Roughly 25 percent (23.4 percent to be exact) of the Earth’s sea floor has been mapped, thanks to an international initiative known as Seabed 2030. Relying largely on voluntary contributions of bathymetric data (or ocean topography) by governments, companies and research institutions, the project is part of a larger UN-led initiative called The Ocean Decade. Seabed 2030 hopes to map 100 percent of the ocean floor by 2030, which researchers say will be possible thanks to advances in technology and corralling already available data. Over the past year alone, Seabed 2030 has added measurements for around 3.8 million square miles (roughly the size of Europe) primarily through newly opened archives, rather than active mapping efforts.

Scientists believe collecting more bathymetric data will help further our understanding of climate change and ocean preservation efforts. Ocean floor mapping also helps in the detection of tsunamis and other natural disasters. “A complete map of the ocean floor is the missing tool that will enable us to tackle some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time, including climate change and marine pollution. It will enable us to safeguard the planet’s future,” said Mitsuyuki Unno, executive director of The Nippon Foundation in a press release. 

As the BBC notes, much of the data used in Seabed 2030 already existed. The group largely relies on contributions from governments and companies, though some of these entities are still reluctant to completely open up their archives for fear of spilling national or trade secrets. 

All the data that Seabed 2030 is collecting will be available to the public online on the GEBCO (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans) global grid. Prior to Seabed 2030, very little directly measured ocean floor data was available for public use. Most bathymetric measurements are estimated using satellite altimeter readings, which give a very rough idea of the shape of the sea floor surface. Some scientists believe a global effort to locate the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 would have been better informed by newer, more precise methods to chart the ocean floor.

Last year, hurricanes hammered the Southern and Eastern US coasts at the cost of more than 160 lives and $70 billion in damages. Thanks to climate change, it's only going to get worse. In order to quickly and accurately predict these increasingly severe weather patterns, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Tuesday that it has effectively tripled its supercomputing (and therefore weather modelling) capacity with the addition of two high-performance computing (HPC) systems built by General Dynamics.

“This is a big day for NOAA and the state of weather forecasting,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press statement. “Researchers are developing new ensemble-based forecast models at record speed, and now we have the computing power needed to implement many of these substantial advancements to improve weather and climate prediction.”

General Dynamics was awarded the $505 million contract back in 2020 and delivered the two computers, dubbed Dogwood and Cactus, to their respective locations in Manassas, Virginia, and Phoenix, Arizona. They'll replace a pair of older Cray and IBM systems in Reston, Virginia, and Orlando, Florida.

Each HPC operates at 12.1 petaflops or, "a quadrillion calculations per second with 26 petabytes of storage," Dave Michaud, Director, National Weather Service Office of Central Processing, said during a press call Tuesday morning. That's "three times the computing capacity and double the storage capacity compared to our previous systems... These systems are amongst the fastest in the world today, currently ranked at number 49 and 50." Combined with its other supercomputers in West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Colorado, the NOAA wields a full 42 petaflops of capacity. 

With this extra computational horsepower, the NOAA will be able to create higher-resolution models with more realistic physics — and generate more of them with a higher degree of model certainty, Brian Gross, Director, NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center, explained during the call. This should result in more accurate forecasts and longer lead times for storm warnings.

"The new supercomputers will also allow significant upgrades to specific modeling systems in the coming years," Gross said. "This includes a new hurricane forecast model named the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, which is slated to be in operation at the start of the 2023 hurricane season," and will replace the existing H4 hurricane weather research and forecasting model.

While the NOAA hasn't yet confirmed in absolute terms how much of an improvement the new supercomputers will grant to the agency's weather modelling efforts, Ken Graham, the Director of National Weather Service, is convinced of their value. 

"To translate what these new supercomputers will mean for for the average American," he said during the press call, "we are currently developing models that will be able to provide additional lead time in the outbreak of severe weather events and more accurately track the intensity forecasts for hurricanes, both in the ocean and that are expected to hit landfall, and we want to have longer lead times [before they do]."

EV startup Lightyear debuted its first solar-powered vehicle this week, a sleek sedan called the Lightyear 0. The company gave us a peek at a production prototype of Lightyear 0 in 2019, and at first glance, not much has changed. The car is essentially an unconventional hybrid equipped with both a conventional 60-kilowatt-hour EV battery pack and solar panels on its roof, hood and hatch. The solar panels on the Lightyear 0 will charge automatically whenever the car is exposed to the sun — it doesn’t matter if it’s parked or driving.

The Lightyear 0 isn’t as much solar-powered as solar-assisted. In order to drive for long distances, the vehicle has to tap into its battery reserve. The car’s solar panels can provide 44 miles of range per day in a sunny climate, whereas its EV range is 388 miles. But for drivers with exceptionally short commutes or those who need their vehicle infrequently, the Lightyear 0 could allow them to no longer spend money on gas or charging. The company claims that those with a daily commute of 22 miles can drive the Lightyear 0 for two straight months in the Netherlands summer without needing to charge. Drivers in sunnier climates can go for longer. Lightyear claims that the sun can provide the Lightyear 0 with anywhere between 3,700 to 6,800 miles of range annually.

It’s important to note that Lightyear 0 owners will need to drive for a significantly long time in order to justify the vehicle's purchase as a cost-saving measure. The Lightyear 0 will cost €250,000 (which amounts to roughly $263,262 USD), and the company only plans on making 946 units. But a more reasonably-priced vehicle is on the way. Lightyear recently also unveiled a prototype of a $33,000 solar-powered car, which is scheduled to go into production by 2025.

New York lawmakers have passed a bill that would temporarily ban new bitcoin mining operations. Early on Friday, state senators voted 36-27 to pass the legislation. It's now bound for the desk of Governor Kathy Hochul, who will sign it into law or veto the bill. The law would come into effect immediately after it's signed.

An attempt to enact similar legislation last year hit a wall when the New York State Senate passed it but Assembly members did not. The latest bill passed the Assembly in April.

The legislation seeks to establish a two-year moratorium on licenses for cryptocurrency mining operations that use power-hungry proof-of-work authentication methods for validating blockchain transactions. Right now, bitcoin and ethereum (the two largest cryptocurrencies) fall under that category, though the latter is shifting to a different setup.

The moratorium only covers mining operations that run on carbon-based power sources. Any that harness entirely renewable energy sources or an alternative to proof of work that requires less power won't be affected. Existing operations and those already going through a permit renewal process won't be impacted either.

While the moratorium is in place, New York will carry out a study into the environmental impact of proof-of-work authentication methods, per the bill. As CNBC notes, New York has ambitious climate goals that require the state's greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced by 85 percent by 2050 under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

New York became a hotbed for crypto mining operations in part due to its plentiful hydroelectricity, low electricity prices and cooler climate than other areas of the US (which means less energy is needed to cool mining hardware). 

Some mining companies have threatened to leave New York due to regulatory uncertainty and set up shop in more crypto-friendly states. Even so, crypto proponents have suggested that, given New York's status as a legislative leader, other states could follow suit with similar regulations. 

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is working on a policy regarding bitcoin mining. The White House is looking into the impact of such technology on greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the myriad issues with hydrogen as a clean energy source is infrastructure, as it's very expensive to move around and store an extremely explosive gas. Toyota and its subsidiary Woven Planet believe they may have a solution with a new portable hydrogen cartridge prototype. The idea is that they can be filled up at a dedicated facility, transported where needed, then returned when you receive your next shipment. 

The cartridges would be relatively small at 16 inches long, 7 inches in diameter and about 11 pounds in weight. Toyota calls them "portable, affordable, and convenient energy that makes it possible to bring hydrogen to where people live, work, and play without the use of pipes.. [and] swappable for easy replacement and quick charging." 

They could be useful for "mobility [i.e. hydrogen cars], household applications, and many future possibilities we have yet to imagine," Toyota said. It didn't mention any specific uses, but it said that "one hydrogen cartridge is assumed to generate enough electricity to operate a typical household microwave for approximately 3-4 hours."

In its press release, Toyota acknowledges that most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels and so not exactly green. But it thinks that it'll be generated with low carbon emissions in the future, and that the cartridges could help with some of the infrastructure issues. 

Toyota plans to test that theory by conducting proof of concept trials in various places, including its "human-centered smart city of the future," Woven City in Susono City, Zhizuoka Prefecture in Japan. The company is also "working to build a comprehensive hydrogen-based supply chain aimed at expediting and simplifying production, transport, and daily usage," it said. 

Hydrogen is an impractical fuel for automobiles, mainly due to the expense and lack of places to refuel. It's more viable for things like trains and semi trucks, where electrification can be more of a challenge. It also holds promise for air transportation, as batteries are too heavy to be practical in that situation. However, Toyota seems to be pitching the cartridges for personal and home use, but it's not yet clear what you'd use them for. 

Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes just scored a major coup in his quest to end Australia's use of coal energy. The Wall Street Journalreports AGL Energy, Australia's worst emissions producer, has withdrawn plans to 'demerge' its retail power and generation units (thus keeping coal power plants running longer) after Cannon-Brookes bought over 11 percent of the company's stock. The breakup plan is unlikely to pass a shareholder vote after the tech executive's move, AGL said.

Both the chairman and CEO of AGL are stepping down as a result of the failed demerger. The board of directors is also conducting a review of the company's strategy, and plans broader changes to the board as well as overall management. The directors want to deliver the best value in light of "Australia's energy transition," the company added.

Cannon-Brookes hopes AGL can shut down the coal plants about 10 years sooner than the company's 2045 goal. He originally tried to buy AGL outright with help from Canadian investment giant Brookfield Asset Management, but resorted to buying stock after the energy provider rejected the offers.

The Atlassian exec's renewable energy push began in 2017, when he learned of Tesla's proposal to end southern Australian blackouts using large-scale battery storage. He has long singled out AGL as a target. According to Cannon-Brookes, AGL represents about 8 percent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. That's more than every car in the country, and more than some entire developed countries.

The stock ploy won't guarantee that AGL shuts down its coal plants ahead of schedule. Still, it's a relatively unique effort in the tech world to accelerate the shift toward clean energy. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and others have generally focused on reducing their own emissions by either buying renewables or installing solar and wind power at their facilities — Atlassian's co-creator is trying to engineer change across an entire country.

Ford has begun deliveries of the F-150 Lightning. The first customer to get their hands on the electric pickup is Nicholas Schmidt, who lives in the automaker's home state of Michigan, around a two-hour drive from the F-150 Lightning plant in Dearborn. Ford started full production of the EV there last month.

The EV is replacing a gas-powered F-150, Schmidt told Bloomberg. Schmidt, who also owns a Tesla Model 3, said he had considered buying a Rivian R1T and also placed a reservation for a Tesla Cybertruck. He said whichever electric pickup he was able to order first would be the one he bought. After taking delivery of the F-150, Schmidt cancelled his Cybertruck reservation.

Ford said at the beginning of this month it would start delivering the F-150 Lightning "in the coming days." While it's not the first automaker to deliver an electric pickup in the US (Rivian started doing so last year), it beat Tesla to the punch.

It had a leg up on Tesla in this market anyway, as the F-150 has been the best-selling vehicle in the US for the last four decades. Case in point: it received nearly 45,000 pre-orders for the Lightning in just 48 hours. Given that the Cybertruck won't go on sale until next year, both Ford and Rivian have a shot at building up a significant share of the electric truck market long before Tesla gets the Cybertruck into the wild. 

Starting later this year, NVIDIA will begin selling a liquid-cooled version of its A100 GPU for data centers. The GPU maker is positioning the video card as a way for cloud computing companies to make their facilities more energy-efficient. It may seem unintuitive, but by adding a water block to the component, data centers can reduce their dependence on inefficient air- and water-based chillers.

In testing, NVIDIA claims a facility outfitted with its water-cooled A100 GPUs ran the same workload as an air-cooled data center while using about 30 percent less power. The new version of the A100 is also more space-efficient. Thanks to its water block design, it occupies a single PCIe slot instead of two like its air-cooled sibling.

In the consumer market, we’ve already seen companies like EVGA offer GPUs with built-in water blocks, and companies like EK sell aftermarket units you can install on your existing video card. We’re hopeful today’s announcement is a sign that NVIDIA plans to push water-cooled GPUs toward the mainstream. In the meantime, the company has begun sending out samples of the new A100 to enterprise customers. It also plans to introduce a water-cooled version of its H100 Tensor Core GPU sometime next year.

They may not be able to shout "Eureka!" like their human colleagues but AI/ML system have shown immense potential in the field of compound discovery — whether that's sifting through reams of data to find new therapeutic compounds or imagining new recipes using the ingredients' flavor profiles. Now a team from Meta AI, working with researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have created an AI that can devise and refine formulas for increasingly high-strength, low-carbon concrete.

Traditional methods for creating concrete, of which we produce billions of tons every year, are far from ecologically friendly. In fact, they generate an estimated 8 percent of the annual global carbon dioxide emission total. Advances have been made in recent years to reduce the concrete industry's carbon footprint (as well as in make the material more rugged, more resilient and even capable of charging EVs) but overall its production remains among the most carbon intensive in modern construction.

Reducing the amount of carbon that goes into concrete could be as simple as changing the ingredients that go into concrete. The material is made from four basic components: cement, aggregate, water and admixture (which act as doping agents). Cement is far and away the most carbon-intensive ingredient of the four so research has been made into reducing the amount of cement needed by supplementing it with lower-carbon materials like fly ash, slag, or ground glass. 

Similarly, aggregate materials like gravel, crushed stone, sand might be replaced with recycled concrete. The problem is that there are dozens of potential ingredient materials that could be used and the ratio of their amounts all interact to influence the structural profile of the resulting concrete. In short, there are a whole slew of possible combinations for researchers to test, select, and refine; and working through those myriad options sequentially, at human speed, is going to take forever. So the Meta folks trained an AI to do it, much faster.

Working with Prof. Lav Varshney, electrical and computer engineering department, and Prof. Nishant Garg, civil engineering department, both of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the team first trained the model using the Concrete Compressive Strength data set. This set includes more than 1,000 concrete formulas as well as their structural attributes, including seven-day and 28-day compressive strength data. The team determined the resulting concrete mixture's carbon footprint using the Cement Sustainability Initiative's Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) tool. 

Of the generated list of potential formulas, the research team then selected the five most promising options and iteratively refined them until they met or exceeded the 7- and 28-day strength metrics while dropping carbon requirements by at least 40 percent. The refinement process took mere weeks and ended up generating a concrete formula that exceeded all of those requirements while replacing as much as 50 percent of the required cement with fly ash and slag. Meta then teamed with concrete company Ozinga, the folks who recently built Meta's newest datacenter in Illinois, to further refine the formula and conduct real world testing. 

Looking ahead, the Meta team hopes to further improve the formula's 3- and 5-day strength profiles (basically ensuring it dries faster so the rest of the construction can move ahead sooner) and get a better understanding of how it cures under varying weather conditions like wind or high humidity. 

On Earth Day, Twitter announced a ban on ads that promote climate change denial. It said misleading advertising that contradicts scientific consensus on the crisis won't be permitted on the platform under its policy on inappropriate content.

"We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis," leaders from the company's sustainability team wrote in a blog post. "We recognize that misleading information about climate change can undermine efforts to protect the planet."

Twitter says it will assess whether climate change ads break the rules based on reports from authoritative sources, such as the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The company added that, in the months ahead, it will share more details about its "work to add reliable, authoritative context to the climate conversations happening on Twitter."

This move builds on some other measures Twitter is taking to address climate change. By the end of 2022, Twitter aims to only be using carbon-neutral power sourcing at its data centers. It also joined the EU climate pact earlier this year. Among other things, Twitter committed to switch to renewable electricity at its leased operations in the bloc and to increase its investments in carbon-removal tech.