Efforts to tease apart the vast swarm of proteins in venom -- a field called venomics -- have burgeoned in recent years, leading to important drug discoveries. From a report: In a small room in a building at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the invertebrate keeper, Emma Califf, lifts up a rock in a plastic box. "This is one of our desert hairies," she said, exposing a three-inch-long scorpion, its tail arced over its back. "The largest scorpion in North America." This captive hairy, along with a swarm of inch-long bark scorpions in another box, and two dozen rattlesnakes of varying species and sub- species across the hall, are kept here for the coin of the realm: their venom. Efforts to tease apart the vast swarm of proteins in venom -- a field called venomics -- have burgeoned in recent years, and the growing catalog of compounds has led to a number of drug discoveries. As the components of these natural toxins continue to be assayed by evolving technologies, the number of promising molecules is also growing.

"A century ago we thought venom had three or four components, and now we know just one type of venom can have thousands," said Leslie V. Boyer, a professor emeritus of pathology at the University of Arizona. "Things are accelerating because a small number of very good laboratories have been pumping out information that everyone else can now use to make discoveries." She added, "There's a pharmacopoeia out there waiting to be explored." It is a striking case of modern-day scientific alchemy: The most highly evolved of natural poisons on the planet are creating a number of effective medicines with the potential for many more.

One of the most promising venom-derived drugs to date comes from the deadly Fraser Island funnel web spider of Australia, which halts cell death after a heart attack. Blood flow to the heart is reduced after a heart attack, which makes the cell environment more acidic and leads to cell death. The drug, a protein called Hi1A, is scheduled for clinical trials next year. In the lab, it was tested on the cells of beating human hearts. It was found to block their ability to sense acid, "so the death message is blocked, cell death is reduced, and we see improved heart cell survival," said Nathan Palpant, a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia who helped make the discovery.

Extreme weather due to the climate crisis is expected to increasingly make some Australian homes "uninsurable," with a new report suggesting up to one in 25 households will struggle to be covered by 2030. From a report: The analysis by the Climate Council, using data from consultants Climate Valuation, mapped the 10 electorates across the country considered most at risk of becoming uninsurable due to flood, fire and other extreme weather risk. The most at-risk areas were mostly found to be in flood and cyclone-prone areas of Queensland and in parts of Victoria built over flood plains near major rivers. "Uninsurable" is defined in the report as an area where the required type of insurance product was expected to be not available, or only available at such high cost that no one could afford it.

Bosses are hellbent on getting their staff back into the office. It's just that the rules don't necessarily apply to them. Bloomberg reports: While 35% of non-executive employees are in the office five days a week, only 19% of executives can say the same thing, according to a survey conducted by Future Forum, a research consortium supported by the Slack messaging channel. Of the percentage of employees who move to work, more than half say they would like to have at least some flexibility, and non-executive workers generally say that work-life balance is much worse than that of their bosses. Moreover, the disparity is increasing. In the fourth quarter of 2021, non-executive employees were approximately 1.3 times more likely than their bosses to be completely in the office. Now, the probability is almost twice as high, and the proportion of non-executives working from the office five days a week is the highest since the survey began in June 2020, according to the more than 10,000 administrative workers surveyed in the United States, Australia and France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.

The gap points to a double standard in back-to-office messaging: executives, from Bank of America Corp. to Alphabet Inc.'s Google, urge their workers to return in part to increase face-to-face collaboration, but the bosses themselves are somewhat exempt. Companies are also trying to justify long-term office leases or state-of-the-art locations like Apple Park in Cupertino, California. [...] As the back-to-office policy debate evolves, Future Forum recommends flexible schedules and location to retain top talent, even if it means breaking cultural traditions and developing new workflows. "People being in the office gives the illusion of control, but it's just an illusion," [Brian Elliott, executive director of Future Forum] said. "It doesn't mean they're being productive."

Developer burnout is helping to drive an exodus of software developer talent from organizations, as part of a larger trend known as the Great Resignation, according to a report released on April 13 by MuleSoft, which is a division of Salesforce. From a report: The MuleSoft report was based on research conducted by Vanson Bourne in February 2022 across the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Australia. Eighty-six percent of respondents indicated that in the last two years it has become increasingly difficult to recruit software developers. One of the reasons why is the larger macroeconomic trend of the Great Resignation, where employees are leaving their employers en masse during the COVID-19 pandemic as they seek a better work-life balance.

Burnout is also a large challenge for developers, according to the report. The top causes of developer burnout are increasing workloads and the challenges of learning new skills to adapt to emerging technologies. "The pandemic was a massive accelerator for the need of digital tools," Matt McLarty, global field CTO and vice president of the Digital Transformation Office (DTO) at MuleSoft, told ITPro Today. "Non-technology companies were ultimately forced to become technology companies overnight, and we saw nearly every organization require developers to help them achieve these new goals on high-pressure deadlines, all at once."

"Digital purchases are mysteriously expiring on classic PlayStation consoles," Kotaku reports, "rendering a random assortment of games unplayable."

The glitch is "affecting users' ability to play games they ostensibly own." Upon re-downloading the PSOne Classic version of Chrono Cross, for instance, Twitter user Christopher Foose was told the purchase expired on December 31, 1969, preventing him from playing the game on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. GamesHub editor Edmond Tran described a similar issue. Trying to boot up Chrono Cross on PlayStation 3, Tran said, gave him the same expiration date and time, only adjusted for his location in Australia. Tran did mention, however, that he was able to download the PSOne Classic from his library and play just fine on Vita despite the game's apparent delisting from the handheld's store.

While at first this felt like an attempt at encouraging Chrono Cross fans to purchase the new Radical Dreamers remaster, Kotaku quickly found evidence of this same problem occurring with different games. Chrono Cross worked just fine for content creator Words, but not its spiritual predecessor Chrono Trigger, the license for which somehow lapsed 40 years before the game was added to the PSOne Classic library.

Steve J over on Twitter asked PlayStation directly why the expiration date for his copy of Final Fantasy VI was changed to 1969, but never received a response....

The only potential explanation I've seen for this issue thus far involves what's known as the "Unix epoch," or the arbitrary date early engineers designated as the beginning of the operating system's lifespan. Some bug or glitch on Sony's backend may be defaulting PlayStation game license expiration dates to the Unix epoch, essentially telling them they can't be played after midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.

In March a 44-year-old librarian at Pennsylvania's Bucknell University saved a copy of a web site about a 16th century Ukrainian politician and patron of the arts. One month later, "the original website is lost," reports the Washington Post, "its server space likely gone to cyberattacks, power outages or Russian shelling."

But thanks to that librarian, the site "remains intact on server space rented by an international group of librarians and archivists." Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 shared the Post's report: Buildings, bridges, and monuments aren't the only cultural landmarks vulnerable to war. With the violence well into its second month, the country's digital history — its poems, archives, and pictures — are at risk of being erased as cyberattacks and bombs erode the nation's servers.

Over the past month, a motley group of more than 1,300 librarians, historians, teachers and young children have banded together to save Ukraine's Internet archives, using technology to back up everything from census data to children's poems and Ukrainian basket weaving techniques. The efforts, dubbed Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (or SUCHO), have resulted in over 2,500 of the country's museums, libraries, and archives being preserved on servers they've rented, eliminating the risk they'll be lost forever. Now, an all-volunteer effort has become a lifeline for cultural officials in Ukraine, who are working with the group to digitize their collections in the event their facilities get destroyed in the war....

They banded together, and amid sleepless nights across multiple time-zones, they recruited, trained, and organized scores of volunteers wanting to help archive Ukraine's historical websites. Large parts of the Internet get periodically archived through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which partners with the organization, but SUCHO's organizers also needed something more advanced, said Quinn Dombrowski, an academic technology specialist at Stanford University. In many cases, the Wayback Machine can dig into the first or second layer of a website, she added, but many documents, like pictures and uploaded files, on Ukraine's cultural websites could be seven or eight layers deep, inaccessible to traditional Web crawlers. To do that, they turned to a suite of open source digital archiving tools called Webrecorder, which have been around since the mid-2010s, and used by institutions including the United Kingdom's National Archive and the National Library of Australia...

SUCHO's organizers receive tips from librarians and archivists across the world who may know of a rare museum in Ukraine that needs to have its work backed up. Other volunteers have become sleuths, using Google Maps to take a digital walk down Ukrainian streets, looking for any signs that might say "museum" or "library" and trying to find out if it has a website that needs archiving. In other cases, when a shelling happens somewhere, a group of volunteers dedicated to "situation monitoring" alerts any volunteers that might be awake to look for institution websites in that region that need backing up, for fear they could go offline any minute.
Or, as that Bucknell librarian told the Post, "We're trying to save as much as possible."

Google is partnering with iFixit to sell official replacement parts for its Pixel phones later this year, making it easier for independent professionals and consumers to repair the devices. From a report: The news follows similar moves by Apple and Samsung and will cover models ranging from the Pixel 2 to the Pixel 6 Pro, along with future Pixel models. The parts will sold through ifixit.com and be available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and European Union countries where Pixels are sold. The parts, which will include batteries, replacement displays and cameras, will be available either individually or in iFixit kits, which include tools needed to perform the repairs like specialty screwdriver bits, Google said.

The federal Liberal government introduced legislation Tuesday to force digital giants to compensate news publishers for the use of their content. CBC News reports: The new regulatory regime would require companies like Google and the Meta Platforms-owned Facebook -- and other major online platforms that reproduce or facilitate access to news content -- to either pay up or go through a binding arbitration process led by an arms-length regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The compensation extracted from these digital giants must be used, in large part, to fund the creation of news content to protect the "sustainability of the Canadian news ecosystem," according to a government backgrounder distributed to reporters. The government is pitching the arrangement as a way to prop up an industry that has seen a steady decline since the emergence of the internet.

To preserve access to Canadian news, the federal government has adopted much of the so-called "Australian model," named after the country that first forced digital companies to pay for the use of news content. According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, more than $190 million has been paid already to Australian media companies since the model was enacted last year. The big winners have been legacy media and larger media outlets.

The new Canadian scheme would require that Facebook, Google and other digital platforms that have "a bargaining imbalance with news businesses" make "fair commercial deals" with newspapers, news magazines, online news businesses, private and public broadcasters and certain non-Canadian news media that meet specific criteria. The goal is to have these digital platforms negotiate deals with publishers without the need for government intervention. [T]he amount of money each news business gets from these digital giants will be decided by those negotiations -- there's no preset formula. In the absence of some sort of voluntary arrangement, news businesses can initiate a mandatory bargaining process and go to a CRTC arbitration panel for a binding decision.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Wing this morning announced that it is adding Texas to its list of drone delivery markets. On April 7, the Alphabet-owned operation will be arriving in Frisco and Little Elm, a pair of towns in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. The primary partner is Walgreens, where drones will be picking up health and wellness products. Also on the list is easyvet for pet meds, Texas Health, which provides first aid kits, and Blue Bell Creameries, which is dropping off ice cream as summer looms. Upon launch, the offerings will be available to select customers via invite.

"I do want to set clear expectations: Not everyone who lives within range of our drones will be able to order on Day 1," says CEO Adam Woodworth. "We're going to invite customers in groups to make sure everyone has a good first experience with drone delivery." Frisco and Little Elm become the second U.S. market and fifth overall currently being served by Wing. They join Christiansburg, Virginia; Helsinki, Finland; and Canberra and Logan, Australia. The pilots are still fairly limited, as Wing grapples with regulations and other roadblocks, though early last month it announced that it had made its 200,000th delivery.

Hertz will buy "up to" 65,000 Polestar EVs for its rental fleet over the next five years. It follows a similar decision last year to order 100,000 Tesla vehicles by the end of 2022, which helped Tesla's market valuation surpass the $1 trillion mark. Engadget reports: The initial mix will focus on the Polestar 2 sedan, but should expand to other models over time. Vehicles will be available to rent in Europe starting this spring, and should reach both North America and Australia late this year. The team-up is a continuation of Hertz's plan to offer the biggest selection of EV rentals in North America, and "one of the largest" worldwide. The strategy includes offering EVs to rideshare drivers working for companies like Uber.

The purchase is a gradual one, and Hertz has clearly given itself wiggle room in case it wants fewer models. This is still a large order, though, and could significantly increase the chances that your next rental might be an EV. It's also a bigger deal for Polestar than it was for Tesla. Polestar sold just 29,000 cars in 2021, and 'only' expects to more than double that number in 2022 -- Hertz could play a large role in the manufacturer's near-term success.

Almost $10 billion over the next decade will be pumped into helping Australia compete in cyber warfare with adversaries such as Russia and China in a major funding boost that will nearly double the size of the nation's leading cyber security agency. From a report: In its centrepiece defence budget announcement, the government will make the largest single investment in the 75-year history of the Australian Signals Directorate, the country's powerful and highly secretive electronic intelligence agency. The government said the funding increase -- dramatically named Project REDSPICE (Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber, and Enablers) -- will significantly expand the ASD's offensive cyber capabilities, as well as the agency's ability to prevent hacking and other digital attacks.

The government intends to put national security at the centre of the upcoming election campaign, contrasting its latest announcements with reductions to defence spending during the Rudd-Gillard era. In his budget night speech Treasurer Josh Frydenberg described the $9.9 billion in spending over 10 years as the country's "biggest ever investment in Australia's cyber preparedness." It comes on top of the government's previously announced expansion in Australian Defence Force personnel and the purchase of new Chinook helicopters, Abrams tanks and combat engineering vehicles.

A review of 26 studies finds benefits of music on mental health are similar to those of exercise and weight loss. From a report: "Music," wrote the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, "has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation." A new analysis has empirically confirmed something that rings true for many music lovers -- that singing, playing or listening to music can improve wellbeing and quality of life. A review of 26 studies conducted across several countries including Australia, the UK and the US has found that music may provide a clinically significant boost to mental health. Seven of the studies involved music therapy, 10 looked at the effect of listening to music, eight examined singing and one studied the effect of gospel music. The analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, confirmed "music interventions are linked to meaningful improvements in wellbeing," as measured quantitatively via standardised quality-of-life survey data. The effects were similar whether participants sang, played or listened to music.

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it will expand its cybersecurity skilling initiative to 23 additional countries. The campaign, which began last year in the U.S., is part of the company's push to help solve the cybersecurity industry's growing talent problem, while also helping diversify the industry. From a report: Like many industries within tech, cybersecurity is facing both a workforce shortage and a widening skills gap among workers. According to Kate Behncken, vice president and lead of Microsoft Philanthropies, by 2025 there will be 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs open globally. Microsoft originally launched the skilling campaign in the U.S. last fall, partnering with 135 community colleges to skill and recruit workers into the cybersecurity industry. By expanding skilling and training to 23 countries, Microsoft aims to get ahead of the demand. The countries, which include Australia, Brazil, Canada and India, were chosen due to their "elevated cyberthreat risk."

Australia's record-breaking wildfires of 2019 and 2020 blasted smoke so high that even the ozone layer in the stratosphere was damaged, a new analysis shows. Hmmmmmm shares a report: The Black Summer bushfires, which raged along Australia's east coast from November 2019 to January 2020, caused unprecedented destruction. The fires burned more than 70,000 square kilometres of bushland, destroyed more than 3000 homes, and killed more than 30 people and billions of animals. Smoke billowed all the way to South America and triggered distant ocean algal blooms. Now, Peter Bernath at Old Dominion University in Virginia and his colleagues have shown that the smoke also pushed its way up into the stratosphere and triggered chemical reactions that destroyed ozone. They analysed data from the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment satellite, which monitors levels of 44 different molecules in the atmosphere. This revealed that stratospheric ozone declined by 13 per cent in the middle latitude area of the southern hemisphere -- which includes Australia -- in the aftermath of the Black Summer fires.

Abnormally hot air has hit both of the world's poles at once, while the extent of Arctic sea ice appears to have been historically low this winter. From a report: Temperature records were broken in Antarctica as warm air swept unusually far into the heart of the continent. Concordia station, which is high above sea level and has an annual average temperature of -50C, reached an all-time high of -12.2C on 18 March, beating the -13.7C record set in December 2016. Another research station, Vostok, also saw record high temperatures. "The Antarctic [heat] is really extreme. I haven't seen anything like that. Colleagues haven't seen anything this extreme," says Walt Meier at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. A band of westerly winds around Antarctica usually isolates the continent from other weather systems. But in the past week, an "atmospheric river" of hot air, originating in the mid-latitudes, travelled down from Tasmania and South Australia, breaching those winds to travel far across the ice, says John Turner at the British Antarctic Survey.

Although such events aren't unprecedented, the temperatures this time are very high. Turner says while it is undoubtedly an "extreme event," he thinks the Antarctic heat looks like natural variability rather than climate change. Past research by Turner has found no discernible trend in extreme temperatures in Antarctica, where the hole in the ozone layer appears to have cancelled out the impact of global warming so far. The recent highs won't have any consequences such as impacts on landing strips for scientists stationed on the continent either, says Ted Scambos at the University of Colorado, Boulder, because most have already departed ahead of the Antarctic winter and those remaining are hunkered down with supplies. The record temperatures come shortly after Antarctic sea ice declined to a record low minimum extent, at 1.92 million square kilometres on 25 February. "It was quite a lot lower than anything else in the 40-plus year record," says Scambos.

Australia's competition watchdog filed a lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta Platforms on Friday, alleging the social media giant failed to prevent scammers using its platform to promote fake ads featuring well-known people. From a report: The advertisements, which endorsed investment in cryptocurrency or money-making schemes, could have misled Facebook users into believing they were promoted by famous Australians, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) said. The lawsuit filed in the Federal Court also alleges Facebook "aided and abetted or was knowingly concerned in false or misleading conduct and representations by the advertisers," the ACCC said in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science.org: An extinct rat that once lived on an island in the Indian Ocean may have put the kibosh on scientists' dreams of resurrecting more famous extinct animals like the woolly mammoth. The Christmas Island rat disappeared just over 100 years ago, but researchers now say even its detailed genome isn't complete enough to bring it back to life. The work "shows both how wonderfully close -- and yet -- how devastatingly far" scientists are from being able to bring back extinct species by genetically transforming a close relative in what's called "de-extinction," says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study. [...] To bring back an extinct species, scientists would first need to sequence its genome, then edit the DNA of a close living relative to match it. Next comes the challenge of making embryos with the revised genome and bringing them to term in a living surrogate mother. So far, scientists have sequenced the genomes of about 20 extinct species, including a cave bear, passenger pigeon, and several types of mammoths and moas. But no one has yet reported re-creating the extinct genome in a living relative.

In the new study, Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, thought it best to start small. "If we want to try something so crazy, why not start with a simple model," he reasoned. So, he, Jian-Qing Lin, a molecular biologist at Shantou University, and their colleagues, focused on the Christmas Island rat (Rattus macleari), which disappeared by 1908 from that island, located about 1200 kilometers west of Australia. This species "should be a dreamy candidate for de-extinction," McCauley says, given its close relationship with the Norway rat, a well-studied lab animal with a complete genome sequence that scientists already know how to modify.

Gilbert and Lin extracted DNA from the skins of two preserved Christmas Island rats and sequenced it many times over to get as much of the genome as possible. They achieved more than 60 times' coverage of it. Old DNA only survives in small fragments, so the team used the genome of the Norway rat as a reference to piece together as much as possible of the vanished rat's genome. Comparing the two genomes revealed almost 5% of the Christmas Island rat's genome was still missing, Lin, Gilbert, and their colleagues report today in Current Biology. The lost sequences included bits of about 2500 of the rat's estimated 34,000 genes. "I was surprised," Gilbert says. The recovered DNA included the genes for the Christmas Island rat's characteristic rounded ears, for example, but important immune system and olfaction genes were either missing or incomplete. The work "really highlights the difficulties, maybe even the ridiculousness, of [de-extinction] efforts," says Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Herridge says many of the missing genes make each species unique. It's also worth noting that the human genome differs by just 1% from those of chimps and bonobos.

Others researchers like Andrew Pask, a developmental biologist at the University of Melbourne, Parkville, says that the missing 5% of an extinct animal's genome likely won't affect how the transformed animal looks or behaves.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Physicists in Australia have programmed a quantum computer half a world away to make, or at least simulate, a record-size time crystal -- a system of quantum particles that locks into a perpetual cycle in time, somewhat akin to the repeating spatial pattern of atoms in an actual crystal. The new time crystal comprises 57 quantum particles, more than twice the size of a 20-particle time crystal simulated last year by scientists at Google. That's so big that no conventional computer could simulate it, says Chetan Nayak, a condensed matter physicist at Microsoft, who was not involved in the work. "So that's definitely an important advance." The work shows the power of quantum computers to simulate complex systems that may otherwise exist only in physicists' theories.

[Philipp Frey and Stephan Rachel, theorists at the University of Melbourne] performed the simulation remotely, using quantum computers built and run by IBM in the United States. The qubits, which can be set to 0, 1, or 1 and 0 at once, can be programmed to interact like magnets. For certain settings of their interactions, the researchers found, any initial setting of the 57 qubits, such as 01101101110 ..., remains stable, returning to its original state every two pulses, the researchers report today in Science Advances. [...] Whereas more than 100 researchers worked on the Google simulation, Frey and Rachel worked alone to perform their larger demonstration, submitting it to the IBM computers over the internet. "It was just me, my graduate student, and a laptop," Rachel says, adding that "Philipp is brilliant!" The entire project took about 6 months, he estimates. The demonstration isn't perfect, Rachel says. The flipping pattern ought to last indefinitely, he says, but the qubits in IBM's machines can only hold their states long enough to simulate about 50 cycles. Ultimately, the stabilizing effect of the interactions might be used to store the state of a string of qubits in a kind of memory for a quantum computer, he notes, but realizing such an advance will take -- what else? -- time.

Remember when Google threatened to leave Australia if the country implemented a "news media bargaining code" forcing social media platforms to pay news publishers? Wired reports: Google and Facebook did not leave; they paid up, striking deals with news organizations to pay for the content they display on their sites for the first time. The code was formally approved on March 2, 2021... One year after the media code was introduced, Google has 19 content deals with news organizations and Facebook has 11, according to [Australia's communications minister Paul] Fletcher. Now countries around the world are looking at Australia's code as a blueprint of how to subsidize the news and stop the spread of "news deserts" — communities that no longer have a local newspaper.

Canada is expected to propose its own version in March. Media associations in both the U.S. and New Zealand are calling for similar policies. Reports suggest the UK culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, is also planning to require platforms to strike cash-for-content deals.

The international interest has prompted fierce debate about how well Australia's code works.

"We know it works, we can see the evidence," says Fletcher. He points to how the deals are funding journalism in rural areas. Broadcaster The ABC said its deals with Facebook and Google enabled it to hire 50 regional journalists. Google, however, disagrees. It has accused the media code of stifling media diversity by giving media giants a better deal than smaller publishers. "The primary benefactors of such a code would be a small number of incumbent media providers," Google said in a submission to the U.S. Copyright Office, which is currently reviewing its own media laws....

The criticism of Australia's system focuses on its lack of transparency, which means that media companies cannot compare notes on the deals they are offered and there is a lack of clarity on which outlets are entitled to negotiate.... Concerns about the code's flaws are leaking into Canada, where Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party is drafting its own Australia-style legislation. "We're locking down the incumbent publishers, and we're locking down Google and Facebook's dominance as opposed to countering the dominance that exists on both sides," says Dwayne Winseck, journalism professor at Canada's Carleton University.... Yet Canada's news industry is willing to overlook these limitations because it considers the cash as a lifeline, according to Paul Deegan, president and chief executive of News Media Canada.... They are running out of time to save some of the media landscape, he explains — 40 newspapers have closed permanently since the start of the pandemic. "We've got a number of titles and even chains of titles that are quite literally teetering on the brink."

Deegan agrees the code isn't perfect. This is not a magic bullet, he says, "this is a badly needed Band-Aid."

"Volkswagen AG has lost hope that many of its roughly 4,000 vehicles aboard a cargo ship that caught fire last week in the Atlantic can be saved," Bloomberg reported Friday, citing estimates that the total cargo loss for the Felicity Ace could exceed a third of a billion dollars.

"The blaze is believed to have lasted more than a week after the Panama-flagged ship's crew members were evacuated and it was left adrift." VW's Golf compact cars and ID.4 electric crossovers were among the vehicles aboard the ship, according to an internal email last week from the automaker's U.S. operation. Headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany, the group manufactures cars under brands including VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini — all of which were on the ship.
Earlier this week Qz.com argued that the fire was being fueled by lithium-ion batteries. Slashdot reader McGruber shared their report: It's not clear if the batteries contributed to the fire starting in the first place — a greasy rag in a lubricant-slicked engine room or a fuel leak are the usual suspects in ship fires — but the batteries are keeping the flames going now.

A forensic investigation will take months to determine the cause. [Last] Saturday, João Mendes CabeÃas, captain of the port of Faial, the nearest Azorean island, told Reuters that the batteries in the ship's cargo are "keeping the fire alive...." Large quantities of dry chemicals are needed to smother lithium ion battery fires, which burn hotter and release noxious gases in the process. Pouring water onto the Felicity Ace wouldn't put out a lithium-ion battery fire, CabeÃas told Reuters, and the added water weight could make the ship more unstable.

Electric vehicle fires are rare, but pose their own kind of flammability risk, and one that becomes heightened as EVs go mainstream. Large numbers of EVs grouped together, as when they are transported by cargo ship, or electric buses parked in an overnight lot, raise the risk that one flaming battery could ignite a chain reaction in adjacent batteries. According to a research proposal at the National Academy of Sciences' Transportation Research Board, "Lithium-ion battery fire risks are currently undermanaged in transit operations."

There have been more than 35 large lithium-ion battery fires since 2018, Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium fires, told the Financial Times, including a 13-ton Tesla megapack storage battery in Victoria Australia that burned for three days. An electric ferry in Norway caught fire in 2019, and in April 2021, a battery fire at a Beijing mall killed two firefighters.

In addition, car-carrying ships and ferries can face higher risks from fires, according to insurer Allianz Global's head of marine risk. Due to the internal areas not being divided to make it easier to transport cars, when a fire starts it can spread more easily.