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- Browns camp updates, day 10: All’s quiet on QB front vs. Commanders Akron Beacon Journal
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Tag Archives: nature
Tori Amos Honors Sinéad O’Connor With Emotional Covers at San Francisco Show: ‘A Force of Nature’ – Rolling Stone
- Tori Amos Honors Sinéad O’Connor With Emotional Covers at San Francisco Show: ‘A Force of Nature’ Rolling Stone
- Watch: P!nk and Brandi Carlile’s Emotional Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor American Songwriter
- Pink, Brandi Carlile Honor Sinéad O’Connor with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ Duet TMZ
- Pink and Brandi Carlile perform ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ as tribute to Sinéad O’Connor USA TODAY
- Watch Pink And Brandi Carlile Pay Tribute To Sinéad O’Connor With Breathtaking Duet HuffPost
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Elon Musk Says His AI Project Will Seek to Understand the Nature of the Universe – The Wall Street Journal
- Elon Musk Says His AI Project Will Seek to Understand the Nature of the Universe The Wall Street Journal
- ‘It presumes to replace us’: Concerns of bias in AI grow after Elon Musk issues new warning Fox News
- Elon Musk agrees A.I. will hit people ‘like an asteroid,’ says he used Obama meeting to urge regulation Yahoo Finance
- Elon Musk warns AI could cause ‘civilization destruction’ even as he invests in it CNN
- Elon Musk to develop ‘TruthGPT’ as he warns about ‘civilizational destruction’ from AI Fox News
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Alarm sounded over light pollution from satellites as global threat to nature – The News International
- Alarm sounded over light pollution from satellites as global threat to nature The News International
- A call for scientists to halt the spoiling of the night sky with artificial light and satellites Nature.com
- Satellites and space junk may make dark night skies brighter, hindering astronomy and hiding stars from our view The Conversation Indonesia
- Light pollution frustrates astronomers looking for discoveries | WUSF Public Media WUSF Public Media
- A systematic light pollution modelling bias in present night sky brightness predictions Nature.com
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BBC Denies Pulling David Attenborough Nature Doc To Avoid Angering Right-Wingers – HuffPost
- BBC Denies Pulling David Attenborough Nature Doc To Avoid Angering Right-Wingers HuffPost
- BBC won’t broadcast Attenborough episode on destruction of wildlife over fear of right-wing backlash Boing Boing
- BBC under fire over conservationist Attenborough episode, sports presenter Lineker’s Twitter row The Tribune India
- BBC Slammed for Pulling Episode of David Attenborough Series TheWrap
- The truth about Britain’s wildlife crisis is stark: the timid BBC must let David Attenborough tell it loud and clear The Guardian
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NFL draft: Texans’ Deshaun Watson-related punishment improves Browns picks – Dawgs By Nature
- NFL draft: Texans’ Deshaun Watson-related punishment improves Browns picks Dawgs By Nature
- Texans forfeit 2023 fifth-round pick, fined $175K for salary cap reporting violation NFL.com
- NFL strips Texans of fifth-round draft pick for salary cap violation with Deshaun Watson profootballtalk.nbcsports.com
- Texans forfeit NFL Draft pick, fined $175,000 after salary cap reporting violation involving Deshaun Watson CBS Sports
- Texans fined $175,000 and lose draft pick for salary cap infraction involving former QB Deshaun Watson Fox News
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NFL combine: Andrew Berry, Browns rumors for free agency and NFL draft – Dawgs By Nature
- NFL combine: Andrew Berry, Browns rumors for free agency and NFL draft Dawgs By Nature
- Can Andrew Berry and the Browns get it right in the offseason? – Terry Pluto’s Scribbles cleveland.com
- Cleveland Browns Catherine Raiche Talks About her Role With Team, Working With GM Andrew Berry Sports Illustrated
- Browns GM Andrew Berry on creating ‘flexibility’ ahead of potential free agent push The Athletic
- How Alex Van Pelt will help Deshaun Watson and more Browns takeaways: Orange and Brown Talk cleveland.com
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Space Sail Experiment Expedites Disposal of Satellite
There’s a lot of junk orbiting our planet, from tiny flecks of paint to defunct rocket stages. While solutions to remove pre-existing debris have been developed, a private space company in Germany has successfully tested a method to deorbit satellites at the end of their life to prevent them from becoming space debris in the first place.
The Drag Augmentation Deorbiting System (ADEO) braking sail was developed by High Performance Space Structure Systems as a way to deorbit satellites at the end of their mission. In a space-based test in December 2022 called “Show Me Your Wings,” ADEO was deployed from an ION Satellite Carrier built by private space company D-Orbit. ADEO successfully pushed the satellite carrier out of its orbit, sending it into the atmosphere to burn up.
“Show Me Your Wings” marks the final in-flight qualification test of ADEO as a proof-of-concept after tests began in 2018. The European Space Agency hopes ADEO will help prevent future decommissioned satellites from becoming orbiting space debris, which can pose a threat to space operations.
“We want to establish a zero debris policy, which means if you bring a spacecraft into orbit you have to remove it,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher in a press release.
ADEO is a 38-square-foot (3.5-square-meter) sail made up of an aluminum-coated polyamide membrane secured to four carbon-fibre reinforced arms that are positioned in an X-shape. The sail increases surface drag when deployed from a satellite, leading to a more rapidly decaying orbit. ADEO can also be scaled up or down depending on the size of the satellite it’s attached to. The largest version could reach 1,076-square-feet (100-square-meter) with the smallest sail being 37-square-foot (3.5-square-meter).
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NASA estimates that 27,000 pieces of space debris are orbiting Earth, most of which are larger than a softball and traveling at speeds around 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour). While ESA has previously announced plans to remove pre-existing space debris in the form of decommissioned satellites, ADEO is an attempt at preventing satellites from ever becoming debris in the first place.
More: Jeff Bezos’s Girlfriend Is Leading an All-Women Blue Origin Spaceflight
Coal in the U.S. Is Pointlessly Expensive
Nearly all of the coal plants operating in the U.S. are now more expensive to keep online than it would be to build entirely new renewable energy facilities in their stead, according to a new analysis by Energy Innovation, an energy and policy firm. The analysis found that 99% of U.S. coal plants supply energy that would be cheaper if those plants were shut down and replaced with wind farms or solar fields.
“Coal is unequivocally more expensive than wind and solar resources, it’s just no longer cost competitive with renewables,” Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst at Energy Innovation, told the Guardian. “This report certainly challenges the narrative that coal is here to stay.”
In 2020, the country reached a point that the report refers to as the “cost crossover,” when renewables overtook coal on the U.S. grid. Energy Innovation has been running analyses since that year, looking at the cost of these coal plants compared to new renewable energy. The 2020 analysis found that 62% of the coal fleet was pricier to run than it would be to replace it with renewables; in 2021, that number had risen to 71%.
There’s a big new factor at play in this year’s analysis: the Inflation Reduction Act, which both provides significant tax credits for building new renewables as well as loan guarantees to replace fossil fuel infrastructure. Thanks in part to these incentives, the Energy Innovation analysis found that, out of the 210 coal plants still operating in the country, only one—a plant in Wyoming—produces energy at a cost that is competitive compared to the price of either local wind, solar, or both. And a lot of these potential renewable plants would be a lot cheaper; new wind or solar facilities would be around 30% cheaper than some three-quarters of the existing coal plants.
Coal use in the U.S., the leading source of carbon emissions worldwide, peaked in 2007; since then, its use has been on a downward trajectory, falling some 55% in output as of 2021. While right-wing narratives have blamed climate concerns, especially the Obama administration’s policies, for dragging down coal, the explanation is actually much easier: free market competition from other energy sources. During the fracking boom of the 2010s, natural gas suddenly became a lot less expensive than coal, while simultaneously, the cost of renewables like wind and solar were plummeting. Even President Donald Trump, who entered office vowing to put miners back to work producing “beautiful clean coal”—and who gave the industry a lot of freebies and second chances while in office—wasn’t able to reverse the hand of the market.
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“We can’t just snap our fingers and retire all coal plants but we need to accelerate the buildout of wind and solar so that when the time comes we can wean ourselves off coal,” Solomon told the Guardian.
Defunct Satellite and Rocket Stage Nearly Collide in Potential ‘Worst-Case Scenario’
An old rocket body and military satellite—large pieces of space junk dating back to the Soviet Union—nearly smashed into each other on Friday morning, in an uncomfortable near-miss that would’ve resulted in thousands of pieces of debris had they collided.
LeoLabs, a private company that tracks satellites and derelict objects in low Earth orbit, spotted the near-collision in radar data. The company, which can track objects as tiny as 3.9 inches (10 centimeters) in diameter, operates three radar stations, two in the U.S. and one in New Zealand.
The two objects whizzed past each other at an altitude of 611 miles (984 kilometers) on the morning of Friday, January 27. LeoLabs “computed a miss distance of only 6 meters [20 feet] with an error margin of only a few tens of meters,” the company said in a tweet.
That is unbelievably close, as Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell conveyed in a graphic posted to Twitter. The SL-8 rocket body (NORAD ID 16511), specifically its second stage, has been in space since 1986, while the Cosmos 2361 military satellite (NORAD ID 25590), known as Parus, launched to low Earth orbit in 1998. A collision between the two objects would have produced thousands of new debris fragments that would have lingered in Earth orbit for decades.
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The conjunction happened in an orbital “bad neighborhood” located between 590 and 652 miles (950 and 1,050 km) above the surface, according to LeoLabs. This band has “significant debris-generating potential” in low Earth orbit “due to a mix of breakup events and abandoned derelict objects,” the company explained in a series of tweets. The so-called bad neighborhood hosts around 160 SL-8 rocket bodies along with their roughly 160 payloads launched decades ago. LeoLabs says around 1,400 conjunctions involving these rocket bodies were chronicled between June and September 2022.
LeoLabs describes this type of potential collision between “two massive derelict objects” as a “worst-case scenario,” saying it would be “largely out of our control and would likely result in a ripple effect of dangerous collisional encounters.” Indeed, a collision on this scale would most certainly accelerate the ongoing Kessler Syndrome—the steady accumulation of space debris that threatens to make portions of Earth orbit inaccessible.
Related story: What to Know About Kessler Syndrome, the Ultimate Space Disaster
Near-misses in space are becoming increasingly common, whether it’s conjunctions between defunct satellites or clouds of debris that threaten the International Space Station. Avoidance maneuvers are now a steady fixture for satellite operators, with SpaceX, as an extreme example, having to perform over 26,000 collision avoidance maneuvers of its Starlink satellites from December 1, 2020 to November 30, 2022.
In addition to focusing on collision avoidance, LeoLabs recommends the implementation of debris mitigation and debris remediation efforts. This could take the form of sensible guidelines having to do with the removal of satellites once they’re been retired, as well as the introduction of debris removal technologies.
More: The FCC Wants a 5-Year Deadline to Deorbit Defunct Satellites