Solar power in California has reached a new record output, briefly surpassing 100% of power demand. It comes just days after the state exceeded 100% of energy demand with renewables (wind, solar and hydro) over a record 45 days straight, and 69 out of 75. CleanTechnica reports: As you can see [here], at its peak, solar power was providing 102.1% of electricity demand in California. Together, wind, water, and solar peaked at 136.4% of electricity demand! [...] The best news is that California seems to quickly be chopping the duck curve down to size. [...] The solution for the duck curve is clear: energy storage. Store that bursting solar energy produced in the middle of the day and gradually use it in the evening as the sun goes down and electricity demand rises. The good news is that California has been making progress on this very fast! Look at the graph [here] regarding electricity generation from natural gas and note the line for 2023 versus the line for 2024. [...]

The overall story is that California renewable energy continues to lead the way forward. Solar power is now peaking at more than 100% of electricity demand, renewables as a whole are peaking at 134% electricity demand, the duck curve has been shaved down to basically no duck curve at all (but you could now call the battery charge/discharge curve a duck curve), and the whole state (and world) is benefitting. Get ready for more records in the days to come. We're still a few weeks away from the summer solstice. Further reading: Battery-Powered California Faces Lower Blackout Risk This Summer

On June 3, a "planet parade" of six planets -- Jupiter, Mercury, Uranus, Mars, Neptune and Saturn -- will form a straight line through the pre-dawn sky. Astronomy.com reports: Some 20 minutes before sunrise, all six planets should be visible, though note that Uranus (magnitude 5.9) and Neptune (magnitude 7.8) will be too faint for naked-eye observing and, although they're present in the lineup, will need binoculars or a telescope to spot. But Jupiter (magnitude -2), Mercury (magnitude -1), Mars (magnitude 1), and Saturn (magnitude 1) will all stand out clearly to the naked eye in a line spanning some 73 degrees on the sky.

What's more, a delicate waning crescent Moon is crashing the party as well, standing just to the lower left of Mars. Note, however, that our Moon is not perfectly in line -- that's because Luna's orbit is tilted some 5 degrees with respect to the ecliptic. The next morning, June 4, the crescent Moon does a little better, falling more closely in line a bit farther from Mars. But now Mercury has stepped out of place and stands to Jupiter's lower right (south) as the two planets reach a close conjunction just 7 degrees apart -- not to be missed, especially in binoculars or telescopes!

By June 5, Mercury lies to Jupiter's lower left, replacing the gas giant as the easternmost point in the planetary lineup. And the nearly New Moon (just 2 percent lit) stands above the pair. As June progresses, Mercury quickly ducks out of view, passing close to the Sun before reappearing in the evening sky and leaving us with only five planets in the pre-dawn sky. But those planets continue to form a nice, clean line, stretching nearly 80 degrees from Jupiter to Saturn (with Uranus, Mars, and Neptune in between) by June 30. On this morning, the Moon as rejoined the line, once again a delicate waning crescent about 33 percent lit, hanging perfectly in place to Mars' upper right.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Last year, Jaume Pellicer led a team of fellow scientists into a forest on Grande Terre, an island east of Australia. They were in search of a fern called Tmesipteris oblanceolata. Standing just a few inches tall, it was not easy to find on the forest floor. "It doesn't catch the eye," said Dr. Pellicer, who works at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona in Spain. "You would probably step on it and not even realize it." The scientists eventually managed to spot the nondescript fern. When Dr. Pellicer and his colleagues studied it in the lab, they discovered it held an extraordinary secret. Tmesipteris oblanceolata has the largest known genome on Earth. As the researchers described in a study published on Friday, the fern's cells contain more than 50 times as much DNA as ours do. [The analysis revealed the species T. oblanceolata to have a record-breaking genome size of 160.45 Gbp, which is about 7% larger than that of P. japonica (148.89 Gbp). For comparison, the human genome contains about 3.1 Gbp distributed across 23 chromosomes and when stretched out like a ball of yarn, the length of DNA in each cell only measures about 2m.] "Surprisingly, having a larger genome is usually not an advantage," notes Phys.org in a report. "In the case of plants, species possessing large amounts of DNA are restricted to being slow growing perennials, are less efficient at photosynthesis (the process by which plants convert the sun's energy into sugars) and require more nutrients (especially nitrogen and phosphates) to grow and compete successfully with their smaller-genomed neighbors. In turn, such effects may influence the ability of a plant to adapt to climate change and their risk of extinction."

"In animals, some of the largest genomes include the marbled lungfish (Protopterus aethiopicus) at 129.90 Gbp and the Neuse River waterdog (Necturus lewisi) at 117.47 Gbp," reports Phys.org. "In stark contrast, six of the largest-known eukaryotic genomes are held by plants, including the European mistletoe (Viscum album) at 100.84 Gbp."

With the help of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers discovered a galaxy at a redshift of 14.32, indicating it existed just 290 million years post-Big Bang. In a NASA release today, Stefano Carniani from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, and Kevin Hainline from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, described how this source was found and what its unique properties tell us about galaxy formation: "The instruments on Webb were designed to find and understand the earliest galaxies, and in the first year of observations as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), we found many hundreds of candidate galaxies from the first 650 million years after the big bang. In early 2023, we discovered a galaxy in our data that had strong evidence of being above a redshift of 14, which was very exciting, but there were some properties of the source that made us wary. The source was surprisingly bright, which we wouldn't expect for such a distant galaxy, and it was very close to another galaxy such that the two appeared to be part of one larger object. When we observed the source again in October 2023 as part of the JADES Origins Field, new imaging data obtained with Webb's narrower NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) filters pointed even more toward the high-redshift hypothesis. We knew we needed a spectrum, as whatever we would learn would be of immense scientific importance, either as a new milestone in Webb's investigation of the early universe or as a confounding oddball of a middle-aged galaxy.

In January 2024, NIRSpec observed this galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0, for almost ten hours, and when the spectrum was first processed, there was unambiguous evidence that the galaxy was indeed at a redshift of 14.32, shattering the previous most-distant galaxy record (z = 13.2 of JADES-GS-z13-0). Seeing this spectrum was incredibly exciting for the whole team, given the mystery surrounding the source. This discovery was not just a new distance record for our team; the most important aspect of JADES-GS-z14-0 was that at this distance, we know that this galaxy must be intrinsically very luminous. From the images, the source is found to be over 1,600-light years across, proving that the light we see is coming mostly from young stars and not from emission near a growing supermassive black hole. This much starlight implies that the galaxy is several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun! This raises the question: How can nature make such a bright, massive, and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?

The data reveal other important aspects of this astonishing galaxy. We see that the color of the galaxy is not as blue as it could be, indicating that some of the light is reddened by dust, even at these very early times. JADES researcher Jake Helton of Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona also identified that JADES-GS-z14-0 was detected at longer wavelengths with Webb's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), a remarkable achievement considering its distance. The MIRI observation covers wavelengths of light that were emitted in the visible-light range, which are redshifted out of reach for Webb's near-infrared instruments. Jake's analysis indicates that the brightness of the source implied by the MIRI observation is above what would be extrapolated from the measurements by the other Webb instruments, indicating the presence of strong ionized gas emission in the galaxy in the form of bright emission lines from hydrogen and oxygen. The presence of oxygen so early in the life of this galaxy is a surprise and suggests that multiple generations of very massive stars had already lived their lives before we observed the galaxy.

All of these observations, together, tell us that JADES-GS-z14-0 is not like the types of galaxies that have been predicted by theoretical models and computer simulations to exist in the very early universe. Given the observed brightness of the source, we can forecast how it might grow over cosmic time, and so far we have not found any suitable analogs from the hundreds of other galaxies we've observed at high redshift in our survey. Given the relatively small region of the sky that we searched to find JADES-GS-z14-0, its discovery has profound implications for the predicted number of bright galaxies we see in the early universe, as discussed in another concurrent JADES study (Robertson et al., recently accepted). It is likely that astronomers will find many such luminous galaxies, possibly at even earlier times, over the next decade with Webb. We're thrilled to see the extraordinary diversity of galaxies that existed at Cosmic Dawn!

A new tool called Lifeseeker could help search and rescue teams find missing people in minutes using their cellphones. The technology acts as a miniature cellphone tower, allowing rescuers to pinpoint cellphone locations within a 3-mile radius, significantly improving the efficiency and success rate of search missions in challenging terrains. The Colorado Sun reports: "As we detect the phone, basically a blotch shows up on the map and as we fly around that area, that blotch gets smaller and smaller and smaller until we can see exactly where they are," said Dr. Tim Durkin, a search and rescue program coordinator for Colorado Highland Helicopters. "That process of detecting, focusing on one specific location takes about a minute -- not really very long at all." Depending on the situation, search and rescue teams can then send in ground crews with the person's location or land the helicopter if there's a clearing nearby and conditions allow for a safe landing, Durkin said. During a test mission in La Plata Canyon northwest of Durango, search crews found the two people they were looking for within two minutes and 14 seconds, Durkin said.

The technology, called Lifeseeker, was developed by Spain-based company CENTUM research & technology and is in the process of being approved by the Federal Communications Commission before it can be sold to the state or counties hoping to use it for their SAR efforts, he said. [...] The radio-based technology needs a clear view of the terrain without interference to pick up the signal of the cellphone. If the conditions and terrain are favorable, it can detect a cellphone up to nearly 20 miles away. It takes about three minutes to attach the Lifeseeker unit inside a helicopter when needed for a search and rescue mission, Durkin said. SAR can also use the tool to send text messages to the missing person, for example, advising them to stay in one area if they are hurt or move to a clearing for a helicopter to pick them up. The tool also has a broadcast function that allows SAR to send out a message to a group of people within a certain range, similar to an Amber Alert for a missing child, to warn them of a wildfire or flood, Durkin said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A sophisticated joint European-Japanese satellite has launched to measure how clouds influence the climate. Some low-level clouds are known to cool the planet, others at high altitude will act as a blanket. The Earthcare mission will use a laser and a radar to probe the atmosphere to see precisely where the balance lies. It's one of the great uncertainties in the computer models used to forecast how the climate will respond to increasing levels of greenhouse gases. "Many of our models suggest cloud cover will go down in the future and that means that clouds will reflect less sunlight back to space, more will be absorbed at the surface and that will act as an amplifier to the warming we would get from carbon dioxide," Dr Robin Hogan, from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, told BBC News.

The 2.3-tonne satellite was sent up from California on a SpaceX rocket. The project is led by the European Space Agency (ESA), which has described it as the organization's most complex Earth observation venture to date. Certainly, the technical challenge in getting the instruments to work as intended has been immense. It's taken fully 20 years to go from mission approval to launch. Earthcare will circle the Earth at a height of about 400km (250 miles). It's actually got four instruments in total that will work in unison to get at the information sought by climate scientists.

The simplest is an imager -- a camera that will take pictures of the scene passing below the spacecraft to give context to the measurements made by the other three instruments. Earthcare's European ultraviolet laser will see the thin, high clouds and the tops of clouds lower down. It will also detect the small particles and droplets (aerosols) in the atmosphere that influence the formation and behavior of clouds. The Japanese radar will look into the clouds, to determine how much water they are carrying and how that's precipitating as rain, hail and snow. And a radiometer will sense how much of the energy falling on to Earth from the Sun is being reflected or radiated back into space.

Retailers are being urged to stop making everyday products such as drinks bottles, outdoor furniture and toys out of brightly coloured plastic after researchers found it degrades into microplastics faster than plainer colours. From a report: Red, blue and green plastic became "very brittle and fragmented," while black, white and silver samples were "largely unaffected" over a three-year period, according to the findings of the University of Leicester-led project. The scale of environmental pollution caused by plastic waste means that microplastics, or tiny plastic particles, are everywhere. Indeed, they were recently found in human testicles, with scientists suggesting a possible link to declining sperm counts in men.

In this case, scientists from the UK and the University of Cape Town in South Africa used complementary studies to show that plastics of the same composition degrade at different rates depending on the colour. The UK researchers put bottle lids of various colours on the roof of a university building to be exposed to the sun and the elements for three years. The South African study used plastic items found on a remote beach. "It's amazing that samples left to weather on a rooftop in Leicester and those collected on a windswept beach at the southern tip of the African continent show similar results," said Dr Sarah Key, who led the project. "What the experiments showed is that even in a relatively cool and cloudy environment for only three years, huge differences can be seen in the formation of microplastics." This field study, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, is the first such proof of this effect. It suggests that retailers and manufacturers should give more consideration to the colour of short-lived plastics.

China's rapid solar power expansion is slowing due to grid bottlenecks, market reforms, and diminishing rooftop space, with new solar builds dropping 32% in March year-on-year. Reuters reports: The country's solar power expansion is slowing due to tighter curbs on supplying excess power from rooftop solar into the grid and changes in electricity pricing that are denting the economics of new solar projects. Forecasts show China's solar build this year will be heavily outpaced by growth in its photovoltaic (PV) module manufacturing capacity, raising the prospect the country will export more solar panels despite a trade backlash in Europe and the U.S. The main factor slowing the expansion of distributed solar - installations built near the point of use, mostly on rooftops - is that there is not enough storage or transmission capacity to soak up the excess power generated when the sun is shining. That in turn is leading regulators to take away some of the price support that led to the rapid growth of distributed solar. "In the next couple of years, this is going to be a huge problem that all provinces will face as grids are oversaturated, the infrastructure is overwhelmed," said Cosimo Ries, an analyst with Trivium China, a policy research group. [...]

Renewable generators previously enjoyed a guarantee that grid operators would buy nearly all of their power at a rate tied to the coal index. That guarantee was lifted on April 1 and took effect earlier in some places, three industry experts said. Now, renewable generation is increasingly subject to less favourable market pricing. Shenhua Energy, a state-run coal and power firm, said in its first-quarter report that prices for its solar power fell 34.2% year-on-year to 283 yuan per megawatt-hour (MWh), while its coal power prices fell just 2.4% to 406 yuan per MWh. Wang Xiuqiang, a researcher at consultancy Beijing Linghang, attributed the lower solar prices and profitability to a higher proportion of market-based pricing. At the same time, grid companies are dialling back the 5% curtailment limit, "creating the risk for project owners that their generation might not be bought", said David Fishman of Shanghai-based energy consultancy the Lantau Group.

Curtailment for Huaneng Power International, a major state-owned generator, rose to 7.7% in the first quarter from 3.1% a year earlier, Jefferies analysts said in a client note, citing Huaneng management. In a further challenge, the easiest-to-site projects have already been largely developed, said Shi Lida, research manager at Yongan Guofu Asset Management. At sites still available, rooftops may need to be reinforced, grid connections may be limited, or hours of sunlight may be short. "If your costs don't continue to fall, the investment will not be cost effective," Shi said. Further reading: Germany Has Too Many Solar Panels, and It's Pushed Energy Prices Negative

Using the Euclid space telescope, astronomers have discovered dozens of rogue planets drifting without stars in the Orion nebula. The Guardian reports: The European Space Agency (Esa) launched the $1 billion observatory last summer on a six-year mission to create a 3D map of the cosmos. Armed with its images, scientists hope to understand more about the mysterious 95% of the universe that is unexplained. The first wave of scientific results come from only 24 hours of observations, which revealed 11m objects in visible light and 5m in infrared. Along with the rogue planets, the researchers describe new star clusters, dwarf galaxies and very distant, bright galaxies from the first billion years of the universe.

A flurry of new images from the same observations are the largest ever taken in space and demonstrate the stunning wide-field views that astronomers can expect from Euclid in the coming years. Among those released on Thursday is a breathtaking image of Messier 78, a vibrant star nursery shrouded in interstellar dust, that reveals complex filaments of gas and dust in unprecedented detail. One of the newly released images shows Abell 2390, a giant conglomeration of more than 50,000 Milky Way-like galaxies. Such galaxy clusters contain up to 10 trillion times as much mass as the sun, much of which is believed to be elusive dark matter. Another image of the Abell 2764 galaxy cluster reveals hundreds of galaxies orbiting within a halo of dark matter.

Other images capture NGC 6744, one of the largest spiral galaxies in the nearby universe, and the Dorado group of galaxies, where evolving and merging galaxies produce shell-like structures and vast, curving tidal tails. The rogue planets spotted by Euclid are about 3m years old, making them youngsters on the cosmic scale. They are at least four times as big as Jupiter and were detected thanks to the warmth they emit. Astronomers know they are free-floating because they are so far away from the nearest stars. The celestial strays are destined to drift through the galaxy unless they encounter a star that pulls them into orbit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother. He opens up about work, the pressures he faces as a middle-aged man, and thoughts that he doesn't even discuss with his wife. His mother will occasionally make a comment, like telling him to take care of himself -- he's her only child. But mostly, she just listens. That's because Sun's mother died five years ago. And the person he's talking to isn't actually a person, but a digital replica he made of her -- a moving image that can conduct basic conversations. They've been talking for a few years now. After she died of a sudden illness in 2019, Sun wanted to find a way to keep their connection alive. So he turned to a team at Silicon Intelligence, an AI company based in Nanjing, China, that he cofounded in 2017. He provided them with a photo of her and some audio clips from their WeChat conversations. While the company was mostly focused on audio generation, the staff spent four months researching synthetic tools and generated an avatar with the data Sun provided. Then he was able to see and talk to a digital version of his mom via an app on his phone.

"My mom didn't seem very natural, but I still heard the words that she often said: 'Have you eaten yet?'" Sun recalls of the first interaction. Because generative AI was a nascent technology at the time, the replica of his mom can say only a few pre-written lines. But Sun says that's what she was like anyway. "She would always repeat those questions over and over again, and it made me very emotional when I heard it," he says. There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them. In fact, the avatars are the newest manifestation of a cultural tradition: Chinese people have always taken solace from confiding in the dead.

The technology isn't perfect -- avatars can still be stiff and robotic -- but it's maturing, and more tools are becoming available through more companies. In turn, the price of "resurrecting" someone -- also called creating "digital immortality" in the Chinese industry -- has dropped significantly. Now this technology is becoming accessible to the general public. Some people question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is actually a healthy way to process grief, and it's not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. For now, the idea still makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But as Silicon Intelligence's other cofounder, CEO Sima Huapeng, says, "Even if only 1% of Chinese people can accept [AI cloning of the dead], that's still a huge market."

Computer models have found that recent heat waves in the north Pacific may be due to a large reduction in aerosols emitted by factories in China. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Phys.Org reports: In this new effort, the research team noted that the onset of the heat waves appeared to follow successful efforts by the Chinese government to reduce aerosol emissions from their country's factories. Beginning around 2010, factories and power generating plants in China began dramatically reducing emissions of aerosols such as sulfate, resulting in much cleaner air. Noting that aerosols can act like mirrors floating in the air, reflecting heat from the sun back into space, and also pointing out that earlier research efforts had suggested that massive reductions of aerosols in one place could lead to warming in other places -- they wondered if reductions of aerosols in China might be playing a role in the heat waves that began happening in the north Pacific.

To find out if that might be the case, the team began collecting data and then input it into 12 different computer climate models. They ran them under two conditions -- one where emissions from East Asia remained as they were over the past several decades and one where they dropped in the way they had in reality. They found that the models with no declines did not cause much change elsewhere, whereas those with aerosol drops showed heat waves occurring in the northeast parts of the Pacific Ocean.

The models also showed why -- as less heat was reflected back into space over China, warming of coastal regions in Asia began, resulting in the development of high-pressure systems. That in turn made low-pressure systems in the middle Pacific more intense. And that resulted in the Aleutian Low growing bigger and moving south which weakened the westerly winds that typically cool the sea surface. The result was hotter conditions.

The Associated Press reports that an F-16 performing aerial combat tests at 550 miles per hour was "controlled by artificial intelligence, not a human pilot."

And riding in the front seat was the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force... AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028.

It was fitting that the dogfight took place at [California's] Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. [U.S. Secretary of the Air Force] Frank Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.

"It's a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it," Kendall said in an interview with The Associated Press after he landed... At the end of the hourlong flight, Kendall climbed out of the cockpit grinning. He said he'd seen enough during his flight that he'd trust this still-learning AI with the ability to decide whether or not to launch weapons in war... [T]he software first learns on millions of data points in a simulator, then tests its conclusions during actual flights. That real-world performance data is then put back into the simulator where the AI then processes it to learn more.
"Kendall said there will always be human oversight in the system when weapons are used," the article notes.

But he also said looked for to the cost-savings of smaller and cheaper AI-controlled unmanned jets.

Slashdot reader fjo3 shared a link to this video. (More photos at Sky.com.)

Eight prominent U.S. newspapers owned by investment giant Alden Global Capital are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, in a complaint filed Tuesday in the Southern District of New York. From a report: Until now, the Times was the only major newspaper to take legal action against AI firms for copyright infringement. Many other news publishers, including the Financial Times, the Associated Press and Axel Springer, have instead opted to strike paid deals with AI companies for millions of dollars annually, undermining the Times' argument that it should be compensated billions of dollars in damages.

The lawsuit is being filed on behalf of some of the most prominent regional daily newspapers in the Alden portfolio, including the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer Press.

ReneR writes: A major T2 Linux milestone has been released, shipping with full support for 25 CPU architectures and several C libraries, as well as restored support for Intel IA-64 Itanium. Additionally, many vintage X.org DDX drivers were fixed and tested to work again, as well as complete support for the latest KDE 6 and GNOME 46.

T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support and support for nearly all existing CPU architectures: Alpha, Arc, ARM(64), Avr32, HPPA(64), IA64, M68k, MIPS(64), Nios2, PowerPC(64)(le), RISCV(64), s390x, SPARC(64), and SuperH x86(64). T2 is an increasingly popular choice for embedded systems and virtualization. It also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi, Sun and HP workstations, as well as the latest ARM64 and RISCV64 architectures.

The release contains a total of 5,140 changesets, including approximately 5,314 package updates, 564 issues fixed, 317 packages or features added and 163 removed, and around 53 improvements. Usually most packages are up-to-date, including Linux 6.8, GCC 13, LLVM/Clang 18, as well as the latest version of X.org, Mesa, Firefox, Rust, KDE 6 and GNOME 46!

More information, source and binary distribution are open source and free at T2 SDE.

The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses now feature support for multimodal AI -- without the need for a projector or $24 monthly fee. (We're looking at you, Humane AI.) With the new update, the Meta AI assistant will be able to analyze what you're seeing, and it'll give you smart, helpful answers or suggestions. The Verge reports: First off, there are some expectations that need managing here. The Meta glasses don't promise everything under the sun. The primary command is to say "Hey Meta, look and..." You can fill out the rest with phrases like "Tell me what this plant is." Or read a sign in a different language. Write Instagram captions. Identify and learn more about a monument or landmark. The glasses take a picture, the AI communes with the cloud, and an answer arrives in your ears. The possibilities are not limitless, and half the fun is figuring out where its limits are. [...]

To me, it's the mix of a familiar form factor and decent execution that makes the AI workable on these glasses. Because it's paired to your phone, there's very little wait time for answers. It's headphones, so you feel less silly talking to them because you're already used to talking through earbuds. In general, I've found the AI to be the most helpful at identifying things when we're out and about. It's a natural extension of what I'd do anyway with my phone. I find something I'm curious about, snap a pic, and then look it up. Provided you don't need to zoom really far in, this is a case where it's nice to not pull out your phone. [...]

But AI is a feature of the Meta glasses. It's not the only feature. They're a workable pair of livestreaming glasses and a good POV camera. They're an excellent pair of open-ear headphones. I love wearing mine on outdoor runs and walks. I could never use the AI and still have a product that works well. The fact that it's here, generally works, and is an alright voice assistant -- well, it just gets you more used to the idea of a face computer, which is the whole point anyway.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: On a slice of the ocean front in west Singapore, a startup is building a plant to turn carbon dioxide from air and seawater into the same material as seashells, in a process that will also produce "green" hydrogen — a much-hyped clean fuel.

The cluster of low-slung buildings starting to take shape in Tuas will become the "world's largest" ocean-based carbon dioxide removal plant when completed later this year, according to Equatic, the startup behind it that was spun out of the University of California at Los Angeles. The idea is that the plant will pull water from the ocean, zap it with an electric current and run air through it to produce a series of chemical reactions to trap and store carbon dioxide as minerals, which can be put back in the sea or used on land... The $20 million facility will be fully operational by the end of the year and able to remove 3,650 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, said Edward Sanders, chief operating officer of Equatic, which has partnered with Singapore's National Water Agency to construct the plant. That amount is equivalent to taking roughly 870 average passenger cars off the road. The ambition is to scale up to 100,000 metric tons of CO2 removal a year by the end of 2026, and from there to millions of metric tons over the next few decades, Sanders told CNN. The plant can be replicated pretty much anywhere, he said, stacked up in modules "like lego blocks...."

The upfront costs are high but the company says it plans to make money by selling carbon credits to polluters to offset their pollution, as well as selling the hydrogen produced during the process. Equatic has already signed a deal with Boeing to sell it 2,100 metric tons of hydrogen, which it plans to use to create green fuel, and to fund the removal of 62,000 metric tons of CO2.
There's other projects around the world attempting ocean-based carbon renewal, CNN notes. "Other projects include sprinkling iron particles into the ocean to stimulate CO2-absorbing phytoplankton, sinking seaweed into the depths to lock up carbon and spraying particles into marine clouds to reflect away some of the sun's energy." But carbon-removal projects are controversial, criticized for being expensive, unproven at scale and a distraction from policies to cut fossil fuels. And when they involve the oceans — complex ecosystems already under huge strain from global warming — criticisms can get even louder. There are "big knowledge gaps" when it comes to ocean geoengineering generally, said Jean-Pierre Gatusso, an ocean scientist at the Sorbonne University in France. "I am very concerned with the fact that science lags behind the industry," he told CNN.

A large-screen IMAX documentary about the James Webb Space Telescope "has just opened in 300 theaters across North America," write an anonymous Slashdot reader, noting that it's playing for one week only. "And it gets a rave review in Forbes." Imagine venturing to the beginning of time and space, exploring cosmic landscapes so vast and beautiful that they've remained unseen by human eyes until now.

This is the promise of "Deep Sky," an extraordinary IMAX presentation that brings the universe's awe-inspiring mysteries closer than ever before. Directed by the Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn and narrated by the equally acclaimed actress Michelle Williams, "Deep Sky" is a monumental journey through the cosmos, powered by the groundbreaking images captured by NASA's Webb Telescope... "Deep Sky" is more than a documentary about a space telescope; it's an immersive experience that invites audiences to see the universe as never before. Through the power of IMAX, viewers are transported across 13 billion years of cosmic history, to the very edges of the observable universe. Here, in stunning clarity, we witness the birth of stars, the formation of galaxies, and the eerie beauty of exoplanets — planets that orbit stars beyond our own Sun. These images, beamed back to Earth by JWST, reveal the universe's vast beauty on a scale that seems only the giant IMAX screen can begin to convey...

What makes "Deep Sky" particularly captivating is its ability to render the incomprehensible beauty and scale of the universe accessible. The IMAX® experience, known for its breathtaking visuals and sound, serves as the perfect medium to convey the majesty of the cosmos.
The review says the film celebrates the achieve of thousands of people working across decades, "aiming to answer some of humanity's oldest questions: Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? Are we alone in the vastness of space?"

The reviewer also spoke to JWST telescope scientist Matt Mountain — in another article applauding the film for "encapsulating the grandeur of space exploration on the IMAX canvas." In "Deep Sky," viewers are taken on a journey from the telescope's construction to its deployment and early operational phases. The documentary highlights the international collaboration and engineering marvels behind the JWST, featuring insights from key scientists and engineers who brought the telescope to life. The film aims to rekindle a sense of wonder about the universe and our place within it, emphasizing the human desire to explore and understand the cosmos.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California's main grid for 30 of the past 38 days. Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson has been tracking California's renewables performance, and he shares his findings on Twitter (X) when the state breaks records. Jacobson notes that supply exceeds demand for "0.25-6 h per day," and that's an important fact. The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day but in the fact that it's happening on a consistent daily basis, which has never been achieved before.

At the two-week record mark, Ian Magruder at Rewiring America made this great point on LinkedIn: "And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January ...), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight." On April 2, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) recommended 26 new transmission projects worth $6.1 billion, with a big number being devoted to offshore wind. In response, Jacobson predicted on April 4 that California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035.

Andrew Jones reports via IEEE Spectrum: The European Space Agency will launch a mission late this year to demonstrate precision formation flying in orbit to create artificial solar eclipses. In a press conference last week, the agency announced details of the mission and the technology the orbiters will use to pull off its exquisitely-choreographed maneuvers. ESA's Proba-3 (PRoject for On-Board Autonomy) consists of a pair of spacecraft: a 300-kilogram Coronagraph spacecraft and a 250-kilogram Occulter. The pair are now slated to launch on an Indian PSLV rocket in September and ultimately enter a highly elliptical, 600-by-60,530-kilometer orbit. The aim, the agency says, is to move the separate spacecraft to some 144 meters apart, with the Occulter, as a disc, blocking out the sun.

Achieving this formation will allow the Coronagraph to study our star's highly ionized, extremely hot atmosphere -- but also demonstrate the technology as a precursor for more ambitious, future, formation-flying endeavors. [...] ESA has science objectives for Proba-3, using observations made in space to study solar astrophysics without any intervention of the Earth's atmosphere. The agency's Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun (ASPIICS) coronagraph will help to discern why the solar corona is significantly hotter than the Sun itself. This could further our understanding of the Sun and assist solar weather predictions. However, it is the precision formation flying that Proba-3 aims to demonstrate which could help unlock future breakthroughs. [...]

Precisely-controlled Occulter spacecraft could be used with space telescopes to block light from a star in order to directly detect potential orbiting planets, while a constellation of spacecraft can, through interferometry, create large-scale observatories, achieving large apertures and long focal lengths than possible with large solo satellites. Further applications include Earth observation, space-based gravitational wave detection, and a range of missions in which two or more spacecraft need to interact, such as rendezvous, docking, and in-orbit servicing.

As the moon blocked the view of the sun across parts of Mexico, the United States and Canada on Monday, the celestial event managed another magnificent feat: It got people offline. From a report: According to Cloudflare, a cloud-computing service used by about 20 percent of websites globally, internet traffic dipped along the path of totality as spellbound viewers took a break from their phones and computers to catch a glimpse of the real-life spectacle.

The places with the most dramatic views saw the biggest dips in traffic compared with the previous week. In Vermont, Arkansas, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio -- states that were in the path of totality, meaning the moon completely blocked out the sun -- internet traffic dropped by 40 percent to 60 percent around the time of the eclipse, Cloudflare said. States that had partial views also saw drops in internet activity, but to a much lesser extent. At 3:25 p.m. Eastern time, internet traffic in New York dropped by 29 percent compared with the previous week, Cloudflare found.

The path of totality made up a roughly 110-mile-wide belt that stretched from Mazatlan, Mexico, to Montreal. In the Mexican state of Durango, which was in the eclipse zone, internet traffic measured by Cloudflare dipped 57 percent compared with the previous week, while farther south, in Mexico City, traffic was down 22 percent. The duration of the eclipse's totality varied by location, with some places experiencing it for more than four minutes while for others, it was just one to two minutes.