Lifeboat Foundation

This weekend, Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo told Le Parisien that Parisians will get to vote whether they want to ban free-floating electric scooters or not. As I explained last week, Dott, Lime and Tier, the three scooter companies currently operating in the city, have operating licenses that are set to expire on March 23rd, 2023. And the fate of those services could have wide implications across the micromobility sector.

“If Parisians want to own their own scooter, there’s no issue. But we have a real issue with free-floating scooters. It’s not climate-friendly. Employees working for these companies are not properly treated,” Mayor of Paris told Le Parisien.

“That’s why I’m going to ask a question to Parisians in a vote that is going to take place on Sunday, April 2nd so that I can understand what they want,” she added.

Climate change is the biggest challenge of our time. To slow down global warming, we need to rethink how we generate and consume energy. Facing significant structural changes in supply and demand, we are in the middle of an energy transition with a strong need for action.

To reach a net zero economy by 2050 we have to swiftly replace fossil fuels in power generation with renewable, clean and secure sources. At the same time technologies powered by fossil-fuels must be replaced by electrified applications such as those seen in electric vehicles or heat pumps. Microelectronics plays a decisive role in respective applications.

Infineon’s semiconductor solutions enable the provision of green energy as well as the electrification of applications in the industrial, mobility and consumer sectors. Our semiconductor solutions are vital to decarbonization, they are key elements in creating a better future.

The meteorite and explosion-site quasicrystals were both uncovered by a team that includes Luca Bindi of the University of Florence, Italy, and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University. In those previous cases, the materials were subjected to extremely high-pressure, high-temperature shock events—analysis of the meteorite sample revealed the temperature reached at least 1,200 °C and the pressure 5 GPa, while the New Mexico sample reached 1,500 °C and closer to 8 GPa. These transient, intense conditions contorted the materials’ atoms, forcing them to arrange into patterns unseen for usual laboratory conditions.

The explosion-site sample was found in a rock-like substance made of sand that had been fused together with copper wires from a measurement device that had been set up to monitor the atom-bomb test. As a trained geologist, Bindi was aware that similar substances—so-called fulgurites—are created when lightning strikes a beach or a sand dune. He wondered if lightning-fused samples might also contain quasicrystals, so he and the team set about collecting and analyzing the structures of as many fulgurites as they could lay their hands on.

Luck was on their side. In a fragment of a storm-created fulgurite from the Nebraskan Sand Hills—grass-stabilized sand dunes in northern Nebraska—the team found a micron-sized fragment of a quasicrystal with a previously unseen composition and pattern. Specifically, the newly discovered quasicrystal has a dodecagonal—12-fold symmetric—atomic structure. Such ordering is impossible in ordinary crystals, Bindi says, and is unusual even for quasicrystals (both the meteorite and explosion-site quasicrystals, as well as most lab-made ones, have fivefold symmetric patterns). “This was all more than [we] could have hoped for in such a long-shot search,” Steinhardt says.

Multiple agencies concurred this week that 2022 was among the hottest years on record—a continuation of a dangerous trend that experts say underscores the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels, the primary source of planet-heating pollution.

The World Meteorological Organization confirmed Thursday that last year was one of the hottest since record-keeping began. Citing its analysis of six international datasets, the WMO said that the average global temperature in 2022 was roughly 1.15°C above preindustrial (1850−1900) levels.

“The persistence of a cooling La Niña event” prevented 2022 from being even hotter, but “this cooling impact will be short-lived and will not reverse the long-term warming trend caused by record levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in our atmosphere,” said the United Nations weather agency.

“The domestic transportation sector presents an enormous opportunity to drastically reduce emissions that accelerate climate change and reduce harmful pollution.”

In what can be hailed a significant and impactful move, the U.S. Department of Energy, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency released a Blueprint on how to decarbonize the entire U.S. transport system. The strategy is hoped to cut all greenhouse emissions from the transportation sector by 2050.

The Biden administration unveiled a comprehensive blueprint for decarbonizing the transportation sector, which accounts for the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Depending on how bright C/2022 E3 (ZTF) becomes, it could even be visible to the naked eye.

Scientists recently discovered a green comet that was last visible in the night sky 50,000 years ago — that’s so long ago that the Earth was in the midst of the Ice Age.

Now, a NASA blog post points out the fact that the comet will make its closest approach to the sun on January 12. It will be close enough to Earth that it may be visible to the naked eye.

Continue reading “A green comet will soon be visible from Earth for the first time in 50,000 years” »

Back in 2002, the science fiction film Minority Report once again reignited futuristic imaginations about a world and police state gone too far. At the time, the movie inspired plenty of speculation about the future of our society, how computers would interact with us, and how law enforcement would be carried out proactively based on intent. In the movie, they combined technology with the psychic abilities of the “precogs,” to proactively prevent crimes.

The precogs had the ability to predict when crimes were about to be committed ahead of time, enabling law enforcement to act early.

Twenty years later, in a climate of abundant data, almost limitless processing, and at a point in history where law enforcement is frequently discussed, some of these technologies are beginning to look more feasible than ever.

Continue reading “AI Tools: From Minority Report To Mission Possible” »

The study was conducted by inspecting 215,000 land-based glaciers worldwide.

Climate change is a primal environmental problem of our century, and it’s getting worse day by day. The melting of glaciers increases the temperatures on the Earth and causes extreme cold. According to new research, glaciers melt faster than we thought. Apparently, two-thirds of glaciers on track will be disappeared by 2100, researchers say.

As reported by Phys.

Continue reading “Two-thirds of the glaciers will be melted by 2100, study indicates” »

Across much of the country, the holidays were ushered in with strong winter storms, with every region of the country impacted by extreme weather from Christmas into the new year. The West Coast has experienced the most recent extreme weather with its third atmospheric river event in just three weeks bringing record rainfall and winds along the California coast. Buffalo, NY, is still digging out from its record holiday snowstorm and much of the Northern Plains saw record snowfalls just last week. The southern states weren’t spared from extreme winter weather with Florida and other parts of the southeast experiencing record cold temperatures over Christmas. While these weather events are all quite different — from heavy snows to rain to extreme cold — the one thing they have in common is the challenge it brings to the 1,400 utility companies across the country.

Extreme weather events are increasing, and utilities and customers alike are feeling the impact. According to Climate Central, the United States has experienced a 67% increase in major power outages from weather-related events since 2000, a trend predicted to continue as extreme weather events increase in frequency. With these most recent weather events across the country, on Christmas Eve alone, over 1.6 million U.S. customers were without power. The troubles continue now in California with nearly 196,000 Californians without power last week and more storms over the Pacific ready to move in bringing similar conditions.

Large utilities have been effectively using predictive weather analytics to prepare and pre-stage crews to help manage restoration efforts during major weather events like we just saw. But the majority of small to mid-size utilities still rely on traditional forecasts, severe weather updates and immediate impact assessments to make decisions around operations, safety and resource allocation. Recent advancements in technology, data modeling and cloud computing are making enterprise technology, such as machine learning for weather risks, more accessible to utilities of all sizes.