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Once renewable sources of electricity meet or beat the costs of fossil fuel generation, everything changes. With the immediate financial benefit just as clear as the long-term environmental benefit, utilities turn their attention to how to make it work rather than debating whether it’s worth the investment. Solar and onshore wind technologies have hit this point in recent years, but the unique challenges presented by offshore wind have required different solutions that have taken time to mature. Governments have provided some subsidies to encourage that progress, and global capacity grew to 28 gigawatts last year. But those subsidies make it trickier to calculate how close to cost-competitive offshore wind has become.

A team led by Imperial College London’s Malte Jansen worked to compare 41 offshore wind projects in Europe going back to 2005. The researchers’ analysis suggests offshore wind, at least in Europe, is on the cusp of dropping below the price of more traditional generating plants.

Subsidies and auctions

Bids for constructing these offshore wind farms came in through national auctions, which included subsidies with varying structures. They all offered guaranteed prices for the generated electricity. Some promise to pay the difference when the market rate drops below the guarantee while allowing the wind-farm operator to increase profits when the market rate rises above the guarantee. Others require the utility to return excess profits when the market rate is high. And each country has a different limit on how long the guarantees last, whether that’s a set number of years or a set amount of electricity sold.

Enlarge / A research associate works at the Moderna Therapeutics Inc. lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Moderna has given the first doses of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine to participants in what will be a 30,000-person trial, as the United States moved into a new phase of the race to develop a vaccine by the start of next year.

The Boston-based biotech said on Monday that it had begun the first Phase III study of a vaccine in the US, a large-scale trial that is usually the last before a new product is submitted for regulatory approval.

The company’s shares were up as much as 10.6 percent before paring some of their gains.

GPS device and services provider Garmin on Monday confirmed that the worldwide outage that took down the vast majority of its offerings for five days was caused by a ransomware attack.

“Garmin Ltd. was the victim of a cyber attack that encrypted some of our systems on July 23, 2020,” the company wrote in a Monday morning post. “As a result, many of our online services were interrupted including website functions, customer support, customer facing applications, and company communications. We immediately began to assess the nature of the attack and started remediation.” The company said it didn’t believe personal information of users was taken.

Garmin’s woes began late Wednesday or early Thursday morning as customers reported being unable to use a variety of services. Later on Thursday, the company said it was experiencing an outage of Garmin Connect, FlyGarmin, customer support centers, and other services. The service failure left millions of customers unable to connect their smartwatches, fitness trackers, and other devices to servers that provided location-based data required to make them work. Monday’s post was the first time the company provided a cause of the worldwide outage.

Enlarge (credit: Guy Bar-Oz)

Ancient trash heaps recently yielded some clues about how the Plague of Justinian, part of a one-two punch with volcanic climate havoc, devastated commercial farming at the fringes of the Byzantine Empire in the 540s CE. They tell us a lot about the ancient Byzantine world, but they also suggest how archaeologists might someday unearth the story of the COVID-19 pandemic from the layers of stuff we're dumping into landfills in 2020.

Gaza wine and Byzantine pilgrims

For thousands of years, people survived in Israel's arid Negev Highlands by farming enough grain to feed their families and enough grapes to make their own wine. But under the Byzantine Empire (which arose in 330 CE as a successor to the Roman Empire), the Negev flourished. Cities sprang up in the desert, fueled by a new export trade: grapes for the famous Gaza wine, a sweet white wine that ancient chroniclers raved about and which was in demand from Britain to Yemen.

Gaza wine tied the remote Negev into the international Mediterranean economy, and it turned scattered small subsistence farms into larger commercial enterprises supplied by irrigation systems and pigeon-poop fertilizer. For a couple of centuries, the Byzantine Empire's citizens paid well for a steady flow of Gaza wine, and the Empire built monasteries and sent religious pilgrimages to the Levant.

Enlarge / Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Committee in 2018. (credit: Xinhua/Liu Jie via Getty Images)

Google will keep "nearly all" of its workforce—around 200,000 employees and contractors—working from home for another year, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Google CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly made the decision last week.

The long timeline gives more certainty for Googlers who are making school and housing decisions for the coming academic year. Previously Google workers were due back in the office in January.

Companies across Silicon Valley—and across the broader US economy—have been keeping their offices closed longer as the severity of the coronavirus pandemic becomes more clear.