For decades, ship emissions steadily rose as increasing global trade drove higher ship traffic. Then, in 2020, new international regulations cut ships’ sulfur emissions by 77%. Our newly published research shows how lightning over shipping lanes dropped by half almost overnight after the regulations went into effect.
Hacker news discussion FWIW.
https://t.co/W0FBWAHRSZ pic.twitter.com/ILDZGNiUy3
— Dr. Alexander Zawacki (@AChillGhost) August 17, 2025
From the latest edition of Bloomberg's Green Daily newsletter, which is about, "parametric insurance, a product providing rapid compensation when certain weather-related metrics are met."
Carmen Martin and Maddy Dahl of Blur Rhino Studio created this life-sized minke whale fall for our Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery exhibit. It introduces the concept that a death from one perspective can be a beginning of new life from another.
— Ben Miller (@extinctmonsters.bsky.social) July 27, 2025 at 7:17 AM
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Long article (that questions whether the gas even does anything meaningful):
The British group, which included four former special forces members, took a different approach.
About 10 weeks before the expedition, the men began sleeping in hypoxic tents, which lower oxygen levels in the air and gradually acclimatized the hikers to conditions on Mount Everest, [the organizer] said.
While hypoxic tents have been used by some climbers for years, the big innovation for the British expedition came two weeks before the excursion, when the men flew to Limburg, Germany, outside Frankfurt, where a doctor ... had been experimenting with inhaled gases in his clinic.
The men wore masks hooked up to ventilators as an anesthesiologist slowly introduced higher levels of xenon into their systems.
Did AMC get scammed into buying way too many jalapenos or something pic.twitter.com/zeDV9N49Q2
— ben (@ben4benis) February 2, 2025
There's an enormous lake between Rwanda and Congo, valuable both as a fishery, and because of the presence of methane below. The resources might lead to conflict between the two countries, and the makeup of the lake could also lead to a rare and massively fatal limnic eruption like what occurred at Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986:
We know how devastating a limnic eruption can be. On Aug. 21, 1986, the serene Lake Nyos, a crater lake in Cameroon, unleashed a silent eruption of carbon dioxide. The invisible cloud of gas spilled over the lake’s rim, descending upon nearby villages with lethal consequences. In a harrowing instant, over 1,700 lives were extinguished as the calm waters transformed into a death trap. Lake Kivu’s significant methane content makes this scenario a possibility here, too. Given the surrounding settlements, a limnic eruption on Lake Kivu could potentially claim 2 million lives. And there are fears that rather than planning for such an eventuality, the government is undertaking work that will make it more likely.
and u can buy it pic.twitter.com/FbKq1r6BzQ
— Harris Rothaermel (@DeveloperHarris) November 2, 2024
The Firefly Petunia emits a soft glow similar to moonlight. It can be grown in pots, baskets, or gardens, quickly attaining about 8 to 10 inches in size with abundant white flowers. This plant is easy to care for, thriving without needing special conditions or treatments.Although typically regarded as annuals, petunias can be grown indoors if placed in a sunny spot. They flourish under long summer days, preferring at least six hours of direct sunlight. Promoting vigorous growth will produce a brighter glow.
public health officials stress there is no evidence so far of a bird flu cluster or that the virus is spreading easily among humans.Missouri’s state epidemiologist said in an interview that additional testing is being conducted to confirm whether the patient, who has recovered, had bird flu. The patient did not develop the usual symptoms associated with bird flu or have exposure to known sources of the virus. The illnesses experienced by the patient’s contacts, he said, could have been caused by common pathogens such as the coronavirus.
[The defendant has] been in the game farm business since 1987
...
The US district court judge ... said he struggled to come up with a sentence for [the defendant]. He said he weighed [the defendant]’s age and lack of a criminal record with a sentence that would deter anyone else from trying to “change the genetic makeup of the creatures” on the Earth.
This is just a promo video, but there's a considerable chance that Wang Yaping becomes the first woman on the Moon. https://t.co/KIRPamv8Cq pic.twitter.com/IRE9Pr0XhQ
— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) September 28, 2024
Every single Apollo image is hard as hell pic.twitter.com/SgTbETkq3O
— Delta9250 (@deltaIV9250) September 25, 2024
I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.
The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.
Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.
The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.
(He goes on to discuss other locations and the factor most likely tied to longevity.) Here's a list of the 2024 winners.
For decades, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation used a pseudoscientific technology to assess prisoners’ credibility during investigations, even after researchers debunked the CVSA and after its manufacturer, NITV Federal Services, admitted that it was not capable of detecting lies, a Chronicle investigation has found.
...
NITV Federal Services offers dozens of courses to law enforcement agencies each year and has sold its machines and training sessions to thousands of departments, billing the CVSA as a cheaper alternative to the polygraph test — another controversial lie-detector technology. Collectively, these California agencies have spent at least hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on the CVSA since 2020, the Chronicle found.
...
The CVSA purportedly works by measuring inaudible changes to a person’s speech patterns. According to an early 2000s training manual obtained by the Chronicle, a person’s vocal cords are “subject to physiological tremors” that diminish when they are stressed. Thus, a stressed person’s speech patterns would have a different frequency, and a different shape when plotted on a graph, than an unstressed person.
California’s prison system has moved to ban the use of a controversial lie-detector test — compared by one expert to a Ouija board or an astrological chart — following a Chronicle investigation into the technology and its impact on the incarcerated.
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While California’s prisons will no longer use the CVSA, the Chronicle’s investigation identified 13 other law enforcement agencies around the state that were still using the technology to interview prospective officers during the hiring process. At least three of these agencies had also recently used the tool during criminal investigations.
From the CVSA Wikipedia entry:
A 2013 paper published in Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics reviewed the "scientific implausibility" of its principles and "ungrounded claims of the aggressive propaganda from sellers of voice stress analysis gadgets"
Take a snapshot of the air quality in any location. Serve it to politicians or business owners for a blind taste test of the air quality in their area. The tragedy of the commons never tasted so good!One shouldn’t worry too much about getting sick from these cookies: we breath this air everyday!As a workshop students or community groups can harvest air in egg foams from different parts of the city, test the results, and place one of each baked cookie on a map for comparison, sending the remainder of the cookies as gifts to interested parties.
These experiments were conducted aboard the ISS beginning in 2017. In the end, six independent studies led to over 1,500 space flames being ignited, three times more than originally planned. pic.twitter.com/EfkboAmVuU
— Patricia Klein (@patricia_klein_) June 6, 2024
You can find this emblem and more here: https://t.co/4FaUst63xU
— Patricia Klein (@patricia_klein_) June 6, 2024
According to this article about diamond prices plummeting this year:
Falling marriage rates as well as growing popularity for gold and lab-grown gems all drove down Chinese demand for diamonds
...
“There’s no doubt that there are some challenges in the diamond industry, but they’re not challenges that can’t be addressed,” said [the] co-founder of specialist diamond advisory firm Gemdax.
He noted diamonds are discretionary products and it’s a case of “creating the want” for it, as with the case for other luxury segments like high-end watches and bags.
“The industry has not done large-scale category marketing for almost 20 years. And we’re seeing the aftermath of that”