Science

Rivian released a short film today in which the company’s CEO RJ Scaringe issues a call to action on climate change, arguing the time is now to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy solutions.

The scale of the challenge means we need to be making these changes now, and we need to begin working toward every increasing renewable content on our grid. We need to replace the roughly one-and-a-half billion combustion powered vehicles on our planet with electric vehicles, but also know that on the path to the end state, we’re going to have solutions that are imperfect, but we need to start.

Trump tapped former New York Representative Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Zeldin has a 14 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters.

He’ll “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards,” Trump said.

A digital trail can provide evidence of someone obtaining an illegal abortion, but as Lux Alptraum wrote back in 2022, they’re not usually the initial tipoff:

A full 45 percent of cases were brought to the attention of the police via a healthcare professional like a doctor, nurse, or social worker. Another 26 percent of people were reported by friends or family members. 

In case you were wondering.

Hurricane Rafael cut off power across the island even before it made landfall on Wednesday as a Category 3 storm. Authorities are still working to restore power after weeks of widespread, prolonged blackouts exacerbated by another hurricane that struck Cuba in late October.

Unsurprising. Oura also found that there was a 2.3 percent increase in stressed minutes, a 19.5 percent decrease in restorative time and heart rates were 3.7 percent higher.

My own Oura data shows that I had 4 hours 30 minutes of stress on election day and eight whole hours of stress processing the results yesterday.

Bezos, who killed The Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris and also owns a space company with billions in government contracts, was among the first major US tech leaders to chime in this morning. He is certainly aware that one of his biggest rivals in aerospace is run by a close confidant of the president-elect.

Utility planning documents show rising costs for customers in some regions of the US as tech companies build out energy-hungry data centers, the Washington Post reports:

“A lot of governors and local political leaders who wanted economic growth and vitality from these data centers are now realizing it can come at a cost of increased consumer bills,” said Neil Chatterjee, former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Meta wanted to build a nuclear-powered AI data center in the US — until a rare species of bee was found at the site, according to the Financial Times.

Tech giants have inked a string of nuclear energy deals lately to try to meet growing electricity demand for AI data centers.

Sorry, I had to. Anyway, please look at these pictures of how Nerds Gummy Clusters are made — and keep your eyes peeled for them this Halloween because they are scary good.

You know, when I wrote “A vote for Trump is a vote for measles,” I was not expecting the campaign to follow up by putting Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick on CNN to falsely claim vaccines cause autism, a thing he says he learned by spending a couple hours with RFK Jr. Vaccines do not cause autism, but childhood diseases cause death. Don’t get it twisted.

EcoFlow’s whole-home energy backup solution, PowerOcean, now works with LG’s Homey smart home platform to help manage your home’s energy use. According to a press release:

Users can automatically change their lights to green when the EcoFlow EV charger completes charging their vehicle. They can also start their washing machine when their EcoFlow solar panels generate excess energy or receive notifications when energy prices drop, making it cost-effective to charge their EcoFlow home battery. 

PowerOcean is currently only available in Europe, but EcoFlow says it’s coming to the US next year.

Blue Origin leadership has viewed Donald Trump as positive for space. Most of Jeff Bezos’ focus is currently on Blue Origin. “Elon’s real superpower is getting government money,” Bezos has said, according to The Post.

Bezos claims spiking the Post’s Kamala Harris endorsement was a “principled decision.”

Did you know SpaceX’s “latest generation broadband satellites” use AMD chips? The chipmaker just bragged about that in Q3 2024 earnings, and it’s news to me.

AMD’s product page says: “AMD Versal Adaptive SoCs combine application processors, real-time processors, and vector processors with traditional FPGA resources such as programmable logic fabric, DSP resources, and embedded memory.”

don’t feed your fucking private medical records to a chatbot, Jesus Christ.

Nothing to see here, I’m sure. Jeff Bezos, owner of Blue Origin and The Post, just really strongly felt like there didn’t need to be a presidential endorsement this time around, no reason.

Okay, this one’s weird: Musk has posted a three-minute clip of a game, but the audio is someone telling him how “We were one second away from telling the rocket to abort” — and how the amazing ‘chopstick’ Super Heavy booster catch was close to being a scary crash.

While TechCrunch suggests he “inadvertently” broadcasted this, it’s not a broadcast. Someone clipped it this way.

Science Corporation (what a name!) announced preliminary clinical trial results of their Prima retinal implant. Wired’s write-up goes into more detail, but the 2mm chip acts as a replacement photoreceptor in the retinas of folks who lost their central vision. After a year, some trial participants were able to read, solve crossword puzzles, and play cards. It’s not the same as normal vision — there’s no color, for instance. But it’s impressive nonetheless!

The Quartz Corp CEO Thomas Guillaume said the company’s assets have been “largely preserved” after Hurricane Helene brought devasting flooding and power outages to the area.

Sibelco, another quartz mining company crucial to the chip-making process, resumed operations earlier this month.

The company is adding a STEM feed for all US, Great Britain, and Ireland-based users that surfaces technology and science content. The feed itself isn’t new, but now it will be enabled by default.

An educational feed could be a way for TikTok to push back against a potential ban in the US and lawsuits that say the app is dangerous to kids.