A NASA-led international satellite mission was set for blastoff from Southern California early on Thursday on a major Earth science project to conduct a comprehensive survey of the world's oceans, lakes and rivers for the first time. Reuters reports: Dubbed SWOT, short for Surface Water and Ocean Topography, the advanced radar satellite is designed to give scientists an unprecedented view of the life-giving fluid covering 70% of the planet, shedding new light on the mechanics and consequences of climate change. A Falcon 9 rocket, owned and operated by billionaire Elon Musk's commercial launch company SpaceX, was set to liftoff before dawn on Thursday from the Vandenberg U.S. Space Force Base, about 170 miles (275 km) northwest of Los Angeles, to carry SWOT into orbit. If all goes as planned, the SUV-sized satellite will produce research data within several months.

Nearly 20 years in development, SWOT incorporates advanced microwave radar technology that scientists say will collect height-surface measurements of oceans, lakes, reservoirs and rivers in high-definition detail over 90% of the globe. The data, compiled from radar sweeps of the planet at least twice every 21 days, will enhance ocean-circulation models, bolster weather and climate forecasts and aid in managing scarce freshwater supplies in drought-stricken regions, according to researchers. One major thrust of the mission is to explore how oceans absorb atmospheric heat and carbon dioxide in a natural process that moderates global temperatures and climate change. [...] SWOT's ability to discern smaller surface features also be used to study the impact of rising ocean levels on coastlines.

Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a major milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory. From a report: Scientists for decades have said that fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes stars shine, could provide a future source of bountiful energy. The result announced on Tuesday is the first fusion reaction in a laboratory setting that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction.

"This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy," Arati Prabhakar, the White House science adviser, said during a news conference on Tuesday morning at the Department of Energy's headquarters in Washington, D.C. "And even deeper understanding of the scientific principles that are applied here." From an environmental perspective, fusion has always had a strong appeal. Within the sun and stars, fusion continually combines hydrogen atoms into helium, producing sunlight and warmth that bathes the planets.

In experimental reactors and laser labs on Earth, fusion lives up to its reputation as a very clean energy source, devoid of the pollution and greenhouse gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels and the dangerous long-lived radioactive waste created by current nuclear power plants, which use the splitting of uranium to produce energy. There was always a nagging caveat, however. In all of the efforts by scientists to control the unruly power of fusion, their experiments consumed more energy than the fusion reactions generated. That changed at 1:03 a.m. on Dec. 5 when 192 giant lasers at the laboratory's National Ignition Facility blasted a small cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser that contained a frozen nubbin of hydrogen encased in diamond.

Light infrastructure has expanded alongside population growth but it's not only star gazing in jeopardy -- cultures, wildlife, science and human health are all threatened. From a report: Some researchers call light pollution cultural genocide. Generations of complex knowledge systems, built by Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders upon a once-clear view of the Milky Way, are being lost. In the natural world, the mountain pygmy possum, a marsupial native to Australia, is critically endangered. Its main food source, the bogong moth, is being affected by artificial outdoor lighting messing with its migration patterns. Sea turtles are exhibiting erratic nesting and migration behaviours due to lights blasting from new coastal developments. So how bright does our future look under a blanket of light?

"If you go to Mount Coot-tha, basically the highest point in Brisbane, every streetlight you can see from up there is a waste of energy," Brendan Downs says. "Why is light going up and being wasted into the atmosphere? There's no need for it." Around the world, one in three people can't see the Milky Way at night because their skies are excessively illuminated. Four in five people live in towns and cities that emit enough light to limit their view of the stars. In Europe, that figure soars to 99%. Blame skyglow -- the unnecessary illumination of the sky above, and surrounding, an urban area. It's easy to see it if you travel an hour from a city, turn around, then look back towards its centre.

Splashdown successful. The announcer on NASA's livestream called it a "text-book entry" for "America's new ticket to ride -- to the moon and beyond."

After flying over 239,000 miles — and 80 miles over the surface of the moon — NASA's uncrewed "Orion" capsule has returned from its 25-and-a-half day test flight in space.

NASA is still streaming its coverage. And CNN had emphasized that "This final step will be among the most important and dangerous legs of the mission." "We're not out of the woods yet. The next big test is the heat shield," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told CNN in a phone interview Thursday, referring to the barrier designed to protect the Orion capsule from the excruciating physics of reentering the Earth's atmosphere. The spacecraft will be traveling about 32 times the speed of sound (24,850 miles per hour or nearly 40,000 kilometers per hour) as it hits the air — so fast that compression waves will cause the outside of the vehicle to heat to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius)....

As the capsule reaches around 200,000 feet (61,000 meters) above the Earth's surface, it will perform a roll maneuver that will briefly send the capsule back upward — sort of like skipping a rock across the surface of a lake.... "By dividing the heat and force of reentry into two events, skip entry also offers benefits like lessening the g-forces astronauts are subject to," said Joe Bomba, Lockheed Martin's Orion aerosciences aerothermal lead, in a statement....

As it embarks on its final descent, the capsule will slow down drastically, shedding thousands of miles per hour in speed until its parachutes deploy. By the time it splashes down, Orion will be traveling 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour). While there are no astronauts on this test mission — just a few mannequins equipped to gather data and a Snoopy doll — Nelson, the NASA chief, has stressed the importance of demonstrating that the capsule can make a safe return.

This week the Atlantic published its list of "the 10 Most Promising Breakthrough Innovations of 2022."

"We didn't just get one 'unheard-of' cancer breakthrough; we got several in one year...." Is death reversible? It was this year for several pigs (or, at least, for their organs). By pumping an experimental substance into the veins and arteries of animals that had been lying deceased for an hour, Yale researchers got their hearts to start beating again. The technology is "very far away from use in humans," Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale University, told The New York Times. In the short term, scientists said, they hope that their research could help doctors preserve the organs of the recently deceased for use in transplants. But the longer-term implications of the experiment can't be ignored: If we have the power to reanimate the heart or other organs of the recently deceased, at what point might we be able to reverse sudden deaths? Could we revive soldiers who bleed out on the battlefield? Could we stock hospitals and nursing homes with buckets of the stuff to resuscitate patients? Should every future American household keep some on hand in the event of a terrible accident?

These questions thrust us into the ethical realm and invoke spooky references to "The Monkey's Paw," Pet Sematary, and any number of stories about the dark side of trying to design an escape hatch from mortality. Perhaps, as this technology improves, that debate is on its way. But for millions of people who have lost loved ones to, say, a sudden heart attack or stroke, it's not remotely dystopian to imagine an injection that could reverse tragedies long considered irreversible....

The Power to Synthesize Life (Kind Of)
This summer, scientists grew an embryo in a lab without the use of sperm, or eggs, or a womb. It happened to be that of a mouse. But the species is of secondary importance.... Some scientists I consulted for this project said that the results, which were published this year in the science journal Cell, were the most important scientific breakthrough of 2022.

Scientists are not close to turning stem cells into human babies that make their first gasping cries in antiseptic laboratories. But this work does suggest a major leap forward in our ability to grow synthetic organs and more closely research the relationship between embryonic mutations and developmental diseases. As Paul Tesar, a developmental biologist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told Stat, "As soon as the science starts to move into a place where it's feasible to go from a stem cell population in a Petri dish all the way through to organ development, it's a pretty wild and remarkable time."
The article also notes that NuScale's small nuclear reactors received approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and "could be running by the end of the decade." Meanwhile, the start-up Quaise is working on drilling technology "that can vaporize granite with a highly concentrated beam of radio-frequency power. If such a technology became widely available, deep drilling would be commonplace and geothermal energy would be accessible on just about any patch of land. It would be as though humankind conceived of a magic wand that, waved across the Earth, makes any square mile as energy-rich as an oil-gushing stretch of Texas or Saudi Arabia."

The article also suggests one more possibility for the future. "Decades from now, millions of people may actually prefer the consistency and taste of meat that didn't come from an animal, because they'll know what they're buying when a cultivated rib eye is as consistent as an electrical gadget."

A year-long investigation by a Congressional commitee is accussing the fossil fuel industry of spreading climate disinformation. CNN reports: The committee found the fossil fuel industry is "posturing on climate issues while avoiding real commitments" to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Lawmakers said it has sought to portray itself as part of the climate solution, even as internal industry documents reveal how companies have avoided making real commitments. "Today's documents reveal that the industry has no real plans to clean up its act and is barreling ahead with plans to pump more dirty fuels for decades to come," House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney told CNN in a statement....

The committee said documents uncovered also showed the fossil fuel industry has presented natural gas as a so-called "bridge fuel" to transition to cleaner sources of energy, all while doubling down on its long-term reliance on fossil fuels with no clear plan of action to fully transition to clean energy....

In a 2016 email from a BP executive to John Mingé, then-Chairman and President of BP America, and others, about climate and emissions, an employee assessed that the company often adopted an obstructionist strategy with regulators, noting, "we wait for the rules to come out, we don't like what we see, and then try to resist and block."

"The fossil fuel industry has of late been involved in extensive "greenwashing" — misleading claims in advertisements, particularly on social media, claiming or suggesting that they are "Paris aligned," and that they are committed to meaningful solutions," Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor who has studied the fossil fuel industry's rebuke of climate science and consulted for law firms that have brought suits against the fossil fuel industry, told CNN. "Numerous analyses shows that these claims are untrue."

"JetBlue is giving up carbon offsets for its domestic flights," reports the Verge, "shifting its focus instead to sustainable aviation fuels.

"It's a step that could help the airline actually reduce its emissions rather than relying primarily on controversial carbon offsets to counteract its fossil fuel use." Back in 2020, JetBlue became the first U.S. airline to voluntarily offset greenhouse gas emissions from all of its domestic flights. That effort ends in 2023, the company announced this week. The airline now plans to effectively cut its per-seat emissions in half by 2035. For flights to take off without generating as much pollution, JetBlue says its planes will need to run on sustainable aviation fuels.
JetBlue's announcement calls the move "a science-based target approved by the Science Based Targets initiative, a coalition that defines and promotes best practices in emissions reduction targets....

"[T]his science-based target aligns with the goals of the Paris Agreement and the growing airline's own goal to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040 — 10 years ahead of broader airline industry targets." JetBlue also recognizes how critical external partners are to decarbonizing the aviation industry and is committed to encouraging and supporting efforts by aircraft and engine manufacturers, governments, regulatory agencies, and fuel suppliers to realize their own greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. "Effectively cutting our per-seat emissions in half will require substantial change to the way we run our business today," said Robin Hayes chief executive officer, JetBlue.

"Our team is fully committed to hitting the goal, but we can't do it alone. We are calling on governments, aircraft and engine manufacturers, and fuel producers to support the development of the products and solutions that airlines need to achieve our ambitious goals...."

"The aviation industry is at a critical time in our push towards net zero. Many of these lower carbon solutions are proven, but still haven't achieved the scale needed to make a meaningful impact," said Sara Bogdan, director of sustainability and environmental social governance, JetBlue. "Encouragement of these maturing technologies is needed and the investments we make today will help shape the trajectory of these solutions as they grow to realize their fullest potential."

Mark Harris writes via MIT Technology Review: In early 2021, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia announced The Line: a "civilizational revolution" that would house up to 9 million people in a zero-carbon megacity, 170 kilometers long and half a kilometer high but just 200 meters wide. Within its mirrored, car-free walls, residents would be whisked around in underground trains and electric air taxis. Satellite images of the $500 billion project obtained exclusively by MIT Technology Review show that the Line's vast linear building site is already taking shape, running as straight as an arrow across the deserts and through the mountains of northern Saudi Arabia. The site, tens of meters deep in places, is teeming with many hundreds of construction vehicles and likely thousands of workers, themselves housed in sprawling bases nearby.

Analysis of the satellite images by Soar Earth, an Australian startup that aggregates satellite imagery and crowdsourced maps into an online digital atlas, suggests that the workers have already excavated around 26 million cubic meters of earth and rock -- 78 times the volume of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. Official drone footage of The Line's construction site, released in October, indeed showed fleets of bulldozers, trucks, and diggers excavating its foundations. Visit The Line's location on Google Maps and Google Earth, however, and you will see little more than bare rock and sand.

One of the great differences between Mars and Earth involves what's going on beneath the surface. Our planet remains a tectonically and volcanically active world -- witness the current eruptions in Hawaii -- while Mars has been a cold, geologically dead place for the past three billion years. That was the thinking at least. But a new paper in Nature Astronomy challenges that accepted wisdom. Mars, it suggests, may still be geologically active today. Time: The findings are the result of orbital photography, surface data, and computer modeling of a lowland region near the Martian equator known as Elysium Planitia -- where NASA's Mars InSight probe landed in 2018. Researchers from the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory analyzed recordings of Mars quakes taken by InSight and concluded that they all result from a series of subsurface fissures dubbed Cerberus Fossae, which stretch nearly 1,300 km (800 mi.) across the Martian surface. This gives rise to what are known as mantle plumes: blob-like masses of molten rock that rise to reach the base of the crust, causing quakes, faulting, and volcanic eruptions. Computer modeling of the region indicates that far from being geologically dead, Elysium Planitia experienced major volcanic eruptions as recently as 200 million years ago.

Colgate-Palmolive spent years devising a recyclable toothpaste tube. Pulling it off was a technical masterstroke, substituting plastic for a mix of materials that was historically tough to reclaim. The result, one executive said, was "nice squeezability." One big problem remains: Many sorting centers around the US don't accept them. From a report: The gap between Colgate's engineering success and the practicalities of where-do-we-toss-our-empties underscores a persistent challenge for corporate America: Switching to packaging that can bypass landfills isn't enough if there is no easy way to recycle it. In Colgate's case, that is 9 billion tubes a year requiring extra effort to avoid the trash heap.

The new tubes, which currently cover 78% of the company's US toothpaste lineup, are made with HDPE, the recyclable plastic used for products such as milk jugs. But in the fragmented US system, companies making recyclable products have to persuade a wide range of stakeholders, from local governments to private companies, to accept the items, sort them and turn them into something new. It's a process that can take years. The tubes still aren't classified as recyclable by How2Recycle, an organization that issues standardized labels with instructions on how to dispose of packaging.

A three-year-old NASA satellite lost touch with ground controllers two weeks ago and is now wandering through low Earth orbit without supervision. Sadly, the space agency fears the worst. Gizmodo reports: NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) mission has not communicated with ground stations since November 25 due to some sort of glitch the space agency is yet to identify, NASA wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. The spacecraft is equipped with an onboard command loss timer that's designed to reset ICON in the event that contact is lost for eight days, but the reset seemingly did not work as the team was still unable to communicate with the spacecraft on December 5 after the power cycle was complete.

Although silent, the ICON spacecraft is still intact. NASA used the Department of Defense's Space Surveillance Network to confirm that ICON is still out there in one piece, according to the space agency. But communication is obviously key for orbiting spacecraft, as it allows the mission team to send commands to satellites and also receive data through downlinked signals. "The ICON mission team is working to troubleshoot the issue and has narrowed the cause of the communication loss to problems within the avionics or radio-frequency communications subsystems," NASA wrote in the blog post. "The team is currently unable to determine the health of the spacecraft, and the lack of a downlink signal could be indicative of a system failure." Oof, that doesn't sound good.

A Japanese billionaire picked his crewmates for the first-ever artist-centered mission. Space.com reports: Yusaku Maezawa, who made his fortune as an online fashion retailer, announced the eight people who would be flying with him on the dearMoon mission, which aims to use a SpaceX Starship to fly around the moon as soon as next year. "I hope each and every one will recognize the responsibility that comes with leaving the Earth, travelling to the moon and back," Maezawa says in the video in Japanese, with a translation provided in-video.

Riding along with Maezawa will be:
- Steve Aoki, D.J., producer and electronic dance music artist with several Billboard-charting studio albums;
- Tim Dodd, YouTube creator of the "Everyday Astronaut" channel (Dodd has interviewed SpaceX founder Elon Musk multiple times on camera);
- Yemi A.D., artist and choreographer known for his work with JAD Dance Company and with Ye (formerly Kanye West);
- Karim Iliya, photographer whose publications include National Geographic Magazine;
- Rhiannon Adam, a photographer who has been supported by the BBC/Royal Geographical Society and won multiple awards, according to their website;
- Brendan Hall, filmmaker on projects such as the two-hour documentary "Blood Sugar Rising" about diabetes in the United States, according to the Internet Movie Database;
- Dev Joshi, an "Indian television actor known for portraying the role of Baal Veer in Sony Sab's Baal Veer and Baalveer Returns," according to the Internet Movie Database;
- T.O.P., a South Korean rapper known as the lead for the boy band Big Bang;
- Two backup members: dancer Miyu, and snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington.

Each member of the dearMoon crew was briefly quoted in a video from the dearMoon YouTube channel, and the announcement was confirmed on Dodd's and Maezawa's Twitter feeds.

Alphabet's Google plans to combine the team working on the mapping service Waze with the group overseeing the company's Maps product, as the search giant faces pressure to streamline operations and cut costs. From a report: Google plans to merge Waze's more than 500 employees with the company's Geo organization, which oversees the Maps, Earth and Street View products, beginning on Friday, according to a Google spokeswoman. Waze CEO Neha Parikh will exit her role following a transition period, the spokeswoman said. Google said it planned to maintain Waze as a stand-alone service and didn't plan to conduct any layoffs as part of the reorganization.

Google expects the restructuring to reduce overlapping mapmaking work across the Waze and Maps products, the company said. "Google remains deeply committed to Waze's unique brand, its beloved app and its thriving community of volunteers and users," the spokeswoman said in a statement. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has looked for areas to improve efficiency following a slowdown in advertising growth this year. In September, Mr. Pichai said he wanted Google to become 20% more productive and indicated the company could merge teams working on overlapping products.

The United Nations' biodiversity chief says global talks under way in Montreal are the "last chance" to reverse the destruction of the natural world. From a report: "Biodiversity is the foundation of life. Without it, there is no life," Elizabeth Maruma Mrema told BBC Radio 4's Inside Science programme. But she is worried about the amount of work still needed for the 196 countries to reach an agreement. The Global Biodiversity Framework, if agreed, represents fundamental change. It is the nature equivalent of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to limit global temperature rise and arrest the climate crisis.

"The targets in that [Global Biodiversity Framework] are a roadmap to, by 2030, reverse and halt the loss of biodiversity, which has reached rates unprecedented in the history of humankind" Ms Mrema said. The list of 20 targets includes quantifiable aims, such as a call for 30% of the Earth's land and sea to be conserved through the establishment of protected areas. But it also includes trickier political issues, such as protecting the rights and access of indigenous people to their territories. Indigenous communities are custodians of an estimated 85% of the world's biodiversity -- and where they have rights and access, it is significantly better protected from degradation and damage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: The world is choking in plastic trash, and the UN wants to do something to fix it. A weeklong meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on Plastic Pollution in Punta del Este, Uruguay, ended last Friday (Dec. 2). It was a first, formal step towards a legally binding international treaty to deal with the global plastics problem. Such a pact would be the most consequential environmental treaty in years, on par with 2015's Paris Agreement on climate change. The INC will spend the next two years negotiating how binding the regulations will be. While most of the 1,800 attendees in Uruguay ostensibly support ending plastic pollution as a baseline, competing motives have factions pulling in different directions. Hardline countries and campaigners are pushing for outright bans on "problem plastics" and certain chemicals, as well as internationally set regulations and strict production monitoring. Plastics industry coalitions -- which include the world's largest plastic producers, like Nestle and Unilever -- are calling for a focus on recycling and global targets defined by national priorities.

Details of the treaty will have to be negotiated over the next couple of years. The High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution, made up of 45 countries, is calling to restrict the single-use plastics found in packaging and consumer goods. They make up half of the plastic waste produced today, so a restriction would hugely reduce pollution, as well as force a transformation for consumers -- and the companies producing their goods -- in the way they drink bottled water, order takeout, or buy cleaning products and cosmetics. An international standard for monitoring production would also try to ensure that plastics are chemically safe, genuinely recyclable, and durable enough to be reusable. Of the roughly 10,000 chemicals used in producing plastics, more than 2,400 have been found to be harmful, causing a range of health problems from asthma to infertility. Recycling is not currently viable for most plastics, but better production monitoring could shift that. Further reading: Is Plastic Recycling a Myth?

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Fifty years ago today, astronauts aboard Apollo 17, NASA's last crewed mission to the Moon, took an iconic photograph of our planet. The image became known as the Blue Marble -- the first fully illuminated picture of Earth, in color, taken by a person. Now, scientists have re-created that image during a test run of a cutting-edge digital climate model. The model can simulate climatic phenomena, such as storms and ocean eddies, at 1-kilometer resolution, as much as 100 times sharper than typical global simulations.

To re-create the swirling winds of the Blue Marble -- including a cyclone over the Indian Ocean -- the researchers fed weather records from 1972 into the supercomputer-powered software. The resulting world captured distinctive features of the region, such as upwelling waters off the coast of Namibia and long, reedlike cloud coverage. Experts say the stunt highlights the growing sophistication of high-resolution climate models. Those are expected to form the core of the European Union's Destination Earth project, which aims to create a 'digital twin' of Earth to better forecast extreme weather and guide preparation plans.

California-based startup Heirloom is using limestone to capture CO2 from the atmosphere to reduce carbon emissions and prevent the worst effects of global warming. CNBC reports: CO2 naturally occurs in limestone. Heirloom removes that CO2 by heating the limestone into a powder and stores the extracted CO2 underground. The remaining powder is then thirsty for more CO2. Heirloom spread that powder out on trays, with a robot determining location for maximum CO2 absorption. A process that naturally takes years is reduced to just three days. Once the powder is full, the process starts again.

Heirloom's approach is relatively cheap compared with other types of carbon capture and removal and highly scalable, which made it attractive to investors like Microsoft. "We identified that Heirloom's enhanced mineralization approach used widely available materials as passive airflow technologies, [which] means it has a potential to reach a low cost trajectory that's really been a challenge to this industry as a whole," said Brandon Middaugh, director of the climate innovation fund at Microsoft.

Heirloom says it plans to deploy its first site next year and aims to remove 1 billion tons of CO2 by 2035. It also sells carbon credits, which allow companies to offset their own CO2 emissions. Buyers include Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify and Klarna.

It began decades ago, with a few hardy pioneers slogging north across the tundra. It's said that one individual walked so far to get there that he rubbed the skin off the underside of his long, flat tail. Today, his kind have homes and colonies scattered throughout the tundra in Alaska and Canada -- and their numbers are increasing. Beavers have found their way to the far north. From a report: It's not yet clear what these new residents mean for the Arctic ecosystem, but concerns are growing, and locals and scientists are paying close attention. Researchers have observed that the dams beavers build accelerate changes already in play due to a warming climate. Indigenous people are worried the dams could pose a threat to the migrations of fish species they depend on.

"Beavers really alter ecosystems," says Thomas Jung, senior wildlife biologist for Canada's Yukon government. In fact, their ability to transform landscapes may be second only to that of humans: Before they were nearly extirpated by fur trappers, millions of beavers shaped the flow of North American waters. In temperate regions, beaver dams affect everything from the height of the water table to the kinds of shrubs and trees that grow. Until a few decades ago, the northern edge of the beaver's range was defined by boreal forest, because beavers rely on woody plants for food and material to build their dams and lodges. But rapid warming in the Arctic has made the tundra more hospitable to the large rodents: Earlier snowmelt, thawing permafrost and a longer growing season have triggered a boom in shrubby plants like alder and willow that beavers need. Aerial photography from the 1950s showed no beaver ponds at all in Arctic Alaska. But in a recent study, Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, scanned satellite images of nearly every stream, river and lake in the Alaskan tundra and found 11,377 beaver ponds.

Palo Alto, California began investigating where its recycling goes over four years ago, reports NBC News. The results? Palo Alto's best reckoning, today, is that about 40% of its recyclable material stays in North America, where it's supposed to be processed according to strict environmental and labor standards. The other roughly 60% goes abroad, mainly to Asia, with next to no transparency about its fate.

Experts say cities and towns across the United States would probably have similar difficulty in determining how much of their recyclables are actually recycled. "If you keep stuff out of landfill but just dump it in Laos, that's not achieving a good goal," said Martin Bourque of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, a group that advised Palo Alto in its pursuit of transparency. "That's not what the whole idea was of recycling."

The main obstacle that Palo Alto encountered was that the half-dozen companies that trade the city's recyclables on world markets declined to name their trading partners, citing business reasons. Unable to force disclosure, Palo Alto city staff concluded they are stuck. "It is not possible to definitively determine whether the materials are being recycled properly or whether they may be causing environmental or social problems," they wrote in a report published this year....

Palo Alto officials said they've taken two lessons from this saga. First, they want to recycle more in the U.S.... If made permanent, staff said, the change could increase the average citizen's recycling bill by about $33 a year. The second lesson, City Manager Ed Shikada said, is that Palo Alto can't transform the global recycling system alone. In March the city began talks with other interested California cities to discuss possible reforms at the local or state levels. The group includes San Jose, the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area, and about a dozen other Northern California municipalities. Shikada said they might seek to expand recycling capacity in California, for instance, or ask lawmakers to impose new transparency requirements on companies that export recyclable goods.
The article cites World Bank estimates that only about 9% of waste ultimately gets recycled in East Asia and Pacific region. "The balance goes to landfills and incinerators or into nature, with local and global consequences.... Research suggests countries in Southeast Asia rank among the top global sources of ocean plastic."

"Childhood friends in Oman who figured out how to turn carbon dioxide into rock are among five winners chosen for the Prince of Wales's prestigious Earthshot Prize," reports the BBC: The annual awards were created by Prince William to fund projects that aim to save the planet. Each winner will receive £1m ($1.2m) to develop their innovation.... "I believe that the Earthshot solutions you have seen this evening prove we can overcome our planet's greatest challenges," Prince William said during the ceremony. "By supporting and scaling them we can change our future," he said.
1,500 projects were nominated, according to the event's web site. Here's the five winners:

• A Kenya-based company producing stoves powered by processed biomass (made from charcoal, wood and sugarcane) that "burns cleaner, creating 90% less pollution than an open fire," while cutting fuel costs in half.
• The Indian startup behind Greenhouse-in-a-box. "Plants in the greenhouse require 98% less water than those outdoors and yields are seven-times higher," explains the site, while the greenhouses themselves are 90% cheaper than a standard greenhouse, "more than doubling farmers' incomes [while] using less water and fewer pesticides."
• A Queensland-based program to expand the network of rangers using drones to monitor reefs and wildfires while sharing information and innovative ideas.
• London-based start-up Notpla, which created a plastic alternative made from seaweed and plants that's entirely biodegradable. (The seaweed used in its production also captures carbon twenty-times faster than trees.)
• The company 44.01 removes CO2 permanently by mineralising it in peridotite, accelerating the natural process by pumping carbonated water into peridotite underground. (Unlike carbon storage, "mineralizing" CO2 removes it forever, making the process safer, cost-effective, and scalable.)

Five prizes will be awarded each year until 2030.