An anonymous reader writes: In the early 70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon created a spaceship tale for a graduation project -- little knowing it would influence Alien and many other works. Made for $60,000 by film school students, horror maestro John Carpenter's directorial debut Dark Star is now regarded as a sci-fi cult classic. Having just turned 50 years old, it's a world away from much of the sci-fi that came before it and would come after, neither space odyssey nor space opera, rather a bleak, downbeat and often absurd portrait of a group of people cooped together in a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Arguably its most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb. Dark Star was a collaboration between Carpenter, who directed and scored the film, and Dan O'Bannon, who in addition to co-writing the script, acted as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, as well as playing the volatile, paranoid Sergeant Pinback. They met as budding filmmakers at the University of Southern California. "While [Carpenter and O'Bannon] couldn't be more dissimilar in personality, they were both very energetic and focused," says Daniel Griffiths, director of Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film.

The sci-fi films of this period tended to be bleak and dystopian, explains John Kenneth Muir, author of The Films of John Carpenter -- films like Silent Running (1972), in which all plant life on Earth is extinct, or George Lucas's 1971 debut THX-1138, in which human emotion is suppressed. "Dark Star arrived in this world of dark, hopeless imaginings, but took the darkness one step further into absurd nihilism." Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the "ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one "in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star". Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 "with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things". Where Kubrick scored his film with classical music, Dark Star opens with a country song, Benson, Arizona. (A road in the real-life Benson is named in honor of the film). The film was even released with the tagline "the spaced-out odyssey." Dark Star captured the mood of the time in which it was made, says Muir, the atmosphere of Nixon's America. "The 1960s was all about utopian dreaming and bringing change to America in the counterculture. The 1970s represent what writer Johnny Byrne called 'The wake-up from the hippie dream', a reckoning with the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same." [...]

When Dark Star premiered at the FILMEX expo in 1974, the audience response was largely positive. "They recognized the film's absurdist humor and celebrated its student film roots," says Griffiths. It had a limited theatrical release in 1975, but it was not a commercial success. "The film met with negative reviews from critics, and general disinterest from audiences," says Muir. "Both Carpenter and O'Bannon realized that all the struggles they endured to make the film did not matter to audiences, they only cared about the finished product. I think they were discouraged," says Griffiths. The growth of the VHS market, however, helped it find its audience and propelled it towards cult status. Its influence can still be felt, perhaps most directly in Ridley Scott's Alien, for which O'Bannon, who died in 2009, wrote the screenplay. The two films share DNA. Alien is also set on a grotty working vessel with a bickering crew, only this time the alien wasn't played for laughs.

Despite making pledges to cut down on plastic packaging, a new report from the nonprofit conservation organization Oceana estimates that Amazon's plastic waste has continued to grow in the US. From a report: The company created 208 million pounds of plastic waste from its packaging in the US in 2022 alone, which Oceana says is enough trash to circle Earth more than 200 times in the form of plastic air pillows. That's a nearly 10 percent jump from the amount of plastic waste it generated the year before, according to the report. The US is a worrying outlier for Amazon, Oceana says. Globally, the e-commerce giant says that it reduced its use of plastic packaging 11.6 percent in 2022 compared to the prior year. But the US is the company's biggest market, and Oceana argues it's where Amazon needs to make a lot more progress.

Last year was the hottest on record and the Earth is headed towards a global warming of 2.7 degrees, yet top fossil fuel and cement producers show a disregard for climate change and actively make things worse. From a report: A new Carbon Majors Database report found that just 57 companies were responsible for 80 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions between 2016 and 2022. Thirty-eight percent of total emissions during this period came from nation-states, 37 percent from state-owned entities and 25 percent from investor-owned companies.

Nearly 200 parties adopted the 2015 Paris Agreement, committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, 58 of the 100 state- and investor-owned companies in the Carbon Majors Database have increased their production in the years since (The Climate Accountability Institute launched Carbon Majors in 2013 to hold fossil fuel producers accountable and is hosted by InfluenceMap). This number represents producers worldwide, including 87 percent of those assessed in Asia, 57 percent in Europe and 43 percent in North America.

It's not a clear case of things slowly turning around, either. The International Energy Agency found coal consumption increased by eight percent over the seven years to 8.3 billion tons -- a record high. The report names state-owned Coal India as one of the top three carbon dioxide producers. Russia's state-owned energy company Gazprom and state-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco rounded out the trio of worst offenders.

NASA announced on Wednesday that they have selected three companies to develop preliminary designs for vehicles to take astronauts around the south polar region of the Moon. "After the astronauts return to Earth, these vehicles would be able to self-drive around as robotic explorers, similar to NASA's rovers on Mars," reports the New York Times. "The self-driving capability would also allow the vehicle to meet the next astronaut mission at a different location." From the report: The companies are Intuitive Machines of Houston, which in February successfully landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon; Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo.; and Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, Calif. Only one of the three will actually build a vehicle for NASA and send it to the moon. NASA had asked for proposals of what it called the lunar terrain vehicle, or L.T.V., that could drive at speeds up to 9.3 miles per hour, travel a dozen miles on a single charge and allow astronauts to drive around for eight hours. The agency will work with the three companies for a year to further develop their designs. Then NASA will choose one of them for the demonstration phase. The L.T.V. will not be ready in time for the astronauts of Artemis III, the first landing in NASA's return-to-the-moon program, which is currently scheduled for 2026.

The plan is for the L.T.V. to be on the lunar surface ahead of Artemis V, the third astronaut landing that is expected in 2030, said Lara Kearney, manager of the extravehicular activity and human surface mobility program at the NASA Johnson Space Center. "If they can get there earlier, we'll take it earlier," Ms. Kearney said. The L.T.V. contract will be worth up to $4.6 billion over the next 15 years -- five years of development and then a decade of operations on the moon, most of it going to the winner of this competition. But Ms. Kearney said the contracts allow NASA to later finance the development of additional rovers, or allow other companies to compete in the future.

artmancc writes: The White House has directed NASA and other federal agencies to get to work on a plan to implement precision timekeeping and dissemination on the moon and elsewhere in space. Reuters cited a memo from the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) that "instructed the space agency to work with other parts of the U.S. government to devise a plan by the end of 2026 for setting what it called a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC). The name of the proposed time standard is similar to the terrestrial time standard known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

"OSTP chief Arati Prabhakar's memo said that for a person on the moon, an Earth-based clock would appear to lose on average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day and come with other periodic variations that would further drift moon time from Earth time," Reuters reported. An unidentified OSTP official said the lunar time standard is needed for secure and synchronized communication between astronauts, satellites orbiting the moon, and Earth.

A nearly two-pound piece of trash from the International Space Station may have hit a house in Florida. Alejandro Otero said it "tore through the roof and both floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida," reports Ars Technica. "Otero wasn't home at the time, but his son was there." From the report: A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That's an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time -- 2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC) -- that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida. This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry.

Otero's likely encounter with space debris was first reported by WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida. Since then, NASA has recovered the debris from the homeowner, according to Josh Finch, an agency spokesperson. Engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center will analyze the object "as soon as possible to determine its origin," Finch told Ars. "More information will be available once the analysis is complete." [...] In a post on X, Otero said he is waiting for communication from "the responsible agencies" to resolve the cost of damages to his home.

If the object is owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could make a claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, according to Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. "It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States," she told Ars. "If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused." This could be an issue in this case. The batteries were owned by NASA, but they were attached to a pallet structure launched by Japan's space agency.

Earth has a long-running fever that shows little signs of easing. The planet has set high temperature records in each of the last nine months, and March is poised to become the 10th. From a report: Multiple locations around the world observed unprecedented heat on the month's final weekend, as if to put an exclamation mark on this exceptional run of warmth. The weekend heat was most widespread in Europe, where many countries set national high temperature records for March. But it was also unusually warm in Asia, parts of Central America and West Africa.

Human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas is fueling this warmth, with an assist from the El Niño climate pattern. It felt more like summer than early spring in Eastern Europe over the weekend, with temperatures soaring into the 70s and 80s, about 20 to 35 degrees above normal. Eight countries set national records for March warmth. Further reading: India Predicts Searing Heat in Threat to Lives, Power Supply.

"Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona..." reads the official text of House Bill #2,477. "PLUTO IS THE OFFICIAL STATE PLANET."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Capital Media Services: The governor signed legislation Friday designating Pluto as Arizona's "official state planet." It joins a list of other items the state has declared to be "official,'' ranging from turquoise as the state gemstone and copper as the state metal to the Sonorasaurus as the state dinosaur. "I am proud of Arizona's pioneering work in space discovery," governor Hobbs said.

What makes Pluto unique and ripe for claim by Arizona is that it is the only planet actually discovered in the United States, and the discovery was made in Flagstaff. Rep. Justin Wilmeth, a Phoenix Republican and self-described "history nerd,'' said that needed to be commemorated, starting with the legacy of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. In 1930, Tombaugh was working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. "The whole story of Clyde is just amazing, just sitting there under the telescope'' looking for planets by taking photos over a period of time, said Wilmeth. "It was two different glass planes that had one little spec of light moving in a different direction,'' showing it wasn't just another star — and all by observation and not computers. "To me, that's something that's just mind boggling."
"The International Astronomical Union voted years ago to strip Pluto of its official status as a planet," the article points out, noting that its official definition specifies that planets "clear the neighboring region of other objects." (While Pluto "has such a small gravitational pull, it has not attracted and absorbed other space rocks in its orbit".)

So in 2006 Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, according to a NASA web page. "Pluto is about 1/6 the width of Earth," and has a radius of 715 miles or 1,151 kilometers. "If Earth was the size of a nickel, Pluto would be about as big as a popcorn kernel."

Long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam called Arizona's new legislation "How to advertise you are ignorant. Scientists said something we don't like, so we'll make a law!" They can call it their "State Planet" all they want, but people who actually know about the skies will be mocking them for it. While there is nostalgia for the old classification, and the new one isn't perfect... it's certainly more meaningful when trying to divide up the objects of a planetary system for study.
Reached for a comment by Capital Media Services, Representative Wilmeth said "It might matter to some that are going to get picky or persnickety about stuff... There's several generations of Americans ... who believe that Pluto's a planet — or at least that's what we were taught. I'm never going to think differently. That's just my personal opinion." (The news site adds that "What is important, Wilmeth said, is remembering the history and promoting it.")

Five senators in Arizona's state legislatur did vote against the measure — though not all of them did so for scientific reasons, Senator Anthony Kern explained to Capital Media Services. "I did not want to discriminate against those who wanted Mars, Venus, Jupiter, or everyone's favorite, Uranus."

"Sail to a continent as mysterious as outer-space itself," the new web site urges.

"William Shatner saw Earth from the highest view," writes Scripps News Service. "Now he's heading to the bottom of it — and inviting you to join him." The 93-year-old is setting sail for Antarctica on Dec. 19, which will mark just over three years since the "Star Trek" actor returned from a trip to space in real life, not just as Captain James T. Kirk. Fellow space traveler NASA astronaut Scott Kelly will join Shatner on the 10-day Space2Sea expedition, and 260 others can too — if they pay for their $37,500 ticket.

The cheapest suite — priced at $35,500 — along with the top three most expensive ones — reaching $91,500 — are already sold out. Presented by Future of Space, the trip aboard the new "ultra-luxury" vessel is said to be full of "awe-inspiring experiences," including "intimate encounters" with penguins, visits to remote historical locations and evenings full of stories from "esteemed guests," like Shatner. Travelers can also kayak the waters or go down deep under the ice in submersibles, both for additional charges...

Shatner said he experienced something called the "overview effect" while viewing the Earth from space. The overview effect, coined by space philosopher and author Frank White, refers to a shift in how astronauts think about our life on the planet, described by White as "the feeling that the Earth itself is a whole system, and we're just a part of it." It's also realizing through experience that there are no borders or boundaries on Earth. It's often marked by feelings of increased appreciation of the planet's beauty. Shatner's invitation to "fellow explorers" for the Space2Sea expedition seem to echo this phenomenon, with the actor saying he didn't expect to be "captivated by the fragile, blue curve of our planet" when flying on Blue Origin's rocket.

"After taking a look at Floorp Browser, I was left wondering whether there was a Chromium-based web browser that was as good, or even better than Chrome," writes a "First Look" reviewer at It's Foss News.

"That is when I came across Thorium, a web-browser that claims to be the 'the fastest browser on Earth'." [Thorium] is backed by a myriad of tweaks that include, compiler optimizations for SSE4.2, AVS, AES, various mods to CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, thinLTO flags, and more. The developer shares performance stats using popular benchmarking tools... I tested it using Speedometer 3.0 benchmark on Fedora 39 and compared it to Brave, and the scores were:

Thorium: 19.2; Brave: 19.5

So, it may not be the "fastest" always, probably one of the fastest, that comes close to Brave or sometimes even beats it (depends on the version you tested it and your system).

Alexander Frick, the lead developer, also insists on providing support for older operating systems such as Windows 7 so that its user base can use a capable modern browser without much fuss... As Thorium is a cross-platform web browser, you can find packages for a wide range of platforms such as Linux, Raspberry Pi, Windows, Android, macOS, and more.
Thorium can sync to your Google account to import your bookmarks, extensions, and themes, according to the article.

"Overall, I can confidently say that it is a web browser I could daily drive, if I were to ditch Chrome completely. It gels in quite well with the Google ecosystem and has a familiar user interface that doesn't get in the way."

A Linux Foundation subsidiary has developed a free and open-source 3D game engine distributed under the Apache license. And last week the Open 3D Foundation announced "a big step forward, showcasing the power of open-source technologies in giving gamers around the globe unforgettable gaming experiences."

"We are proud to unveil MadWorld as the first mobile title powered by O3DE," said Joe Bryant, Executive Director of the Open 3D Foundation, "demonstrating the large potential of open-source technologies in game development."

And then this week Los Angeles Business Journal reported that El Segundo-based gaming studio Carbonated Inc. "has raised $11 million of series A funding to finance the development and release of its debut game title... Prior to its most recent round, Carbonated closed an $8.5 million seed funding round in 2020, which also included participation from Andreessen and Bitkraft." Since its founding [in 2015], the company has been focusing on research and development for its upcoming first title, called "MadWorld." The third-person, multiplayer shooter game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features both player-versus-player and player-versus-environment features. Players of the game will battle for land control in a dystopian setting. Using a combination of open-source mapping tools and Carbonated's proprietary custom operations technology, called Carbyne, the game's world is designed around real-life cities and locations. Players are initially dropped into the game's version of their own real-time location.

The game allows players to optionally engage using blockchain technology with a digital asset-ownership layer powered by a blockchain network called XPLA.
Earlier this month Madworld "opened up for Early Access registration," reports the egamers web site, arguing that the game "is set to redefine the gaming landscape and will make its public debut later this year." After a catastrophic event named "The Collapse," MadWorld takes place in a desolate Earth where players engage in a battle for survival, highlighting the game's unique setting and immersive experience. The game's world is intricately designed with 250,000 land plots mapped out on a hexagonal grid, each presenting unique resources and strategic benefits. This innovative approach to game design enhances the gameplay experience and introduces a new layer of strategy and competition.

MadWorld's gameplay is centered around integrating Web3 technologies, which allows for the ownership, enhancement, and trading of tokenized representations of real-world locations. This feature encourages players to create clans and work together or compete for essential resources that are spread across the vast game world. Clans can acquire these resources by paying tributes to NFT landowners using "Rounds," the in-game currency. This mechanism not only fosters a sense of community and teamwork but also creates unique economic opportunities within the game by blending traditional gaming elements with the emerging field of digital assets.
"With its use of O3DE, Carbonated can enhance the game's visual fidelity, performance, and scalability," according to the Linux Foundation's announcement, "in order to deliver a fast-paced adventure on mobile platforms." O3DE is an open-source game engine developed by a collaborative community of industry experts. It includes state-of-the-art rendering capabilities, dynamic lighting, and realistic physics simulation. These features have enabled Carbonated to build realistic dystopian environments and create action-packed gameplay in MadWorld.
According to its official site, MadWorld "is set to be released to the public sometime in 2024 and is currently being tested on iOS and Android operating systems."

Carbonated's CEO Travis Boatman made this prediction to the site Decrypt. "We think mobile is where the breakout will happen for Web3."

"If you want to see what the cutting edge of next-gen clean energy innovation looks like, it'd be hard to find a place better than Texas," Bill Gates wrote recently on his blog," saying "amazing companies" are breaking ground across the state. "Each one represents a huge boon for the local economy, America's energy security, and the fight against climate change." The world is undergoing an energy transition right now, fueled by the development and deployment of new clean energy technologies. The pace of innovation at the heart of this transition is happening faster than many people (including me!) dared hope. The progress makes me optimistic about the future — and excited about the role that American communities will play, especially in places like Texas.

Breakthrough Energy and I have invested more than $130 million into Texas-based entrepreneurs, institutions, and projects. It's a big bet, but it's one I'm confident in. Why? Because of the people. Nearly half a million Texans work in the oil and gas industry, and their skills are directly transferrable to next-generation industries. This workforce will help form the backbone of the world's new clean energy economy, and it will cement Texas's energy leadership for generations to come.

Many of the companies I'm seeing on this trip already employ or plan to employ oil and gas workers. One of those companies is Infinium, which is working on next-generation clean fuels for trucks, ships, and even planes. I'm visiting their first demonstration plant in Corpus Christi, where they're turning waste CO2 and renewable energy into electrofuels — or eFuels — for trucks. They've already signed a deal with Amazon, and sometime soon, if you live in the area, you might get a delivery supported by Infinium eDiesel. The key to Infinium's approach is that their fuels can be dropped into existing engines... I'm especially excited about the work they're doing on sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF — which could reduce emissions from air travel by as much as 90 percent, according to company estimates. Infinium is in the process of converting an old gas-to-liquid plant in West Texas into a new facility that will increase the company's capacity for producing eFuels ten-fold. Breakthrough Energy's Catalyst program has invested in this first-of-its-kind plant, and I can't wait to see it when it's done.

Another company I'll see is Mars Materials. They're a Breakthrough Energy Fellows project working on a different way to reuse CO2. The company is developing a clever technique for turning captured carbon into one of the key components in carbon fiber, an ultra-light, ultra-strong material that is used in everything from clothing to car frames... The Mars Materials team relocated from California to Texas in part because of the skilled oil and gas talent that they could access in the state, and they aren't the first Breakthrough Energy company to do that. I'm going to check out their lab, where their scientists are hard at work optimizing the conversion process.
Both companies assume abundant CO2, Gates writes, but "fortunately for them, Texas is also in the process of becoming a capital for direct air capture... A recent study found that Texas has the greatest DAC deployment potential in the country and could create as many as 400,000 jobs by 2050." Already a direct air capture "hub" in Kingsville, Texas is expected to create 2,500 jobs over the next five years, while Houston has been selected as the site for one of America's seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs.

"If you want to catch a glimpse of our country's clean energy future," Gates writes, "you should head on down to the Lone Star State."

Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: The New York Times has an occasional series called "Overlooked," whereby notable people whose deaths were overlooked at the time receive the obituary they deserve. Their latest installment eulogizes Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who passed away in 1921 at age 53. From the report: "In the early 20th century, when Henrietta Leavitt began studying photographs of distant stars at the Harvard College Observatory, astronomers had no idea how big the universe was... Leavitt, working as a poorly paid member of a team of mostly women [computers] who cataloged data for the scientists at the observatory, found a way to peer out into the great unknown and measure it."

Leavitt discovered the period-luminosity relationship for Cepheid variable stars. The relationship, now known as Leavitt's Law, is a crucial rung in the cosmic distance ladder, the methods for measuring the distance to stars, galaxies, and across the visible universe. From the report: "[Leavitt's Law] underpinned the research of other pioneering astronomers, including Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley, whose work in the years after World War I demolished long-held ideas about our solar system's place in the cosmos. Leavitt's Law has been used on the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope in making new calculations about the rate of expansion of the universe and the proximity of stars billions of light years from earth. 'She cracked into something that was not only impressive scientifically but shifted an entire paradigm of thinking...'"

Decades of buried trash is releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, at higher rates than previously estimated, the researchers said. From a report: These landfills also belch methane, a powerful, planet-warming gas, on average at almost three times the rate reported to federal regulators, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. The study measured methane emissions at about 20 percent of about 1,200 large, operating landfills in the United States. It adds to a growing body of evidence that landfills are a significant driver of climate change, said Riley Duren, founder of the public-private partnership Carbon Mapper, who took part in the study.

"We've largely been in the dark, as a society, about actual emissions from landfills," said Mr. Duren, a former NASA engineer and scientist. "This study pinpoints the gaps." Methane emissions from oil and gas production, as well as from livestock, have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Like carbon dioxide the main greenhouse gas that's warming the world, methane acts like a blanket in the sky, trapping the sun's heat. And though methane lasts for a shorter time in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it is more potent. Its warming effect is more than 80 times as powerful as the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that landfills are the third largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the United States, emitting as much greenhouse gas as 23 million gasoline cars driven for a year. Organic waste like food scraps can emit copious amounts of methane when they decompose.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: They're vast expanses that can be as big as towns: open landfills where household waste ends up, whether it's vegetable scraps or old appliances. These landfills also belch methane, a powerful, planet-warming gas, on average at almost three times the rate reported to federal regulators, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

For the new study, scientists gathered data from airplane flyovers using a technology called imaging spectrometers designed to measure concentrations of methane in the air. Between 2018 and 2022, they flew planes over 250 sites across 18 states, about 20 percent of the nation's open landfills. At more than half the landfills they surveyed, researchers detected emissions hot spots, or sizable methane plumes that sometimes lasted months or years. That suggested something had gone awry at the site, like a big leak of trapped methane from layers of long-buried, decomposing trash, the researchers said.

"You can sometimes get decades of trash that's sitting under the landfill," said Daniel H. Cusworth, a climate scientist at Carbon Mapper and the University of Arizona, who led the study. "We call it a garbage lasagna." Many landfills are fitted with specialized wells and pipes that collect the methane gas that seeps out of rotting garbage in order to either burn it off or sometimes to use it to generate electricity or heat. But those wells and pipes can leak. The researchers said pinpointing leaks doesn't just help scientists get a better picture of emissions, it also helps landfill operators fix leaks. Keeping more waste out of the landfill, for example by composting food scraps, is another fix. "The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that landfills are the third largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the United States, emitting as much greenhouse gas as 23 million gasoline cars driven for a year," notes the NYT. "Overseas, the picture can be less clear, particularly in countries where landfills aren't strictly regulated. Previous surveys using satellite technology have estimated that globally, landfill methane makes up nearly 20 percent of human-linked methane emissions."

According to a new study published in the journal Nature, timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks around 2029 because the planet is rotating faster than it used to. The Associated Press reports: "This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal," said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. "It's not a huge change in the Earth's rotation that's going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable. It's yet another indication that we're in a very unusual time." Ice melting at both of Earth's poles has been counteracting the planet's burst of speed and is likely to have delayed this global second of reckoning by about three years, Agnew said.

"We are headed toward a negative leap second," said Dennis McCarthy, retired director of time for the U.S. Naval Observatory who wasn't part of the study. "It's a matter of when." It's a complicated situation that involves, physics, global power politics, climate change, technology and two types of time. [...] McCarthy said the trend toward needing a negative leap second is clear, but he thinks it's more to do with the Earth becoming more round from geologic shifts from the end of the last ice age.

Three other outside scientists said Agnew's study makes sense, calling his evidence compelling. But Levine doesn't think a negative leap second will really be needed. He said the overall slowing trend from tides has been around for centuries and continues, but the shorter trends in Earth's core come and go. "This is not a process where the past is a good prediction of the future," Levine said. "Anyone who makes a long-term prediction on the future is on very, very shaky ground."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge, written by Nilay Patel: Today, I'm talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Twitter, er, X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter — it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but Jack spun it out of Twitter in 2021, just before Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X. Bluesky is now an independent company with a few dozen employees, and it finds itself in the middle of one of the most chaotic moments in the history of social media. There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization -- the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish -- is the future. It's a powerful concept that's been kicking around for a long time, but now it feels closer to reality than ever before. You've heard us talk about it a lot on Decoder: the core idea is that no single company -- or individual billionaire -- can amass too much power and control over our social networks and the conversations that happen on them.

Bluesky's approach to this is something called the AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky's own platform but which is also a technology that anyone can use right now to host their own servers and, eventually, interoperate with a bunch of other networks. You'll hear Jay explain how building Bluesky the product alongside AT Protocol the protocol has created a cooperate-compete dynamic that runs throughout the entire company and that also informs how it's building products and features -- not only for its own service but also for developers to build on top of. Jay and I also talked about the growth of the Bluesky app, which now has more than 5 million users, and how so many of the company's early decisions around product design and moderation have shaped the type of organic culture that's taken hold there. Content moderation is, of course, one of the biggest challenges any platform faces, and Bluesky, in particular, has had its fair share of controversies. But the idea behind AT Protocol and Bluesky is devolving control, so Bluesky users can pick their own moderation systems and recommendation algorithms -- a grand experiment that I wanted to know much more about.

Finally, Jay and I had the opportunity to get technical and go deeper on standards and protocols, which are the beating heart of the decentralization movement. Bluesky's AT Protocol is far from the only protocol in the mix -- there's also ActivityPub, which is what powers Mastodon and, soon, Meta's Threads. There's been some real animosity between these camps, and I asked Jay about the differences between the two, the benefits of Bluesky's approach, and how she sees the two coexisting in the future.

The Los Angeles Times checks in on America's largest dam-removal project, which they say is now "revealing a stark landscape that had been underwater for generations."

"A thick layer of muddy sediment covers the sloping ground, where workers have been scattering seeds and leaving meandering trails of footprints. In the cracked mud, seeds are sprouting and tiny green shoots are appearing." With water passing freely through tunnels in three dams, the Klamath River has returned to its ancient channel and is flowing unhindered for the first time in more than a century through miles of waterlogged lands. Using explosives and machinery, crews began blasting and tearing into the concrete of one of the three dams earlier this month... The emptying of the reservoirs, which began in January, is estimated to have released as much as 2.3 million tons of sediment into the river, abruptly worsening its water quality and killing nonnative perch, bluegill and bass that had been introduced in the reservoirs for fishing. Downstream from the dams, the river's banks are littered with dead fish. But tribal leaders, biologists and environmentalists say that this was part of the plan, and that the river will soon be hospitable for salmon to once again swim upstream to spawn... [The dams] blocked salmon from reaching vital habitat and degraded the river's water quality, contributing to toxic algae blooms in the reservoirs and disease outbreaks that killed fish...

Workers have been drilling holes in the top of the Copco No. 1 Dam, placing dynamite and setting off blasts, then using machinery to chip away fractured concrete. The dam, which has been in place since 1918, is scheduled to be fully removed by the end of August. The smaller Copco No. 2 Dam was torn down last year as the project began. Two earthen dams, the Iron Gate and the John C. Boyle, remain to be dismantled starting in May. If the project goes as planned, the three dams will be gone sometime this fall, reestablishing a free-flowing stretch of river and enabling Chinook and coho salmon to swim upstream and spawn along about 400 miles of the Klamath and its tributaries. Meanwhile, teams of scientists and workers are focusing on restoring the landscape and natural vegetation on about 2,200 acres of denuded reservoir-bottom lands...

River restoration advocates are optimistic. They say undamming the Klamath will demonstrate the potential for restoring free-flowing rivers elsewhere in California, and point to initial plans to remove two dams on the Eel River as another promising opportunity.

Long-time Slashdot reader HanzoSpam shared an announcement from the University of California San Diego.

The school's researchers teamed with materials-science company Algenesis to show "that their plant-based polymers biodegrade — even at the microplastic level — in under seven months." "We're trying to find replacements for materials that already exist, and make sure these replacements will biodegrade at the end of their useful life instead of collecting in the environment," stated Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Michael Burkart, one of the paper's authors and an Algenesis co-founder. "That's not easy."

"When we first created these algae-based polymers about six years ago, our intention was always that it be completely biodegradable," said another of the paper's authors, Robert Pomeroy, who is also a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and an Algenesis co-founder. "We had plenty of data to suggest that our material was disappearing in the compost, but this is the first time we've measured it at the microparticle level...."

"This material is the first plastic demonstrated to not create microplastics as we use it," said Stephen Mayfield, a paper coauthor, School of Biological Sciences professor and co-founder of Algenesis. "This is more than just a sustainable solution for the end-of-product life cycle and our crowded landfills. This is actually plastic that is not going to make us sick."

Creating an eco-friendly alternative to petroleum-based plastics is only one part of the long road to viability. The ongoing challenge is to be able to use the new material on pre-existing manufacturing equipment that was originally built for traditional plastic, and here Algenesis is making progress. They have partnered with several companies to make products that use the plant-based polymers developed at UC San Diego, including Trelleborg for use in coated fabrics and RhinoShield for use in the production of cell phone cases.

"When we started this work, we were told it was impossible," stated Burkart. "Now we see a different reality. There's a lot of work to be done, but we want to give people hope. It is possible."

Gizmodo reports that increased activity on the Moon "may affect the unique radio silence on the lunar far side, an ideal location for radio telescopes to pick up faint signals from the cosmic past." This week, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) held the first Moon Farside Protection Symposium in Italy to advocate for preserving radio silence on the far side of the Moon. The symposium hopes to raise awareness about the threat facing the far side of the Moon and develop approaches to shielding it from artificial radio emissions....

NASA has shown interest in using the lunar radio silence, proposing an ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope inside a crater on the far side of the Moon. The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope is designed to observe the universe at frequencies below 30 megahertz, which are largely unexplored by humans since those signals are reflected by the Earth's ionosphere, according to NASA. At those low frequencies, radio telescopes on the Moon can detect near-Earth objects approaching our planet before other observatories, it can search for signals of alien civilizations, and study organic molecules in interstellar space...

As more missions head towards the Moon, however, that perfect silence is increasingly being compromised. Earlier this week, for example, China launched a satellite to relay communication between ground operations on Earth and an upcoming mission on the far side of the Moon. The satellite, Queqiao-2, is the first of a constellation of satellites that China hopes to deploy by 2040 to communicate with future crewed missions on the Moon and Mars. As part of its Artemis program, NASA is aiming to build the Lunar Gateway, a space station designed to orbit the Moon to support future missions to the lunar surface and Mars. In advance of this, a NASA-funded cubesat, called CAPSTONE, has entered into a unique halo orbit to demonstrate the stability and practicality of this trajectory for future lunar missions... CAPSTONE marks the beginning of something big — establishing a permanent communication link between Earth and lunar assets, and ensuring the steady, uninterrupted flow of data.

NASA and its Chinese counterparts have eerily similar plans for lunar exploration, and the Moon is currently a 'free-for-all' with no regulations set in place as to who can own our dusty orbital companion.
"In other words, things are about to get real loud out there as far as radio transmissions are concerned."