Slashdot reader Charlotte Web writes: The "Group of Seven" (or G7) nations are some of the world's largest economies — the U.S. and Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy, and Japan. On Sunday they pledged $2 billion to help developing countries pivot away from fossil fuels and pledged an "overwhelmingly decarbonized" electricity sector by 2030. The New York Times calls these "major steps in what leaders hope will be a global transition to wind, solar and other energy that does not produce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions."

Politico's Ryan Heath argues "The language on a 'green revolution' is quite strong — there's plenty of detail missing, but it gives climate campaigners a lot to hit leaders with if they fail to deliver. And it's a big deal for the G-7 to agree to 'to conserve or protect at least 30 percent of our land and oceans by 2030.'"
Other reports from Politico's writers:

• "Boris Johnson admitted that the world's richest economies had not managed to secure a widely advertised 1 billion vaccine doses to send to developing countries. The final communique says the group will deliver 870 million doses over the next year."

• "The G-7 nations called for a 'timely, transparent, expert-led, and science-based WHO-convened' investigation into the origins of Covid-19, including in China. WHO's first crack at an investigation — released in March — called a lab leak 'extremely unlikely,' but China didn't grant access to key documents and Secretary of State Antony Blinken called that investigation 'highly deficient' this morning. The U.S. government remains split between two origin theories."

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on "renewed interest in cables that can power consumers in one country with electricity generated hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in another" and possibly even transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways: Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms many believe essential to meet climate targets often can't. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. As countries phase out carbon to meet climate goals, they'll have to spend at least $14 trillion to strengthen grids by 2050, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That's only a little shy of projected spending on new renewable generation capacity and it's increasingly clear that high- and ultra-high-voltage direct current lines will play a part in the transition.

The question is how international will they be...?
The article points out that in theory, Mongolia's Gobi desert "has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power — more than double the U.S.'s entire installed power generation capacity — to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions..." The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile's Atacama Desert, which has the world's highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China's. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China...

Persuading countries to rely on each other to keep the lights on is tough, but the universal, yet intermittent nature of solar and wind energy also makes it inevitable, according to Rifkin. "This isn't the geopolitics of fossil fuels," owned by some and bought by others, he says. "It is biosphere politics, based on geography. Wind and sun force sharing...."

If these supergrids don't get built, it will be because their time has both come and gone. Not only are they expensive, politically difficult, and unpopular — they have to cross a lot of backyards — their focus on mega-power installations seems outdated to some. Distributed microgeneration as close to home as your rooftop, battery storage, and transportable hydrogen all offer competing solutions to the delivery problems supergrids aim to solve.

Slashdot reader SysEngineer shares this report from the BBC: Scientists are reporting what they say is the longest sediment avalanche yet measured in action. It occurred underwater off West Africa, in a deep canyon leading away from the mouth of the Congo River. Something in excess of a cubic kilometre of sand and mud descended into the deep. This colossal flow kept moving for two whole days and ran out for more than 1,100km across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

The event would have gone unrecorded were it not for the fact that the slide broke two submarine telecommunications cables, slowing the internet and other data traffic between Nigeria and South Africa in the process. And also because of the prescient action of researchers who had lined the length of the Congo Canyon with instruments capable of measuring current and sediment velocities.

The auction has ended for a seat with Jeff Bezos and his brother on their first Blue Origin flight into space next month. Slashdot reader ytene writes that a live-streamed auction for the seat "lasted less than 10 minutes after opening at $4.8 million."

The Hill reports: That came after nearly 7,600 people from 159 countries had registered to bid on a seat for the July 20 space flight by the time registration closed Thursday, according to ABC News... Blue Origin said the $28 million would be donated to Club for the Future, Blue Origin's 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a mission to "inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM and to help invent the future of life in space," according to its website... Blue Origin said the fourth and final crew member of the mission will also be announced when the identity of the auction winner is revealed.
Today CNN ran a story headlined "Jeff Bezos is going to space for 11 minutes. Here's how risky that is." (Or how safe?) They'll be going up and coming right back down, and they'll be doing it in less time — about 11 minutes — than it takes most people to get to work. Suborbital flights differ greatly from orbital flights of the type most of us think of when we think of spaceflight. Blue Origin's New Shepard flights will be brief, up-and-down trips, though they will go more than 62 miles above Earth, which is widely considered to be the edge of outer space.

Orbital rockets need to drum up enough power to hit at least 17,000 miles per hour, or what's known as orbital velocity, essentially giving a spacecraft enough energy to continue whipping around the Earth rather than being dragged immediately back down by gravity. Suborbital flights require far less power and speed. That means less time the rocket is required to burn, lower temperatures scorching the outside of the spacecraft, less force and compression ripping at the spacecraft, and generally fewer opportunities for something to go very wrong.

New Shepard's suborbital fights hit about about three times the speed of sound — roughly 2,300 miles per hour — and fly directly upward until the rocket expends most of its fuel. The crew capsule will then separate from the rocket at the top of the trajectory and briefly continue upward before the capsule almost hovers at the top of its flight path, giving the passengers a few minutes of weightlessness. It works sort of like an extended version of the weightlessness you experience when you reach the peak of a roller coaster hill, just before gravity brings your cart — or, in Bezos' case, your space capsule — screaming back down toward the ground.

The New Shepard capsule then deploys a large plume of parachutes to slow its descent to less than 20 miles per hour before it hits the ground... Blue Origin's New Shepard capsule, which is fully autonomous and does not require a pilot, has never had an explosive mishap in 15 test flights. And the nature of Bezos' flight means it comes with some inherently lower risks than more ambitious space travel attempts.

But that doesn't mean the risk is zero, either.

In the longest biological experiment on the International Space Station yet, freeze-dried mouse sperm remained viable after nearly six years in space. Exposure to space radiation didn't seem to harm the sperm's DNA or the cells' ability to produce healthy "space pups," researchers report in Science Advances. Science News reports: That may be good news for future spacefarers. Scientists have worried that chronic exposure to space radiation might not only put astronauts at risk for cancer and other diseases, but also create mutations in their DNA that could be passed down to future generations. The new results hint that deep-space travelers could safely bear children. Studying how space radiation affects reproduction is tricky. Instruments on Earth can't perfectly mimic space radiation, and the ISS lacks freezers for long-term cell storage. So biologist Teruhiko Wakayama of the University of Yamanashi in Kofu, Japan and colleagues freeze-dried sperm, allowing it to be stored at room temperature. The team then sent sperm from 12 mice to the space station, while keeping other sperm from the same mice on the ground.

After returning the sperm cells to Earth, rehydrating them and injecting them into fresh mouse eggs, the team transferred those embryos to female mice. About 240 healthy space pups were born from sperm kept on the ISS for nearly three years; about 170 others were born from sperm kept on the space station for nearly six years. Genetic analyses revealed no differences between these space pups and mice born from sperm stored on the ground. Space pups that mated as adults had healthy children and grandchildren.

Amid an intensifying drought, Lake Mead in Nevada, the nation's largest reservoir by volume, reached its lowest level since the 1930s late Wednesday. From a report: The record low is due to a combination of years of punishing drought that's worsening across the Southwest, as well as challenges in managing water resources for a burgeoning population. The record-low reading, as well as expected subsequent drops in the lake, are almost certain to trigger a federal "water shortage" declaration later this summer, which would set off cuts in water allocations to several states. Lake Mead, which sits along the border between Nevada and Arizona, is part of the vast Colorado River basin that provides water for agriculture and human consumption to seven states, and also generates electricity at the massive Hoover Dam.

Cuts in water supplies, to be determined in August, would affect the region's farmers, residents of sprawling cities such as Las Vegas, and others. Already, the Hoover Dam is operating below its maximum capacity, and it could see a further reduction in power generation as the summer goes on. Years of unusually dry conditions along with a growing population and water resource decisions have helped lead to the situation. As of Thursday morning, the Bureau of Reclamation showed Lake Mead's hourly water levels dipped to 1,071.48 feet Thursday, and remained below the previous record set on July 1, 2016.

Several of macOS Monterey's features won't be available to users with an Intel-powered Macs. On the macOS Monterey features page, fine print indicates that the following features require a Mac with the M1 chip, including any MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac model released since November 2020: 1. Portrait Mode blurred backgrounds in FaceTime videos
2. Live Text for copying and pasting, looking up, or translating text within photos
3. An interactive 3D globe of Earth in the Maps app
4. More detailed maps in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London in the Maps app
5. Text-to-speech in more languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish
6. On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline
7. Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance)

Between May and July of 2013, a single grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus) was spotted off the coast of Namibia. This was odd, as while there have been rare sightings of this species in the Atlantic Ocean, they are usually confined to the northern hemisphere. From a report: It turns out the animal had travelled at least 20,000 kilometres (12,427.4 miles) -- halfway around the planet -- setting a record for a migration of any mammal, barring humans. Rus Hoelzel at Durham University in the UK and his colleagues used tissue samples collected from the whale's skin and analysed its DNA to trace its origins.

By comparing it with other grey whale populations, they found that this individual, a male, was probably born to the endangered western North Pacific population, found along the coast of eastern Asia. This means it travelled at least 20,000 kilometres to get to the southern Atlantic. Earth's circumference is slightly over 40,000 kilometres. "This is the record really for an in-water migration, if you're assuming that this individual started its life in the north-west Pacific and it found its way to Namibia," says Hoelzel. "That's as far as any vertebrate has ever gone in water, as far as we know." Land dwelling mammals fall far short of this feat -- the record is a grey wolf that roamed more than 7000 kilometres in a year.

On World Oceans Day, Nat Geo cartographers say the swift current circling Antarctica keeps the waters there distinct and worthy of their own name: the Southern Ocean. National Geographic reports: Since National Geographic began making maps in 1915, it has recognized four oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. Starting on June 8, World Oceans Day, it will recognize the Southern Ocean as the world's fifth ocean. "The Southern Ocean has long been recognized by scientists, but because there was never agreement internationally, we never officially recognized it," says National Geographic Society Geographer Alex Tait. Geographers debated whether the waters around Antarctica had enough unique characteristics to deserve their own name, or whether they were simply cold, southern extensions of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.

While the other oceans are defined by the continents that fence them in, the Southern Ocean is defined by a current. Scientists estimate that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) was established roughly 34 million years ago, when Antarctica separated from South America. That allowed for the unimpeded flow of water around the bottom of the Earth. The ACC flows from west to east around Antarctica, in a broad fluctuating band roughly centered around a latitude of 60 degrees south -- the line that is now defined as the northern boundary of the Southern Ocean. Inside the ACC, the waters are colder and slightly less salty than ocean waters to the north.

Extending from the surface to the ocean floor, the ACC transports more water than any other ocean current. It pulls in waters from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, helping drive a global circulation system known as the conveyor belt, which transports heat around the planet. Cold, dense water that sinks to the ocean floor off Antarctica also helps store carbon in the deep ocean. In both those ways, the Southern Ocean has a crucial impact on Earth's climate. [...] For now, by fencing in the frigid southern waters, the ACC helps keep Antarctica cold and the Southern Ocean ecologically distinct. Thousands of species live there and nowhere else. By drawing attention to the Southern Ocean, the National Geographic Society hopes to promote its conservation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere reached 419 parts per million in May, its highest level in more than four million years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on Monday. After dipping last year because of pandemic-fueled lockdowns, emissions of greenhouse gases have begun to soar again as economies open and people resume work and travel. The newly released data about May carbon dioxide levels show that the global community so far has failed to slow the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, NOAA said in its announcement.

The May measurement is the monthly average of atmospheric data recorded by NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at an observatory atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano. NOAA's monthly average from its measurements came to 419.13 parts per million, and scientists from Scripps calculated their average as 418.92. A year ago, the average was 417 parts per million. The last time the atmosphere held similar amounts of carbon dioxide was during the Pliocene period, NOAA said, about 4.1 to 4.5 million years ago. At that time, sea levels were 78 feet higher. The planet was an average of 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, and large forests might have grown in what is today's Arctic tundra. "We are adding roughly 40 billion metric tons of CO2 pollution to the atmosphere per year," said Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, in a statement. "If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, the highest priority must be to reduce CO2 pollution to zero at the earliest possible date."

The U.S. Air Force wants to invest $38 million next year in projects under the heading "Rocket Cargo." Ars Technica reports that Air Force is already spending $9.7 million on the projects, "but seeks to increase that total for the coming year as it moves into the test phase of the program. The funds will have to be approved by Congress as part of its budget deliberation process this summer and fall."

The Air Force's 462-page budget-justifying document says their branch of the military "seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver Air Force cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity."

Although this does not refer to Starship by name, this is the only vehicle under development in the world with this kind of capability. The Air Force does not intend to invest directly into the vehicle's development, the document says. However, it proposes to fund science and technology needed to interface with the Starship vehicle so that the Air Force might leverage its capabilities. Clearly, some Air Force officials are intrigued by the possibility of launching 100 tons of cargo from the United States and having the ability to land it anywhere in the world about an hour later.

The hills of ice at the base of Alaska's Muldrow Glacier "have sat undisturbed and covered by tundra for more than 60 years," reports the Washington Post, adding that in normal years the glacier only moves about three inches a day.

But that's suddenly changed, and they're now moving between 360 and 720 inches a day (that is, 30 to 60 feet, every day). The rare phenomenon began last fall some 12 miles uphill. That's where the glacier initially started sliding, its smooth surface ice cracking under tremendous, hidden stresses. New crevasses opened and ice cliffs were pushed up in a chaotic jumble. The first witness was a pilot who spied the scene in March as he flew around the north side of Denali, the continent's tallest mountain.

The Muldrow has been "surging" forward ever since, at speeds up to 100 times faster than normal....

Surges are one of the last mysteries for those who study glaciers, in part because they happen so infrequently and in just a fraction of places around the world. The activity is different from a glacier actually growing in size, and it can take decades for the right conditions to develop.... The prevailing theory of surges is that the natural advance of a glacier causes friction, which melts the deepest ice. Loose gravel traps the meltwater underneath. But as snow and ice accumulate in the glacier's higher elevations, the mass there gets top heavy. A surge redistributes that mass to lower elevations, with the meltwater serving as a lubricant that helps the glacier pick up speed as it slides downhill.

This last happened with the Muldrow during the winter and spring of 1956-57. Given its record of surges roughly every 50 years, scientists had long anticipated the current event. Their concern is that a warming climate could spell disaster for future surges. "You wonder, 'Are you going to ever be able to see the surge again?' " said Chad Hults, regional geologist for Alaska's national parks. "I don't know, because 50 years from now, you might lose enough glacier ice that even if it surges... you might not actually even be able to see any difference."

For most of the glaciologists and geologists tracking today's surge, it's a once-in-a-lifetime thrill.
The article also reminds readers that "across the Alaska Range, glaciers are losing mass because of climate change."

"Earthquakes shouldn't occur more than 300 kilometers below Earth's surface, according to most geophysical models," reports Science magazine. "Yet they commonly do — a phenomenon that has mystified seismologists for decades."

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares their report on one possible explanation: that water carried by the tectonic plates shoved beneath continents "could be triggering these deep temblors." The find may also explain another marvel: why a huge number of fist-size diamonds form at this depth...

Steven Shirey, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institution for Science...and his team took a closer look at how water might make its way down deep... Regardless of depth, Shirey and his team found that once rocks in the slabs reached temperatures above 580 degrees C, they were less able to hold water. As that water flooded out of the slab, it weakened the surrounding rocks and triggered quakes, Shirey and his colleagues report in AGU Advances. This water, typically chock-full of dissolved minerals, would also be available to fuel diamond formation...

"The temperature tells the story," says Douglas Wiens, a seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the new study. If the tectonic slab starts out hot, as it would if the rocks are relatively young, he says, the plate will dehydrate at depths between 100 and 250 kilometers and thus won't carry water far enough down to generate deep quakes. But if rocks in the sinking slab are old and relatively cool, water will stay locked inside the sinking slab for a longer time, persisting there until it is released at depths of 300 to 500 kilometers or more.

Further work in both the lab and the field will be needed to fully understand the relationships between water released from sinking slabs and deep earthquakes, Wiens says. In the meantime, he says, it's clear that diamonds that form at those depths, imperfections and all, will be critical to teasing out the details of the story.

Plans for an artificial island to house 35,000 people and protect the port of Copenhagen from rising sea levels have been approved by Danish MPs. The BBC reports: The giant island, named Lynetteholm, would be connected to the mainland via a ring road, tunnels and a metro line. The approval by Denmark's parliament paves the way for the 1 sq mile (2.6 sq km) project to begin later this year. But it faces opposition from environmentalists who have concerns over the impact of its construction.

Plans for Lynetteholm include a dam system around its perimeter, with the aim of protecting the harbour from rising sea levels and storm surges. If construction goes ahead as planned, the majority of the foundations for the island off Denmark's capital should be in place by 2035, with an aim to fully complete the project by 2070. Some of the environmental concerns include the transportation of materials by road, which will involve large numbers of vehicles to move the 80 million tons of soil required to create the peninsula alone. "There are also concerns among environmentalists about the movement of sediment at sea and the possible impact on ecosystems and water quality," the report adds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Researchers believe they've now pinpointed a previously unknown planetary-scale reset that occurred about 19 million years ago. This extinction event transpired in the world's oceans, and decimated shark populations. The boneless fishes still have not recovered from the damage, the team suggests in a paper published Thursday in Science. Scales cover the bodies -- and even the eyeballs -- of sharks. Known as "dermal denticles," these scales function like protective armor and their ridges also reduce drag as the animals swim, said Elizabeth C. Sibert, an oceanographer and paleontologist at Yale University. These scales are microscopic -- each one is only about the width of a human hair -- but sharks slough off about 100 denticles for each tooth they lose, making them common in the fossil record. This abundance makes them valuable to scientists seeking to understand the past, said Paul Harnik, a paleobiologist at Colgate University, not involved in the research. "It's a sheer numbers game."

In 2015, Dr. Sibert received a box of mud spanning about 40 million years of history. The reddish clay, extracted from two sediment cores that had been drilled deep into the Pacific Ocean seafloor, contained fish teeth, shark denticles and other marine microfossils. Using a microscope and a very fine paintbrush, Dr. Sibert picked through the two sediments and counted the number of fossils in samples separated in time by several hundred thousand years. About halfway through her data set, Dr. Sibert spotted an abrupt change in the fossil record. Nineteen million years ago, the ratio of shark denticles to fish teeth changed drastically: Samples older than that tended to contain roughly one denticle for every five fish teeth (a ratio of about 20 percent), but more recent samples had ratios closer to 1 percent. That meant that sharks suddenly became much less common, relative to fish, during an era known as the early Miocene, Dr. Sibert concluded. Dr. Sibert and her collaborators, in an earlier study using the same data set, had also found that sharks declined in abundance by roughly 90 percent about 19 million years ago. These declines in relative and absolute shark abundance suggest that something happened to shark populations about 19 million years ago, Dr. Sibert concluded.

But there was still the question of whether a true extinction occurred, she said. "We wanted to know if the sharks went extinct, or if they just became less prominent." To test the idea of an extinction, Dr. Sibert recruited Leah D. Rubin, a marine scientist then at the College of the Atlantic in Maine. Together, they developed a framework to identify distinct groups of denticles. The researchers settled on 19 denticle traits -- such as their shape and the orientation of their ridges. Dr. Sibert and Ms. Rubin sorted roughly 1,300 denticles into 88 groups. These groups don't correspond exactly to shark species, but seeing more groups is an indicator that a shark population is more diverse, the researchers proposed. Of the 88 denticle groups initially present before 19 million years ago, only nine persisted afterward. The reduction in shark diversity suggests that they experienced an extinction around that time, Dr. Sibert and Ms. Rubin concluded. In fact, this event was probably even more cataclysmic to sharks than the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact that occurred 66 million years ago, they said. "There were just a small fraction that survived into this post-extinction world," Dr. Sibert said. The researchers have no idea what caused this massive die-off. "There were no significant climatic changes in the early Miocene, and there's no evidence of an asteroid impact around that time," the report says.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Venus can no longer wait. NASA will send two new robotic missions to Earth's hothouse twin, the agency's new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced this afternoon at his "State of NASA" speech here at the agency's headquarters. The missions, together costing up to $1 billion, mark NASA's first visit to the planet since the early 1990s, whereas nearby Mars has seen a host of robotic visitors. They're expected to launch by the decade's end.

The scientific case for exploring Venus has long been strong. No planet has more to say about how Earth came to be. Mars is tiny and frozen, its heat and atmosphere largely lost to space long ago. Venus could host active volcanoes, and it may have once featured oceans and continents, which are critical to the evolution of life. Plate tectonics roughly like Earth's might have held sway there, or might be starting today, hidden under the clouds. Venus also proves by example that orbiting within a star's "habitable zone" doesn't guarantee a planet is suitable for life. Understanding how Venus's atmosphere went bad and turned into a runaway greenhouse, boiling away any oceans and baking the surface, could help astronomers studying other solar systems distinguish truly Earth-like exoplanets from our evil twins.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The nations that make up the G7 have pumped billions of dollars more into fossil fuels than they have into clean energy since the Covid-19 pandemic, despite their promises of a green recovery. As the UK prepares to host the G7 summit, new analysis reveals that the countries attending committed $189 billion to support oil, coal and gas between January 2020 and March 2021. In comparison, the same countries -- the UK, US, Canada, Italy, France, Germany and Japan -- spent $147 billion on clean forms of energy. The support for fossil fuels from seven of the world's richest nations included measures to remove or downgrade environmental regulations as well as direct funding of oil, gas and coal.

The analysis from the development charity Tearfund, the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the Overseas Development Institute showed that the nations missed opportunities to make their response to the pandemic greener. In most cases, money provided for fossil fuel industries was given with no strings attached, rather than with conditions requiring a reduction in emissions or pollution. The analysis found that eight in every 10 dollars spent on non-renewable energy came without conditions. This included lifelines that were thrown to the aviation and car industries, which received $115 billion from the G7 countries. Of that money, 80% was given with no attempt to force the sectors to cut their emissions in return for the support. Only one in every 10 dollars committed to the Covid-19 response benefited the "cleanest" energies such as renewables and energy efficiency measures.

Obipale shares a report from ScienceAlert: The inevitable has occurred. A piece of space debris too small to be tracked has hit and damaged part of the International Space Station -- namely, the Canadarm2 robotic arm. The instrument is still operational, but the object punctured the thermal blanket and damaged the boom beneath. It's a sobering reminder that the low-Earth orbit's space junk problem is a ticking time bomb. Canadarm2 -- formally known as the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), designed by the Canadian Space Agency -- has been a fixture on the space station for 20 years. It's a multi-jointed titanium robotic arm that can assist with maneuvering objects outside the ISS, including cargo shuttles, and performing station maintenance.

It's unclear exactly when the impact occurred. The damage was first noticed on 12 May, during a routine inspection. NASA and the CSA worked together to take detailed images of and assess the damage. "Despite the impact, results of the ongoing analysis indicate that the arm's performance remains unaffected," the CSA wrote in a blog post. "The damage is limited to a small section of the arm boom and thermal blanket. Canadarm2 is continuing to conduct its planned operations." Robotics operations on the ISS using the Canadarm2 will continue as planned for the near future, the CSA said. But both space agencies will continue to gather data in order to perform an analysis of the event, both to understand how it occurred, and to assess future risk.

"The web browser is a crucial part of modern life, and yet it hasn't really been revised since the '90s," writes Protocol. "That may be about to change." The browser tab is an underrated thing. Most people think of them only when there are too many, when their computer once again buckles under Chrome's weight. Even the developers who build the tabs — the engineers and designers working on Chrome, Firefox, Brave and the rest — haven't done much to them. The internet has evolved in massive, earth-shaking ways over the last two decades, but tabs haven't really changed since they became a browser feature in the mid '90s.

Josh Miller, however, has big plans for browser tabs. Miller is the CEO of a new startup called The Browser Company, and he wants to change the way people think about browsers altogether. He sees browsers as operating systems, and likes to wonder aloud what "iOS for the web" might look like. What if your browser could build you a personalized news feed because it knows the sites you go to? What if every web app felt like a native app, and the browser itself was just the app launcher? What if you could drag a file from one tab to another, and it just worked? What if the web browser was a shareable, synced, multiplayer experience? It would be nothing like the simple, passive windows to the web that browsers are now. Which is exactly the goal.

The Browser Company (which everyone on the team just calls Browser) is one of a number of startups that are rethinking every part of the browser stack. Mighty has built a version of Chrome that runs on powerful server hardware and streams the browser itself over the web. Brave is building support for decentralized protocols like IPFS, and experimenting with using cryptocurrencies as a new business model for publishers. Synth is building a new bookmarks system that acts more like a web-wide inbox. Sidekick offers a vertical app launcher and makes tabs easier to organize. "A change is coming," said Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker. "The question is just the time frame, and what's actually required to make it happen."

They have lots of different ideas, but they share a belief that the browser can, and should, be more than it is. "We don't need a new web browser," Miller said. "We need a new successor to the web browser."

While he was at the White House, Chief Digital Officer (and Miller's boss) Jason Goldman said something Miller couldn't forget. "Platforms have all the leverage," is how Miller remembers it. "And if you care about the future of the internet, or the way we use our computers, or want to improve any of the things that are broken about technology ... you can't really just build an application. Platforms, whether it's iOS or Windows or Android or Mac OS, that's where all the control is."

Natural gas "creates less carbon emissions than the coal it replaces, but we have to find ways to minimize the leakage of methane."

That's the opinion of Vaclav Smil, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, writing in IEEE's Spectrum (in an article shared by Slashdot reader schwit1): Natural gas is abundant, low-cost, convenient, and reliably transported, with low emissions and high combustion efficiency. Natural-gas-fired heating furnaces have maximum efficiencies of 95 to 97 percent, and combined-cycle gas turbines now achieve overall efficiency slightly in excess of 60 percent. Of course, burning gas generates carbon dioxide, but the ratio of energy to carbon is excellent: Burning a gigajoule of natural gas produces 56 kilograms of carbon dioxide, about 40 percent less than the 95 kg emitted by bituminous coal.

This makes gas the obvious replacement for coal. In the United States, this transition has been unfolding for two decades. Gas-fueled capacity increased by 192 gigawatts from 2000 to 2005 and by an additional 69 GW from 2006 through the end of 2020. Meanwhile, the 82 GW of coal-fired capacity that U.S. utilities removed from 2012 to 2020 is projected to be augmented by another 34 GW by 2030, totaling 116 GW — more than a third of the former peak rating.

So far, so green. But methane is itself a very potent greenhouse gas, packing from 84 to 87 times as much global warming potential as an equal quantity of carbon dioxide when measured over 20 years (and 28 to 36 times as much over 100 years). And some of it leaks out. In 2018, a study of the U.S. oil and natural-gas supply chain found that those emissions were about 60 percent higher than the Environmental Protection Agency had estimated. Such fugitive emissions, as they are called, are thought to be equivalent to 2.3 percent of gross U.S. gas production...

Without doubt, methane leakages during extraction, processing, and transportation do diminish the overall beneficial impact of using more natural gas, but they do not erase it, and they can be substantially reduced.