We all need great internet service, but it doesn't happen by accident. From a report: Let's talk about internet policy! In Canada! Wheee! I'm serious that there are useful lessons from a saga over home internet service in Canada. What has been a promising, albeit imperfect, system that increased choices and improved internet service for Canadians is poised to fall apart. Barring a last-minute government intervention today or Friday, many smaller internet providers in Canada are likely to significantly increase their prices and lose customers or shut down. The dream of more competition leading to better internet service for Canadians is on life support. What's happening in Canada reveals why we need smart internet policy to be paired with strong government oversight to have better and more affordable internet for all -- and it shows what happens when we lose that.

The U.S. has botched it for years, and that's one reason America's internet service stinks. Canada may be a real-world experiment in what happens when muddled government regulation undermines internet policy that has mostly been effective. Bear with me for a lesson in Canada's home internet service. The bottom line is that Canadians have something that is relatively novel to Americans: Many people have options to pick a home internet provider that they don't hate. That's because in Canada -- similar to many countries including Britain, Australia and Japan -- the companies that own internet pipelines are required to rent access to businesses that then sell internet service to homes. Regulators keep a close watch to make sure those rental costs and terms are fair.

The Spanish government on Tuesday announced plans to invest $13.2 billion to build microchips in the country and "help reduce the dependence of Span and the European Union on other suppliers," reports the Associated Press. From the report: Speaking in Madrid, Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said the five-year plan is aimed at enabling Spain to cover every area in the design and production of microchips, which are now considered key to all areas of modern industry. She said the plan was among the most ambitious of the Spanish government's projects to reboot the economy after the COVID-19 pandemic and that it would have an effect on other sectors.

The project was directed at boosting the EU's weak position in microchip production, which Calvino said represented some 10% of the world total. She said this led to a great dependence on a small number of major producers such as Taiwan, the United States, South Korea, Japan and China. Calvino added that "the war in Ukraine makes it a priority to reinforce strategic autonomy in energy, technology, food production as well as cyber security."

As states race to keep plants open, California becomes a test case of how much the tide has shifted. From a report: Charles Komanoff was for decades an expert witness for groups working against nuclear plants, delivering blistering critiques so effective that he earned a spot at the podium when tens of thousands of protesters descended on Washington in 1979 over the Three Mile Island meltdown. Komanoff would go on to become an unrelenting adversary of Diablo Canyon, the hulking 37-year-old nuclear facility perched on a pristine stretch of California's Central Coast that had been the focal point of anti-nuclear activism in America. But his last letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in February, was one Komanoff never expected to write. He implored Newsom to scrap state plans to close the coastal plant. "We're going to have to give up some of our long-held beliefs if we are going to deal with climate," Komanoff said in an interview. "I am still a solar and wind optimist. But I am a climate pessimist. The climate is losing."

Komanoff's conversion is emblematic of the rapidly shifting politics of nuclear energy. The long controversial power source is gaining backers amid worries that shutting U.S. plants, which emit almost no emissions, makes little sense as governments race to end their dependence on fossil fuels and the war in Ukraine heightens worries about energy security and costs. The momentum is driven in large part by longtime nuclear skeptics who remain unsettled by the technology but are now pushing to keep existing reactors running as they face increasingly alarming news about the climate.

The latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in April, warned that the world is so dangerously behind on climate action that within a decade it could blow past the targets crucial to containing warming to a manageable level. Emissions analysts are increasingly critical of retirements of existing nuclear reactors as they take large amounts of low-emissions power off the grid, undermining the gains made as sources such as wind and solar come online. The movement to keep plants open comes despite persistent worries about toxic waste and just a decade after the nuclear disaster at Japan's Fukushima plant. It has been boosted by growing public acceptance of nuclear power and has nurtured an unlikely coalition of industry players, erstwhile anti-nukers, and legions of young grass-roots environmental activists more worried about climate change than nuclear accidents.

Mastercard is launching a "controversial" biometric payments programme in stores, as the card company tries to keep pace with nimble fintechs and bigger competitors such as Amazon. From a report: Retailers that sign up to its pilot scheme can allow customers to pay in-store with a gesture such as a smile or a wave. The system, which requires customers to enrol first, could also be connected to loyalty programmes and purchase history. "Payments is a wide space, and we are trying to offer what customers want," Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard's president of cyber and intelligence, told the Financial Times. He said that Mastercard could act as the "enabler of the ecosystem," setting unified privacy and security standards for a technology that has raised the hackles of privacy and data protection campaigners. "It's important that we make sure that data is handled properly and the transaction is safe," said Bhalla. "Everything is done with consumer consent." The facial recognition software itself will come from companies including Japan's NEC, Brazil's Payface and California-based PopID. The first pilots are launching this week at five supermarkets run by the St Marche chain in Brazil. The ambition is to eventually allow consumers to use a single enrolment to pay across different stores, says Bhalla, with further pilots planned across regions including Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

Sony has announced the initial lineup of games for its revamped, multi-tier PlayStation Plus subscription service, and firmed up its launch dates over the next five weeks. From a report: The service will launch in Asia on May 24, Japan on June 2, North and South America on June 13, and Europe, Australia, and New Zealand on June 23. Games coming to the subscription service include Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, the Demon's Souls remake, Insomniac's Spider-Man games, and Red Dead Redemption 2. But the structure of the deal is confusing, there's nothing more recent than the director's cut editions of Ghosts of Tsushima and Death Stranding (both released in mid-2021), and the classic games offering for the service's top tier appears extremely thin at present -- even lacking any PlayStation 2 games under emulation.

The number of titles from third-party developers and publishers is dwarfed by the offering from internal studios. It's important to note, however, that Sony characterized this list as "an early look at some of the games that will be included during the launch time frame." So there is room for the offering to improve in the coming weeks. The lowest-priced Essential tier remains the same as the current PlayStation Plus, offering a handful of free PS4 and PS5 games every month alongside access to multiplayer online gaming. Sony has yet to announce the Essential tier games for the service's relaunch in June.

Onkyo, one of the best-known Japanese manufacturers of home theater equipment, has "filed for bankruptcy at Osaka District Court on Friday, with total liabilities of around 3.1 billion yen ($24 million)," reports Nikkei Asia. The report is sparse on details but attributes the bankruptcy to a "market shift to streaming and smartphones."

In mid-2020, Onkyo USA Corporation ended a 45-year run as Onkyo's exclusive sales, marketing and distribution division for the Americas, according to Audioholics.

Onkyo has appeared in a few stories on Slashdot over the years. Our personal favorite was a story in 2003 about a new use of embedded Linux in Onkyo's home music server.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Two minutes after the world's biggest tectonic plate shuddered off the coast of Japan, the country's meteorological agency issued its final warning to about 50 million residents: A magnitude 8.1 earthquake had generated a tsunami that was headed for shore. But it wasn't until hours after the waves arrived that experts gauged the true size of the 11 March 2011 Tohoku quake. Ultimately, it rang in at a magnitude 9 -- releasing more than 22 times the energy experts predicted and leaving at least 18,000 dead, some in areas that never received the alert. Now, scientists have found a way to get more accurate size estimates faster, by using computer algorithms to identify the wake from gravitational waves that shoot from the fault at the speed of light.

Recently, researchers involved in the hunt for gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time created by the movement of massive objects -- realized that those gravity signals, traveling at the speed of light, might also be used to monitor earthquakes. "The idea is that as soon as mass moves anywhere, the gravitational field changes, and ... everything feels it," says Bernard Whiting, a physicist at the University of Florida who worked on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. "What was amazing was that the signal would be present even in seismometers." Sure enough, in 2016, Whiting and his colleagues reported that regular seismometers could detect these gravity signals. Earthquakes result in large shifts in mass; those shifts give off gravitational effects that deform both existing gravitational fields and the ground beneath seismometers. By measuring the difference between these two, the scientists concluded they could create a new kind of earthquake early warning system. Gravitational signals show up on seismometers before the arrival of the first seismic waves, in a portion of the seismogram that's traditionally ignored. By combining signals from dozens of seismometers on top of one another, scientists can identify patterns to interpret the size and location of large events, Whiting says.

Now, Andrea Licciardi, a postdoc at Cote d'Azur University, and his colleagues have built a machine-learning algorithm to do that pattern recognition. They trained the model on hundreds of thousands of simulated earthquakes before testing it on the real data set from Tohoku. The model accurately predicted the earthquake's magnitude in about 50 seconds -- faster than other state-of-the-art early warning systems, researchers report today in Nature. "It's more than the seed of an idea -- they've shown that it can be done," Whiting says. "What we showed was a proof of principle. What they're showing is a proof of implementation."

Since Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming launched two years ago, more than 10 million people worldwide have streamed games through the service. That number's likely to jump a bit higher as a result of a partnership Microsoft struck with Epic Games to offer Epic's hit title Fortnite for free through Xbox Cloud Gaming. From a report: The move will effectively let people play Fortnite in a way similar to how they stream videos from companies like Netflix, regardless of how beefy their gaming device is. Unlike previous efforts, Microsoft said this agreement applies to anyone who wants to play, with or without a subscription. Gamers will be able to play on an iPhone or iPad or a device powered by Google's Android software, even though both Apple and Google have banned Fortnite from their respective app stores amid an ongoing legal dispute. "This is just the beginning for us -- we're going to learn, implement feedback, and in time look to bring even more free-to-play titles to players through the cloud," Microsoft said in a statement. The service will be available for free in 26 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico and the US.

New data shared by tracking company MUSO shows that the number of visits to pirate sites has increased by nearly 30% compared to last year. The publishing category is growing particularly hard, mostly driven by manga piracy. The United States continues to harbor the most pirates in absolute numbers. TorrentFreak reports: During the first quarter of 2022, pirate site visits increased by more than 29% compared to a year earlier, which is good for a dazzling 52.5 billion visits. Nearly half of this traffic (48%) goes to TV-related content. The publishing category takes second spot with 27%, followed by the film (12%), music (7%), and software (6%) categories. The traffic increase is noticeable across all types of piracy but the publishing category stands out. Compared to the first quarter of 2021, the number of visits in this category has grown explosively. Software piracy is lagging behind, but the category still continues to grow. The strong growth in the publishing category is largely driven by manga, comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Some of the pirate sites dedicated to this 'niche', such as Manganato.com, attract well over 100 million 'visits' per month. That's more than iconic pirate sites such as The Pirate Bay and Fmovies.to.

The United States is the country that sends most visitors to pirate sites. With well over 5.7 billion 'visits' in the first three months of the year, the U.S. is good for more than 10% of all piracy traffic. With a 39% increase compared to last year, pirate audience growth exceeds the global average. Russia and India follow at a respectable distance with just over 3 billion visits to pirate sites, followed by China and France, with 1.8 and 1.7 billion visits, respectively. There is no single explanation for the apparent piracy boom. However, MUSO sees the upward trend as an alarming signal and expects that the 'streaming wars' and growing subscription fatigue may play a role.

Researchers in Japan have developed a new method for making 5-cm (2-in) wafers of diamond that could be used for quantum memory. The ultra-high purity of the diamond allows it to store a staggering amount of data -- the equivalent of one billion Blu-Ray discs. New Atlas reports: [R]esearchers at Saga University and Adamant Namiki Precision Jewelery Co. in Japan have developed a new method for manufacturing ultra-high purity diamond wafers that are big enough for practical use. With this technique, the team says the resulting diamond wafers measure 5 cm across, and have such immense data density that they can theoretically store the equivalent of a billion Blu-Ray discs. One Blu-Ray can store up to 25 GB (assuming it's single-layered), which would mean this diamond wafer should be able to store a whopping 25 exabytes (EB) of data. The company calls these wafers Kenzan Diamond. The key is that these diamonds have a nitrogen concentration of under three parts per billion (ppb), making them incredibly pure. The researchers say that these are the largest wafers with that level of purity -- most others only get to 4 mm2 (0.006 in2) at most.

Achieving this requires a new manufacturing technique. Diamond wafers are made by growing the crystals on a substrate material, and that material is usually a flat surface. The problem is, the diamond can crack under the strain, degrading the quality. In the new process, the team made a relatively simple change -- the substrate surface was shaped like steps, which spreads the strain horizontally and prevents cracking. This allows them to make larger diamond wafers with higher purity. The team hopes to commercialize these diamond wafers in 2023, and in the meantime are already working towards doubling the diameter to 10 cm (4 in).

Earlier this month, demolition began on the Nakagin Capsule Tower, an iconic building designed by Kisho Kurokawa. Still, in many ways, Kurokawa's dynamic vision is woven into the fabric of our architectural present. From a report: The building at the time was in a conspicuous state of disrepair. Its concrete surface was pockmarked; many of the circular windows were papered over. Last year, after more than a decade of back-and-forth over the building's fate, the owners' association agreed to sell the towers to a consortium of real-estate firms, and earlier this month news came that demolition of the structure had finally begun. Recent photos posted by a preservationist initiative on Facebook show that its base now half gone; the hundred and forty-four capsules float above the construction, bereft and doomed. The future that Kurokawa and the Metabolism movement imagined didn't come to pass, yet in many ways their dynamic vision is woven into the fabric of our architectural present.

Metabolism officially launched with a manifesto, in 1960, as Japanese cities were being reconceptualized after the destruction of the Second World War. Part of a new postwar generation of architects, Metabolism's founders -- among them Kurokawa, Kiyonori Kikutake, and Fumihiko Maki -- were driven, as Kurokawa wrote in his 1977 book, "Metabolism in Architecture," by "traumatic images of events that took place when we were in our formative childhood years." Born in 1934, in Aichi Prefecture, Kurokawa was the son of an architect whose style he described as "ultra-nationalistic." In his own studies, he was drawn first to Kyoto University, for its sociological approach to architecture, then to Tokyo University, where he studied under the modernist architect Kenzo Tange, who worked after the war on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. But Kurokawa was more interested in looking forward. "I felt that it was important to let the destroyed be and to create a new Japan," he wrote.

[...] The Nakagin capsules suggest a kind of utopian urban life style. Their paucity of space and equipment meant that activities typically done at home, like eating and socializing, would instead be conducted out on the street. The Nakagin capsules were not full-time residences but pieds-a-terre for suburban businessmen or miniature studios for artists and designers. The individual capsules were pre-assembled, then transported to the site and plugged in to the towers' central cores. Each unit -- two and a half metres by four metres by two and a half metres, dimensions that, Kurokawa noted, are the same as those of a traditional teahouse -- contained a corner bathroom fit for an airplane, a fold-down desk, integrated lamps, and a bed stretching from wall to wall. Televisions, stereos, and tape decks could also be included at the buyer's discretion. [...] In some ways, Kurokawa's vision of a domestic architecture that prioritized mobility and flexibility proved prophetic. The capsules were the original micro-apartments, an ancestor to today's capsule hotels, and a forebear of the shared, temporary spaces of Airbnb.

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."

Diners in Japan could soon be able to savour the umami of a bowl of ramen or miso soup without having to worry about their salt intake. From a report: In what they claim is a world first, researchers have developed chopsticks that artificially create the taste of salt, as part of efforts to reduce sodium levels in some of the country's most popular dishes. The chopsticks work by using electrical stimulation and a mini-computer worn on the eater's wristband. The device transmits sodium ions from food, through the chopsticks, to the mouth where they create a sense of saltiness, according to Homei Miyashita, a professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, whose laboratory collaborated with the food and drink manufacturer Kirin to develop the device. The team said they would refine the prototype and hoped to make the chopsticks available to consumers next year. The utensils could find a receptive audience in Japan, where the traditional diet tends to be high in salt due to the use of ingredients such as miso and soy sauce.

"Russia's Roscosmos will stop working with NASA and other western space agencies on the International Space Station," reports Engadget: On early Saturday morning, Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin slammed international sanctions against Russia and said normal cooperation between the space agency and its western counterparts would only be possible after they were lifted.... Rogozin said Roscosmos would submit proposals on ending its work with NASA and other international space agencies to Russian authorities.

It's unclear how the decision would affect the space station. The ISS is not owned by any single country. The US, European Union, Russia, Canada and Japan operate the station through a cooperative agreement between the countries. Roscosmos, however, is critical to the ISS. The Russian Orbital Segment handles guidance control for the entire station....

The ISS isn't the first joint space program to see its future thrown into uncertainty due to rising tensions between the West and Russia. In March, Roscosmos said it would not ferry OneWeb's internet satellites to space until the UK government sold its stake in the company. That same month, the European Space Agency announced it was suspending its joint ExoMars mission with Roscosmos.
But in the middle of all this, "There are currently seven astronauts onboard the ISS — three Russian cosmonauts, three NASA astronauts and one German-born ESA astronaut, Matthias Maurer..." reports UPI: The three Russian cosmonauts are Sergey Korsakov, Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev. It was not immediately clear how the suspension of cooperation would impact the cosmonauts at the ISS.

Artemyev has expressed support for Russia and its decision to invade Ukraine in a statement made last month after he boarded the space station in a yellow and blue uniform, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. "There is no need to look for secret signs and symbols in our uniform. Color is just color," he said. "Despite the fact that we are in space, we are together with our president and people!"

For the first time in more than a decade, a narrow majority in Japan now supports restarting idled nuclear reactors, according to a poll in the country's top business newspaper. From a report: The survey result marks the first time since the Fukushima disaster in 2011 that an increasing role for nuclear energy has been favored. It comes amid surging power prices and warnings of electricity shortages in Tokyo. Some 53% of people said nuclear reactors should restart if safety can be ensured, while 38% said they should remain shut, according to the poll conducted by the Nikkei. That's up from 44% support for the restarts in a similar survey in September. The newspaper has been conducting semiregular polls on the issue for more than a decade. Japanese public opinion moved decisively against atomic power after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami resulted in the meltdown of three reactors at Fukushima, with most of the country's operable nuclear reactors remaining shut. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has pushed up energy prices globally, however, and a recent tremor in Japan took several gas- and coal-fired plants offline, leading to the first-ever electricity supply alert for Tokyo. "There is a strong tailwind for nuclear power at this moment," Nobuo Tanaka, a former executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in an interview Monday. If Japan restarts nuclear, the country's utilities could resell spare liquefied natural gas to Europe, he said.

Spotify may be the latest service to adopt NFTs. According to the Financial Times, the company is "drawing up plans to add blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens to its streaming service, fueling excitement in the crypto and music industries about the potential of NFTs to boost artists' earnings." It comes just days after Mark Zuckerberg confirmed NFTs will soon be coming to Instagram. From the report: Two recent job ads show Spotify is recruiting people to work on early stage projects related to "Web3," a tech buzzword for a blockchain-powered network that some crypto enthusiasts hope will wrestle control back from the Big Tech platforms that dominate today's internet.

Spotify's recruitment in the sector appears to be at an exploratory stage. It pointed to Web3 in a recruitment notice for an engineer on its "experimental growth" team. "This small and full-stack team is responsible for driving growth through new technologies, like Web3," the ad said. A separate Spotify job listing, for a manager in its future-gazing "Innovation and Market Intelligence" group, shows the music streaming service is looking for a candidate with experience in "content, creator, media, web3, and emerging technology industries" to "help define Spotify Moonshots," a term for ambitious new projects. The report goes on to note that Spotify "was an early collaborator on Facebook's ill-fated cryptocurrency project, Diem."

Daniel Ek, Spotify's chief executive, told a company podcast back in 2019 that cryptocurrencies and blockchain could allow users of "a service like Spotify [...] to be able to pay artists directly," especially across international borders or in regions where few people have traditional bank accounts. "That can open up massive opportunities where all of a sudden, a user in Japan might pay a creator in Argentina. And that opens up huge opportunities for how we can further our mission."

Christopher Alexander, a British-American architect and design theorist that affected fields including software and sociology, died on Thursday, March 17, after a long illness. He was 86. Christopher Newport University reports: Christopher Alexander, a towering figure in architecture and urbanism -- one of the biggest influences on the New Urbanism movement -- died on Thursday, March 17, after a long illness, it was reported by Michael Mehaffy, a long-time collaborator and protege. Alexander was the author or principal author of many books, including A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling architectural books of all time. He is considered to be the father of the pattern language movement in software, which is the idea behind Wikipedia. In 2006, he was one of the first two recipients, along with Leon Krier, of CNU's Athena Medal, which honors those who laid the groundwork for The New Urbanism movement.

In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. Other works include The Timeless Way of Building and A New Theory of Urban Design. Alexander was more than a theorist: In 2006, when he was awarded the Athena, it was reported he had designed and built more than 200 buildings around the world. In 2012, his The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth, tells the story of a school campus in Japan that was designed and built using the principles that he articulated (see photo at top).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has confirmed in an undertaking to the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) that it would stop opening new accounts for users in the Canadian province, the regulator said on Thursday. The dispute between Binance and OSC started in June last year, when the exchange announced its decision to quit Ontario after a regulatory crackdown on crypto exchanges in the province for allegedly failing to meet securities laws. However, in December, Binance notified investors that it was allowed to continue its operations in Ontario while still being unregistered in the province, the OSC said.

In the undertaking, Binance also made a slew of other commitments, including halting trading in existing Ontario accounts, with certain exceptions that the company said were necessary "to protect investors." The crypto exchange also offered to provide fee waivers and reimbursements to certain Ontario users, and said it would hire an independent third party to oversee the implementation of its commitments.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: For years, scientists have believed frigid craters at the Moon's poles hold water ice, which would be both a scientific boon and a potential resource for human missions. Now, researchers have discovered (PDF) a reason why the ice has persisted on an otherwise bone-dry world: Some polar craters may be protected by ancient magnetic fields. Researchers have known about the anomalies ever since the Apollo 15 and 16 missions in 1971 and 1972, when astronauts measured regions of unusual magnetic strength on the surface. Some anomalies are now known to be up to hundreds of kilometers across. Although their origin is debated, one possibility is they were created more than 4 billion years ago when the Moon had a magnetic field and iron-rich asteroids crashed into its surface. The resultant molten material may have been permanently magnetized.

Thousands of the anomalies are thought to exist across the lunar surface, but the team mapped ones at the south pole in detail using data from Japan's Kaguya spacecraft, which orbited the Moon from 2007 to 2009. They found at least two permanently shadowed craters that were overlapped by these anomalies, the Sverdrup and Shoemaker craters, and there are likely more. Although the remnant fields are thousands of times weaker than Earth's, they could be sufficient to deflect the solar wind. Craters with known anomalies could become prime targets for science and exploration. NASA is already planning to visit the south polar region with a rover due for launch next year, called VIPER, and the agency intends to send humans there later this decade as part of its Artemis program. Studying the ice could reveal how it was delivered, which may in turn shed light on how Earth got its water.

China exported nearly 500,000 electric cars in 2021 -- more than any other country in the world -- thanks to increasing sales in Europe and Southeast Asia by emerging cost-competitive automakers, Nikkei has learned. From the report: According to the General Administration of Customs of China, the number of passenger EVs exported in 2021 increased 2.6 times to 499,573 units. Meanwhile, Germany doubled its exports to about 230,000 units, while the U.S fell 30% to around 110,000 units, and Japan increased 24% to 27,400 units -- according to data compiled by the German Association of the Automotive Industry and the Japan External Trade Organization.

China accounts for 60% of global EV production, and is emerging as the world's factory for EVs having already secured the same position in digital product manufacturing. Exports to the EU grew in the wake of it announcing a policy to ban the sale of new hybrid and gasoline-powered vehicles in 2035. China's EV exports to Europe rose fivefold to 230,000 units, with the region absorbing half of China's total EV exports. Belgium imported 87,000 units and the U.K. 50,000 units. Of the almost 500,000 units exported, more than 100,000 appear to have originated from Tesla's Shanghai plant.