An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, according to renowned climate scientist Prof James Hansen, who said the international 2C target is "dead." A new analysis by Hansen and colleagues concludes that both the impact of recent cuts in sun-blocking shipping pollution, which has raised temperatures, and the sensitivity of the climate to increasing fossil fuels emissions are greater than thought. The group's results are at the high end of estimates from mainstream climate science but cannot be ruled out, independent experts said. If correct, they mean even worse extreme weather will come sooner and there is a greater risk of passing global tipping points, such as the collapse of the critical Atlantic ocean currents.

Hansen, at Columbia University in the US, sounded the alarm to the general public about climate breakdown in testimony he gave to a UN congressional committee in 1988. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) defined a scenario which gives a 50% chance to keep warming under 2C -- that scenario is now impossible," he said. "The 2C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise." The new analysis said global heating is likely to reach 2C by 2045, unless solar geoengineering is deployed. [...] In the new study, published in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, Hansen's team said: "Failure to be realistic in climate assessment and failure to call out the fecklessness of current policies to stem global warming is not helpful to young people."

[...] Hansen said the point of no return could be avoided, based on the growing conviction of young people that they should follow the science. He called for a carbon fee and dividend policy, where all fossil fuels are taxed and the revenue returned to the public. "The basic problem is that the waste products of fossil fuels are still dumped in the air free of charge," he said. He also backed the rapid development of nuclear power. Hansen also supported research on cooling the Earth using controversial geoengineering techniques to block sunlight, which he prefers to call "purposeful global cooling." He said: "We do not recommend implementing climate interventions, but we suggest that young people not be prohibited from having knowledge of the potential and limitations of purposeful global cooling in their toolbox." Political change is needed to achieve all these measures, Hansen said: "Special interests have assumed far too much power in our political systems. In democratic countries the power should be with the voter, not with the people who have the money. That requires fixing some of our democracies, including the US."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Scientists have found that using seismometers is a new and inexpensive method to detect falling space junk, which can cause damage on impact and carry toxic materials — and may someday turn deadly...

It's not an easy task to track large hunks of falling metal everywhere in the world. Ground-based radar can detect falling objects, but it doesn't cover much of the world or is often classified data, said Ben Fernando [a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University who is leading this research]. The other option is through optical instruments, such as doorbell cameras, but the information on the time, size and speed can be limited. Instead, Fernando turned to seismology data. Stations located around the world live-stream data, which can be easily downloaded. Seismometers have been used to track meteors in the sky for over a century, but he said this is the first time he's aware of its use for tracking space debris.

Stations located around the world live-stream data, which can be easily downloaded. Seismometers have been used to track meteors in the sky for over a century, but he said this is the first time he's aware of its use for tracking space debris. Fernando first tested the idea to track the controlled reentry of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission in September 2023, which brought back material from the asteroid Bennu. He set up seismometers along the capsule's path in the landing spot in Utah and measured its sonic boom. "It's a really good way of monitoring what's coming in, how often it's coming in, how big the things hitting the Earth are," said Fernando, who presented his results at the American Geophysical Union conference in December...

"The shockwave deforms the ground around the seismometer," said Fernando. "It also keeps ringing for a lot longer because all of that energy is bouncing around in the soil...." [H]e said an automated system could help detect these objects within moments of it appearing on the stations. In addition to detecting an event, the seismometers can help locate where any debris may have fallen. Tracking debris is important because some space debris can contain toxic materials that can harm the surrounding environment.
The article notes reports of the uncontrolled reentry into Earth's atmosphere of at least 951 objects larger than one square meter from 2010 to 2022.

"On average, objects heavier than 1,000 pounds came down about every 8 days... In fact, the threat of getting hit by uncontrolled orbital reentries has increased by a factor of four from 2010 to 2023, said Luciano Anselmo, who published a study assessing the risk."

Mr. Dollar Ton shares a report from the BBC: The chemical building blocks of life have been found, among many other complex chemical compounds, in the grainy dust of an asteroid called Bennu, an analysis reveals. Samples of the space rock, which were scooped up by a Nasa spacecraft and brought to Earth, contain a rich array of minerals and thousands of organic compounds. These include amino acids, which are the molecules that make up proteins, as well as nucleobases -- the fundamental components of DNA. The findings are published in two papers in the journal nature.

Astronomers have discovered a newly identified asteroid that has a 1-in-83 chance of striking Earth on December 22, 2032, though the most likely scenario is a close miss. Designated as 2024 YR4, the asteroid measures in at 196 feet wide and is currently 27 million miles away. Space.com reports: The near-Earth object (NEO) discovered in 2024, which is around half as wide as a football field is long, will make a very close approach to Earth on Dec. 22, 2032. It's estimated to come within around 66,000 miles (106,200 kilometers) of Earth on that day, according to NASA's Center of NEO Studies (CNEOS). However, when orbital uncertainties are considered, that close approach could turn out to be a direct hit on our planet.

Such an impact could cause an explosion in the atmosphere, called an "airburst," or could cause an impact crater when it slams into the ground. This is enough to see asteroid 2024 YR4 leap to the top of the European Space Agency's NEO impact Risk List and NASA's Sentry Risk Table. "People should absolutely not worry about this yet," said Catalina Sky Survey engineer and asteroid hunter David Rankin. "Impact probability is still very low, and the most likely outcome will be a close approaching rock that misses us."

As for where it could hit Earth, Rankin said that the "risk corridor" for impact runs from South America across the Atlantic to sub-Saharan Africa.

Dangerous temperatures could kill 50% more people in Europe by the end of the century, a study has found, with the lives lost to stronger heat projected to outnumber those saved from milder cold. From a report: The researchers estimated an extra 8,000 people would die each year as a result of "suboptimal temperatures" even under the most optimistic scenario for cutting planet-heating pollution. The hottest plausible scenario they considered showed a net increase of 80,000 temperature-related deaths a year.

The findings challenge an argument popular among those who say global heating is good for society because fewer people will die from cold weather. "We wanted to test this," said Pierre Masselot, a statistician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and lead author of the study. "And we show clearly that we will see a net increase in temperature-related deaths under climate change." The study builds on previous research in which the scientists linked temperature to mortality rates for different age groups in 854 cities across Europe. They combined these with three climate scenarios that map possible changes in population structure and temperature over the century.

The U.S. may have led China in the AI race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed. From a report: Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta , said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an "earth-shattering model" on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which competes with OpenAI's recently released o1 model.

"What we've found is that DeepSeek ... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models," Wang said. In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the U.S. and China as an "AI war," adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs -- AI chips that are widely used to build leading powerful AI models -- than people may think, especially considering U.S. export controls. [...] "The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure," Wang said, later adding, "We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom." DeepSeek's holding company is a quant firm, which happened to have a lot of GPUs for trading and mining. DeepSeek is their "side project."

Scientists have detected cosmic "chorus waves" resembling bird chirps over 62,000 miles from Earth, a region where such waves have never been observed. "Scientists still aren't sure how the perturbations happen, but they think Earth's magnetic field may have something to do with it," reports the Associated Press. From the report: The chorus has been picked up on radio antennas for decades, including receivers at an Antarctica research station in the 1960s. And twin spacecraft -- NASA's Van Allen Probes -- heard the chirps from Earth's radiation belts at a closer distance than the newest detection. The latest notes were picked up by NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale satellites, launched in 2015 to explore the Earth and sun's magnetic fields. The new research was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Chorus waves have also been spotted near other planets including Jupiter and Saturn. They can even produce high-energy electrons capable of scrambling satellite communications. "They are one of the strongest and most significant waves in space," said study author Chengming Liu from Beihang University in an email. The newfound chorus waves were detected in a region where Earth's magnetic field is stretched out, which scientists didn't expect. That raises fresh questions about how these chirping waves form. "It's very captivating, very compelling," Jaynes said. "We definitely need to find more of these events."

CNN has the latest on "a startling discovery made public in July that metallic rocks were apparently producing oxygen on the Pacific Ocean's seabed, where no light can penetrate.

"Initial research suggested potato-size nodules rich in metals, predominantly found 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) below the surface in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, released an electrical charge, splitting seawater into oxygen and hydrogen through electrolysis." The unprecedented natural phenomenon challenges the idea that oxygen can only be made from sunlight via photosynthesis. Andrew Sweetman, a professor at the UK's Scottish Association for Marine Science who was behind the find, is embarking on a three-year project to investigate the production of "dark" oxygen further... Uncovering dark oxygen revealed just how little is known about the deep ocean, and the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or CCZ, in particular. The region is being explored for the deep-sea mining of rare metals contained in the rock nodules. The latter are formed over millions of years, and the metals play a key role in new and green technologies...

Understanding the phenomenon better could also help space scientists find life beyond Earth, [Sweetman] added... Officials at NASA are interested in the research on dark oxygen production because it could inform scientific understanding of how life might be sustained on other planets without direct sunlight, Sweetman said. The space agency wants to run experiments to understand the amount of energy required to potentially produce oxygen at higher pressures that occur on Enceladus and Europa, the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter, respectively, he added. Those moons are among the targets for investigating the possibility of life.

Deep-sea mining companies are aiming to mine the cobalt, nickel, copper, lithium and manganese contained in the nodules for use in solar panels, electric car batteries and other green technology. Some companies have taken issue with Sweetman's research. Critics say deep-sea mining could irrevocably damage the pristine underwater environment and that it could disrupt the way carbon is stored in the ocean, contributing to the climate crisis.
CNN's article also notes Massachusetts microbiologist Emil Ruff, who found unexpected oxygen far below the Canadian prairie in water isolated from the atmosphere for more than 40,000 years.

"Nature keeps surprising us," he said. "There are so many things that people have said, 'Oh, this is impossible,' and then later it turns out it's not."

"The universe is expanding faster than predicted by theoretical models," writes Phys.org, "and faster than can be explained by our current understanding of physics." There's now been new confirmation of this (published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters) by a team led by Dan Scolnic, an associate professor of physics at Duke University.

And this means the so-called Hubble tension "now turns into a crisis," said Dan Scolnic, who led the research team... This is saying, to some respect, that our model of cosmology might be broken." Measuring the universe requires a cosmic ladder, which is a succession of methods used to measure the distances to celestial objects, with each method, or "rung," relying on the previous for calibration. The ladder used by Scolnic was created by a separate team using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is observing more than 100,000 galaxies every night from its vantage point at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Scolnic recognized that this ladder could be anchored closer to Earth with a more precise distance to the Coma Cluster, one of the galaxy clusters nearest to us. "The DESI collaboration did the really hard part, their ladder was missing the first rung," said Scolnic. "I knew how to get it, and I knew that that would give us one of the most precise measurements of the Hubble constant we could get, so when their paper came out, I dropped absolutely everything and worked on this non-stop."

To get a precise distance to the Coma cluster, Scolnic and his collaborators used the light curves from 12 Type Ia supernovae within the cluster. Just like candles lighting a dark path, Type Ia supernovae have a predictable luminosity that correlates to their distance, making them reliable objects for distance calculations. The team arrived at a distance of about 320 million light-years, nearly in the center of the range of distances reported across 40 years of previous studies — a reassuring sign of its accuracy. "This measurement isn't biased by how we think the Hubble tension story will end," said Scolnic. "This cluster is in our backyard, it has been measured long before anyone knew how important it was going to be."
The results? "It matches the universe's expansion rate as other teams have recently measured it," writes Phys.org, "but not as our current understanding of physics predicts it. The longstanding question is: is the flaw in the measurements or in the models? Scolnic's team's new results add tremendous support to the emerging picture that the root of the Hubble tension lies in the models..."

And the article closes with this quote from Scolnic: "Ultimately, even though we're swapping out so many of the pieces, we all still get a very similar number. So, for me, this is as good of a confirmation as it's ever gotten. We're at a point where we're pressing really hard against the models we've been using for two and a half decades, and we're seeing that things aren't matching up," said Scolnic.

"This may be reshaping how we think about the universe, and it's exciting! There are still surprises left in cosmology, and who knows what discoveries will come next?"

"The next great space telescope will study distant galaxies and faraway planets from an orbital outpost about a million miles from Earth," writes the Washington Post. "But first it has to be put together, piece by piece, in a cavernous chamber at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland."

One long-time NASA worker calls it "the largest clean room in the free world," and the Post notes everyone wears white gowns and surgical masks "to keep hardware from being contaminated by humans. No dust allowed. No stray hairs. One wall is entirely covered by HEPA filters." The place is known as the Clean Room, or sometimes the High Bay. It is 125 feet long, 100 feet wide, 90 feet high, with almost as much volume as the Capitol Rotunda. NASA boasts that in the Clean Room you could put nearly 30 tractor-trailers side by side on the floor and stack them 10 high... About two dozen workers clustered around towering pieces of hardware, some twice or three times the height of a typical person. When stacked and integrated, these components will form the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The assembly of the telescope ramped up this fall, with 600 workers aiming to get everything integrated and tested by late 2026. NASA has committed to launching the telescope no later than May 2027. The telescope will be roughly the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, but not quite as long (a "stubby Hubble," some call it). What the astronomy community and the general public will receive in exchange for the considerable taxpayer investment of nearly $4 billion is an instrument that can do what other telescopes can't.

It will have a sprawling field of view, about 100 times that of the Hubble or Webb space telescopes. And it will be able to pivot quickly across the night sky to new targets and download tremendous amounts of data that will be instantly available to the researchers. A primary goal of the Roman is to understand "dark energy," the mysterious driver of the accelerating expansion of space. But it will also attempt to study the atmospheres of exoplanets — worlds orbiting distant stars...

The main element, informally referred to as "the telescope" but officially called the "optical telescope assembly," showed up this fall. It was originally built as a spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office. That's right: It was built to look down at Earth, rather than at the rest of the universe. The NRO decided more than a decade ago that it didn't need it, and gave it, along with another, identical spy satellite, to NASA. Roman's wide-angle view of deep space, its maneuverability and ability to download massive amounts of data makes it optimized as a dark energy telescope. And it will also study the effects of dark matter, which comprises about 25 percent of the universe but remains a ghostly presence.

Smithsonian Magazine reports: A homeowner on Prince Edward Island in Canada has had a very unusual near-death experience: A meteorite landed exactly where he'd been standing roughly two minutes earlier. What's more, his home security camera caught the impact on video -- capturing a rare clip that might be the first known recording of both the visual and audio of a meteorite striking the planet. The shocking event took place in July 2024 and was announced in a statement by the University of Alberta on Monday.

"It sounded like a loud, crashing, gunshot bang," the homeowner, Joe Velaidum, tells the Canadian Press' Lyndsay Armstrong. Velaidum wasn't home to hear the sound in person, however. Last summer, he and his partner Laura Kelly noticed strange, star-shaped, grey debris in front of their house after returning from a walk with their dogs. They checked their security camera footage, and that's when they saw and heard it: a small rock plummeting through the sky and smashing into their walkway. It landed so quickly that the space rock itself is only visible in two of the video's frames.

Google has partnered with Indian startup Varaha to purchase 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal credits by 2030, marking its largest deal in India and the largest involving biochar, a carbon removal solution made from biomass. TechCrunch reports: The offtake agreement credits will be delivered to Google by 2030 from Varaha's industrial biochar project in the western Indian state of Gujarat, the two firms said on Thursday. [...] Biochar is produced in two ways: artisanal and industrial. The artisanal method is community-driven, where farmers burn crop residue in conical flasks without using machines. In contrast, industrial biochar is made using large reactors that process 50-60 tons of biomass daily.

Varaha's project will generate industrial biochar from an invasive plant species, Prosopis Juliflora, using its pyrolysis facility in Gujarat. The invasive species impacts plant biodiversity and has overtaken grasslands used for livestock. Varaha will harvest the plant and make efforts to restore native grasslands in the region, the company's co-founder and CEO Madhur Jain said in an interview. Once the biochar is produced, a third-party auditor will submit their report to Puro.Earth to generate credits. Although biochar is seen as a long-term carbon removal solution, its permanence can vary between 1,000 and 2,500 years depending on production and environmental factors.

Jain told TechCrunch that Varaha tried using different feedstocks and different parameters within its reactors to find the best combination to achieve permanence close to 1,600 years. The startup has also built a digital monitoring, reporting and verification system, integrating remote sensing to monitor biomass availability. It even has a mobile app that captures geo-tagged, time-stamped images to geographically document activities, including biomass excavation and biochar's field application. With its first project, Varaha said it processed at least 40,000 tons of biomass and produced 10,000 tons of biochar last year.

Nearly three-quarters of all known bacterial species have never been studied in scientific literature, while just 10 species account for half of all published research, according to a new analysis published on bioRxiv.

The study of over 43,000 bacterial species found that E. coli dominates with 21% of all publications, followed by human pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus. Microbes crucial for human health and Earth's ecosystems remain largely unexplored, University of Michigan biologist Paul Jensen reported.

A new $1-million project by non-profit Align to Innovate aims to help close this gap by studying 1,000 microbes under varying conditions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Benj Edwards: While worrying about AI takeover might seem like a modern idea that sprung from War Games or The Terminator, it turns out that a similar concern about machine dominance dates back to the time of the American Civil War, albeit from an English sheep farmer living in New Zealand. Theoretically, Abraham Lincoln could have read about AI takeover during his lifetime. On June 13, 1863, a letter published (PDF) in The Press newspaper of Christchurch warned about the potential dangers of mechanical evolution and called for the destruction of machines, foreshadowing the development of what we now call artificial intelligence—and the backlash against it from people who fear it may threaten humanity with extinction. It presented what may be the first published argument for stopping technological progress to prevent machines from dominating humanity.

Titled "Darwin among the Machines," the letter recently popped up again on social media thanks to Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy. The author of the letter, Samuel Butler, submitted it under the pseudonym Cellarius, but later came to publicly embrace his position. The letter drew direct parallels between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the rapid development of machinery, suggesting that machines could evolve consciousness and eventually supplant humans as Earth's dominant species. "We are ourselves creating our own successors," he wrote. "We are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race."

In the letter, he also portrayed humans becoming subservient to machines, but first serving as caretakers who would maintain and help reproduce mechanical life—a relationship Butler compared to that between humans and their domestic animals, before it later inverts and machines take over. "We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man... we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them... in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals," he wrote. The text anticipated several modern AI safety concerns, including the possibility of machine consciousness, self-replication, and humans losing control of their technological creations. These themes later appeared in works like Isaac Asimov's The Evitable Conflict, Frank Herbert's Dune novels (Butler possibly served as the inspiration for the term "Butlerian Jihad"), and the Matrix films. "Butler's letter dug deep into the taxonomy of machine evolution, discussing mechanical 'genera and sub-genera' and pointing to examples like how watches had evolved from 'cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century' -- suggesting that, like some early vertebrates, mechanical species might get smaller as they became more sophisticated," adds Ars. "He expanded these ideas in his 1872 novel Erewhon, which depicted a society that had banned most mechanical inventions. In his fictional society, citizens destroyed all machines invented within the previous 300 years."

The University of Colorado Boulder's magazine recently wrote: What happened during the "Snowball Earth" period is perplexing: Just as the planet endured about 100 million years of deep freeze, with a thick layer of ice covering most of Earth and with low levels of atmospheric oxygen, forms of multicellular life emerged. Why? The prevailing scientific view is that such frigid temperatures would slow rather than speed evolution. But fossil records from 720 to 635 million years ago show an evolutionary spurt preceding the development of animals...

Carl Simpson, a macroevolutionary paleobiologist at CU Boulder, has found evidence that cold seawater could have jump-started — rather than suppressed — evolution from single-celled to multicellular life forms.
That evidence is described in Quanta magazine: Simpson proposes an answer linked to a fundamental physical fact: As seawater gets colder, it gets more viscous, and therefore more difficult for very small organisms to navigate. Imagine swimming through honey rather than water... To test the idea, Simpson, a paleobiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his team conducted an experiment designed to see what a modern single-celled organism does when confronted with higher viscosity... In an enormous, custom-made petri dish, [grad student Andrea] Halling and Simpson created a bull's-eye target of agar gel — their own experimental gauntlet of viscosity. At the center, it was the standard viscosity used for growing these algae in the lab. [Green algae, which swims with a tail-like flagellum.] Moving outward, each concentric ring had higher and higher viscosity, finally reaching a medium with four times the standard level. The scientists placed the algae in the middle, turned on a camera, and left them alone for 30 days — enough time for about 70 generations of algae to live, swim around for nutrients and die...

After 30 days, the algae in the middle were still unicellular. As the scientists put algae from thicker and thicker rings under the microscope, however, they found larger clumps of cells. The very largest were wads of hundreds. But what interested Simpson the most were mobile clusters of four to 16 cells, arranged so that their flagella were all on the outside. These clusters moved around by coordinating the movement of their flagella, the ones at the back of the cluster holding still, the ones at the front wriggling.
"One thing that you learn about small organisms from a physics point of view is that they don't experience the world the same way that we do, as larger-bodied organisms," Simpson says in the university's article. It says that instead unicellular organisms are specifically "affected by the viscosity, or thickness, of sea water," and Simpson adds that "basically, that would trigger the origin of animals, potentially."

Last year Simpson posted a preprint on biorxiv.org. (And he also co-authored an article on "physical constraints during Snowball Earth drive the evolution of multicellularity.")

There's a video showing algae in Simpson's lab clumping together in viscous water. "This observed behavior adds evidence to Simpson's hypothesis that single-celled organisms clumped together to their mutual advantage during the 'Snowball Earth' period," says the video's description, "thus adding momentum to the rise of multicellular organisms." But Simpson says in the university's article, "To actually see it empirically means there's something to this idea."

Simpson and colleagues have now received a $1 million grant to study grains of sand made from calcium carbonate and called ooids, since their diameter "could be a proxy measurement of Earth's temperature for the last 2.5 billion years," according to the university's article. Geologist Lizzy Trower says the research "can tell us something about the chemistry and water temperature in which they formed." And more importantly, "Does the fossil record agree with the predictions we would make based on this theory from this new record of temperature?" Trower and Simpson's work also has potential implications for the human quest to find life elsewhere in the universe, Trower said. If extremely harsh and cold environments can spur evolutionary change, "then that is a really different type of thing to look for in exoplanets (potentially life-sustaining planets in other solar systems), or think about when and where (life) would exist."

MicroStrategy's bitcoin holdings and a tech investment fund are commanding extraordinary premiums in U.S. markets, highlighting unusual price anomalies reminiscent of past market distortions. MicroStrategy shares are trading at more than double the market value of their main asset -- bitcoin holdings -- while closed-end fund Destiny Tech100 recently traded at 11 times its net asset value, down from 21 times earlier in 2024.

Similar market irregularities have emerged throughout history. In 1923, investor Benjamin Graham profited from a disconnect between DuPont and General Motors shares. During the 1929 bull market, closed-end fund Capital Administration Co. traded at a 1,235% premium to its net asset value. WSJ adds: The PalmPilot during the 1990s and early 2000s was a hand-held device and personal assistant that came with a touch-screen display and a stylus. Palm was the biggest maker of hand-held computer devices, with 70% market share, and it held its initial public offering in March 2000, about a week before the Nasdaq Composite Index's peak during the dot-com bubble.

Palm's shares jumped 150% on their first day of trading, giving Palm a stock-market value of about $53 billion. Palm was still 94%-owned by parent 3Com at the time. Yet on Palm's first day of trading, 3Com's shares fell 21%.

The funny part: According to the stock market, 3Com was worth about $23 billion less than the value of the Palm shares that 3Com owned. This made no sense, yet the valuations remained out of whack for months. In time, both stocks came down to earth, sanity prevailed and the world eventually moved on to smartphones.

The climate crisis is "wreaking havoc" on the planet's water cycle, with ferocious floods and crippling droughts affecting billions of people, a report has found. The Guardian: Water is people's most vital natural resource but global heating is changing the way water moves around the Earth. The analysis of water disasters in 2024, which was the hottest year on record, found they had killed at least 8,700 people, driven 40 million from their homes and caused economic damage of more than $550bn.

Rising temperatures, caused by continued burning of fossil fuels, disrupt the water cycle in multiple ways. Warmer air can hold more water vapour, leading to more intense downpours. Warmer seas provide more energy to hurricanes and typhoons, supercharging their destructive power. Global heating can also increase drought by causing more evaporation from soil, as well as shifting rainfall patterns.

Deadly flash floods hit Nepal and Brazil in 2024, while river flooding caused devastation in central Europe, China and Bangladesh. Super Typhoon Yagi, which struck south-east Asia in September, was intensified by the climate crisis, as was Storm Boris which hit Europe the same month. Droughts also caused major damage, with crop production in southern Africa halving, causing more than 30 million people to face food shortages. Farmers were also forced to cull livestock as their pastures dried up, and falling output from hydropower dams led to widespread blackouts.

This week New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose published his annual "Good Tech" awards to "shine the spotlight on a few tech projects that I think contributed positively to humanity."

And high on the list is "Andres Freund, and every open-source software maintainer saving us from doom." The most fun column I wrote this past year was about a Microsoft database engineer, Andres Freund, who got some odd errors while doing routine maintenance on an obscure open-source software package called xz Utils. While investigating, Freund inadvertently discovered a huge security vulnerability in the Linux operating system, which could have allowed a hacker to take control of hundreds of millions of computers and bring the world to its knees.

It turns out that much of our digital infrastructure rests on similar acts of nerdy heroism. After writing about Freund's discovery, I received tips about other near disasters involving open-source software projects, many of which were averted by sharp-eyed volunteers catching bugs and fixing critical code just in time to foil the bad guys. I could not write about them all, but this award is to say: I see you, open-source maintainers, and I thank you for your service.
Roose also acknowledges the NASA engineers who kept Voyager 1 transmitting back to earth from interstellar space — and Bluesky, "for making my social media feeds interesting again."

Roose also notes it was a big year for AI. There's a shout-out to Epoch AI, a small nonprofit research group in Spain, "for giving us reliable data on the AI boom." ("The firm maintains public databases of AI models and AI hardware, and publishes research on AI trends, including an influential report last year about whether AI models can continue to grow at their current pace. Epoch AI concluded they most likely could until 2030.") And there's also a shout-out to groups "pushing AI forward" and positive uses "to improve health care, identify new drugs and treatments for debilitating diseases and accelerate important scientific research."

• The nonprofit Arc Institute released Evo, an AI model that "can predict and generate genomic sequences, using technology similar to the kind that allows systems like ChatGPT to predict the next words in a sequence."

• A Harvard University lab led by Dr. Jeffrey Lichtman teamed with researchers from Google for "the most detailed map of a human brain sample ever created. The team used AI to map more than 150 million synapses in a tiny sample of brain tissue at nanometer-level resolution..."

• Researchers at Stanford and McMaster universities developed SyntheMol, "a generative AI model that can design new antibiotics from scratch."

"We're going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction," Elon Musk posted Thursday on X.com.

Ars Technica's senior space editor points out that "These are definitive statements that directly contradict NASA's plans to send a series of human missions to the lunar south pole later this decade and establish a sustainable base of operations there with the Artemis Program." And "It would be one thing if Musk was just expressing his opinion as a private citizen..." but Musk "has assumed an important advisory role for the incoming administration. He was also partly responsible for the expected nomination of private astronaut [and former SpaceX flight commander] Jared Isaacman to become the next administrator of NASA. Although Musk is not directing US space policy, he certainly has a meaningful say in what happens." So what does this mean for Artemis? The fate of Artemis is an important question not just for NASA but for the US commercial space industry, the European Space Agency, and other international partners who have aligned with the return of humans to the Moon. With Artemis, the United States is in competition with China to establish a meaningful presence on the surface of the Moon. Based upon conversations with people involved in developing space policy for the Trump administration, I can make some educated guesses about how to interpret Musk's comments. None of these people, for example, would disagree with Musk's assertion that "the Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient" and that some changes are warranted.

With that said, the Artemis Program is probably not going away. After all, it was the first Trump administration that created the program about five years ago. However, it may be less well-remembered that the first Trump White House pushed for more significant changes, including a "major course correction" at NASA... To a large extent, NASA resisted this change during the remainder of the Trump administration, keeping its core group of major contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, in place. It had help from key US Senators, including Richard Shelby, the now-retired Republican from Alabama. But this time, the push for change is likely to be more concerted, especially with key elements of NASA's architecture, including the Space Launch System rocket, being bypassed by privately developed rockets such as SpaceX's Starship vehicle and Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.

In all likelihood, NASA will adopt a new "Artemis" plan that involves initiatives to both the Moon and Mars. When Musk said "we're going straight to Mars," he may have meant that this will be the thrust of SpaceX, with support from NASA. That does not preclude a separate initiative, possibly led by Blue Origin with help from NASA, to develop lunar return plans.
One month ago in a post on X.com, incoming NASA administrator Isaacman described himself as "passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history..."

And he also added that Americans "will walk on the Moon and Mars and in doing so, we will make life better here on Earth."

"Private space stations have been raising billions of dollars in an effort to build future hubs — and even one day cities — in orbit," according to a recent report from the U.K. newspaper, the Telegraph: Axiom Space, a US business aiming to build its own station, has raised more than $500m (£400m). Vast, a space business backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, is plotting two stations before the end of the decade. Gravitics, meanwhile, has raised tens of millions of dollars for its modular space "real estate". Nasa itself, along with other space agencies, is planning a further station, Lunar Gateway, which will orbit the Moon. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has also announced plans to build a space station by 2027, called Orbital Reef, which it has described as an orbital "mixed-use business park". Working with US aerospace business Sierra Space, Orbital Reef will be made up of inflatable pods, which can be launched on a regular rocket before being "blown up" in space. Sierra Space says these modules could house in-space manufacturing or pharmaceutical technology...

Since 2021, Nasa has also offered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to private companies to develop commercial space stations that could succeed the ISS. So far, it has handed $400m to companies including Axiom, Blue Origin (which is working with Sierra Space), and Northrop Grumman... Vast hopes to launch its first space station, Haven-1, as soon as 2025. This simple module will be the first privately-run space station and will be occupied by a crew of four over four two week expeditions... While Vast was not one of the businesses to secure funding from Nasa, it hopes by launching the first proof-of-concept space station as soon as next year it can leapfrog rival efforts and claim the agency as an anchor customer. From there, it can target other space agencies or companies looking to conduct research.
Some interesting perspectives from the article:

• Chris Quilty, an analyst at Quilty Space: "If China were not building its own space station it is arguable whether Nasa would have felt enjoined to maintain a human presence in low Earth orbit."

• Tim Farrar, founder of TMF Associates, which advises some of the world's top space companies: "Unless they either secure government funding or focus on space tourism, they will inevitably have to rely on the largess of either billionaires or gullible investors who are space enthusiasts."

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.