Month: January 2017

(credit: Lawrence Berkeley Lab)

In Science’s Policy Forum column, President Barack Obama has penned an article arguing that the world is quickly replacing fossil fuel-based energy with clean energy. That momentum, he asserts, will not be stopped by “near-term” policy changes from Donald Trump’s incoming administration.

The current president writes that, although climate change is undeniable, the incoming administration might do nothing about it. That would be a political mistake, but it might not effect on the economics of clean energy, Obama argues. “Mounting economic and scientific evidence leave me confident that trends toward a clean-energy economy that have emerged during my presidency will continue,” he wrote, adding that “the trend toward clean energy is irreversible.”

The president cites recent studies from national and international agencies showing that energy emissions are decoupling from economic growth, a trend that “should put to rest the argument that combatting climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living.” And the potential damage to the economy is vast: a 4°C increase in global temperature could “lead to lost US federal revenue of roughly $340 billion to $690 billion annually.”

Enlarge / Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell (credit: National Press Club)

“Why, why, why... ?”

In a speech Monday at the National Press Club, US Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell puzzled over the GOP’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act without having replacement legislation at the ready. “Why do you want to want to repeal it without telling what we’re going to do?” she said. “That’s not what we owe the American people.”

Her question—and her whole speech—are part of a coordinated campaign by the outgoing Administration to protect the signature healthcare legislation from Republican leaders, who are already abuzz with plans for a swift repeal once President-elect Donald Trump takes office January 20.

Enlarge / The VISIR instrument before its impending upgrades. (credit: ESO)

Today, the European Southern Observatory announced an agreement with Breakthrough Starshot, the group dedicated to sending hardware to return data from the nearest stars. The agreement would see Breakthrough Starshot fund the development of new hardware that would allow the ESO's Very Large Telescope to become an efficient planet hunter. The goal is presumably to confirm there's something in the Alpha Centauri system worth sending hardware to image.

Breakthrough Starshot's audacious plan involves using ground-based lasers and light sails to accelerate tiny craft to a significant fraction of the speed of light. This would allow the craft to visit the stars of the Alpha Centauri system within decades. The company's goal is to get data back to Earth while many of the people alive today are still around.

Getting meaningful data requires a detailed understanding of the Alpha Centauri system, which is where the new telescope hardware will come in. Last year, scientists confirmed the existence of an exoplanet orbiting the closest star of the three-star system, Proxima Centauri. But we'll want to know significantly more about it, its orbit, and whether there are signs of any other planets in the system before we send spacecraft. The other two stars of Alpha Centauri are also worth a closer look.

KAREN BLEIER/AFP/GettyImages

Right now self-driving cars are a technical challenge. No amount of sensors and mapping can currently produce a 100 percent reliable self-driving car, but plenty of companies are working on it. When this technology does hit the market, the inevitable question is going to be "how much extra does it cost?"

Waymo, the Alphabet self-driving car division that was recently spun off from Google, is working on getting that cost as low as possible. According to a recent article from Bloomberg, the company has spent the last 12 months working on "scalability." The company's efforts have lead to a "90 percent" decrease in the cost of the LIDAR sensor, which is typically the most costly item in a self-driving car solution.

(credit: Photograph by Randy Stewart)

Yahoo, one of the Internet's most venerable companies, won't exist for much longer. Verizon officially acquired Yahoo for $4.8 billion in July, and a new financial filing from the company includes details of what's going to happen.

That July sale included Yahoo's operating business, but it didn't include the big chunk of Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba owned by Yahoo, and it didn't include certain other assets, mostly shares of Asia-based companies and non-core patents. What remains, according to SEC paperwork filed today, will be rolled into an "investment company" called Altaba.

The size of the board will be reduced to five directors, and many key executives will leave, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Yahoo co-founder David Filo. Also out are Eddy Hartenstein, Richard Hill, Jane Shaw, and Maynard Webb. The departures are not "due to any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company's operations, policies, or practices," according to the company's filing.

The Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant (credit: Russ Nelson)

On Monday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced an agreement with utility company Entergy to close the 2GW Indian Point nuclear power plant, located 25 miles north of New York City. The closure was mutually agreed-upon by both the state of New York and Energy, although the state and the utility gave conflicting assessments of the power plant’s reasons for closure.

A statement from the governor’s office read:

The aging 2,000 megawatt nuclear power plant... has presented numerous threats to the safety of over 20 million residents and the environmental health of the area. After extensive litigation and negotiation, Entergy has agreed to end all operations at the facility, with plans to shut down Indian Point Unit 2 as early as April 2020 and Unit 3 in April 2021.

Entergy, on the other hand, offered a different characterization of the shut down in a press release:

Enlarge / An artist's rendering of some humans 10,000 years in the future about to make a mistake. (credit: Courtesy of Redacted Pictures/Peter Kuper)

Do we have a responsibility to warn the future about radioactivity? And if we have that responsibility, do we have a right to create radioactive materials that could harm future generations in the first place?

These are the questions posed by the new observational documentary Containment, which will air on PBS’ Independent Lens tonight at 10pm ET. Although directors Peter Galison and Robb Moss don’t offer clear answers, their interviews with nuclear waste experts, policy directors, and people associated with and affected by nuclear sites are thorough and sober.

Containment focuses exclusively on the dangers of nuclear waste from both nuclear weapons projects and nuclear energy, often lumping the two endeavors together in a way that can come across as unjustly censuring nuclear energy, whose benefits in the face of climate change are scarcely mentioned. But ultimately the message seems to be that a rational and pragmatic approach to storing waste, unclouded by delusion that any site can be completely and totally safe, is necessary.

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Rice is a staple food for more than half of the world’s population. Rice yields depend on numerous factors, such as agricultural practices, but they also depend on the temperature at which the crop is grown. Previous studies have shown that temperatures above rice's optimum physiological temperature can reduce crop yield.

As a result, the International Food Policy Research Institute has stated that the effects of rising temperatures from climate change would likely reduce rice yield by 10 percent by 2050. This could have dramatic impacts across the world, as hunger and malnutrition are already significant problems.

But little is known about the physiological mechanisms through which rice plants respond and adapt to climate change. Previous investigations have left a lot of uncertainty, as they've used different methods to develop crop models. To address this, an international team of scientists has explored how rising temperatures affect the sensitivity of rice yields using a new compilation of data from 83 field warming experiments at 13 sites across the globe. The team also evaluated three modeling approaches (statistical models, local crop models, and global gridded crop models) to understand one of the sources of uncertainty.

Enlarge / Edge in all its Windows 10 build 15002 glory. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has released Windows 10 build 15002 to Windows Insiders on the fast update ring.

The new build comes to most of us more than a month since the last build was released back on December 7, and it includes a substantial number of changes and new features. The company wanted to avoid pushing out new builds around the holiday period, but with that now a distant memory, it's back to work for the Windows developers. A few people even got their hands on the build early as Microsoft published it to its servers over the weekend, albeit without release notes.

There's no Mobile update this time around, nor any indication of when a Mobile update will ship.