Sunday, December 22

Tag: massive

What Gives Billionaires Like Musk And Abramovich Such A Massive Carbon Footprint
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MONEY

What Gives Billionaires Like Musk And Abramovich Such A Massive Carbon Footprint

Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have been vying for the world’s richest person ranking all year after the former’s wealth soared a staggering US$160 billion in 2020, putting him briefly in the top spot. Musk isn’t alone in seeing a significant increase in wealth during a year of pandemic, recession and death. Altogether, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth surge over $1.9 trillion in 2020, according to Forbes. Those are astronomical numbers, and it’s hard to get one’s head around them without some context. As anthropologists who study energy and consumer culture, we wanted to examine how all that wealth translated into consumption and the resulting carbon footprint. Walking in a billionaire’s shoes We found that billionaires have carbon footprints that can be thousands of...
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A Massive Expansion Of Solar Power, Who Pays And Who Benefits?
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ENVIRONMENT, VIDEO REELS

A Massive Expansion Of Solar Power, Who Pays And Who Benefits?

Felix Mormann, Texas A&M University Electricity generation produces a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change. The electric grid also is highly vulnerable to climate change effects, such as more frequent and severe droughts, hurricanes and other extreme weather events. For both of these reasons, the power sector is central to the Biden administration’s climate policy. President Joe Biden’s proposal to produce 45% of the nation’s electricity from solar energy by 2050 seeks to transform the power sector from problem child into child prodigy. As the details evolve, two cornerstones have emerged. First, Biden has repeatedly called for extending tax credits for solar power and other renewables, at a projected cost of US$200 billion over the next decade. Second...
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What A Massive Flare Seen On The Closest Star To The Solar System Means For Chances Of Alien Neighbors
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SCIENCE

What A Massive Flare Seen On The Closest Star To The Solar System Means For Chances Of Alien Neighbors

The Sun isn’t the only star to produce stellar flares. On April 21, 2021, a team of astronomers published new research describing the brightest flare ever measured from Proxima Centauri in ultraviolet light. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the solar system and is home to a potentially habitable planet. Hubble/European Space Agency/WikimediaCommons, CC BY-SA To learn about this extraordinary event – and what it might mean for any life on the planets orbiting Earth’s closest neighboring star – I spoke with Parke Loyd, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and co-author of the paper. Excerpts from our conversation are below and have been edited for length and clarity. Why were you looking at Proxima Centauri? Proxima Centauri is the closest star to this solar system. A couple...
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Observations From A Cybersecurity Expert – The Sunburst Hack Was Massive And Devastating
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CYBERCRIME

Observations From A Cybersecurity Expert – The Sunburst Hack Was Massive And Devastating

So much remains unknown about what is now being called the Sunburst hack, the cyberattack against U.S. government agencies and corporations. U.S. officials widely believe that Russian state-sponsored hackers are responsible. The attack gave the perpetrators access to numerous key American business and government organizations. The immediate effects will be difficult to judge, and a complete accounting of the damage is unlikely. However, the nature of the affected organizations alone makes it clear that this is perhaps the most consequential cyberattack against the U.S. to date. An act of cyberwar is usually not like a bomb, which causes immediate, well-understood damage. Rather, it is more like a cancer – it’s slow to detect, difficult to eradicate, and it causes ongoing and significant ...
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Massive online open courses see exponential growth during COVID-19 pandemic
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EDUCATION

Massive online open courses see exponential growth during COVID-19 pandemic

Massive open online classes, or MOOCs, have seen a surge in enrollments since March. Enrollment at Coursera – an online platform that offers MOOCs, has skyrocketed and was 640% higher from mid-March to mid-April than during the same period last year, growing from 1.6 to 10.3 million. The surge was driven in part by giving free catalog access for 3,800 courses to their university partners. Enrollment at Udemy – another MOOC provider – was up over 400% between February and March. These surges correspond to lock downs across the world as the pandemic started to rage. As an astronomy professor who teaches and studies MOOCs, I believe there will be a continued shift toward these types of courses as the pandemic forces educators and students alike to rethink the risks associated with in-person...
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