The Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a rule Tuesday to allow adaptive driving beam headlights, or smart headlights, in the U.S. Axios reports: The technology, which relies on sensors and LED light, will help prevent crashes by allowing better illumination of pedestrians, animals and objects without impairing the visibility of drivers in other vehicles, NHTSA said. Adaptive driving beam headlight systems, which are commonplace in Europe and Canada, automatically focus beams on darker, unoccupied areas while reducing the intensity of illumination in times of oncoming traffic. Research released in 2019 by the American Automobile Association found that European vehicles with adaptive headlight systems increase roadway lighting by as much as 86% when compared to U.S. low beam headlights. "NHTSA prioritizes the safety of everyone on our nation's roads, whether they are inside or outside a vehicle. New technologies can help advance that mission," said Steven Cliff, NHTSA's deputy administrator, in a statement. "NHTSA is issuing this final rule to help improve safety and protect vulnerable road users."

Financial institutions channeled more than $1.5 trillion into the coal industry in loans and underwriting from January 2019 to November 2021, even though many have made net-zero pledges, a report by a group of 28 non-government organizations showed. From a report: Reducing coal use is a key part of global efforts to slash climate-warming greenhouse gases and bring emissions down to "net zero" by the middle of the century, and governments, firms and financial institutions across the world have pledged to take action. But banks continue to fund 1,032 firms involved in the mining, trading, transportation and utilization of coal, the research showed.

"Banks like to argue that they want to help their coal clients transition, but the reality is that almost none of these companies are transitioning," said Katrin Ganswind, head of financial research at German environmental group Urgewald, which led the research. "And they have little incentive to do so as long as bankers continue writing them blank checks." The study said banks from six countries - China, the United States, Japan, India, Britain and Canada - were responsible for 86% of global coal financing over the period. Direct loans amounted to $373 billion, with Japanese banks Mizuho Financial, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial -- both members of the Net Zero Banking Alliance -- identified as the two biggest lenders. Neither firm responded immediately to requests for comment.

"Sports fans who tuned in to watch the Beijing Winter Olympics on YouTube are instead being served propaganda videos," reports Wired: An analysis of YouTube search results by WIRED found that people who typed "Beijing," "Beijing 2022," "Olympics," or "Olympics 2022" were shown pro-China and anti-China propaganda videos in the top results. Five of the most prominent propaganda videos, which often appear above actual Olympics highlights, have amassed almost 900,000 views.

Two anti-China videos showing up in search results were published by a group called The BL (The Beauty of Life), which Facebook previously linked to the Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual movement that was banned by the Chinese Communist Party in 1999 and has protested against the regime ever since. They jostled for views with pro-China videos posted by Western YouTubers whose work has previously been promoted by China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Similar search results were visible in the US, Canada, and the UK.

WIRED also found signs that viewing numbers for pro-China videos are being artificially boosted through the use of fake news websites....

YouTube did not respond to a request to comment on why content used as propaganda to promote or deride China was being pushed to the top of Olympics search results, nor did the company say if those behind the videos had violated its terms of service by using fake websites to inflate their views.
The problem was first spotted by John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the University of Toronto's research laboratory, Citizen Lab. He tells Wired that after watching skating and curling videos, YouTube's autoplay kicked in and "I found myself on a slippery slide from skating and curling into increasingly targeted propaganda."

While the videos he saw are no longer being autoplayed, Wired still argues that "the way similar videos still dominate YouTube search results suggests the platform is at risk of letting such campaigns hijack the Olympics."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Researchers in Canada say they've come up with two simple physical techniques to help prevent a common cause of dizziness and fainting. In a small trial, they found that these maneuvers, which involve nothing more than moving your lower limbs, could effectively reduce the symptoms of initial orthostatic hypotension (IOH), a condition that temporarily leaves people light headed when they stand up. [...] Though many people can experience IOH without ever registering it as a big problem, some sufferers can have repeated or severe enough episodes of IOH that it routinely affects their daily functioning. Study author Satish Raj, a heart rhythm cardiologist at the University of Calgary, and his colleagues have often seen these sorts of patients at their dysautonomia and fainting clinic. And they wondered if there was something more they could offer these patients besides lifestyle changes like drinking more water or medications.

As he explains it, when people stand up, blood flow normally shifts downward to below our chest. But in IOH, this change seems to be accompanied by a reflex, triggered by the activation of muscles as we stand up, that causes blood vessels to open widely -- and it's this combination that then causes the rapid but temporary drop in blood pressure. Based on Raj's team's earlier work, as well as other research, they hypothesized that people with IOH could short-circuit this process by activating the reflex early or by tensing the lower limb muscles as they stood, somewhat mitigating the blood pressure drop.

To test this out, they recruited 22 volunteers with IOH to try out both of the techniques they developed. One method involved pre-activating the muscles behind the reflex from a sitting position, done simply by raising the knees one at a time for up to 30 seconds. The other asked people to stand and then tense up their lower limbs, by crossing their legs and clenching their thighs and butt. As a control, the volunteers would also stand up normally. Compared to the control condition, on measures of both the volunteers' circulation and their self-reported symptoms, people's IOH improved after doing either technique. And Raj's patients in the clinic have anecdotally reported similar success after adopting the strategies. The team's findings were published Wednesday in the journal Heart Rhythm.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Quantum computing is still rare enough that merely installing a system in a country is a breakthrough, and IBM is taking advantage of that novelty. The company has forged a partnership with the Canadian province of Quebec to install what it says is Canada's first universal quantum computer. The five-year deal will see IBM install a Quantum System One as part of a Quebec-IBM Discovery Accelerator project tackling scientific and commercial challenges. The team-up will see IBM and the Quebec government foster microelectronics work, including progress in chip packaging thanks to an existing IBM facility in the province. The two also plan to show how quantum and classical computers can work together to address scientific challenges, and expect quantum-powered AI to help discover new medicines and materials. IBM didn't say exactly when it would install the quantum computer. However, it will be just the fifth Quantum One installation planned by 2023 following similar partnerships in Germany, Japan, South Korea and the US. Canada is joining a relatively exclusive club, then.

A lighthearted study of spring flowers' blooming times confirms that groundhog soothsaying is essentially a cute, furry coin flip. From a report: The idea behind Groundhog Day is as simple as it is eccentric. Every February 2 -- the halfway point between the winter solstice and spring equinox -- a bleary-eyed groundhog is hoisted from its burrow into the daylight in towns across the United States and Canada. If its human handler proclaims that the rodent sees its shadow (as Punxsutawney Phil did this year), then six more weeks of winter await; if it doesn't, spring will come early -- or so the tradition goes. Each year, the date's approach is met with gleeful anticipation and sometimes a rewatching of the movie that made the day globally famous. Each year, the groundhogs' "proclamations" are reported with mock seriousness. The occasional tongue-in-cheek assertion to the contrary -- for example, General Beauregard Lee from Jackson, Georgia, self-reports an accuracy rate of 99 percent -- few would make the case for groundhog divination as a substitute for long-range meteorology.

To verify whether groundhogs might be weather soothsayers, a team of researchers from Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada, decided to take a cold, hard look at the evidence. It was, admits lead author Alex Ross, a project that was born in the campus bar ("There were many conversations over many beers," he confesses to National Geographic), and given extra impetus by the boredom of a pandemic. But the result, which appeared in the journal Weather, Climate, and Society, is unquestionably the most comprehensive statistical analysis yet published of the accuracy of groundhog predictive abilities.

[...] Not all groundhogs had equal forecasting powers. Punxsutawney Phil's predictions were correct 52 times out of 100, while three mascots -- Essex Ed from Essex, Connecticut; Chuckles from Manchester, Connecticut; and Stonewall Jackson from Wantage, New Jersey -- scored correctly more than 70 percent of the time. Conversely, Buckeye Chuck from Marion, Ohio; Dunkirk Dave (Dunkirk, New York); and Holland Huckleberry (Holland, Ohio) each had a less than 30 percent success rate. Punxsutawney Phil and Ontario's Wiarton Willie were the only groundhogs with more than 50 years of predictions on record. Of the newcomers, the worst performer was probably Winnipeg Willow, who made only four predictions, was wrong on three of them, and predicted a late spring in a year when it arrived 38 days earlier than average. "Even if certain groundhogs can occasionally predict the onset of spring better than others," the authors write, "there appears to be no clear prophet among the group evaluated here."

An almost 500-mile long bolt of lightning that lit up the sky across three US states has set a new world record for longest flash, scientists have confirmed. The BBC reports: The lightning bolt, extended a total of 477.2 miles (768 km) and spread across Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The previous record was 440.6 miles (709 km) and recorded in Brazil in 2018. Lightning rarely extends over 10 miles and usually lasts under a second. Another lightning flash recorded in 2020 -- in Uruguay and Argentina -- has also set a new record for duration at 17.1 seconds. The previous record was 16.7 seconds.

According to the WMO, both records took place in areas prone to intense storms that produce 'megaflashes,' namely the Great Plains region of the United States and the La Plata basin of South America's southern cone. Previously accepted WMO 'lightning extremes' include a 1975 incident in which 21 people were killed by a single flash of a lightning as they huddled inside a tent in Zimbabwe. In another incident, 469 people were killed when lightning struck the Egyptian town of Dronka in 1994, causing burning oil to flood the town.

How to analyse data without revealing their secrets? From a report: Data are valuable. But not all of them are as valuable as they could be. Reasons of confidentiality mean that many medical, financial, educational and other personal records, from the analysis of which much public good could be derived, are in practice unavailable. A lot of commercial data are similarly sequestered. For example, firms have more granular and timely information on the economy than governments can obtain from surveys. But such intelligence would be useful to rivals. If companies could be certain it would remain secret, they might be more willing to make it available to officialdom. A range of novel data-processing techniques might make such sharing possible. These so-called privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are still in the early stages of development. But they are about to get a boost from a project launched by the United Nations' statistics division. The UN PETs Lab, which opened for business officially on January 25th, enables national statistics offices, academic researchers and companies to collaborate to carry out projects which will test various PETs, permitting technical and administrative hiccups to be identified and overcome.

The first such effort, which actually began last summer, before the PETs Lab's formal inauguration, analysed import and export data from national statistical offices in America, Britain, Canada, Italy and the Netherlands, to look for anomalies. Those could be a result of fraud, of faulty record keeping or of innocuous re-exporting. For the pilot scheme, the researchers used categories already in the public domain -- in this case international trade in things such as wood pulp and clocks. They thus hoped to show that the system would work, before applying it to information where confidentiality matters. They put several kinds of PETs through their paces. In one trial, OpenMined, a charity based in Oxford, tested a technique called secure multiparty computation (SMPC). This approach involves the data to be analysed being encrypted by their keeper and staying on the premises. The organisation running the analysis (in this case OpenMined) sends its algorithm to the keeper, who runs it on the encrypted data. That is mathematically complex, but possible. The findings are then sent back to the original inquirer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Twitter has on various occasions been accused of political bias, with politicians or commentators alleging Twitter's algorithm amplifies their opponents' voices, or silences their own. In this climate, Twitter commissioned a study to understand whether their algorithm may be biased towards a certain political ideology. While Twitter publicized the findings of the research in 2021, the study has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS.

The study looked at a sample of 4% of all Twitter users who had been exposed to the algorithm (46,470,596 unique users). It also included a control group of 11,617,373 users who had never received any automatically recommended tweets in their feeds. This wasn't a manual study, whereby, say, the researchers recruited volunteers and asked them questions about their experiences. It wouldn't have been possible to study such a large number of users that way. Instead, a computer model allowed the researchers to generate their findings. [...] The researchers found that in six out of the seven countries (Germany was the exception), the algorithm significantly favored the amplification of tweets from politically right-leaning sources. Overall, the amplification trend wasn't significant among individual politicians from specific parties, but was when they were taken together as a group. The starkest contrasts were seen in Canada (the Liberals' tweets were amplified 43%, versus those of the Conservatives at 167%) and the UK (Labour's tweets were amplified 112%, while the Conservatives' were amplified at 176%).

In acknowledgement of the fact that tweets from elected officials represent only a small portion of political content on Twitter, the researchers also looked at whether the algorithm disproportionately amplifies news content from any particular point on the ideological spectrum. To this end, they measured the algorithmic amplification of 6.2 million political news articles shared in the US. To determine the political leaning of the news source, they used two independently curated media bias-rating datasets. Similar to the results in the first part of the study, the authors found that content from right-wing media outlets is amplified more than that from outlets at other points on the ideological spectrum. This part of the study also found far-left-leaning and far-right-leaning outlets were not significantly amplified compared with politically moderate outlets. The authors of the study point out that the algorithms "might be influenced by the way different political groups operate," notes The Conversation. "So for example, some political groups might be deploying better tactics and strategies to amplify their content on Twitter."

The Toronto Star just published a searing excerpt from the book Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower — written by a member of Canada's Parliament: It argues in part that "The social conflict that existed in the early days of Cobalt has been magnified a thousandfold in jurisdictions where the rule of law is compromised, and incursions into Indigenous territories heighten conflict." The world is searching for cobalt, the miracle ingredient of the digital age. The metal's capacity to store energy and stabilize conductors has made possible the proliferation of rechargeable batteries, smartphones and laptops. More crucially, in the face of catastrophic climate change, cobalt offers the hope of a clean-energy future. But cobalt has a much darker side. The relentless drive to feed the cobalt needs of Silicon Valley has led to appalling levels of degradation, child abuse and environmental damage in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the world's number one cobalt producer. The situation is so dire that human rights campaigners have denounced cobalt as the blood mineral of the 21st century.

In the 21st century, Canada's relationship to its resource extraction sector is coming under increasing scrutiny as we contemplate a world of melting ice and burning forests. So what can the story of Cobalt teach us in an age of pandemic, impending climate catastrophe, racial division and class strife? It may be that the shape-shifting metal will prove to be the miracle ingredient that leads us to a more sustainable way of life. Or it may be that we need to find a less rapacious balance between environment, social justice, human rights and the world's depleting resources.
The article points out that big tech companies "would love to cut their ties with the abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but cobalt is an extremely elusive metal, and the struggle to secure cobalt supplies is taking place within the context of a much broader geopolitical struggle with China."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Goatbot for sharingi the article.

"A race against time is under way for the U.S. Navy to reach one of its downed fighter jets — before the Chinese get there first," reports the BBC: The $100m (£74m) F-35C plane came down in the South China Sea after what the Navy describes as a "mishap" during take-off from the USS Carl Vinson. The jet is the Navy's newest, and crammed with classified equipment. As it is in international waters, it is technically fair game. Whoever gets there first, wins.

The prize? All the secrets behind this very expensive, leading-edge fighting force....

A U.S. salvage vessel looks to be at least 10 days away from the crash site. That's too late, says defence consultant Abi Austen, because the black box battery will die before then, making it harder to locate the aircraft. "It's vitally important the U.S. gets this back," she says. "The F-35 is basically like a flying computer. It's designed to link up other assets — what the Air Force calls 'linking sensors to shooters'."
The BBC describes the plane as the U.S. Navy's first "low observable" carrier-based aircraft, "which enables it to operate undetected in enemy airspace." And it's also "the most powerful fighter engine in the world," flying at speeds up to 1,200 mph, or Mach 1.6.

After the $100 million warplane crash-landed onto the deck of an aircraft carrier — and then tumbled into the water — images of the crash appeared on social media, reports CNN.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Thelasko for submitting the story!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: African clawed frogs are masters of putting themselves back together, handily regenerating lost tails and hind limbs, when they are tadpoles. But these powers dim with maturity. Wait for an adult frog to regrow a lopped-off limb and you'll see only a tapered spike, more like a talon than a leg. Now, a group of scientists have found a way to harness the adult frog's own cells to regrow an imperfect but functional limb. The researchers placed a silicone cap laden with a mixture of regenerative drugs onto an amputation wound for 24 hours. Over the next 18 months, the frogs gradually regrew what was lost, forming a new leglike structure with nerves, muscles, bones and even toelike projections.

The researchers describe this approach, which builds on earlier research, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The process could guide future research on limb regeneration in humans, but it will be challenging to replicate the results in mammals. "It was a total surprise," Nirosha Murugan, a researcher at Algoma University in Ontario, Canada, and an author of the paper, said of the complexity of the regrown limb. "I didn't think we would get the patterning that we did." "It's not a full limb that's regrown," said Kelly Tseng, a biologist studying regeneration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved with the research. "But it's certainly a robust response." "It is particularly promising that only a daylong treatment can have such a positive effect on an adult animal," Can Aztekin, a researcher studying limb regeneration at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne who was not involved with the research, wrote in an email.

America's National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency of the federal government that enforces U.S. labor law.

And its prosecutors "plan to formally accuse Amazon.com of illegally firing an activist who was trying to unionize its New York warehouses," as well as other violations of the law, reports Bloomberg — unless Amazon settles the case first.

New York Focus reports that the fired worker had commuted from a homeless shelter to Amazon's fulfillment center on New York's Staten Island — a facility where Amazon has held mandatory anti-union meetings. But it's not the only place there's been tension between Amazon and union organizers: In March, an NLRB investigation into the firing of Queens Amazon warehouse worker and labor leader Jonathan Bailey found that the company illegally interrogated and threatened him. NBC News reported that eight other workers also said "they had been fired, disciplined or retaliated against for protected activity." A month later, the NLRB found that Amazon had illegally retaliated against Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who was fired in 2020 for their workplace activism while employed at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle
The Amazon Labor Union (founded by current and former Amazon employees) "has filed a petition to hold an election at four of the e-commerce giant's facilities in Staten Island," Bloomberg reported Friday. And an official for the group told Bloomberg it could galvanize support for a union if they could get the fired worker reinstated. "It would be monumental for him to go back to the same building that he was terminated from and speak his truth and let workers know that it's OK to speak out." Amazon has been grappling with an unprecedented wave of activism and organizing in North America, including walkouts over safety concerns in Staten Island and elsewhere, as well as unionization drives in Alabama, Canada and New York.... In December, Amazon reached a settlement with the labor board requiring the company to inform workers nationwide of their legal rights and to let employees organize on its property during their time off.

"Netflix's stock has tumbled 41% from the all-time high it hit just two months ago," reports CNN Business.

"It's gaining subscribers at a painfully slow pace. Competition is heating up. The company's answer to all that: It just raised prices on North American customers." Netflix ended 2021 with 221.8 million subscribers. That's significantly more than others in the streaming marketplace, including Disney, one of its closest competitors. Disney had 118.1 million subscribers as of October, and it grew subscriptions 60% between October 2020 and October 2021. During that same period, Netflix grew just 9%. Disney hasn't yet reported its financial results for the last three months of 2021. But Netflix's growth slowed even further in the fourth quarter to just 8%. (And Disney's growth last quarter spooked Wall Street too....)

The problem with relying exclusively on subscriptions for revenue is: after a while, you run out of people who haven't subscribed. That's bad news for Wall Street investors who are mostly concerned with companies' abilities to grow. Zak Shaikh, vice president of programming at research-based media firm Magid, believes that Netflix's fall is more of "a Wall Street thing" rather than "something that reflects the business is in trouble.... They still added subs, and they still have the same high usage and viewing metrics," he added. However, even Shaikh pointed out that in the long term, "Netflix will have to deal with the fact that you can't keep adding subscribers."

One way the company has tried to offset its slowing growth is by investing in other verticals, such as gaming. Another way is to raise prices, but that could prove difficult as fierce competition ramps up. Although price increases will probably help to offset its sluggish sign ups, they could also lead to more stagnation for Netflix. For some consumers, price increases — even small ones — are a lot to ask considering that so many competitors are at Netflix's gates.
Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at MoffettNathanson, specifically predicted to CNN Business that 2022 will be a year "of concern about growth and competition for Netflix."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: Officials in Beijing are telling people to avoid international mail and to open their packages outdoors and with gloves, saying cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant could have spread through foreign mail. Experts have repeatedly said that there is little risk of getting the coronavirus from mail. There is no indication that this has changed with the Omicron variant, though it is more infectious. But Robin Brant, the BBC's China correspondent, tweeted on Monday that Beijing was telling residents not to order goods from abroad, and to open packages outside with gloves and a mask on. The South China Morning Post also reported on Monday that Beijing's center for disease control and prevention said that people should order as little as possible from abroad, and that people should wear gloves and masks when opening any mail from high-risk countries. It comes as the center said the first recorded case of the Omicron variant in Beijing could have entered via mail. Officials in Beijing say the man who was infected was sent mail from Canada on January 7. They claim to have detected the Omicron variant on the letter.

Canada's post office notes that the risk of the coronavirus spreading via mail is low as it doesn't live long on surfaces.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot wanted to share this New York Times article which makes the point that "The stunning Covid vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew upon long-buried discoveries made in the hopes of ending past epidemics..." They remain a marvel: Even as the Omicron variant fuels a new wave of the pandemic, the vaccines have proved remarkably resilient at defending against severe illness and death. And the manufacturers, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, say that mRNA technology will allow them to adapt the vaccines quickly, to fend off whatever dangerous new version of the virus that evolution brings next.

Skeptics have seized on the rapid development of the vaccines — among the most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era — to undermine the public's trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the vaccines unfolded over decades, little by little, as scientists across the world pursued research in disparate areas, never imagining their work would one day come together to tame the pandemic of the century. The pharmaceutical companies harnessed these findings and engineered a consistent product that could be made at scale, partly with the help of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's multibillion-dollar program to hasten the development and manufacture of vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests to fight the new virus.

For years, though, the scientists who made the vaccines possible scrounged for money and battled public indifference. Their experiments often failed. When the work got too crushing, some of them left it behind. And yet on this unpredictable, zigzagging path, the science slowly built upon itself, squeezing knowledge from failure.

The vaccines were possible only because of efforts in three areas. The first began more than 60 years ago with the discovery of mRNA, the genetic molecule that helps cells make proteins. A few decades later, two scientists in Pennsylvania decided to pursue what seemed like a pipe dream: using the molecule to command cells to make tiny pieces of viruses that would strengthen the immune system. The second effort took place in the private sector, as biotechnology companies in Canada in the budding field of gene therapy — the modification or repair of genes to treat diseases — searched for a way to protect fragile genetic molecules so they could be safely delivered to human cells. The third crucial line of inquiry began in the 1990s, when the U.S. government embarked on a multibillion-dollar quest to find a vaccine to prevent AIDS. That effort funded a group of scientists who tried to target the all-important "spikes" on H.I.V. viruses that allow them to invade cells. The work has not resulted in a successful H.I.V. vaccine. But some of these researchers, including Dr. Graham, veered from the mission and eventually unlocked secrets that allowed the spikes on coronaviruses to be mapped instead.

In early 2020, these different strands of research came together. The spike of the Covid virus was encoded in mRNA molecules. Those molecules were wrapped in a protective layer of fat and poured into small glass vials. When the shots went in arms less than a year later, recipients' cells responded by producing proteins that resembled the spikes — and that trained the body to attack the coronavirus.

The extraordinary tale proved the promise of basic scientific research: that once in a great while, old discoveries can be plucked from obscurity to make history.

2021 was actually cooler than 2020, points out Wired science journalist Matt Simon. So is that good news?

No. One reason for cooler temperatures in 2021 was likely La Niña, a band of cold water in the Pacific. It's the product of strong trade winds that scour the ocean, pushing the top layer of water toward Asia, causing deeper, colder waters to rush to the surface to fill the void. This in turn influences the atmosphere, for instance changing the jet stream above the United States and leading to more hurricanes in the Atlantic. The sea itself cools things off by absorbing heat from the atmosphere.

The Covid-19 pandemic may have had an additional influence, but not in the way you might think. As the world locked down in 2020, fewer emissions went into the sky, including aerosols that typically reflect some of the sun's energy back into space. "If you take them away, you make the air cleaner, then that's a slight warming impact on the climate," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, during a Thursday press conference announcing the findings. But as economic activity ramped back up in 2021, so did aerosol pollution, contributing again to that cooling effect. The 2021 temperature drop "may be possibly due to a resumption of activity that produces aerosols in the atmosphere," Schmidt said...

Today's findings are all the more alarming precisely because 2021 managed to overcome these cooling effects and still tally the sixth-highest temperature. And while global temperatures were cooler in 2021 than the year before, last year 1.8 billion people lived in places that experienced their hottest temperatures ever recorded, according to a report released today by Berkeley Earth. This includes Asian countries like China and North and South Korea, African nations like Nigeria and Liberia, and in the Middle East places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. "We talk a lot about global average temperatures, but no one lives in the global average," says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. "In fact most of the globe, two-thirds of it, is ocean, and no one lives in the ocean — or very few people at least. And land areas, on average, are warming much faster than the rest of the world...."

Last summer in western Canada and the US Pacific Northwest, absurd temperatures of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit killed hundreds of people. According to Hausfather, the heat wave in Portland, Oregon, would have been effectively impossible without climate change, something like a once-every-150,000-year event.
It's a fascinating article, that looks at trouble spots like Antarctica's sea level-threatening "Doomsday Glacier" and a warming Gulf of Mexico, mapping the intensity of 2021's temperature anomalies along with trend graphs for both global temperatures and land-vs-ocean averages. It touches on how climate change is impacting weather — everything from rain and floods to wildfires and locusts — as Bridget Seegers, an oceanographer at NASA, points out that "Extremes are getting worse. People are losing their homes and their lives and air quality, because the wildfires are bad."

But Seegers somehow arrives at a positive thought. "There's just a lot going on, and I want people to also feel empowered that we understand the problem. It's just this other issue of deciding to take collective action....

"There's a lot of reasons for optimism. We're in charge. This would be a lot worse if we're like, 'Oh, it's warming because we're heading toward the sun, and we can't stop it.'"

(Thanks to Slashdot reader Sanja Pantic for sharing the article!)

Netflix has raised its monthly subscription price by $1 to $2 per month in the United States depending on the plan, the company said on Friday, to help pay for new programming to compete in the crowded streaming TV market. From a report: The standard plan, which allows for two simultaneous streams, now costs $15.49 per month, up from $13.99, in the United States. Prices also went up in Canada, where the standard plan climbed to C$16.49 from C$14.99. The price increases, the first in those markets since October 2020, took effect immediately for new customers. Existing members will see the new prices in the coming weeks when they receive their monthly bills.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The last eight years have been the eight hottest years on record, NASA and the National Oceanic Administration (NOAA) confirmed today. 2021 ranks as the sixth hottest year on record, the agencies said, as global average temperatures trend upward. Rankings aside, there were plenty of red flags throughout 2021 to show us how remarkable the year was for temperature extremes. "The fact is that we've now kind of moved into a new regime ... this is likely the warmest decade in many, many hundreds, maybe 1000s of years," says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "There's enough change that it's having impacts locally."

In North America, those local impacts included epically bad summer heat, even for typically cool regions. In late June and early July, the Pacific Northwestern US and Western Canada struggled with record-smashing temperatures that buckled roads and melted power cables. In the desert further south, California's Death Valley reached a blazing 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius) in July, potentially breaking the world record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on the planet -- for the second year in a row. Across the Atlantic, Europe experienced sweltering heat, too. A reading of 119.8 degrees Fahrenheit (48.8 degrees Celsius) in Sicily might have broken the European record for maximum temperature. (The World Meteorological Organization is still working to vet those records.) All told, July 2021 was the hottest month humans have ever recorded, according to NOAA.

Heat trapped in the world's oceans also reached record levels in 2021, according to research published this week. Ocean heatwaves are likely twice as common now as they were in the early 1980s, and they can be devastating for marine life and coastal communities. They kill coral, take a toll on fishing and crabbing industries, and can even make droughts worse onshore. Temperatures might have been even hotter in 2021, were it not for a La Nina event. La Nina is a recurring climate phenomenon defined by cooler-than-average waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific, which has predictable effects on weather patterns worldwide.

New submitter nuckfuts writes: Canada's Minister of Health is signalling that provinces may make vaccines mandatory in the coming months as the only way to deal with surging COVID-19 caseloads. It will be up to individual provinces to decide. Alberta's Premier Jason Kenny as already stated that Alberta will not make vaccines mandatory. Some European countries, such as Austria and Greece, have moved in that direction already as infection rates hit record highs and vaccination campaigns stall. Greeks over the age of 60 who are not yet vaccinated are now subject to monthly fines of 100 euros ($140 Cdn). Austria, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the European Union, is looking at fining unvaccinated Austrians more than 7,000 euros ($9,880). Slovakia, meanwhile, is offering payments of 600 euros ($844) to encourage people to get their shots.