“A pre-pandemic policy on airport usage is pressuring airlines to keep ‘ghost flights’ in the air,” Wired reported this week — adding “The climate impact is massive.” Lufthansa, Germany’s national airline, which is based in Frankfurt, has admitted to running 21,000 empty flights this winter, using its own planes and Read more…
CNN reports that wastewater-based epidemiology “has proven to be so reliable in dozens of pilot projects across the U.S. that the government has invested millions to create the National Wastewater Surveillance System, or NWSS, a network of 400 testing sites spread across 19 states that is coordinated by the U.S. Read more…
About a tenth of the global oil and gas industry’s methane emissions have been found to come from a group of “ultra-emitter” sites located mostly in Turkmenistan, Russia and the US. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that governments recently agreed to slash by 2030. While huge plumes of methane Read more…
Engineers from the University of Delaware developed a method for effectively capturing 99 percent of carbon dioxide from the air using an electrochemical system powered by hydrogen, a press statement reveals. The new system, outlined in a new paper in the journal Nature Energy, was actually born out of a Read more…
Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality business is to introduce a mandatory distance between people’s digital avatars after warnings that the social media tycoon’s plans for a metaverse will lead to a new wave of online harassment. Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is making a multibillion-dollar bet on VR as the next Read more…
Pop-up notifications are often annoying. For Meta, one in Apple’s iOS operating system, which powers iPhones, is a particular headache. On February 2nd Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, told investors that privacy-focused changes to iOS, including the “ask app not to track” notification, would cost the company around $10 Read more…
A historic bridge in Rotterdam, Netherlands, is to be dismantled so that Jeff Bezos’ superyacht can pass through. The Koningshaven Bridge, nicknamed “De Hef” by locals, has been a landmark in Rotterdam since 1878. Originally a swing bridge, it was converted into a lifting bridge after several ships got stuck Read more…