More than two years and a company rebrand later, Meta is finally opening up access to its VR social platform Horizon Worlds. Starting Thursday, people in the US and Canada who are 18 and up will be able to access the free Quest app without an invite. From a report: Horizon Worlds is Meta's first attempt at releasing something that resembles CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the metaverse. It's an expansive, multiplayer platform that meshes Roblox and the OASIS VR world from Ready Player One. Originally just called Horizon, it requires a Facebook account and lets you hang out with up to 20 people at a time in a virtual space. First announced in September 2019 as a private beta, Horizon Worlds has evolved from primarily being a Minecraft-like environment for building games to more of a social platform. Its thousands of beta testers have held regular comedy shows, movie nights, and meditation sessions. They've also built elaborate objects like a replica of the Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters. "Now we can open up and say we have interesting things that people can do," Vivek Sharma, Meta's VP of Horizon, tells me.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Decrypt: Today, the publisher behind Assassin's Creed and Just Dance revealed Ubisoft Quartz, a platform that lets players earn and purchase in-game items that are tokenized as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain. Quartz will launch first in the PC version of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, the latest online game in the long-running tactical shooter series. Quartz will launch in beta on December 9 in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, and Australia. Ghost Recon Breakpoint players who have reached XP level 5 in the game can access the NFT drops. Ubisoft's release says that players must be at least 18 years old to create a Tezos wallet for use with the game.

Ubisoft is referring to its NFT drops as "Digits" and plans to release free NFTs for early adopters on December 9, 12, and 15, with further drops planned for 2022. An infographic shows items such as weapon skins and unique armor and apparel, along with a message that teases future initiatives: "This is just the beginning" [...] Much of Ubisoft's announcement today highlights the difference in environmental impact between the proof-of-stake Tezos blockchain and the energy-intensive Bitcoin. Tezos claims that a single transaction on its network uses "more than 2 million times less energy" than Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency. It also suggests that a single Tezos transaction uses about as much energy as a 30-second streaming video, whereas a Bitcoin transaction is estimated to measure up to the environmental impact of a full, uninterrupted year of streaming video footage.

The hunting grounds are apparently widening for one of "nature's most effective predators" reports the New York Times, warning of "potentially significant consequences for animals up and down the food chain...."

"As sea ice has receded, killer whales — which are actually dolphins — are now venturing to parts of the sea that were once inaccessible, and spending more time in places they were once seen only sporadically," according to data presented by research scientist Brynn Kimber (who works in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Marine Mammal Laboratory). Arctic sea ice has declined significantly in the four decades since satellite monitoring began. Roughly 75 percent of ice volume disappeared in the last 15 years alone, and the remaining ice is thinner and of poorer quality, said Amy Willoughby, a marine mammal biologist with NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center. The loss of ice coupled with warming waters and atmospheric temperatures has affected every level of the Arctic ecosystem. Large mammals like polar bears have struggled to navigate shrinking habitats, while the marine algae at the base of the Arctic food chain blooms sooner and more abundantly than ever before.

In recent years, scientists have noticed similar upheaval in the behavior of the region's marine mammals. Orca are feasting more often on bowhead whales. Scientists and Indigenous Arctic communities have noted a growing number of bowhead whale carcasses in the northeastern Chukchi and western Beaufort seas with signs of orca attack....

"Killer whales are really intelligent," said Cory Matthews, a research scientist with the Arctic region of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. "They consume really fast. If a new area opens up, they can get in there maybe within the next year and exploit a prey population that could be perhaps really slow to respond to those changes."

NBC News tells the hair-raising tale of Black Oxygen Organics (or "BOO" for short). Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. "A gift from the Ground," it reads. "Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it." BOO, which "can be taken by anyone at any age, as well as animals," according to the company, claims many benefits and uses, including improved brain function and heart health, and ridding the body of so-called toxins that include heavy metals, pesticides and parasites. By the end of the summer, online ads for BOO had made their way to millions of people within the internet subcultures that embrace fringe supplements, including the mixed martial arts community, anti-vaccine and Covid-denier groups, and finally more general alternative health and fake cure spaces.... "Who would have thought drinking dirt would make me feel so so good?" one person in a 27,000-member private Facebook group posted, her face nuzzling a jar of black liquid....

Teams of sellers in these private Facebook groups claim that, beyond cosmetic applications, BOO can cure everything from autism to cancer to Alzheimer's disease.... But there may be an incentive for the hyperbole... Participation in multi-level marketing (MLM) boomed during the pandemic with 7.7 million Americans working for one in 2020, a 13 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Direct Selling Association, the trade and lobbying group for the MLM industry. Wellness products make up the majority of MLM products, and, as the Federal Trade Commission noted, some direct sellers took advantage of a rush toward so-called natural remedies during the pandemic to boost sales. More than 99 percent of MLM sellers lose money, according to the Consumer Awareness Institute, an industry watchdog group...

The secret to dealing dirt seems to be Facebook, where sellers have created dozens of individual groups that have attracted a hodgepodge of hundreds of thousands of members.
NBC News had a bag analyzed by a professor of soil and environmental science at Ohio State University. It found two doses per day "exceeded Health Canada's limit for lead, and three doses for daily arsenic amounts." Growing concern among BOO sellers about the product — precipitated by an anti-MLM activist who noticed on Google Earth that the bog that sourced BOO's peat appeared to share a border with a landfill — pushed several to take matters into their own hands, sending bags of BOO to labs for testing. The results of three of these tests, viewed by NBC News and confirmed as seemingly reliable by two soil scientists at U.S. universities, again showed elevated levels of lead and arsenic. Those results are the backbone of a federal lawsuit seeking class action status filed in November in Georgia's Northern District court. The complaint, filed on behalf of four Georgia residents who purchased BOO, claims that the company negligently sold a product with "dangerously high levels of toxic heavy metals," which led to physical and economic harm.

Black Oxygen Organics did not respond to requests for comment concerning the complaint.
The anti-MLM forces also formed Facebook groups, monitoring Facebook's pro-Boo sales groups and even documenting sales and company meetings — then filed official complaints with Amreica's product-regulating Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. And it all ended badly for Boo... According to BOO President Carlo Garibaldi, they had weathered the FTC complaints, the FDA seizures, the Health Canada recalls and the online mob. But the "fatal blow" came when their online merchant dropped them as clients....

Members of anti-BOO groups celebrated. "WE DID IT!!!!!!" Ceara Manchester, the group administrator, posted to the "Boo is Woo" Facebook group. "I hope this is proof positive that if the anti-MLM community bans together we can take these companies down. We won't stop with just BOO. A new age of anti-MLM activism has just begun."

In a separate Zoom meeting unattended by executives and shared with NBC News, lower-rung sellers grappled with the sudden closure and the reality that they were out hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Criminals have been selling fake vaccine certificates online and may be able to fool an EU system designed to verify the certificates' validity, researchers warn. BankInfoSecurity reports: [A] report released last week, "COVID-19 Vaccination Certificates in the Dark Web," which has not yet been peer-reviewed, notes that some darknet markets continue to sell supposed vaccine certificates for use in multiple countries. Four researchers - Dimitrios Georgoulias, Jens Myrup Pedersen, Morten Falch, Emmanouil Vasilomanolakis - who are all part of the Cyber Security Group at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark, reviewed vaccination certificate offerings from 17 marketplaces and 10 vendor shops. The researchers found that at least one vendor appears to be selling digital certificates, registered in Italy, that are being read as valid by mobile COVID-19 certificate-checking apps developed by both France and Denmark.

The Aalborg University researchers, however, note that many darknet markets forbid any listing containing any items related to COVID-19. But others, they say, do allow both physical and digital vaccine certificates to be offered for sale, and in some cases also "yellow vaccination cards" or other vaccination record cards that can be used as proof of vaccination, albeit only inside the country in which they were supposedly issued. "The listings are heavily focused on European countries and the United States, but there are also listings from other continents and countries, such as Brazil, Canada, Mexico and Australia," as well as Russia, the researchers write. "The pricing differs greatly between the different listings, with the cheapest certificate starting at $39 and the highest price reaching almost $2,800, which included both a physical and a digital certificate, registered in the United Kingdom," they write. Most markets accept bitcoin and monero cryptocurrencies as payment, they add, while a smaller number also take such digital coins as ethereum, cardano, litecoin and zcash. [...] The Aalborg University researchers note that buying a fake digital certificate gives the seller ample opportunity to scam a buyer.

If these fake COVID-19 certificates can indeed pass for valid ones, then one unanswered question remains: How? Many of the sites claim to have access to the systems used to issue certificates, either by hacking into them remotely, or having insiders who work at a healthcare or other health organization, the researchers say. "In the specific case of a listing on the Russian marketplace Hydra, the description even mentioned the exact location and hospital that the system was accessed from," they say. Another possibility, however, is that criminals have somehow stolen one or more private keys for the European system, which were issued to participating health organizations. If so, it would be difficult to revoke these keys, the researchers say, since doing so would invalidate what might be a large quantity of legitimate certificates too.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: U.S. Space Force's General David Thompson, the service's second in command, said last week that Russia and China are launching "reversible attacks," such as electronic warfare jamming, temporarily blinding optics with lasers, and cyber attacks, on U.S. satellites "every single day." He also disclosed that a small Russian satellite used to conduct an on-orbit anti-satellite weapon test back in 2019 had first gotten so close to an American one that there were concerns an actual attack was imminent.

Thompson, who is Vice Chief of Space Operations, disclosed these details to The Washington Post's Josh Rogin in an interview on the sidelines of the Halifax International Security Forum, which ran from Nov. 19 to 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada. The forum opened just four days after a Russian anti-satellite weapon test involving a ground-launched interceptor, which destroyed a defunct Soviet-era electronic intelligence satellite and created a cloud of debris that presents a risk to the International Space Station (ISS). That test drew widespread condemnation, including from the U.S. government, and prompted renewed discussion about potential future conflicts in space.

"The threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it's really an evolution of activity that's been happening for a long time," Thompson, told Rogin. "We're really at a point now where there's a whole host of ways that our space systems can be threatened." "Right now, Space Force is dealing with what Thompson calls 'reversible attacks' on U.S. government satellites (meaning attacks that don't permanently damage the satellites) 'every single day,'" according to Rogin. "Both China and Russia are regularly attacking U.S. satellites with non-kinetic means, including lasers, radio frequency jammers, and cyber attacks, he said." [...] Thompson's assertion that these kinds of attacks are occurring with extreme frequency is new. It underscores the rapid development and fielding by Russia and China, among others, of a wide variety of anti-satellite capabilities, something the U.S. military has called increasing attention to in recent years. "The Chinese are actually well ahead [of Russia]," Thompson told Rogin. "They're fielding operational systems at an incredible rate." "Thompson could not confirm or deny whether any American satellites had actually been damaged in a Russian or Chinese attack," the report adds. "[H]e told Rogin that even if such a thing had occurred, that very fact would be classified."

He did, however, provide new details about the incident in 2019 where a small Russian satellite released a projectile in one on-orbit anti-satellite weapon test. According to The Drive, "Russia's satellite had first got in very close to a U.S. 'national security satellite' and that 'the U.S. government didn't know whether it was attacking or not.'"

"It maneuvered close, it maneuvered dangerously, it maneuvered threateningly so that they were coming close enough that there was a concern of collision," Thompson said. "So clearly, the Russians were sending us a message."

In the early hours of Tuesday, at a ceremony attended by hundreds of masked officials, a prince and at least one pop star, the Caribbean island of Barbados became a republic, cutting ties with Queen Elizabeth II and casting off the last major vestige of its colonial past. The New York Times: The nation swore in its first president, Sandra Mason, a former governor general who had been appointed by the queen. A 21-gun salute rang out as the national anthem played. The red, yellow and navy blue royal flag was lowered -- exactly 55 years after the country gained independence from Britain. "Today, debate and discourse have become action," Ms. Mason, 72, told the onlookers gathered in the capital, Bridgetown. "Today, we set our compass to a new direction."

Ms. Mason received a majority vote in Parliament in October to take on the role. In a speech afterward, Prime Minister Mia Mottley said: "We believe that the time has come for us to claim our full destiny. It is a woman of the soil to whom this honor is being given." The island nation, a democracy of about 300,000 people, announced in September that it would remove Queen Elizabeth as head of state, the latest Caribbean island to do so. It joined Guyana, which gained independence in 1966 and became a republic in 1970; Trinidad and Tobago, which became independent in 1962 and a republic in 1976; and Dominica, which gained full independence as a republic in 1978. Australia, Canada, Jamaica, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea are among the nations that still call the queen their head of state. Barbados will remain part of the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 54 countries with roots in the British Empire.

Long-time Slashdot reader thisisnotreal writes: Long sought-after, and previously thought impossible — a McMaster University PhD student in Hamilton Canada demonstrates a cost-effective and simple laser in silicon.

This could have dramatic consequences for the SiP (Silicon Photonics) — a hot topic for those working in the field of integrated optics. Integrated optics is a critical technology involved in advanced telecommunications networks, and showing increasing importance in quantum research and devices, such as QKD (Quantum Key Distribution) and in various entanglement type experiments (involved in Quantum Compute).
"This is the holy grail of photonics," says Jonathan Bradley, an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Physics (and the student's co-supervisor) in an announcement from McMaster University. "Fabricating a laser on silicon has been a longstanding challenge." Bradley notes that Miarabbas Kiani's achievement is remarkable not only for demonstrating a working laser on a silicon chip, but also for doing so in a simple, cost-effective way that's compatible with existing global manufacturing facilities. This compatibility is essential, as it allows for volume manufacturing at low cost. "If it costs too much, you can't mass produce it," says Bradley.

LG has appointed a new CEO to lead its electronics business. Starting December 1st, current Chief Strategy Officer William Cho will take over for Bong-seok Kwon as the CEO of LG Electronics. From a report: Meanwhile, according to The Korea Herald, Kwon will head up LG's main holding company. Cho has been with LG Electronics since 1987. Prior to his most recent role, he served as the president of LG Canada, and later had the same role at LG Australia and LG USA. Cho is about to take the reins of LG Electronics at an inflection point for the company. It recently shut down its mobile division in July after the unit failed to make a profit in 23 consecutive quarters. At this point, LG Electronics is probably best known for its TVs and monitors, but there too it faces tough competition from Samsung and a variety of Chinese competitors.

The Israeli government has restricted the list of countries to which local security firms are allowed to sell surveillance and offensive hacking tools by almost two-thirds, cutting the official cyber export list from 102 to 37 entries. From a report: The new list, obtained by Israeli business newspaper Calcalist earlier today, only includes countries with proven democracies, such as those from Europe and the Five Eyes coalition: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US.

The list noticeably removes autocratic regimes, to which Israeli companies have often supplied surveillance tools. Spyware developed by Israeli companies like Candiru and the NSO Group has been linked in recent years to human rights abuses in tens of countries, with the tools being used by the local governments to spy on reporters, activists, dissidents, and political rivals.

China's ban on cryptocurrency mining in May triggered an exodus of miners and a global race to relocate millions of the clunky, power intensive machines they use to solve complex puzzles and earn bitcoin. From a report: Fourteen of the biggest crypto mining companies in the world have moved more than 2m machines out of China in the months following the ban, according to data gathered by the Financial Times. The lion's share of machines was hastily moved to the US, Canada, Kazakhstan and Russia. Bit Digital, one of the largest US-listed crypto mining companies, hired an international logistics firm to extract its property from China and is still waiting for a batch of almost 1,000 machines to be released from the docks at the Port of New York.

"We started our fleet migration in March 2020, which in hindsight was a great move. When the ban was announced we had 20,000 miners in China," said Sam Tabar, chief strategy officer of Bit Digital. Still, the company said it had to abandon 372 machines in China, which had "reached the end of their useful lives." Eight out of the 10 largest public mega farms based in North America have expanded the number of machines in their fleets since China's ban, the FT's figures show.

In what's being referred to as the largest-ever cryptocurrency theft involving one person, police in Canada say they recently arrested a teen who allegedly stole $36.5 million worth of cryptocurrency from a single individual in the U.S. Engadget reports: The owner of the currency was the victim of a SIM swap attack. Their cellphone number was hijacked and used to intercept two-factor authentication requests, thereby allowing access to their protected accounts. Some of the stolen money was used to purchase a "rare" online gaming username, which eventually allowed the Hamilton Police Service, as well as FBI and US Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force, to identify the account holder. Police seized approximately $7 million CAD ($5.5 million) in stolen cryptocurrency when they arrested the teen.

Google launched a beta app today that people with speech impairments can use as a voice assistant while contributing to a multiyear research effort to improve Google's speech recognition. From a report: The goal is to make Google Assistant, as well as other features that use speech to text and speech to speech, more inclusive of users with neurological conditions that affect their speech. The new app is called Project Relate, and volunteers can sign up at g.co/ProjectRelate. To be eligible to participate, volunteers need to be 18 or older and "have difficulty being understood by others." They'll also need a Google account and an Android phone using OS 8 or later. For now, it's only available to English speakers in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They'll be tasked with recording 500 phrases, which should take between 30 to 90 minutes to record.

At its fall 2021 GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Nvidia unveiled Riva Custom Voice, a new toolkit that the company claims can enable customers to create custom, "human-like" voices with only 30 minutes of speech recording data. From a report: According to Nvidia, businesses can use Riva Custom Voice to develop a virtual assistant with a unique voice, while call centers and developers can leverage it to launch brand voices and apps to support people with speech and language disabilities. Brand voices like Progressive's Flo are often tasked with recording phone trees and elearning scripts in corporate training video series. For companies, the costs can add up -- one source pegs the average hourly rate for voice actors at $39.63, plus additional fees for interactive voice response (IVR) prompts. Synthesization could boost actors' productivity by cutting down on the need for additional recordings, potentially freeing the actors up to pursue more creative work -- and saving businesses money in the process. For example, Progressive used AI to create a Facebook Messenger chatbot with the voice of Stephanie Courtney, who plays Flo. KFC in Canada built a voice in a Southern U.S. English accent for the chain's ambassador, Colonel Sanders, in the company's Amazon Alexa app. Duolingo is employing AI to create voices for characters in its language learning apps. And National Australia Bank has deployed an AI-powered Australian English voice for the customers who call into its contact centers.

An investor group led by buyout firms Advent International, Permira Advisers and others agreed to take McAfee private in a deal that values the cybersecurity software maker at more than $14 billion including debt. From a report: The private equity consortium will pay $26 a share in cash, according to a statement Monday. Crosspoint Capital Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, GIC Pvt Ltd. and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority are also part of the group of buyers. The purchase price represents a premium of about 23% over McAfee's closing share price of $21.21 on Nov. 4, the day before Bloomberg News first reported details of the potential deal. The shares were up less than 1% Monday morning in New York to $25.55. McAfee has total debt of about $4 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Founded by cybersecurity entrepreneur John McAfee in 1987, the company was a pioneer in developing antivirus software for personal computers. McAfee left in 1994, and was found dead in a Spanish prison cell in June this year, hours after Spain's National Court approved his extradition to the U.S. over multiple tax fraud charges.

Tonight 70 countries around the world set their clocks back an hour — including most of the United States, Canada, the EU and the UK.

Yet "The practice has drawn complaints about its disruptive effects on sleep and schedules," reports UPI, adding that "The American Academy of Medicine has called for an end to Daylight Saving Time, citing growing research that shows its deleterious effects on health and safety." [U.S.] Lawmakers are also increasingly wondering whether Daylight Saving Time is a good idea. At least 350 bills and resolutions have been introduced in every state taking aim at Daylight Saving Time since 2015, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Over the last four years, 19 states have passed similar legislation providing year-round daylight saving time if Congress allowed such changes.

Members of Congress have introduced legislation making changes to Daylight Saving Time, to no avail.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, (Democrat — Rhode Island), said in a video posted to Twitter on Friday that the upcoming switchover was one of his least favorite times of the year since it means darker afternoons. He touted his Sunshine Protection Act that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent.

"We can do a lot better for daylight for everyone who is up in the afternoon," he said.
Also supporting that change is Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio. "We're about to once again do this annual craziness of changing the clock, falling back, springing forward," Newsweek quotes him as saying. "Let's go to permanent daylight saving time. The overwhelming majority of members of Congress approve and support it. Let's get it done. Let's get it passed so that we never have to do this stupid change again."

But currently in America it's the Department of Transportation which is in charge of the practice, reports USA Today, and the Department believes that the practice saves energy, prevents traffic accidents and curbs crime.

So, as the Washington Post reports, "It's that time of the year again. We change the clocks back and we whine about it."

One cybersecurity expert says the cyberattack on the Newfoundland and Labrador health-care system may be the worst in Canadian history, and has implications for national security. CBC News reports: David Shipley, the CEO of a cybersecurity firm in Fredericton, said he's seen similar breaches before, but usually on a smaller scale. "We've never seen a health-network takedown this large, ever," Shipley said in an interview with CBC News. "The severity of this is what really sets it apart." Discovered on Saturday morning, the cyberattack has delayed thousands of appointments and procedures this week, including almost all non-emergency appointments in the Eastern Health region. After refusing to confirm the cause of the disruption for days, Health Minister John Haggie said Wednesday the system has been victim of a cyberattack. Sources have told CBC News the security breach is a ransomware attack, a type of crime in which hackers gain control of a system and hand back the reins only when a ransom has been paid. [...]

Shipley said he normally argues against giving in to ransom demands but the provincial government might have to pay up in this instance since lives are at stake. The government has not confirmed there has been a ransom demand. On Thursday morning, staff at the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's were told the system used to manage patient health and financial information at the hospital is back online. The system -- called Meditech -- only has information from before last weekend, and will need to be updated. It isn't yet clear what the restoration of the system will mean for services at the hospital, or if the system is back online in other parts of the province.

Long-time Slashdot reader Aighearach shares a report from the BBC: Investigators looking into a series of sightings of a mysterious "jetpack man" flying over Los Angeles say they may in fact have been balloons. The FBI launched an investigation after several pilots reported spotting "a guy in a jetpack" at 3,000ft (915m) above the city's LAX airport last year. But now officials say the pilots may have seen inflatables.

Police helicopter footage apparently shows a Halloween decoration that broke loose and drifted into the sky. The images show what appears to be life-sized balloon effigy of Jack Skellington, from the 1993 Tim Burton film The Nightmare Before Christmas.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo, written by climate reporter Brian Kahn: In a major announcement at United Nations climate talks on Thursday, 20 countries said they would stop funding fossil fuel development abroad and instead plow money into clean energy. The group of countries includes finance heavy-hitters like the U.S., UK, and Canada as well as smaller players like Mali and Costa Rica. An analysis by Oil Change International indicates that the 20 countries plus four other investment institutions who signed on could shift $15 billion annually from funding fossil fuels to clean energy projects. "The signatories of today's statement are doing what's most logical in a climate emergency: stop adding fuel to the fire and shift dirty finance to climate action," Laurie van der Burg, the global public finance campaigns co-manager at Oil Change International, said in an emailed statement.

[T]he agreement doesn't pull funding from projects already in the pipeline (climate joke, please laugh). Between 2018 and 2020, Oil Change International also found, the G20 kicked an estimated $188 billion to fossil fuel projects in other countries. That's a lot of very recent extraction happening. The lack of financing abroad also doesn't mean a lack of financing at home. The U.S. and Canada, for example, are major oil and gas producers. Without a plan to wind down production at home, the pledge to end financing for fossil fuels abroad is a bit like promising you won't lend your neighbor money for cigarettes while you keep smoking a pack a day.

Some of the biggest smokers -- errr, fossil fuel funders -- on the block also didn't sign on. Those include Japan, Korea, and China, which are the biggest fossil fuel backers in the G20, according to Oil Change International. Together, they account for more than $29 billion in annual fossil fuel development abroad. That's a major lifeline for fossil fuel developers. We also still need more details on the pledge to end funding, including how exactly the 20 countries and banks define fossil fuel funding. Lastly, the world's private banks and investment firms also need to sign on.

Joshua Chou writes via The Conversation: Last month the Australian Space Agency announced plans to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon by as early as 2026, under a deal with NASA. The rover will collect lunar soil containing oxygen, which could eventually be used to support human life in space. Although the deal with NASA made headlines, a separate mission conducted by private companies in Australia and Canada, in conjunction with the University of Technology Sydney, may see Australian technology hunting water on the Moon as soon as mid-2024. If all goes according to plan, it will be the first rover with Australian-made components to make it to the Moon.

The ten-kilogram rover, measuring 60x60x50cm, will be launched on board the Hakuto lander made by ispace, a lunar robotic exploration company based in Japan. The rover itself, also built by ispace, will have an integrated robotic arm created by the private companies Stardust Technologies (based in Canada) and Australia's EXPLOR Space Technology (of which I am one of the founders). Using cameras and sensors, the arm will collect high-resolution visual and haptic data to be sent back to the mission control centre at the University of Technology Sydney. It will also collect information on the physical and chemical composition of lunar dust, soil and rocks -- specifically with a goal of finding water. We know water is present within the Moon's soil, but we have yet to find a way to extract it for practical use.