel DePinte, an aerial survey program manager with the Forest Service who led the agency's Pacific north-west region aerial survey, noting that this year saw the highest mortality rate for firs in this area in history. These evergreen conifers are less able to survive in drought conditions than other heartier trees that line the landscapes.

He and his colleagues scanned the slopes from planes several times between June and October, detailing the devastation on digital maps. During that time, it became clear that this year would be unlike anything he had seen before. The report is still being finalized but dead trees were spotted in areas across 1.1m acres of Oregon forest. The scientists have taken to dubbing it "firmageddon." "The size of this is enormous," DePinte said. "A lot of people out there think climate change is just impacting the ice caps or some low-level island out there but it is actually impacting right here in our backyard," he added. "If this drought continues as climate change keeps on, and we continue ignoring what nature is showing us across the globe – it doesn't bode well at all." "It will be a different forest with a different feel and it will happen across the landscape as nature decides," DePinte said. "Nature is saying there is just not enough to support the firs, and they will overtime be eliminated from those areas." "Scientists have expected to see signs of stress in the forests, but the suddenness of the spike in mortality was alarming," adds the report. "Before this year, the largest area where dead trees was recorded in Oregon was in 1952 where die-offs were spotted across roughly 550,000 acres."

"The flood of warmth and light once guarded by a thick canopy can increase stream temperatures or make space for invasive species once kept out by shade. Some species will thrive in the shift. But others will perish." The tree deaths also heighten the risk of wildfires.