California lawmakers have passed a bill that would legalize plug-in “balcony” solar systems, allowing residents to connect small solar panels directly to a standard wall outlet after completing a simple online registration. The systems would be capped at 1,200 watts and must meet safety requirements designed to prevent power from Read more…
Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night. The X Safety team probed suspected Chinese accounts involved in influence operations and identified 200,000 accounts, including 200 accounts “posting in a manner Read more…
SpaceX plans to spend up to $100 billion building a new Starship launch facility in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, which the state says could eventually “support thousands of launches annually.” CNBC reports: Once built, Starbase, LA will serve as the main launch facility for Starship, SpaceX’s in-development rocket that’s the largest Read more…
The world’s oceans are hotter than ever recorded, new data suggests, as they suffer from human-caused climate change and the growing El Nino weather phenomenon. The average surface temperature of the planet’s seas outside the polar regions hit 21.1C (70F) on Saturday, according to figures from the European Copernicus climate Read more…
A rapidly developing El Nino is already reaching record-setting levels for this time of year and is expected to intensify further over the coming months. It is off the charts. Usual measures of El Nino have blown past prior record levels in the period with good data, even though maximum Read more…
The European Union’s Copernicus climate monitoring service confirmed Monday that June and July were the hottest on record in western Europe. The period saw an estimated 25,000 heat-related deaths. CNN has before-and-after photos of Europe’s dried rivers, calling it “a crisis so dire it can be seen from space” River Read more…
Researchers have found a clever new way to map a part of Earth’s upper atmosphere that is notoriously difficult to observe. Using orbital data from roughly 1,200 Starlink satellites, they reconstructed changes in atmospheric density about 500 kilometers above Earth. […] The resulting density patterns also showed strong consistency with Read more…