California governor Jerry Brown recently declared an end to the state of emergency brought on by his state’s historically terrible drought. It’s a mid-level miracle, assisted by record rainfall earlier this year. If you don’t believe me, just look at these before and after images. Read more…
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Look at the Profound Difference Between California’s Drought and California Today
Researchers from MIT, UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley, and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology published a paper in Science describing a solar-powered device that uses a new type of metal organic framework (MOF) to extract up to three litres of water per day from even the most arid desert air. (more…)
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New materials allow 2.8l/day of solar-powered desert water-vapor extraction
Fans don’t like to let their favorites go, but now they don’t have to. We live in a world desperate to remake, reboot, and flat-out return to beloved franchises, hunting the closest thing to a sure audience there is. But the more beloved these continuations are, they harder they are to get right. Fans want them to… Read more…
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The New Mystery Science Theater 3000 Is the Perfect Pop Culture Revival
Enlarge / LONG ISLAND SOLAR FARM (credit: Brookhaven National Lab ) In the year 2000, the entire world had roughly four Gigawatts of solar power capacity installed, and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. In 2002, the International Energy Agency forecast suggested that, by 2020, global solar capacity would still be hovering at around 10GW, and still barely register on the global energy markets. How things change. Over the 15 years that followed, solar energy capacity expanded by 5,700 percent, reaching 227GW. The International Energy Agency revised its solar estimates upwards three times over that span, but its most recent estimate—over 400GW of installed capacity by 2020—is already falling behind the curve of solar’s growth. In 2015, the most recent year that numbers are available, 57GW worth of solar panels were shipped. That’s enough to add 400GW of new capacity in seven years, under the completely unrealistic assumption that our manufacturing capacity won’t expand in the mean time. If most projections have been wrong, is there anything we can say about the future? An international team of energy experts makes an attempt to figure out where solar might be going out to the 2030s, when they expect we’ll have Terawatts worth of photovoltaics on our grids. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Solar energy has plunged in price—where does it go from here?
An anonymous reader writes: Allegro MicroSystems LLC is suing a former IT employee for sabotaging its database using a “time bomb” that deleted crucial financial data in the first week of the new fiscal year. According to court documents, after resigning from his job, a former sysadmin kept one of two laptops. On January 31, Patel entered the grounds of the Allegro headquarters in Worcester, Massachusetts, just enough to be in range of the factory’s Wi-Fi network. Allegro says that Patel used the second business-use laptop to connect to the company’s network using the credentials of another employee. While connected to the factory’s network on January 31, Allegro claims Patel, who was one of the two people in charge of Oracle programming, uploaded a “time bomb” to the company’s Oracle finance module. The code was designed to execute a few months later, on April 1, 2016, the first week of the new fiscal year, and was meant to “copy certain headers or pointers to data into a separate database table and then to purge those headers from the finance module, thereby rendering the data in the module worthless.” The company says that “defendant Patel knew that his sabotage of the finance module on the first week of the new fiscal year had the maximum potential to cause Allegro to suffer damages because it would prevent Allegro from completing the prior year’s fiscal year-end accounting reconciliation and financial reports.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Former Sysadmin Accused of Planting ‘Time Bomb’ In Company’s Database
Scientists are increasingly confident that an ocean below the icy surface of Enceladus could support life. (credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA) The prospects for life existing in our Solar System beyond Earth, and finding it within a decade or two, improved with two scientific findings announced Thursday by NASA. The space agency confirmed the presence of hydrogen in plumes emanating from Saturn’s small moon Enceladus, and it also reported that plumes are very likely to exist on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Both of these findings are significant. It means not only that most of the ingredients required for life must exist in the oceans of Enceladus but also that a pair of probes being planned to explore Europa will have a much better chance of finding any life there. In something of an understatement, NASA’s Jim Green, who oversees the agency’s planetary exploration plans, said, “This is a very exciting time to be exploring the Solar System.” The findings buttress a recent focus by NASA on bulking up a program to explore these ocean worlds in the outer Solar System, including Enceladus, Europa and Saturn’s methane-covered moon Titan. This has been a principal aim, in particular, for Texas Republican John Culberson, who serves as chairman of the House subcommittee over NASA’s budget. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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NASA confirms two moons in the Solar System are venting oceans into space
Luke Skywalker’s home planet isn’t the only place in need of moisture farms to harvest water. Here on Earth, with our deserts and droughts, we’ve got tons of folks in need of fresh, drinkable H20. Read more…
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These (Real) New Moisture Harvesters Belong on Tatooine
Three years ago, Kevin Bates created a Tetris -playing business card to showcase his engineering skills to potential employers. But his creation quickly went viral on the internet, and everyone reminiscing about their beloved childhood Game Boy clamored for their own. After testing the waters with the equally tiny… Read more…
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Playing Tetris on a Business Card Is Everything I Hoped It Would Be
The future of illegal torrent websites doesn’t look good. As torrent websites continue to disappear, the founder of The Pirate Bay believes the trend is the just the beginning. From an article: While it might look like torrenters are are still fighting this battle, Sunde claims that the reality is more definitive: “We have already lost.” Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It’s terrible, but people are happy and go like “it could be worse.” That is absolutely not the right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to Africa and poor countries, but they’re only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. Well, I have given up the idea that we can win this fight for the internet. The situation is not going to be any different, because apparently that is something people are not interested in fixing. Or we can’t get people to care enough. Maybe it’s a mixture, but this is kind of the situation we are in, so its useless to do anything about it. We have become somehow the Black Knight from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. We have maybe half of our head left and we are still fighting, we still think we have a chance of winning this battle. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Pirate Bay Founder: ‘I Have Given Up’
Microsoft just sent out invites to members of the media for its big reveal of Xbox Project Scorpio, the upgraded console that will be the “first true 4K console for gamers” according to the company. We’ve long expected E3’s press event to be the big consumer debut for Scorpio, but Microsoft spelled out that it will indeed be the star of the show in a blog post on… Read More
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Microsoft will reveal Project Scorpio Xbox console details at E3 on June 11