An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The nations that make up the G7 have pumped billions of dollars more into fossil fuels than they have into clean energy since the Covid-19 pandemic, despite their promises of a green recovery. As the UK prepares to host the G7 summit, new analysis reveals that the countries attending committed $189 billion to support oil, coal and gas between January 2020 and March 2021. In comparison, the same countries -- the UK, US, Canada, Italy, France, Germany and Japan -- spent $147 billion on clean forms of energy. The support for fossil fuels from seven of the world's richest nations included measures to remove or downgrade environmental regulations as well as direct funding of oil, gas and coal.

The analysis from the development charity Tearfund, the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the Overseas Development Institute showed that the nations missed opportunities to make their response to the pandemic greener. In most cases, money provided for fossil fuel industries was given with no strings attached, rather than with conditions requiring a reduction in emissions or pollution. The analysis found that eight in every 10 dollars spent on non-renewable energy came without conditions. This included lifelines that were thrown to the aviation and car industries, which received $115 billion from the G7 countries. Of that money, 80% was given with no attempt to force the sectors to cut their emissions in return for the support. Only one in every 10 dollars committed to the Covid-19 response benefited the "cleanest" energies such as renewables and energy efficiency measures.

Natural gas "creates less carbon emissions than the coal it replaces, but we have to find ways to minimize the leakage of methane."

That's the opinion of Vaclav Smil, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, writing in IEEE's Spectrum (in an article shared by Slashdot reader schwit1): Natural gas is abundant, low-cost, convenient, and reliably transported, with low emissions and high combustion efficiency. Natural-gas-fired heating furnaces have maximum efficiencies of 95 to 97 percent, and combined-cycle gas turbines now achieve overall efficiency slightly in excess of 60 percent. Of course, burning gas generates carbon dioxide, but the ratio of energy to carbon is excellent: Burning a gigajoule of natural gas produces 56 kilograms of carbon dioxide, about 40 percent less than the 95 kg emitted by bituminous coal.

This makes gas the obvious replacement for coal. In the United States, this transition has been unfolding for two decades. Gas-fueled capacity increased by 192 gigawatts from 2000 to 2005 and by an additional 69 GW from 2006 through the end of 2020. Meanwhile, the 82 GW of coal-fired capacity that U.S. utilities removed from 2012 to 2020 is projected to be augmented by another 34 GW by 2030, totaling 116 GW — more than a third of the former peak rating.

So far, so green. But methane is itself a very potent greenhouse gas, packing from 84 to 87 times as much global warming potential as an equal quantity of carbon dioxide when measured over 20 years (and 28 to 36 times as much over 100 years). And some of it leaks out. In 2018, a study of the U.S. oil and natural-gas supply chain found that those emissions were about 60 percent higher than the Environmental Protection Agency had estimated. Such fugitive emissions, as they are called, are thought to be equivalent to 2.3 percent of gross U.S. gas production...

Without doubt, methane leakages during extraction, processing, and transportation do diminish the overall beneficial impact of using more natural gas, but they do not erase it, and they can be substantially reduced.

A coalition of internet accountability groups is warning the Biden administration against including liability protections for tech companies in future trade agreements, saying that could hamstring efforts to hold platforms responsible for user content. From a report: In a letter sent to President Joe Biden on Thursday, the organizations said including a legal shield in trade deals like the 2018 U.S.-Mexico-Canada accord "reflects a broad effort by the big tech platforms to use 'trade negotiations' to limit domestic policy options."

The letter was signed by 16 public interest groups focused on issues such as civil rights, democracy and the market power of tech platforms, including Public Citizen, Color of Change and the Center for Digital Democracy. The coalition came together as the advocates observed how a ratified trade deal could bake in -- and export -- increasingly controversial legal protections for internet companies, said Morgan Harper, a policy director at the American Economic Liberties Project, which also signed the letter. The groups are "sounding the alarm about this tactic by Big Tech to undermine the inevitability of domestic regulation that's coming their way," Harper said. "We expect that this will be a priority for the Biden administration."

"All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history..." reports the New York Times.

There's already been some surprising results: Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can't find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks. Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.

A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments. The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation.

"A paradigm shift is necessary," said Frank Swiaczny, a German demographer who was the chief of population trends and analysis for the United Nations until last year. "Countries need to learn to live with and adapt to decline...." The ramifications and responses have already begun to appear, especially in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work opportunities for women) and negative (persistent gender inequality and high living costs)... As women have gained more access to education and contraception, and as the anxieties associated with having children continue to intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward, or are already below, the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.

The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline (just like growth) spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to have children, and if they have smaller families than their parents did — which is happening in dozens of countries — the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff... Some countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada, where birthrates hover between 1.5 and 2, have blunted the impact with immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, migration out of the region has compounded depopulation, and in large parts of Asia, the "demographic time bomb" that first became a subject of debate a few decades ago has finally gone off...

According to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rates below replacement level by 2100...
The article asks us to imagine a world where now-empty homes become "a common eyesore," noting that in regional towns in Korea, already "it's easy to find schools shut and abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not enough children."

Slashdot reader boudie2 writes: Maritime Launch Services has secured financing it says will allow it to begin construction on a spaceport facility this fall and get its first launch off the ground in 2022. The first Cyclone 4M medium-class launch vehicle would take off in 2023.

The company wants to construct a rocket-launching site in Canso, Nova Scotia to send satellites into orbit for use in near-earth imaging, communications and scientific experiments. President and CEO Steve Matier stated the company has been approached by small satellite launchers, and MLS is considering hosting one of them for a first flight to orbit from the launch site as the facility scales up its operations. The company is expecting additional funding for the project will be secured through equity, debt and launch contracts.

An area of forest the size of France has regrown naturally across the world in the last 20 years, a study suggests. The BBC reports: The restored forests have the potential to soak up the equivalent of 5.9 gigatons (Gt) of carbon dioxide - more than the annual emissions of the US, according to conservation groups. A team led by WWF used satellite data to build a map of regenerated forests. Forest regeneration involves restoring natural woodland through little or no intervention. This ranges from doing nothing at all to planting native trees, fencing off livestock or removing invasive plants.

The Atlantic Forest in Brazil gives reason for hope, the study said, with an area roughly the size of the Netherlands having regrown since 2000. In the boreal forests of northern Mongolia, 1.2 million hectares of forest have regenerated in the last 20 years, while other regeneration hotspots include central Africa and the boreal forests of Canada. The researchers warned that forests across the world face "significant threats." "Despite 'encouraging signs' with forests along Brazil's Atlantic coast, deforestation is such that the forested area needs to more than double to reach the minimal threshold for conservation," the report says.

NBC News reports on what exactly happened during Elon Musk's appearance on Saturday Night Live — starting with a surprisingly personal monologue: "I don't always have a lot of intonation or variation in how I speak," Musk said, "which I'm told makes for great comedy." He admitted he's socially awkward and said he was the first person with Asperger syndrome to host the show — "or at least the first to admit it."

"I know I sometimes say or post strange things but that's just how my brain works," Musk, 49, said. "I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?"
ET Canada notes that Twitter users later pointed out that former SNL castmember (and later episode host) Dan Aykroyd has also said he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. But NBC notes that Saturday's show was focused on the interests and eccentricities of Elon Musk. His mother, Maye Musk, appeared as part of the show's pre-celebration of Mother's Day. "I'm excited for my Mother's Day gift," she said, before mentioning a form of cryptocurrency hyped by her son. "I just hope it's not Dogecoin."

"It is," said Musk, a big investor in the cryptocurrency...
And later in a skit with Michael Che, Musk had also played a fictional cryptocurrency expert who's asked repeatedly to explain Dogecoin. "It actually started as a joke based on an internet meme but now it's taken over in a very real way," Musk said. "It's the future of currency." Asked again by Che, he said, "I keep telling you, it's a cryptocurrency you can trade for conventional money."

"Oh," Che said. "So it's a hustle."

"Yeah," Musk said, "it's a hustle...."

Dogecoin tracker Darren Rovell tweeted that the cryptocurrency had, at one point, lost $30 billion in value during the show.
In fact, by early Sunday Dogecoin was down 40%, trading as low as 44 cents, reports CNN: It's unclear what was driving the dogecoin selloff. Perhaps investors wanted Musk to say something more supportive of the cryptocurrency. But more likely, there was some "buy the rumor / sell the news" strategy, trying to capitalize on investors' predictions coming true by selling high. Dogecoin traded so actively that Robinhood announced early Sunday morning it was having issues processing crypto trades and was working to resolve the problem.

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: The State Department announced it has reached a $13 million settlement with U.S. defense contractor Honeywell International over allegations it exported technical data concerning fighter jets and other military vehicles to foreign countries, including China. The settlement resolves 34 charges the State Department leveled against the company for disclosing dozens of engineering prints showing dimensions, geometries and layouts for manufacturing parts for aircraft, gas turbine engines and military electronics.

Honeywell voluntarily informed the department in two disclosures that it had violated arms export control laws by sending the technical drawings to foreign countries, the State Department said in a statement. Honeywell had identified 71-controlled drawings that it had exported to Canada, Ireland, China and Taiwan between July 2011 and October 2015. "The U.S. government reviewed copies of the 71 drawings and determined that exports to and retransfers in the PRC of drawings for certain parts and components for the engine platforms for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, B-1B Lancer Long-Range Strategic Bomber and the F-22 Fighter Aircraft harmed U.S. national security," the document said. In a statement emailed to UPI, Honeywell explained it "inadvertently shared" the technology that was assessed as impacting national security during "normal business discussions" but remarked that the schematics were commercially available worldwide. "No detailed manufacturing or engineering expertise was shared," it said.

The company has agreed to pay the fine and have an external compliance officer oversee the consent agreement for at least 18 months as well as conduct an external audit of its compliance program.

Doctors in Canada have been coming across patients showing symptoms similar to that of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare fatal condition that attacks the brain. From a report on BBC, shared by several readers: But when they took a closer look, what they found left them stumped. Almost two years ago, Roger Ellis collapsed at home with a seizure on his 40th wedding anniversary. In his early 60s, Mr Ellis, who was born and raised around New Brunswick's bucolic Acadian peninsula, had been healthy until that June, and was enjoying his retirement after decades working as an industrial mechanic. His son, Steve Ellis, says after that fateful day his father's health rapidly declined. "He had delusions, hallucinations, weight loss, aggression, repetitive speech," he says. "At one point he couldn't even walk. So in the span of three months we were being brought to a hospital to tell us they believed he was dying - but no one knew why."

Roger Ellis' doctors first suspected Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease [CJD]. CJD is a human prion disease, a fatal and rare degenerative brain disorder that sees patients present with symptoms like failing memory, behavioural changes and difficulties with co-ordination. One widely known category is Variant CJD, which is linked to eating contaminated meat infected with mad cow disease. CJD also belongs to a wider category of brain disorders like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and ALS, in which protein in the nervous system become misfolded and aggregated. But Mr Ellis' CJD test came back negative, as did the barrage of other tests his doctors put him through as they tried to pinpoint the cause of his illness. His son says the medical team did their best to alleviate his father's varying symptoms but were still left with a mystery: what was behind Mr Ellis's decline? In March of this year, the younger Mr Ellis came across a possible -- if partial -- answer.

Radio-Canada, the public broadcaster, obtained a copy of a public health memo that had been sent to the province's medical professionals warning of a cluster of patients exhibiting an unknown degenerative brain disease. "The first thing I said was: 'This is my dad,'" he recalls. Roger Ellis is now believed to be one of those afflicted with the illness and is under the care of Dr Alier Marrero. The neurologist with Moncton's Dr Georges-L-Dumont University Hospital Centre says doctors first came across the baffling disease in 2015. At the time it was one patient, an "isolated and atypical case," he says. But since then there have been more patients like the first -- enough now that doctors have been able to identify the cluster as a different condition or syndrome "not seen before". The province says it's currently tracking 48 cases, evenly split between men and women, in ages ranging from 18 to 85. Those patients are from the Acadian Peninsula and Moncton areas of New Brunswick. Six people are believed to have died from the illness.

"After more than 25 years of Canadian governments pursuing a hands-off approach to the online world, the government of Justin Trudeau is now pushing Bill C-10, a law that would see Canadians subjected to the most regulated internet in the free world," argues the Vancouver Sun (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck): Although pitched as a way to expand Canadian content provisions to the online sphere, the powers of Bill C-10 have expanded considerably in committee, including a provision introduced last week that could conceivably allow the federal government to order the deletion of any Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Twitter upload made by a Canadian. In comments this week, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh indicated his party was open to providing the votes needed to pass C-10, seeing the bill as a means to combat online hate...

The users themselves may not necessarily be subject to direct CRTC regulation, but social media providers would have to answer to every post on their platforms as if it were a TV show or radio program. This might be a good time to mention that members of the current Liberal cabinet have openly flirted with empowering the federal government to control social media. In a September Tweet, Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna said that if social media companies "can't regulate yourselves, governments will." Guilbeault, the prime champion of Bill C-10, has spoken openly of a federal regulator that could order takedowns of any social media post that it deems to be hateful or propagandistic...

Basically, if your Canadian website isn't a text-only GeoCities blog from 1996, Bill C-10 thinks it's a program deserving of CRTC regulation. This covers news sites, podcasts, blogs, the websites of political parties or activist groups and even foreign websites that might be seen in Canada...

The penalties prescribed by Bill C-10 are substantial. For corporations, a first offence can yield penalties of up to $10 million, while subsequent offences could be up to $15 million apiece. If TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are suddenly put in a situation where their millions of users must follow the same rules as a Canadian cable channel or radio station, it's not unreasonable to assume they may just follow Facebook's example [in Australia] and take the nuclear option.

The vast majority of the world's mountain glaciers are losing 31 percent more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to 3D satellite measurements. Scientists blame human-caused climate change. NBC News reports: Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world's 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday's journal Nature. That's enough melt flowing into the world's rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet (7.2 meters) of water each year.

The annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 78 billion more tons (71 billion metric tons) a year than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, different than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years and "that's enormous," said Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study. Half the world's glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada. Alaska's melt rates are "among the highest on the planet," with the Columbia glacier retreating about 115 feet (35 meters) a year, Hugonnet said.

Almost all the world's glaciers are melting, even ones in Tibet that used to be stable, the study found. Except for a few in Iceland and Scandinavia that are fed by increased precipitation, the melt rates are accelerating around the world. The near-uniform melting "mirrors the global increase in temperature" and is from the burning of coal, oil and gas, Hugonnet said. Some smaller glaciers are disappearing entirely.

Beavers took down internet service for about 900 customers in a remote Canadian community this weekend after gnawing through crucial fiber cables, the Candian Broadcasting Corporation reported Sunday. From a report: The outage, which has since been resolved, also affected 60 cable TV customers and disrupted local cell phone service, according to a statement from the area's provider, Telus. Tumbler Ridge, a tiny municipality in northeastern British Columbia with a population of about 2,000 people, lost service for roughly 36 hours in what Telus described as a "uniquely Canadian disruption!"

"Beavers have chewed through our fibre cable at multiple points, causing extensive damage," said Telus spokesperson Liz Sauve in an email to Gizmodo. "Our team located a nearby dam, and it appears the beavers dug underground alongside the creek to reach our cable, which is buried about three feet underground and protected by a 4.5-inch thick conduit. The beavers first chewed through the conduit before chewing through the cable in multiple locations." After going down early Saturday morning, service was restored just before 6:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, Sauve confirmed. In its statement, the company said crews worked "around the clock" to address the issue and determine how far the damage continued up the cable line. Telus brought in additional equipment and technicians to tackle "challenging conditions" due to the fact that the ground above the cable is partially frozen this time of year.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Bloomberg article, written by Joe Deaux: As David DeYoung, then a director of business technologies at Alcoa, walked into Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters in September 2015, he knew that the stakes were high. DeYoung led a group of engineers who'd spent decades pursuing the holy grail for the notoriously dirty aluminum industry: a way to smelt the metal without producing any direct carbon emissions. Apple, which Harbor Intelligence analyst Jorge Vazquez estimates uses almost 15,000 metric tons of aluminum annually for its electronics gear, had invited DeYoung to explain a potentially revolutionary carbonless manufacturing process for aluminum that his group was developing. Alcoa was on the verge of ending the DeYoung team's yearslong search. To make the tension even worse, moments before DeYoung stepped into a roundtable with Apple engineers, he received word Alcoa was splitting into two publicly traded companies -- casting another cloud on his unit's project. So Apple's interest in reducing the carbon footprint of its metal casings looked to be key to saving the funding.

But it wasn't until later in 2015 that the payoff from that meeting came, with help from an unexpected source. That's when Vincent Christ, a manufacturing information technology expert from Rio Tinto Group Plc, flew to Cupertino for a similar visit. The London-based company, one of Alcoa's biggest rivals, was also struggling to develop a way to produce aluminum through a process that would emit oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. While heading back to the airport after an hourslong confab with Apple engineers, Christ received a call. Apple had an idea: Rio Tinto and Alcoa were both close to the answer they were looking for, but neither company seemed able to do it on its own. So why not combine efforts? "We had the engine, but we didn't have the wheels, chassis, or body, and Rio brought that all to the party," says DeYoung, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT. "[Apple] said, 'You guys really ought to talk to Rio,' and we were like, 'Yeah, we have already.' But then we said we'll talk to them again, and Apple actually facilitated that second contact."

The result was the creation of Elysis, a joint venture between Alcoa and Rio Tinto with investments from Apple, the government of Canada, and the provincial government of Quebec, which is one of the biggest aluminum-producing regions in the world. The venture has developed a technology that makes so-called green aluminum, whose production doesn't emit carbon dioxide. If the partners can make the process work at commercial scale, it could be used to retrofit existing smelters, transforming them from some of the dirtiest industrial polluters into the kind of green manufacturing facilities business and government are shifting toward. "Elysis has developed a process that substitutes carbon with inert materials -- it won't say what they are -- to make the anode that conducts the electricity causing the chemical reaction," reports Bloomberg. "Elysis' operating costs are about 15% lower than those of conventional smelting, in part because the carbon anodes used in the chemical reaction must be replaced after 25 days, while Elysis' inert material lasts two years. The carbonless process also requires fewer workers, since there's no need to frequently change out the cathodes sitting in the pots of molten alumina."

The immediate hurdle for Elysis is to prove it can crank up the amperage used during carbonless smelting to industrial-strength power levels, which would allow higher daily production rates, says CRU Group analyst Greg Wittbecker. "Elysis announced on April 20 it will begin installing commercial inert anode prototype cells on a smelter in Quebec in an effort to prove it can retrofit existing smelters," adds Bloomberg. "A pivotal moment will be if or when governments implement carbon credit or carbon tax programs that would penalize low-cost aluminum made in plants in China and India that use power from coal-fired plants."

Ford has revealed that it spent last year conducting the "mother of all road trips" for its upcoming BlueCruise system, sending five Mustang Mach-E crossovers and five F-150 trucks on a collective 110,000-mile journey across the US and Canada. Engadget reports: The aim, to no one's surprise, was to gauge how BlueCruise handled in a wide range of realistic road and traffic conditions. Ford had already racked up 500,000 miles of development testing, but these were shorter, narrowly-focused dry runs. The road trips helped Ford look for changes in everything from road signs to weather while traveling cross-country.

BlueCruise will reach 2021 Mustang Mach-E and F-150 models later in the second half of the year through a software update, although you'll need the Co-Pilot360 Active 2.0 Prep Package. Like Super Cruise, it relies on looking for "prequalified" highway sections and verifies that you're paying attention to the road. You really can take your hands off the wheel, but you'll have to be ready to intervene when you either leave the BlueCruise-ready area or face an unexpected issue on the road.

innocent_white_lamb writes: The Saskatchewan government will implement a new tax for passenger electric vehicles. The announcement was made Tuesday. The new $150 annual tax on passenger electric vehicles (EVs) will take effect Oct. 1, 2021. The government said the reason for this tax is that EVs do not contribute to highway maintenance through the provincial fuel tax. The new tax will be collected when the vehicle is registered. The province says it will continue to examine the future potential for expanding the EV tax to commercial vehicles and inter-jurisdictional trucking. The province will also consider options to apply a tax at EV charging stations.

The NBA expects all arenas to be at full capacity next season, thanks to increased COVID-19 testing and more vaccines being administered. Another key aspect toward that effort is the NBA's new multiyear leaguewide partnership with Clear, a biometric screening company known for its expedited security process at hundreds of airports worldwide. ESPN reports: The partnership makes Clear's COVID-19 health screening technology available to all 30 teams in their NBA arenas, and it's expected to help facilitate more fans returning to games, though it's up to each team how to use the technology. Conversations for a leaguewide partnership began in early September. This is Clear's first leaguewide partnership with a professional sports league, but the company has been working with teams in MLS, MLB, NHL and the NFL. Clear first rolled out this program in a leaguewide format with the NHL's bubble season across two cities in Canada last year.

As it pertains to attendance, fans can download the Clear app and upload an identifying document along with a selfie. To link their COVID-19 test results, fans log into their testing account through the app, and results will be linked to their health pass. Before entering the venue, fans can open the app, verify their identity with another selfie and then answer health survey questions. (There are also expected to be an unspecified number of Clear kiosks where fans receive a temperature check and scan their QR code.) Fans are issued a red or green notification depending on their COVID-related health information. A Clear spokesperson noted that the arenas only receive information about whether a fan has passed the requirements for access and not any private health information from the individual. They said that the Clear program is scalable, and could facilitate thousands of fans entering arenas.

Uber and Lyft said U.S. drivers on their ride-hail platforms were earning significantly more than before the pandemic as trip demand outstrips driver supply, prompting the companies to offer extra incentives. From a report: Uber on Wednesday said it would invest an additional $250 million to boost driver earnings and offer payment guarantees in an effort to incentivize new and existing drivers. Uber's Vice President of U.S. & Canada Mobility, Dennis Cinelli, in a blog post told drivers to take advantage of higher earnings before pay returns to pre-COVID-19 levels as more drivers return to the platform. Lyft on Tuesday said drivers in the company's top-25 markets were earning an average of $36 per hour compared to $20 per hour pre-pandemic. Those numbers include tips, but Lyft did not disclose the share of tips in earnings. Lyft is also offering additional incentives and promotions in select markets. Further reading: Uber and Lyft have a driver shortage problem, and it's costing them a lot of money

180 miles east of Seattle, "A pressure vessel from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage fell on a man's farm in Washington State last week," reports the Verge, "leaving a '4-inch dent in the soil,' the local sheriff's office said Friday."

Space.com reports: Although Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered 60 Starlink satellites to orbit last month, the rocket's second stage didn't deorbit properly after completing the mission. The second stage is the smaller, upper part of the Falcon 9 rocket that separates from the main booster to take satellites to their intended orbit. While the main booster returns to Earth for a landing (so SpaceX can refurbish and reuse it on future launches), once the second stage has completed its role in the mission, it is either intentionally destroyed or left to linger in orbit.

Typically it conducts a "deorbit burn" that sends the craft on a safe trajectory to burn up in the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean. But this time, something went wrong: According to Ars Technica, "there was not enough propellant after this launch to ignite the Merlin engine and complete the burn. So the propellant was vented into space, and the second stage was set to make a more uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere." So, instead of burning up over the ocean, the rocket stage ended up breaking up in the sky over the Pacific Northwest — the fiery display visible not only from Washington but also from surrounding states and parts of Canada — just after 9 p.m. local time on Thursday, March 25, or midnight EDT (0400 GMT) on Friday, March 26.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, calls it "a bit of a puzzle" that the stage wasn't de-orbited under control back on March 4, telling the Verge that it "looks like something went wrong, but SpaceX has said nothing about it. However, reentries of this kind happen every couple of weeks. It's just unusual that it happens over a densely populated area, just because that's a small fraction of the Earth."

April 2nd was "World Autism Awareness Day." This prompted Salon to ask: What would a good representation of autism in the media look like? When you talk to people who are neurodiverse, one problem they consistently identify is that even well-developed characters who seem to be on the spectrum are frequently "coded" — that is, they are given personality traits associated with autism but are never directly identified as being autistic.

"I have yet to seen a portrayal in the media that feels genuine," Becca Hector, an autism and neurodiversity consultant and mentor in Colorado, told Salon via Facebook. After noting the prevalence of autistic stereotyping in media, and particularly the entertainment industry, she added that "the closest they ever got, in my opinion, is Temperance Bones from the TV show 'Bones.'" Hector praised how the character "acted" autistic and the people around her responded with a mixture of laughter and exasperation, which struck her as realistic. At the same time, Bones was "absolutely coded."

Jen Elcheson, a 39-year-old autistic paraeducator and published author living in western Canada, agreed with Hector about Bones in the Facebook conversation. "Honestly, I find autistic coded characters easier to relate to in entertainment than the ones they purposely make autistic," she observed. "Because when they do it deliberately, it's usually characters laden in all the stereotypes."
Although Elcheson argued the alternative was also bad.

"When characters are coded not only does the greater public miss out on seeing a different depiction of an autistic that isn't a stereotype, but the autistic community once again experiences erasure."

hackingbear shares a report from The Guardian: Residents [in the Canadian province of New Brunswick] first learned of the investigation last week after a leaked memo from the province's public health agency asked physicians to be on the lookout for (neurological) symptoms similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). For more than a year public health officials have been tracking a "cluster" of 43 cases of suspected neurological disease in the province with no known cause. Despite the initial similarities, screening produced no confirmed cases of CJD, a rare, fatal brain disease caused by misformed proteins known as prions. Only a single suspected case was recorded in 2015, but in 2019 there were 11 cases and 24 in 2020. Researchers believe five people have died from the illness. Health officials have refused to disclose the precise locations of the cases. "The majority of cases are linked to the Acadian peninsula, a sparsely populated region in the north-eastern part of the province," the report says. Some of the symptoms include memory loss, vision problems, abnormal jerking movements, unexplained pains, spasms and behavioral changes.