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USPS has been criticized for not ordering more EVs.

The United States Postal Service announced its initial order of 50,000 next-generation delivery vehicles, 10,019 of which will be battery-electric vehicles. It’s a notable number considering the agency’s resistance to calls for increasing the number of EVs in its future delivery fleet.

Originally, the postal service said it would purchase 165,000 next-generation mail trucks, only 10 percent of which will be battery-electric vehicles. President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats urged the agency to increase the number of EVs, but USPS determined there was no legal reason to change its plans.

Now, the postal service says it will increase its initial order of EVs from 5,000 to 10,019, determining it “makes good sense from an operational and financial perspective.”

Continue reading “USPS is doubling its initial order of electric mail delivery trucks” | >

Rodolfo Salas, chief of paleontology at Peru’s National University of San Marcos, said that the whale was a “sea monster.”

“The most incredible thing is that the skull is in a very good state of preservation, it has complete teeth; it was a first-order predator, at the top of that time that fed on fish penguins; a sea monster just as they imagine it and we think it is a new species,” Salas said.

The “Ocucaje Predator,” as the researchers dubbed it, was about 55 feet long and used its massive, powerful teeth to feed on tuna, sharks and schools of sardines.

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A Chinese company has announced the construction of a new supersonic jet that is designed to travel from China to New York in just 60 minutes.

The company behind the project is Space Transportation, and according to its announcement, the company will be building a “rocket with wings” that will be much cheaper than the rockets used to take satellites into low-Earth orbit, while also being much faster than a commercial plane. Space Transportation has posted a demonstration video to its website, and the showcases four individuals getting aboard the jet that then orientates vertically and then launched.

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Mind-body philosophy | solving the hard problem of consciousness.

Recent advances in science and technology have allowed us to reveal — and in some cases even alter — the innermost workings of the human body. With electron microscopes, we can see our DNA, the source code of life itself. With nanobots, we can send cameras throughout our bodies and deliver drugs directly into the areas where they are most needed. We are even using artificially intelligent robots to perform surgeries on ourselves with unprecedented precision and accuracy.

Materialism says that the cosmos, and all that is contains, is an objective physical reality. As a result, philosophers who subscribe to this school of thought assert that consciousness, and all that it entails, arises from material interactions. As such, the material world (our flesh, neurons, synapse, etc.) is what creates consciousness.

Idealism says that the universe is entirely subjective and that reality is something that is mentally constructed. In other words, consciousness is something that is immaterial and cannot be observed or measured empirically. Since consciousness is what creates the material world, according to this school of thought, it is unclear if we can ever truly know anything that is mind-independent and beyond our subjective experience.

Continue reading “Mind-Body Philosophy | Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness with Patrick Grim” | >

Like electric vehicles – traditionally seen as expensive and niche – solar power is now becoming a realistic option for many households, as well as businesses wishing to decarbonise their operations. While the upfront costs of installing a photovoltaic (PV) rooftop system can be expensive, home solar will usually pay for itself within 5–10 years – and then provides the owner with an essentially free, limitless supply of clean energy, decentralised and unaffected by price volatility. Unlike the world’s increasingly scarce, finite supplies of coal, oil and gas, our Sun will continue to shine for another five billion years. Home solar can also be combined with batteries (which, like solar, are rapidly declining in cost) for energy storage at night.

At the utility scale, gigantic solar projects are now emerging in many countries. Recent years have seen the first gigawatt-scale (GW) facilities. The largest has a nameplate capacity of 2.3 GW. China is the world leader, accounting for 30% of all solar electric generation, followed by Europe (21%) and then the USA (16%). The vast majority is produced from PV modules, with a small fraction obtained by concentrated solar power (using mirrors or lenses to concentrate a large area of sunlight onto a receiver).

Following decades of rapid growth, the worldwide installed capacity of solar power has passed 1 TW this month, according to PV Magazine, an international trade publication headquartered in Berlin, Germany. The magazine has based its analysis on data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

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A team of researchers from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital has developed a device to help patients experiencing refractory hypoxemia. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their new device and how well it worked when tested on human blood and blood inside of live rats.

Refractory hypoxemia is a condition sometimes experienced by patients on ventilators—it is generally due to . Less oxygen makes the trip from the lungs into the bloodstream, leading to organ damage and sometimes death. Current treatment often involves the use of an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine. It extracts most of a patient’s blood, removes , adds oxygen and then pumps it back into the patient. Because ventilators can damage lungs, and because access to ECMO machines is limited (and risk of infection is high), the researchers developed a new machine that can add oxygen directly to blood while it is still inside the patient.

The new machine works by first infusing oxygen into a . That solution travels through a series of ever-smaller nozzles, reducing the size of the bubbles down to micron scale. The bubbles, the researchers note, are smaller than . Next, the bubbles get a coating of a lipid membrane that is similar to some types of natural cell membranes. This prevents toxicity and also keeps the bubbles from sticking together. The resulting solution is then injected directly into a patient’s bloodstream. Once inside, the lipids dissolve, releasing the oxygen into the bloodstream. They are tiny enough that they will not block any .

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An elastic light-emitting polymer that glows like a filament in a light bulb could lead to affordable, practical and robust flexible screens.

Flexible screens could form part of wearable computers that stick to our skin and do away with the need to carry a separate smartphone or laptop. But the various existing flexible displays all have flaws: they either require high voltages to run, are too fragile, too expensive, not bendy enough or lack brightness.

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A gas made of particles of light, or photons, becomes easier to compress the more you squash it. This strange property could prove useful in making highly sensitive sensors.

While gases are normally made from atoms or molecules, it is possible to create a gas of photons by trapping them with lasers. But a gas made this way doesn’t have a uniform density – researchers say it isn’t homogeneous, or pure – making it difficult to study properly.

Now Julian Schmitt at the University of Bonn, Germany, and his colleagues have made a homogeneous photon gas for the first time by trapping photons between two nanoscale mirrors.

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It’s a big ask to tell countries with very little access to electricity to accept the same level of responsibility as electricity-rich nations in striving to achieve the net-zero 2050 emissions target set by the United Nations. And nuclear energy has to be in the mix.

Is the IPCC goal of getting to net-zero by 2050 aspirational or legitimate? A Foreign Policy Review panel tackles the question.

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