Month: June 2016

Drilling at the CarbFix site, with the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant in the background. (credit: Juerg Matter)

As the world continues its slow shift to renewable energy, it would be great to limit the carbon dioxide produced from the fossil fuels we'll burn in the meantime. Some researchers are working on capturing that CO₂ from smokestacks using as little energy as possible. Others are working on places to put it.

Deep, briny aquifers are an obvious choice. The concern there is the risk of leakage. Once we put the CO₂ deep into the Earth, we want it to stay there. Eventually, the CO₂ dissolved in those brines can precipitate as carbonate minerals (which won't be going anywhere), but that takes a pretty long time.

Brines aren't the only option for locking away captured CO₂, though. There are also volcanic rocks that will readily react with CO₂, potentially speeding things along. In 2012, a pilot project got rolling in Iceland to inject CO₂ into basalt—something the island nation has in abundance. An impressive outcome from this pilot is reported in a new paper published in Science.

(credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 1080 video cards will only support two-way SLI, the company has told PC Perspective, backtracking from claims made when the card was first launched.

Initially, Nvidia's plans for creating SLI setups with its latest and greatest GeForce GTX 1080 video cards were a little peculiar. Two-way configurations were supported using a new high-speed bridge to join the two cards together. Three- and four-way configurations were promised, too, but with a twist: first, these would need to use older, slower SLI bridges, and, second, system owners would have to generate a special "enthusiast key" to unlock access to three- and four-way SLI. Without this key, the system would stick to two-way.

The plan is now simpler but, for those rich individuals hoping to build the very fastest systems imaginable, somewhat worse. Configurations with two cards working in SLI using the new bridges will continue to be supported, but the company no longer plans to extend this to three- and four-way configurations at all, and the "enthusiast key" system is being dumped.

(credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The advent of plastics has given humanity a prominent materials footprint on the world. Plastics provide lots of benefits, such as convenience and low cost, but proper recycling or disposal of plastics is an ongoing challenge.

Most conventional plastics do not undergo appreciable biological degradation. Plastic that is not properly disposed of ends up in the environment, where it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. In the ocean, plastic often ends up in fragments less than five millimeters in size.

This microplastic debris can be ingested by marine biota, and it affects life both physically and chemically. But little is known about the overall effect of plastic pollution on marine animals or the mechanisms that would drive any effects. In a recent investigation published in Science, researchers from Sweden explored the influence of plastic microparticles on the development and survival of a fairly typical fish.

(credit: Matthew Keys)

The jury is still out, but at this early stage, there's good reason to doubt the legitimacy of claims that more than 32 million Twitter passwords are circulating online.

The purported dump went live on Wednesday night on LeakedSource, a site that bills itself as a breach notification service. The post claimed that the 32.88 million Twitter credentials contain plaintext passwords and that of the 15 records LeakedSource members checked, all 15 were found to be valid. Twitter Trust and Info Security Officer Michael Coates has said his team investigated the list, and he remains "confident that our systems have not been breached."

Lending credibility to Coates's claim, Twitter has long used the bcrypt hash function to store hashes. Bcrypt hashes are so slow and computationally costly to crack that it would have required infeasible amounts of time and effort for anyone to decipher the underlying plaintext. As of press time, there were no reports of a mass reset of Twitter users' passwords, either.

The adventurous vervet monkey, sitting on a transformer at Gitaru power station. Little did he know that millions of Kenyans were suffering as a result of his curiosity. (credit: KenGen)

A monkey, falling onto a transformer at the Gitaru hydroelectric power station in Kenya, caused a nationwide blackout on Tuesday.

KenGen, the operator of Gitaru dam and Kenya's largest electricity producer, posted a photo on Facebook of the dastardly monkey still perched atop the transformer. Using our crack zoological skills, it appears to be a vervet monkey, which is native to Kenya.

The monkey climbed onto the roof of the Gitaru power station and then dropped onto a transformer, tripping it. This then caused the other transformers to overload and trip, which in turn caused the whole power station to go offline. The loss of 180MW from the hydro plant was enough to cause a national blackout, according to KenGen.