An anonymous reader shares a report: Imagine demanding an "honest" debate over the cost of net zero in a report full of errors that even a schoolboy would be embarrassed about. Then imagine getting coverage of your report in the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. Sound impossible? Well, let me tell you how Civitas, one of the thinktanks housed at 55 Tufton Street in London, did exactly that, and nearly got away with it. On Wednesday, Civitas published a pamphlet on net zero by Ewen Stewart, whose consultancy, Walbrook Economics, works on "the interaction of macroeconomics, politics and capital markets." Stewart is also a climate sceptic, having written in 2021 that human-caused warming is a "contested theory." Along with Civitas, 55 Tufton Street also houses the climate-sceptic lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation and its campaigning arm Net Zero Watch. These groups previously attempted to spark an "honest debate about the cost of net-zero" in 2020.

The Civitas report claims to offer a "realistic" $5.5tn estimate of the cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and says "the government need to be honest with the British people." This estimate is much higher than the figure produced by the government's official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which has said that reaching net zero would require net investments of $1.71tn by 2050. Note the difference between Civitas's "costs" and the CCC's "net investments." The CCC also found that reaching net zero would generate savings in the form of lower fossil fuel bills worth $1.34tn, resulting in a net cost of $0.37tn. In his report for Civitas, Stewart adopts the well-worn climate-sceptic tactic of simply ignoring these savings. He also ignores what the Office for Budget Responsibility has called the potentially "catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences" of unmitigated climate change. The report was timed to follow hot on the heels of Rishi Sunak's big climate speech, in which he called for an "honest" approach to net zero that ends "unacceptable costs."

Astronomers have captured the first direct evidence of a black hole spinning, providing new insights into the universe's most enigmatic objects. From a report: The observations focus on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the neighbouring Messier 87 galaxy, whose shadow was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. Like many supermassive black holes, M87 features powerful jets that are launched from the poles at close to the speed of light into intergalactic space. Scientists have predicted that the rotation of a black hole powers these cosmic jets, but until now direct evidence was elusive.

"After the success of black hole imaging in this galaxy with the Event Horizon Telescope, whether this black hole is spinning or not has been a central concern among scientists," said Dr Kazuhiro Hada, of the national astronomical observatory of Japan and co-author. "Now anticipation has turned into certainty. This monster black hole is indeed spinning." M87 is located 55m light years from the Earth and harbours a black hole 6.5bn times more massive than the Sun. Just beyond the black hole is an accretion disk of gas and dust, swirling on the precipice of the cosmic sinkhole. Some of this material is destined to fall into the black hole, disappearing for ever. But a fraction will be ejected out from the poles of the black hole at more than 99.99% of the speed of light. The paper: Precessing jet nozzle connecting to a spinning black hole in M87 (Nature).

"As the sun rose on Friday over the lunar plateau where India's Vikram lander and Pragyan rover sit, the robotic explorers remained silent," writes the New York Times: The Indian Space Research Organization, India's equivalent of NASA, said on Friday that mission controllers on the ground had sent a wake-up message to Vikram. The lander, as expected, did not reply. Efforts will continue over the next few days, but this could well be the conclusion of Chandrayaan-3, India's first successful space mission to the surface of another world...

The hope was that when sunlight again warmed the solar panels, the spacecraft would recharge and revive. But that was wishful thinking. Neither Vikram nor Pragyan were designed to survive a long, frigid lunar night when temperatures plunge to more than a hundred degrees below zero, far colder than the electronic components were designed for. The spacecraft designers could have added heaters or used more resilient components, but that would have added cost, weight and complexity...

The mission's science observations included a temperature probe deployed from Vikram that pushed into the lunar soil. The probe recorded a sharp drop, from about 120 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface to 10 degrees just three inches down. Lunar soil is a poor conductor of heat. The poor heat conduction could be a boon for future astronauts; an underground outpost would be well-insulated from the enormous temperature swings at the surface. Another instrument on Vikram, a seismometer, detected on Aug. 26 what appeared to be a moonquake... The Pragyan measurement suggests that concentrations of sulfur might be higher in the polar regions. Sulfur is a useful element in technologies like solar cells and batteries, as well as in fertilizer and concrete.

Before it went to sleep earlier this month, Vikram made a small final move, firing its engines to rise about 16 inches above the surface before softly landing again. The hop shifted Vikram's position by 12 to 16 inches, ISRO said. "Hoping for a successful awakening for another set of assignments!" ISRO posted on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, on Sept. 2. "Else, it will forever stay there as India's lunar ambassador."
"Efforts to establish contact will continue," ISRO tweeted yesterday...

The sea-ice surrounding Antarctica is well below any previous recorded winter level, satellite data shows, a worrying new benchmark for a region that once seemed resistant to global warming. BBC: "It's so far outside anything we've seen, it's almost mind-blowing," says Walter Meier, who monitors sea-ice with the National Snow and Ice Data Center. An unstable Antarctica could have far-reaching consequences, polar experts warn. Antarctica's huge ice expanse regulates the planet's temperature, as the white surface reflects the Sun's energy back into the atmosphere and also cools the water beneath and near it.

Without its ice cooling the planet, Antarctica could transform from Earth's refrigerator to a radiator, experts say. The ice that floats on the Antarctic Ocean's surface now measures less than 17 million sq km - that is 1.5 million sq km of sea-ice less than the September average, and well below previous winter record lows. That's an area of missing ice about five times the size of the British Isles. Dr Meier is not optimistic that the sea-ice will recover to a significant degree.

Scientists are still trying to identify all the factors that led to this year's low sea-ice - but studying trends in Antarctica has historically been challenging. In a year when several global heat and ocean temperature records have broken, some scientists insist the low sea-ice is the measure to pay attention to. "We can see how much more vulnerable it is," says Dr Robbie Mallett, of the University of Manitoba, who is based on the Antarctic peninsula. Already braving isolation, extreme cold and powerful winds, this year's thin sea-ice has made his team's work even more difficult. "There is a risk that it breaks off and drifts out to sea with us on it," Dr Mallett says.

In late August the blog of Harvard professor Avi Loeb declared he had "Wonderful news! For the first time in history, scientists analyzed materials from a meter-size object that originated from outside the solar system."

In July Loeb retrieved parts of a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014. A local New York newscast describes the find as "metallic marbles, less than a millimeter in diameter," while Loeb called them "beautiful spheres that were colored — blue, brown or gold."

Now USA Today reports: Early analysis shows that some spherules from the meteor path contain "extremely high abundances" of an unheard-of composition of heavy elements. Researchers on the team say the composition of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, labeled as a "BeLaU" composition, does not match terrestrial alloys natural to Earth or fallout from nuclear explosions. Additionally, the composition is not found in magma oceans of Earth, nor the moon, Mars or other natural bodies in the solar system.

Other elements are thought to have been lost by evaporation during IM1's passage through the Earth's atmosphere, researchers said, leading them to theorize that the spherules could originate in a magma ocean on an exoplanet with an iron core outside the solar system.
Long-time Slashdot reader Okian Warrior writes that "Technical details can be found here, and a readable accounting of the analysis and results can be found on Avi Loeb's blog." Loeb writes that the exact composition of those spheres are now being studied at three separate laboratories, including one at Harvard.

In July the New York Times published reactions to Loeb's claim that "It's most likely a technological gadget with artificial intelligence." "People are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb's wild claims," said Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University. "It's polluting good science — conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room." Dr. Desch added that several of his colleagues were now refusing to engage with Dr. Loeb's work in peer review, the process by which scholars evaluate one another's research to ensure that only high-quality studies are published... "What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works. And they shouldn't go away thinking that."
Last week Salon also had a few questions for Loeb: In your book, you called Carl Sagan's adage that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" a "logical fallacy." How and why do you think that statement is somewhat flawed or a logical fallacy?

It's used as an excuse for people who don't want to deal with an exciting possibility. They don't seek the evidence and they argue, "Well, we don't have any evidence...."

If or when we encounter extraterrestrial life, do you think we'll find it or it will find us? Why?

I think we will find it near us because most stars [formed] billions of years before the sun, so it's more likely that some other civilizations preceded us because their star, if it's like the sun, already went through what we in the future might go through. We just need to be humble and modest, not assume that we are unique and special — that Albert Einstein was the smartest scientist who ever lived since the Big Bang — and engage in the search.

That's what I'm trying to do, and the pushback is really strange under these circumstances because the people who argue against it have very strong opinions. But if you look at the history of science, they were very often wrong: the people [who] thought that the earth was the center of the universe, for example.
From Loeb's blog post: During my routine jog at sunrise on the deck of Silver Star, I was asked: "Are you running away from something or towards something?" My answer was: "Both. I am running away from colleagues who have strong opinions without seeking evidence, and I am running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space."

A spacecraft left behind by U.S. astronauts on the lunar surface could be causing small tremors known as moonquakes, according to a new study. CNN reports: Researchers revealed the previously unknown form of seismic activity on the moon for the first time through an analysis of Apollo-era data using modern algorithms. Massive temperature swings that occur on the moon can cause human-made structures to expand and contract in a way that produces these vibrations, the report suggests. The lunar surface is an extreme environment, oscillating between minus 208 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 133 degrees Celsius) in the dark and 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius) in direct sun, according to a news release about the study.

In fact, the entire surface of the moon expands and contracts in the cold and heat, noted the study published September 5 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. Yet scientists were able to use a form of artificial intelligence to gain such an intimate understanding of the Apollo-era data that they could pinpoint gentle tremors that emitted from an Apollo 17 lunar lander module sitting a few hundred yards away from instruments recording the moonquakes, according to a synopsis of the study, which was led by Francesco Civilini, a recent California Institute of Technology postdoctoral researcher and a research space scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. (NASA provided funding for the study.)

The analysis offers new insights into how the moon responds to its surroundings and what can affect its seismic activities. The rumbles were not dangerous and likely would be imperceptible to humans standing on the moon's surface.

"Silicon Valley billionaires behind a secretive $800 million land-buying spree in Northern California have finally released some details about their plans for a new green city," reports the Associated Press, "but they still must win over skeptical voters and local leaders." After years of ducking scrutiny, Jan Sramek, the former Goldman Sachs trader spearheading the effort, launched a website Thursday about "California Forever." The site billed the project as "a chance for a new community, good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space" in Solano, a rural county between San Francisco and Sacramento that is now home to 450,000 people. He also began meeting with key politicians representing the area who have been trying unsuccessfully for years to find out who was behind the mysterious Flannery Associates LLC as it bought up huge swaths of land, making it the largest single landholder in the county...

[T]o build anything resembling a city on what is now farmland, the group must first convince Solano County voters to approve a ballot initiative to allow for urban uses on that land, a protection that has been in place since 1984. Local and federal officials still have questions about the group's intentions... California is in dire need of more housing, especially affordable homes for teachers, firefighters, service and hospitality workers. But cities and counties can't figure out where to build as established neighborhoods argue against new homes that they say would congest their roads and spoil their quiet way of life.

In many ways, Solano County is ideal for development. It is 60 miles northeast of San Francisco and 35 miles southwest of California's capital city of Sacramento. Solano County homes are among the most affordable in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a median sales price of $600,000 last month. But Princess Washington, mayor pro tempore of Suisun City, said residents deliberately decided to protect open space and keep the area around Travis Air Force Base free of encroachment given its significance. She's suspicious that the group's real purpose is "to create a city for the elite" under the guise of more housing.
The web site for "California Forever" acknowledges they've purchased 50,000 acres — about 78 squares miles — "strategically located" in Northern California's Solano County with access to water and low fire risk.

Speculative illustrations on the site "evoke a cityscape with a dreamy white stucco and red rooftop Mediterranean vibe that might be found in a Greek or Italian village," writes the San Francisco Chronicle. There are hillside neighborhoods stepping down to what must be the banks of the Sacramento River, kayakers tooling through lily pads and anglers fishing from the riverbank at sunrise... The website also names an investor who has not been named previously — venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, an early investor in Google, Slack and other companies...

While California Forever may have billions to invest in the project, it will face staunch opposition from some ranchers who argue that the city would disrupt the economy of a county that is 62% farmland.
The San Francisco Chronicle's urban design critic writes "OK, this is something new — an elevator pitch for a whole new city..." But the website launched Thursday by California Forever offers no real details, such as the projected population or precise location. Instead, there are renderings of cuddly townscapes and soothing talk of building "a remarkable place for Solano residents." Oh, and an earnest promise to "begin the phase of our work that matters most: our conversation with you." Let the eye-rolling commence. It's impossible to critique the vision of the investors, because what was unfurled is so innocuous as to be an insult...

The website also refers to how this will be a center of "economic opportunity" and "new employers." Great! But only two of the 12 renderings show people at work, including one where three men install solar panels while the sun sets in the west. Let's hope they're being paid overtime... The Bay Area needs housing and jobs. It also needs honest approaches to making this happen. Let's hope when California Forever 2.0 launches, there is less fluff and more facts.

Hot on the heels of its lunar landing success, India is readying to blast a probe even deeper into space to study the sun. From a report: The country's first solar observation mission, named Aditya-L1, is set to be launched from India's main spaceport on Sriharikota, an island off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, at 11:50 a.m. local time on Saturday. The spacecraft is scheduled to spend 125 days traveling 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) to its destination, a point in space where objects stay put and consume less fuel.

While arriving there would be an impressive achievement for ISRO, the Indian space agency, Aditya-L1 would have gone just a fraction of the 150 million km between Earth and the sun. For ISRO, success would be another major feat after India became the first country to land a spacecraft close to the lunar south pole in August. India has more ambitious projects in the works. A human spaceflight program aims to launch astronauts into orbit for the first time possibly by 2025, ISRO Chairman S Somanath said in an interview with news agency Asian News International. ISRO and NASA plan to cooperate on sending astronauts to the International Space Station and India is in discussions with Japan to work together on a mission.

Physicists have observed neutrinos originating "from the sun, cosmic rays, supernovae and other cosmic objects, as well as particle accelerators and nuclear reactors," writes Phys.org. But one remaining goal was observing neutrinos inside "collider" particle accelerators (which direct two particle beams).

It's now been accomplished using neutrino detectors located at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland by two distinct research collaborations:

- FASER (Forward Search Experiment)
- SND (Scattering and Neutrino Detector)@LHC

Phys.org argues the two achievements "could open important new avenues for experimental particle physics research. " The results of their two studies were recently published in Physical Review Letters. "Neutrinos are produced very abundantly in proton colliders such as the LHC," Cristovao Vilela, part of the SND@LHC Collaboration, told Phys.org. "However, up to now, these neutrinos had never been directly observed. The very weak interaction of neutrinos with other particles makes their detection very challenging and because of this they are the least well studied particles in the Standard Model of particle physics...."

"Particle colliders have existed for over 50 years, and have detected every known particle except for neutrinos," Jonathan Lee Feng, co-spokesperson of the FASER Collaboration, told Phys.org. "At the same time, every time neutrinos have been discovered from a new source, whether it is a nuclear reactor, the sun, the Earth, or supernovae, we have learned something extremely important about the universe. As part of our recent work, we set out to detect neutrinos produced at a particle collider for the first time...

"Because these neutrinos have high fluxes and high energies, which makes them far more likely to interact, we were able to detect 153 of them with a very small, inexpensive detector that was built in a very short time," Feng explained. "Previously, particle physics was thought to be divided into two parts: high energy experiments, which were required to study heavy particles, like top quarks and Higgs bosons, and high intensity experiments, which were required to study neutrinos. This work has shown that high energy experiments can also study neutrinos, and so has brought together the high-energy and high-intensity frontiers."

The neutrinos detected by Feng and the rest of the FASER collaboration have the highest energy ever recorded in a laboratory environment.... Cristovao Vilela, part of the SND@LHC Collaboration, said "The observation of collider neutrinos opens the door to novel measurements which will help us understand some of the more fundamental puzzles of the Standard Model of particle physics, such as why there are three generations of matter particles (fermions) that seem to be exact copies of each other in all aspects except for their mass. Furthermore, our detector is placed in a location which is a blind spot for the larger LHC experiments. Because of this, our measurements will also contribute to a better understanding of the structure of colliding protons."

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a new perspective on sunspots (those dark, cool areas where the sun's magnetic field is particularly strong, and which often launch solar flares).

"NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has given us a sneak peek of an intriguing patch of the sun that's not yet visible from Earth," reports Space.com: Perseverance photographs the sun daily with its Mastcam-Z camera system to gauge the amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere. Such an effort captured a big sunspot moving across the solar disk late last week and over the weekend, as SpaceWeather.com reported. "Because Mars is orbiting over the far side of the sun, Perseverance can see approaching sunspots more than a week before we do," SpaceWeather.com wrote in a post highlighting the sunspot photos. "Consider this your one-week warning: A big sunspot is coming...."

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections that hit Earth can affect satellite navigation and disrupt power grids, among other things, so tracking the movement of sunspots is more than just of academic interest.

Under a new initiative, named Bandwagon, SpaceX is expanding its rideshare program to cater to the demand for launches to mid-inclination orbits. TechCrunch reports: Orbital inclination refers to what part of the Earth is visible to a satellite as it rotates around the planet. A satellite in an equatorial orbit is at 0 degrees inclination; a satellite in a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) is slightly higher than 90 degrees; and a mid-inclination orbit is around 45 degrees. Currently, SpaceX offers rideshare services on the Falcon 9 rocket to SSO through the Transporter program, which is in notoriously high demand. But mid-inclination orbits (MIOs) are appealing to a growing number of customers, especially to remote sensing companies that want to strengthen their coverage over areas like parts of Asia and the Middle East. Right now, companies must often purchase a dedicated launch from Rocket Lab if they want to position a satellite in MIO.

With the new rideshare program, called Bandwagon, SpaceX is going after this slice of the market. According to SpaceX's website, it currently has two Bandwagon missions booked for 2024 and two for 2025. If they become even close to the popularity of the Rideshare program, they could be a major threat to all other small launch providers: According to Jarrod McLachlan, director of rideshare sales at SpaceX, who spoke at the industry conference, SpaceX has delivered 682 spacecraft to orbit to date via rideshare missions.

Facing a rapidly aging population and land scarcity, the Chinese capital is piloting burial spaces with electronic screens instead of headstones. From a report: When someone dies in Beijing, the body is typically cremated and the ashes are buried behind a gravestone in one of the city's public cemeteries. Family and friends gather at the site to light candles and burn incense to pay their respects. Zhang Yin, a local resident in her 40s, chose a very different burial rite when her grandmother died earlier this year: She had her ashes stored in a compartment of a large room at Beijing's Taiziyu Cemetery, almost like a safe deposit box at a bank. An electronic screen on the door of the compartment displaying pictures and videos of the deceased replaces the traditional headstone. It's a land-saving option that's also more affordable and dovetails with the growing trend of Chinese families wanting more personalized funerals for their loved ones.

"Traditional cemeteries are outdoors, exposed to the wind and sun," Zhang says. "If you bring your kids there, they will only see bare graves, which has no meaning to them. For digital cemeteries, families can watch the photo display of deceased relatives together in a hall." Zhang says her grandfather gave his approval for the digital funeral because he's very receptive to new things -- and, by coincidence, the niche storing her grandmother's ashes is the same as the number of her grandmother's old house. Both local governments and funeral companies in China are experimenting with new ways of conducting burial rites as the country confronts urban land scarcity and a rapidly aging population.

"Earlier this year, after 15 years of searching, scientists finally heard the background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves that fill our universe," writes Space.com.

"Now, the hard work of searching for the source of these ripples in spacetime can begin." Currently, the primary suspects in this case are pairings of supermassive black holes with masses millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't room for a few unusual suspects, which could potentially point us toward new physics....

[G]ravitational waves detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) express wavelengths that are thousands of miles (or km) in length and hold frequencies of milliseconds to seconds. The new gravitational waves detected by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), by contrast, have wavelengths on a scale of trillions of miles (or km). This is similar to the distance between the sun and its neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, a staggering 20 light-years in length. Plus, NANOGrav gravitational wavelengths have frequencies on scales of years instead of mere seconds. Practically, what this means is scientists need to build over 15 years of NANOGrav data to confirm a low-frequency gravitational wave detection.

But, when it happens, it's worth the wait. That's because these results have the capacity to point us toward new information about our universe... "The detection of low-frequency gravitational waves means they're from very different sources to the LIGO and Virgo sources, which are stellar mass black holes and neutron star mergers," Scott Ransom, a National Radio Astronomy Observatory astronomer and former chair of NANOGrav, told Space.com... Ransom is part of a collaboration of researchers that believe low-frequency gravitational waves, including those detected by NANOGrav, may originate from a pretty incredible source. They could come from, the team argues, hundreds of thousands of supermassive black hole pairings that, over the 13.8-billion-year course of cosmic history, came close enough together that they've merged...

"For many decades, theorists have hypothesized that supermassive black hole binaries should produce a signal with characteristics just like what NANOGrav and other pulsar timing arrays are seeing," Luke Zoltan Kelly, a Northwestern University theoretical astrophysicist and NANOGrav researcher, told Space.com. "For most of the community, supermassive black hole binaries are a natural best guess for what's producing the gravitational wave background...." Zoltan Kelley pointed out to Space.com that besides binaries, there are a number of new models in cosmology and in particle physics that, under the right circumstances, could also produce a similar gravitational wave background to that detected by NANOGrav. For example, axion or 'fuzzy' dark matter, cosmic strings, inflationary phase transitions, and many others," the Northwestern astrophysicist said.

"What's really exciting about these possibilities is that each of these models is an attempt to explain some of the biggest current mysteries of our universe."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Scientists have discovered that the Sun produces higher energy light than was thought possible. An unusual type of telescope detected gamma rays with energies of over 1 tera electron volt (TeV), at least five times more energetic than previously known. The Sun emits light spanning a wide range of energies, from infrared through visible light and up to ultraviolet. It was previously predicted that the Sun could produce gamma rays -- electromagnetic radiation with the highest energy -- through interactions with cosmic rays from distant sources, but these would rarely reach Earth to be detectable. A few decades later, these gamma rays were eventually detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in 2011. With more and more observations over the years since, Fermi found that the Sun was producing around seven times more gamma rays than had been predicted. Their energies were detected at up to 200 giga electron volts (GeV), which is the upper limit that Fermi can pick up.

So for the new study, scientists used a different instrument that's sensitive beyond that limit. The instrument in question is called the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC), and it works in a way unlike your everyday telescope. It's made up of a series of 300 big tanks filled with 200 tons of water each. When gamma rays hit molecules in the Earth's atmosphere, they create a cascade of lower energy particles, and these can interact with the water molecules in those big tanks. Sensitive instruments keep watch for these interactions, and scientists can work backwards to calculate the energy of the original gamma ray. Using HAWC data gathered between 2015 and 2021, the researchers discovered that the Sun was producing gamma rays with energies well beyond that which Fermi detected. They were reaching energies on the scale of TeV, with some spiking to almost 10 TeV. Exactly how the Sun produces them remains a mystery, the team says, but further research will investigate how their energy gets so high and what role the Sun's magnetic field might play. The research was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A ban on most kinds of traditional bulbs renews a cultural squabble between regulatory efforts to curb energy consumption and the very American impulse to do whatever one wants in one's domicile. The New York Times: The switchboard at Lightbulbs.com, a (pretty self-explanatory) e-commerce website, lit up with panicked callers on Tuesday, who all wanted to know if the news was true. Had the government just banned the sale of incandescent bulbs? Yes, mostly. Was this decision part of an elaborate political plot? No, mostly. Just what were fans of incandescent lighting supposed to do now? EBay, maybe?

Much like its cousin, the gas stove, the humble light bulb has become a flashpoint in a cultural squabble between environmental regulatory efforts and the very American impulse to do whatever one wants in one's domicile. But unlike the gas stove debate, which grew so heated (sorry) that it drew legislation from Republicans hoping to protect the noble but possibly dangerous appliance, the ban on the sale of most incandescent bulbs went quietly into effect on August 1. (The Biden administration denied trying to ban gas stoves.)

The response to the bulb ban was more of a whimper than a battle cry. "Thomas Edison brought the incandescent light bulb to the masses, and in 2023 Joe Biden banned it in America," officials with the Republican Party of New Mexico wrote in a tweet. "The Biden administration's government overreach continues." Other critics were more concerned about the quality of light affecting their quality of life: "I often stay up late at my desk, and the warm glow of the lamp is like company as I read and write. Ugh. There are people in power who are dedicated to sucking all joy out of the world," Joseph Massey, a self-described "not woke" writer, tweeted.

The world just broke "another terrifying climate record," reports CNN: Antarctic sea ice has fallen to unprecedented lows for this time of year. Every year, Antarctic sea ice shrinks to its lowest levels towards the end of February, during the continent's summer. The sea ice then builds back up over the winter.

But this year scientists have observed something different.

The sea ice has not returned to anywhere near expected levels. In fact it is at the lowest levels for this time of year since records began 45 years ago. The ice is around 1.6 million square kilometers (0.6 million square miles) below the previous winter record low set in 2022, according to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). In mid-July, Antarctica's sea ice was 2.6 million square kilometers (1 million square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average. That is an area nearly as large as Argentina or the combined areas of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.

The phenomenon has been described by some scientists as off-the-charts exceptional — something that is so rare, the odds are that it only happens once in millions of years. But Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said that speaking in these terms may not be that helpful. "The game has changed," he told CNN. "There's no sense talking about the odds of it happening the way the system used to be, it's clearly telling us that the system has changed...."

This winter's unprecedented occurrence may indicate a long-term change for the isolated continent, Scambos said. "It is more likely than not that we won't see the Antarctic system recover the way it did, say, 15 years ago, for a very long period into the future, and possibly 'ever.'" Others are more cautious. "It's a large departure from average but we know that Antarctic sea ice exhibits large year to year variability," Julienne Stroeve, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center told CNN, adding "it's too early to say if this is the new normal or not."
The glaciologist describes the change as "so extreme that something radical has changed in the past two years, but especially this year, relative to all previous years going back at least 45 years." And CNN adds that meanwhile in the Arctic, "sea ice has been on a consistently downwards trajectory as the climate crisis accelerates."

Other possible consequences of the missing sea ice:

• Sea ice reflects sunlight back into space, CNN notes, so when it melts, it "exposes the darker ocean waters beneath which absorb the sun's energy."

• Sea ice floats on the water, so its loss doesn't directly affect rising sea levels, CNN points out. But the disappearance of sea ice does leave coastal ice sheets and glaciers "exposed to waves and warm ocean waters, making them more vulnerable to melting and breaking off."
  
  In February NASA reported that global sea levels "are rising as a result of human-caused global warming, with recent rates being unprecedented over the past 2,500-plus years." Seawater expands when it warms, but NASA also blames the added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers, resulting in a 3.89-inch rise since 1993, and 7.97 inches (200 mm) since 1900.

Astronomers have discovered a two-faced star and are baffled by its bizarre appearance. The Guardian reports: The white dwarf appears to have one side composed almost entirely of hydrogen and the other side made up of helium. It is the first time that astronomers have discovered a lone star that appears to have spontaneously developed two contrasting faces. The object, which is more than 1,000 light years away in the Cygnus constellation, has been nicknamed Janus, after the two-faced Roman god of transition, although its formal scientific name is ZTF J203349.8+322901.1. It was initially discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), an instrument that scans the skies every night from Caltech's Palomar Observatory near San Diego.

"The surface of the white dwarf completely changes from one side to the other," said Dr Ilaria Caiazzo, an astrophysicist at Caltech who led the work. "When I show the observations to people, they are blown away." Caiazzo was searching for white dwarfs and one candidate star stood out due to its rapid changes in brightness. Further observations revealed that Janus was rotating on its axis every 15 minutes. Spectrometry measurements, which give the chemical fingerprints of a star, showed that one side of the object contained almost entirely hydrogen and the other almost entirely helium. If seen up close, both sides of the star would be bluish in colour and have a similar brightness, but the helium side would have a grainy, patchwork appearance like that of our own sun, while the hydrogen side would appear smooth. The findings are published in the journal Nature.

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Jerusalem Post: A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University has produced 'green' hydrogen -- hydrogen that is produced without polluting carbon dioxide emissions but is still highly efficient, the university said. The TAU team produced hydrogen using a water-based gel to attach the enzyme to the electrode and a biocatalyst. Over 90% of the electrons introduced into the system were deposited in the hydrogen without any secondary processes.

"Hydrogen is very rare in the atmosphere, although it is produced by enzymes in microscopic organisms, which receive the energy from photosynthesis processes," explained Itzhak Grinberg, a doctoral student who helped lead the project. "In the lab, we 'electrify' those enzymes. That is, an electrode provides the energy instead of the Sun." However, the challenge is that the enzyme generally "runs away" from the electric charge when making hydrogen in a lab. The hydrogel holds the enzyme in place. "The material of the gel itself is known, but our innovation is to use it to produce hydrogen," said Prof. Iftach Yacoby of TAU's School of Plant Sciences and Food Security, who oversaw the project. "We soaked the electrode in the gel, which contained an enzyme for producing hydrogen called hydrogenase. The gel holds the enzyme for a long time, even under the electric voltage, and makes it possible to produce hydrogen with great efficiency and at environmental conditions favorable to the enzyme -- for example, in salt water, in contrast to electrolysis, which requires distilled water."

The team also tested the gel with two other enzymes and proved that the hydrogenase could attach different enzymes to the electrode. "Today, 'green' hydrogen is produced primarily through electrolysis, which requires precious and rare metals such as platinum along with water distillation, which makes the green hydrogen up to 15 times more expensive than the polluting 'grey' one," said doctoral student Oren Ben-Zvi, who co-led the experiment. Therefore, the hope is that in the future, TAU's method could be commercially implemented to lower the cost of green hydrogen production and hence enable its use in more industries and agriculture, thereby reducing CO2 emissions and making the planet healthier. Their research was published in the journal Carbon Energy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla has officially launched its new 'Charge on Solar' feature to let its electric car owners charge their vehicles with sunshine. Tesla describes the feature: "With Charge on Solar, your Tesla vehicle can charge using only excess solar energy produced by your Tesla solar system. Using excess energy to charge your electric vehicle maximizes the value of your home's solar system. Use the Tesla app to set Charge on Solar limits and have your vehicle charge using extra solar energy."

If you have all the required hardware and software, you can go to your Tesla app, and under "Charge on Solar," you will be able to set your charge limit using excess solar energy. Tesla writes about the charge limit: "Your vehicle will charge from solar and the grid when your current charge level is below the left sun slider. After your vehicle's charge level passes the sun slider, your vehicle automatically switches to only charge on excess solar up to your charge limit. Solar power and home loads are variables so if you ever want to charge faster, you can simply increase the lower charge limit to a desired range." There's also a scheduling feature that stops charging with solar after a specific time if you know that your energy consumption will increase at a specific time.

Disney CEO Bob Iger is citing the studio's output increase for Disney+ as one reason for "some disappointments" as of late. From a report: Speaking to CNBC's David Faber at the Sun Valley Conference, Iger admitted the studio screwed with audience expectations by offering up so much streaming content. The negative impact of that has been commercial disappointments in theaters, be it "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" not even reaching $500 million worldwide or disappointing openings for summer tentpoles "Elemental" and "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny."

"There have been some disappointments. We would have liked some of our more recent releases to perform better," Iger said. "It's reflective not as a problem from a personnel perspective, but I think in our zeal to basically grow our content significantly to serve mostly our streaming offerings, we ended up taxing our people way beyond -- in terms of their time and their focus -- way beyond where they had been. Marvel's a great example of that. They had not been in the TV business at any significant level. Not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series, and frankly, it diluted focus and attention. That is, I think, more of the cause than anything."