CNN’s Rene Marsh travels to Nevada, home to a lithium-rich extinct supervolcano, to see how the rush to procure critical minerals in the United States is pitting environmental advocates against each other.
Less than two weeks after CEO Elon Musk revealed that SpaceX has restarted construction of a Starship launch site at Kennedy Space Center’s existing LC-39A pad, NASA has revealed the company’s plans for an entirely different Starship launch site just a few miles to the north.
Known as Launch Complex 49 (LC-49) and located where NASA once considered building LC-39C, a third Saturn-class pad to match 39A and 39B, NASA now says that SpaceX aims to develop the site into a dedicated Starship launch pad. The plot of land NASA deemed LC-49 as recently as 2017 sits about 1 mile (1.6 km) northwest of NASA’s LC-39B Space Launch System (SLS) pad and 3 miles (5 km) northwest of LC-39A, which SpaceX has leased since 2014 and launched out of since 2017. Unlike 39A, though, SpaceX has a huge amount of work – and major environmental reviews – ahead of it to turn LC-49 into a site capable of launching a rocket more than twice as powerful as Saturn V.
As of today, “LC-49” amounts to a mostly arbitrary dotted line on a map. Situated a few thousand feet south of the lovingly named Mosquito Lagoon Aquatic Preserve and Canaveral Seashore National Park, the site encompasses a variety of wild wetlands and is fully undeveloped. While substantially wetter, the land SpaceX hopes to develop is actually quite similar to the site that now hosts Starbase’s Starship launch facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. Prior to SpaceX’s arrival, the area was empty coastal mudflats.
Elementary, a company developing an AI platform for automating physical product inspections, has raised $30 million in venture capital.
OneZoom is a one-stop site for exploring all life on Earth, its evolutionary history, and how much of it is threatened with extinction.
The OneZoom explorer – available at onezoom.org – maps the connections between 2.2 million living species, the closest thing yet to a single view of all species known to science. The interactive tree of life allows users to zoom in to any species and explore its relationships with others, in a seamless visualisation on a single web page. The explorer also includes images of over 85,000 species, plus, where known, their vulnerability to extinction.
Did black holes form immediately after the Big Bang? How did supermassive black holes form? What is dark matter? In an alternative model for how the Universe came to be, as compared to the ‘textbook’ history of the Universe, a team of astronomers propose that both of these cosmic mysteries could be explained by so-called ‘primordial black holes’. In the graphic, the focus is on comparing the timing of the appearance of the first black holes and stars, and is not meant to imply there are no black holes considered in the standard model. Credit: ESA.
Imagine that your team is meeting to decide whether to continue an expensive marketing campaign. After a few minutes, it becomes clear that nobody has the metrics on-hand to make the decision. You chime in with a solution and ask Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa to back you up with information: “Alexa, how many users did we convert to customers last month with Campaign A?” and Alexa responds with the answer. You just amplified your team’s intelligence with AI. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Intelligence amplification is the use of technology to augment human intelligence. And a paradigm shift is on the horizon, where new devices will offer less intrusive, more intuitive ways to amplify our intelligence.
Hearables, or wireless in-ear computational earpieces, are an example of intelligence amplification devices that have been adopted recently and rapidly. An example is Apple’s AirPods, which are smart earbuds that connect to Apple devices and integrate with Siri via voice commands. Apple has also filed a patent for earbuds equipped with biometric sensors that could record data such as a user’s temperature, heart rate, and movement. Similarly, Google’s Pixel Buds give users direct access to the Google Assistant and its powerful knowledge graph. Google Assistant seamlessly connects users to information stored in Google platforms, like email and calendar management. Google Assistant also provides users with highly-personalized recommendations, helps automate personal communication, and offloads monotonous tasks like setting timers, managing lists, and controlling IoT devices.
The resulting solar cell exhibits a power conversion efficiency of 15.2% and almost 80% transparency.
The U.S. government has warned for years that products from Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Co. pose a national security risk. Now, a Bloomberg investigation has found a key piece of evidence explaining why. Bloomberg’s Jamie Tarabay reports on “Bloomberg Daybreak: Asia.”
HONG KONG, Dec 17 (Reuters Breakingviews) — After conquering semiconductors, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s biggest chipmaker has a new challenge: kickstarting Taiwan’s stalled green transition. Bureaucracy and red tape have marred the island’s renewable-energy goals. The company’s (2330.TW) voracious appetite for cleaner power will offer a much-needed spark.
Referendums on whether to restart a nuclear power plant and whether to change the location of a planned $2 billion liquid fossil gas terminal highlight how politically contentious the island’s energy issues are. President Tsai Ing-wen has pledged to phase out nuclear power and is hoping gas-fired plants will supply half of the $600 billion economy’s electricity needs by 2025. At the same time, she has promised to increase the share of renewable sources to 20%, from 5.4% in 2020.
On paper that’s doable, but in practice it looks increasingly out of reach. Covid-19 disruptions held up wind and solar projects, but lengthy and complex approval processes are also to blame. Offshore wind developers, for instance, must obtain consent letters from at least eight different authorities as well as approval from the environmental watchdog even to be eligible to bid for projects. Those that make it to the second round must also detail how they can meet local procurement requirements, often onerous criteria given how new the industry is in Taiwan. According to one 2021 estimate, unfinished wind and solar projects totalled $83 billion, among the highest in Asia.
A vast system of canyons that dramatically scars the face of Mars could be harboring reserves of hidden water.
An unusually high quantity of hydrogen has been detected in the heart of the 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) of canyons known as Valles Marineris, nicknamed the Grand Canyon of Mars. We know this thanks to new data from the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter’s FREND instrument.
The finding suggests that, at depths up to a meter (three feet) below the surface, the soil in the region is rich in water, either bound up in minerals or as subsurface water ice, potentially offering a new way of locating the precious stuff on the apparently extremely arid world.
