How might Earth’s atmosphere, land, and ocean systems respond to changes in carbon dioxide over time? — Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet.
Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Current news and data streams about global warming and climate change from NASA.
Amazon Web Services (AMZN.O) said it will open data centers in Israel, with the announcement coming weeks after Israel signed a deal with AWS and Google for a more than $1 billion project to provide cloud services for its public sector and military.
In April, AWS and Google (GOOGL.O) won a tender for the four phase project known as “Nimbus”. read more
“Today, Amazon Web Services Inc, an Amazon.com company, announced it will open an infrastructure region in Israel in the first half of 2023”, AWS said in a statement on Friday.
Dubbed “the Giant Arc,” the purported structure is much larger than expected in a cosmos where matter is thought to be evenly distributed.
For tens of thousands of years, a microscopic creature lay frozen and immobile underground in the Siberian permafrost.
Yet, when scientists thawed it out, the tiny multicellular animal didn’t just revive — it reproduced, suggesting that there is a mechanism whereby multicellular animals can avoid cell damage during the freezing process and wake up ready to rumble.
“Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism,” said biologist Stas Malavin of the Soil Cryology Laboratory at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Russia.
US-based Archer Aviation says it wants to make mass market mobility solutions and could launch Maker flying taxi in Los Angeles and Miami by 2024…Maker is a flying taxi that can seat four while not contributing to rising emission levels when on the move.
Ingenuity is the science world’s baby.
Having completed its seventh successful flight, here’s a highlight reel of the best of Ingenuity, from its deployment to its first color photos and recordings.
ANOTHER OPTICAL BREAKTHROUGH COMPLEMENTING METALENSES. In addition to the ongoing revolution in optical science brought about by flat metalenses and single-photon image sensors, there is another parallel and complementing new dimension now added to the mix, which, according to this article, will allow telescopes as thin as a piece of paper.
Can you imagine one day using a telescope as thin as a sheet of paper, or a much smaller and lighter high-performance camera? Or no longer having that camera bump behind your smartphone?
In a paper published in Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Ottawa have proposed a new optical element that could turn these ideas into reality by dramatically miniaturizing optical devices, potentially impacting many of the applications in our lives.
As part of his Master’s degree in civil engineering, an EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) student developed a connector for use in building sustainable structures. His initial project has expanded into an online program for designing bamboo furniture that’s stylish, modular and customizable. And now his connector is being looked at for use by astronauts in outer space.
During his time at EPFL under the Erasmus program, Romain van Wassenhove came up with an idea for a connector that could be used to make modular structures out of sustainable bamboo rather than wood, plastic or metal. “I wanted to focus my Master’s on a topic that had meaning to me and that would lead to a concrete application,” he says. “Working with bamboo was something I already had in mind while I was studying in Brussels.” His connectors can be 3D-printed in biosourced plastic and are customizable to the type of material used for the structure.
Van Wassenhove got the idea for his connector during a class at EPFL on composite materials and developed the concept further through his Master’s project, co-directed at EPFL by Senior Scientist Anastasios Vassilopoulos and by associate professor Lars De Laet at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). In September 2020, soon after graduating, he obtained research funds—through an EPFL Ignition Grant—to enhance the design and operation of his connector and test it on an initial application involving bamboo structures. Today van Wassenhove’s invention is EU patent-protected, and his research has just been published in Composite Structures.
It is called the “city brain”, an artificial intelligence system that is now being used across China – only megacities could afford them before – for everything from pandemic contact tracing to monitoring illegal public assemblies and river pollution.
Authorities at all levels are now using AI for everything from pandemic control to monitoring illegal public assemblies.
An emerging ransomware strain in the threat landscape claims to have breached 30 organizations in just four months since it went operational, riding on the coattails of a notorious ransomware syndicate.
First observed in February 2021, “Prometheus” is an offshoot of another well-known ransomware variant called Thanos, which was previously deployed against state-run organizations in the Middle East and North Africa last year.
The affected entities are believed to be government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, consulting, agriculture, healthcare services, insurance agencies, energy and law firms in the U.S., U.K., and a dozen more countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, according to new research published by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat intelligence team.
