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Article includes an interactive & searchable map of commercial air pollution hot spots

Avram Piltch is the editor in chief of Tom's Hardware, and he's written a thoroughly researched article breaking down the promises and failures of LLM AIs.

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Batteries are going to transform transportation and could also be key in storing renewables like wind or solar power for times when those resources aren’t available. So in a way, they’re a central technology for the two sectors responsible for the biggest share of emissions: energy and transportation.

And if you want to understand what’s coming in batteries, you need to look at what's happening right now in battery materials. The International Energy Agency just released a new report on the state of critical minerals in energy, which has some interesting battery-related tidbits. So for the newsletter this week, let’s dive into some data about battery materials.

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Ibadan, 16 July 2023. – Andøya Spaceport is building Norway’s first Spaceport on Andøya, from where it can launch payloads with orbital launch vehicles into polar and sun-synchronous orbits. The Spaceport will provide the ground infrastructure for launch operator companies to launch small satellites into orbit. Furthermore, the initial capability includes a new launch pad, an integration hall where users can assemble and integrate their payloads into the rockets. The facility will also offer control rooms for operating tests, launch operations, and range activities.

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In the past few years, museums around the world have started to grapple with questions about the origins and ethics of their collections. This includes the acquisition and maintenance of natural history specimens. As museums examine their missions and processes, it seemed like a good time to talk to Sean Decatur, the new president of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. ...

Determining the proper home for objects from Indigenous groups in the United States is governed by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. I asked Decatur how the museum views compliance with these regulations when questions are raised about whether objects or specimens should be in New York. For items that belong to North American Indigenous groups, he emphasized that a clear process exists for repatriation and that the museum has resources to work with Indigenous groups who claim ownership of objects that are in the museum’s collection. But he also wants to make sure that commitments are “more than lip service” by ensuring that the museum returns items that are not now, and were not in the past, collected under terms that do not meet today’s ethical standards. Moreover, Decatur is focused on building fulsome partnerships devoted to healing and moving forward from the past. “There’s more to returning items as a repatriation process than just putting them in the mail,” he said.

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Astronomical radio sources, while intrinsically intense, are also far away. What little of their signal reaches Earth is therefore really faint: A single mobile phone on the surface of the Moon would outshine all but the very brightest of them.

Communication signals of Earth-orbiting satellites are much stronger but are by regulation limited to certain wavelengths. They’re also known to radio astronomers, who can filter them out. However, leakage radiation may result in artificial signals at unintended wavelengths. Leakage typically comes from human activity on the ground, but with the number of satellites literally skyrocketing, astronomers are becoming concerned about the effect from space. Now, a team has announced the first detection of this electromagnetic interference from satellites.

“Leakage radiation from artificial satellites as a possible interference first appeared in our minds only about two years ago,” recalls Benjamin Winkel (Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Germany, and Committee on Radio Astronomy Frequencies, France). “Back then, nobody knew how strong such an effect would be, and if this was more than just a theoretical problem.”

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More than 61,000 people died because of Europe’s record-shattering heat wave last summer, scientists have concluded. And that’s probably still an underestimation.

The figure is just shy of the 70,000 excess deaths researchers attribute to another exceptional heat wave that swept Europe in 2003. That disaster helped raise awareness about the dangers of climate change and the continent’s general lack of heat action plans.

Yet the new findings suggest that in the two decades since, efforts to prepare for a hotter future and protect the continent’s most vulnerable populations have fallen short.

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