Month: January 2018

Enlarge / Sea turtle. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Humans figure out whether to develop as males or females based on the presence of a single gene on the Y chromosome. But that's just one of a dizzying number of ways that plants and animals determine their sex. A large group of reptiles, including crocodilians and many species of turtles, use the ambient temperature. If the eggs are above a certain temperature during a critical period in their incubation, the animal will be likely to develop as a female; below that temperature, you're more likely to get a male.

And that, in a world where temperatures are rising, is a problem.

A new study of sea turtles that live near the Great Barrier Reef has found that populations closest to the equator, where the temperatures are warmest, have been producing over 99 percent females for two decades. While turtles have obviously weathered changing climates in the past, the current rate of change, coupled with sea turtles' long life span, raise concerns about how well they'll cope with our current warming.

Enlarge / Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, speaks to members of the media in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A Democratic effort to reinstate net neutrality rules has won support from a Republican senator and could pass in the Senate if just one more Republican breaks with the GOP.

A Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality repeal would need votes from all Democrats and two Republicans in order to pass through the Senate. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) today became the first Republican senator to pledge support for the repeal reversal.

"Senator Collins does not support the FCC's recent decision to repeal net neutrality rules, and she will support Senator Markey's legislation that would overturn the FCC's vote," a spokesperson for Collins told The Hill and other news outlets today.

Enlarge (credit: Lipton / Timothy B. Lee)

Last month we covered the story of the Long Island Iced Tea Company rebranding itself as Long Blockchain as part of a broader shift in corporate strategy. The company's stock price tripled over night.

On Friday, we got the first concrete details of the company's new blockchain strategy. Long Blockchain planned to raise up to $8.4 million with a stock offering and then use some of the money to buy 1,000 Antminer S9 bitcoin mining machines. The machines would be "installed in a world-class third-party data center experienced in cryptocurrency mining and located in a Nordic country."

But today Long Blockchain announced it was scrapping the stock offering. The company says that it's still planning to buy bitcoin-mining hardware. However, Long Blockchain says that it "can make no assurances that it will be able to finance the purchase of the mining equipment."

Enlarge / The revamped Alienware Command Center's home screen, with its game library on the right. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Another quick update out of CES: Gaming PC maker Alienware is refreshing the Command Center software that comes paired with its line of notebooks and desktops. The overhauled settings app will first arrive in February on a slightly updated version of the company's Area 51 desktop, which loses a front USB port, adds a couple more fans and U.2 SSD support, and supports a wider breadth of LED colors on its chassis. The software will then come pre-installed on new Alienware devices going forward. Unfortunately, it won’t be available for the Dell subsidiary’s existing machines.

This is a mostly visual revamp, with a cleaner, more spaced out, more graphics-heavy look. You can still use the app to monitor and adjust your hardware’s fan speeds and heat output, create overclock profiles, change the lighting effects on your system itself, and create preset profiles for separate games. But that colorization can now be adjusted with more granularity, the overclocking tool lets you manage and test the effect with a few newbie-friendly sliders, and it all appears a bit easier to grok at first blush.

Beyond that, Alienware has now baked a game library and launcher tool into the app’s home screen. The company says the tool will pull in titles downloaded from any source (Steam, GOG, Origin, etc.), the idea being to create a sort of centralized hub for all of your games. Dell says the Command Center will be removable, but the company cautions that it will be the only app that can control lighting and overclocking on Dell devices.

Enlarge / Members of the Texas Army National Guard moved through flooded Houston streets as floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey continued to rise on August 28, 2017. More than 12,000 members of the Texas National Guard were called out to support local authorities in response to the storm. (credit: Zachary Wes)

The figures for 2017's global temperatures aren't out yet, but data from earlier months indicate it will involve a small drop after two years of record-setting heat. NOAA, however, has run the numbers on 2017's impact on the US, finding it to be the third warmest on record and associated with lots of extreme weather events. Amazingly, NOAA's brief report on 2017's climate managed to mention all of this without once mentioning climate change.

A changing climate, however, is implicit in the very first paragraph. 2017, it notes, is the 21st consecutive year with above-average temperatures in the US. It ranks third on the all-time heat list, coming in at 1.45 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th century average. The US' five warmest years on record, NOAA notes, have all occurred after 2006. It was also the third consecutive year in a row that every single state experienced above-average temperatures. For five states, 2017 was the warmest year on record. All of which indicates a major trend in the US' temperatures.

Although the temperatures didn't set a new record, the cost of weather events in 2017 did. The US saw 16 weather and climate disasters that each cost more than $1 billion, with total costs rising above $300 billion. That's nearly $100 billion more than the next closest year (2005), which featured Hurricanes Katrina, Wilma, and Rita. Last year's trifecta featured Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Irma at total costs of $125 billion, $90 billion, and $50 billion, respectively. All three placed in the top five costliest disasters of all time in the US. These disasters also killed 362 people directly.