The state of Utah has the largest saltwater lake in the entire western hemisphere — but it's like the tide went out and never came back, warns the New York Times. [Alternate URL here.]

"If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here's what's in store." The lake's flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.

Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous.

The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah's population. "We have this potential environmental nuclear bomb that's going to go off if we don't take some pretty dramatic action," said Joel Ferry, a Republican state lawmaker and rancher who lives on the north side of the lake.

As climate change continues to cause record-breaking drought, there are no easy solutions. Saving the Great Salt Lake would require letting more snowmelt from the mountains flow to the lake, which means less water for residents and farmers. That would threaten the region's breakneck population growth and high-value agriculture — something state leaders seem reluctant to do. Utah's dilemma raises a core question as the country heats up: How quickly are Americans willing to adapt to the effects of climate change, even as those effects become urgent, obvious, and potentially catastrophic...?

Until recently, that hydrological system existed in a delicate balance... [T]wo changes are throwing that system out of balance. One is explosive population growth, diverting more water from those rivers before they reach the lake. The other shift is climate change, according to Robert Gillies, a professor at Utah State University and Utah's state climatologist. Higher temperatures cause more snowpack to transform to water vapor, which then escapes into the atmosphere, rather than turning to liquid and running into rivers. More heat also means greater demand for water for lawns or crops, further reducing the amount that reaches the lake....

The lake's surface area, which covered about 3,300 square miles in the late 1980s, has since shrunk to less than 1,000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

"Power-hungry, fossil-fuel dependent Japan has successfully tested a system that could provide a constant, steady form of renewable energy, regardless of the wind or the sun," reports Bloomberg: For more than a decade, Japanese heavy machinery maker IHI Corp. has been developing a subsea turbine that harnesses the energy in deep ocean currents and converts it into a steady and reliable source of electricity.... Called Kairyu, the 330-ton prototype is designed to be anchored to the sea floor at a depth of 30-50 meters (100-160 feet).

In commercial production, the plan is to site the turbines in the Kuroshio Current, one of the world's strongest, which runs along Japan's eastern coast, and transmit the power via seabed cables.... Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) estimates the Kuroshio Current could potentially generate as much as 200 gigawatts — about 60% of Japan's present generating capacity....

Japan is already the world's third largest generator of solar power and is investing heavily in offshore wind, but harnessing ocean currents could provide the reliable baseline power needed to reduce the need for energy storage or fossil fuels.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article!

NPR reports: Just last month [Apple] decided to postpone its plan after more than 1,000 current and former employees signed an open letter called the plan inefficient, inflexible and a waste of time. "Stop treating us like school kids who need to be told when to be where and what homework to do," they wrote. It was yet more evidence of the shift in the balance of power between management and rank and file, as demand for workers has hit record highs in the past year.

Companies are finding it hard to enforce unpopular policies and mandates when they fear their workers could just walk away.... Google maps workers, who are employed by the tech company Cognizant, also decided to fight back. They connected with the Alphabet Workers Union and signed a petition citing COVID fears, the costs of commuting amid $5 gas, and the increase in productivity and morale that employees have experienced while working from home.... "Our first day back to the Bothell office full-time will now be September 6," the company said in a statement released on Thursday.

Even as some companies seek to bring back some semblance of office life, others are asking: What is the office for anyway?
In an iconic moment, NPR's reporter also visited a management consulting firm, where their new human resources worker (who started in May) admits that "It's hard to even fathom going into the office 100%. I don't think I could do it ever again."

Saturday the New York Times also reported that some corporate leaders "might find themselves fighting a culture shift beyond their control.... [Non-paywalled version here]

"If the pandemic's two-plus years of remote work experimentation have taught us anything, it's that many people can be productive outside the office, and quite a few are happier doing so." Even as the pandemic has changed course, there are signs that the work-from-home trend is actually accelerating. One recent survey published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that employers are now saying they will allow employees to work from home an average of 2.3 days per week, up from 1.5 days in the summer of 2020.

It's not just the office — it's also the commute. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that almost all of the major cities with the biggest drops in office occupancy during the pandemic had an average one-way commute of more than 30 minutes; and most cities with the smallest drops had shorter commutes.

This week saw the premiere of The Orville: New Horizons on Hulu — a third season, now streaming after two seasons on broadcast TV from 2017 to 2019. Seth MacFarlane (the show's creator/star) tells the Hollywood Reporter how that will change the Orville: "The biggest difference for me being on Hulu is that I don't have to tell a story that's exactly 43 minutes long every week because I have to make room for a certain number of commercials.

"That's not how storytelling works — different stories are different lengths, and you start to fall into this cadence where you're shaving scenes down, you're cutting things that don't need to be cut. The best part about being on Hulu is that those moments where you want to linger on an actor's face because it's meaningful and it helps to tell the story? You can do that. You have the time; you can be indulgent in that way."
MacFarlane tells TV Guide the series is now "a dramatic sci-fi show with comedic elements that come about from the character's personalities." And MacFarlane tells ABC News, "I think people can expect a lot more than they think they can." It's not just Covid that's the reason that it's taken so long. It's a pretty massive uptick in scope. We're only doing 10 episodes, as opposed to 12, they're longer episodes. The scope of these episodes is much more film-like. I think people are a little unprepared for what's to come. Disney and Hulu really gave us the resources to do this right, and we've put it all on the screen.
Long-time Slashdot reader Marxist Hacker 42 wrote a journal entry (with some spoilers) about the new season's premiere episode, noting "a very powerful morality tale" that led to a fifth act with "some prime technobabble worthy of the show's Star Trek heritage." (While long-time Slashdot reader antdude calls it "better than the newer Star Trek like Picard," long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo calls it "an enjoyable watch, and would have been the highlight of the week if it wasn't for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds overshadowing it."

GameRant argues that The Orville in general "is actually truer to the Star Trek spirit than any of the franchise's contemporary entries."

And the series will also stay true to its Yaphit, reports Yahoo Entertainment: Behind the scenes, The Orville team bid farewell to one longtime crew member during the production of Season 3. Comedian Norm Macdonald has voiced fan favorite character, Lt. Yaphit, since the show's freshman year and completed recording his dialogue prior to his death from leukemia last September.

MacFarlane says that he wasn't aware of Macdonald's illness during their three-season collaboration. "As I finish the episodes, the emotion that I feel more than anything is gratitude that he left us with all this great stuff," he remarks. "I was very moved by the fact that he had continued to record for us and continued to play this part. As sad as it is, I'm happy there's more Norm yet to come through The Orville."

Asked whether Macdonald's passing means that Yaphit's tenure aboard The Orville will also conclude at the end of Season 3, MacFarlane suggests that fans may not have seen the last of the gelatinous lieutenant. "We do have a plan," he teases. "We would not do Yaphit without Norm, but there is a plan for how we are going to handle it if we are lucky enough to do Season 4." (As of now, a fourth season is up in the air as the cast's contracts have expired.)

Greece has passed its first climate law, which sets out specific targets to fight climate change and wean itself off coal in power generation by 2028. From a report: The legislation sets interim targets for Greece to cut greenhouse emissions by at least 55% by 2030 and by 80% by 2040 before achieving zero-net emissions by 2050. It also engages the country to cut dependence on fossil fuels, including weaning off indigenous lignite or brown coal -- once the main source of energy -- in electricity production from 2028 onwards. This target might be brought forward to 2025, taking into account security of supplies. "It's an existential matter, a very important one, because it has to do with our lives, because it has to do with our children's lives," Energy Minister Kostas Skrekas told lawmakers before the vote. "Is this just going to help protect the environment? ÎÎ, it's not. It also helps the country's energy security."

Technology entrepreneur Michael Dell once again finds himself at the center of one of his industry's biggest deals. From a report: Dell holds a roughly $16.2 billion stake in VMware, meaning he's likely to have a important say in a potential takeover of the cloud-computing provider by chip maker Broadcom. The two companies are in talks about a transaction, Bloomberg News reported Sunday. While it's not known what price Broadcom is willing to pay for VMware, which has a market value of $40 billion, it may have to offer a sizable premium to get the company's shareholders on board. VMware's market capitalization touched $70 billion as recently as October, when Dell's interest would have been worth some $28 billion. Shares in VMware rose 15% in premarket trading on Monday, which would value the company at about $46 billion.

2016: "Wells Fargo Fires 5,300 Employees For Creating Millions of Phony Accounts"
2017: "Up To 1.4M More Fake Wells Fargo Accounts Possible"

The headlines kept coming.... ("Wells Fargo Hit With 'Unprecedented' Punishment Over Fake Accounts..." "Wells Fargo Employee Informed the Bank of Fake Customer Accounts in 2006")

But this week the New York Times reported a new allegation — involving fake job interviews: Joe Bruno, a former executive in the wealth management division of Wells Fargo, had long been troubled by the way his unit handled certain job interviews. For many open positions, employees would interview a "diverse" candidate — the bank's term for a woman or person of color — in keeping with the bank's yearslong informal policy. But Mr. Bruno noticed that often, the so-called diverse candidate would be interviewed for a job that had already been promised to someone else. He complained to his bosses. They dismissed his claims. Last August, Mr. Bruno, 58, was fired. In an interview, he said Wells Fargo retaliated against him for telling his superiors that the "fake interviews" were "inappropriate, morally wrong, ethically wrong." Wells Fargo said Mr. Bruno was dismissed for retaliating against a fellow employee.

Mr. Bruno is one of seven current and former Wells Fargo employees who said that they were instructed by their direct bosses or human resources managers in the bank's wealth management unit to interview "diverse" candidates — even though the decision had already been made to give the job to another candidate.

Five others said they were aware of the practice, or helped to arrange it...

Third Position shares a report from The Verge: Elon Musk says his deal to buy Twitter is "temporarily on hold" after the social network reported that false or spam accounts comprised less than 5 percent of its 226 million monetizable daily active users. The Tesla CEO, who offered to buy twitter for $44 billion, tweeted a link to a May 2nd Reuters report on Twitter's filing, saying he wants to see the company's calculations.

"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," Musk tweeted. However, in a follow-up tweet, he added that he's "still committed to [the] acquisition," suggesting that it'll proceed after Twitter provides satisfactory information on its numbers. Slashdot reader Excelcia shared a similar report from the BBC, which cited analysts speculating "he could be seeking to renegotiate the price or even walk away from the takeover."

"One analyst, as quoted in the story, suggests that 'Many will view this as Musk using this Twitter filing/spam accounts as a way to get out of this deal in a vastly changing market,'" writes Excelcia. "Shares have dropped another 10% since the announcement."

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is introducing legislation that would strip the Walt Disney Company of special copyright protections granted to the corporation by Congress, while also limiting the length of new copyrights. From a report: The "Copyright Clause Restoration Act of 2022" would cap the length of copyrights given corporations by Congress to 56 years and retroactively implement this change on companies, including Walt Disney. "The age of Republican handouts to Big Business is over. Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists. It's time to take away Disney's special privileges and open up a new era of creativity and innovation," Hawley told Fox News Digital in an exclusive statement. According to Hawley's office, Congress has used an old law, also known as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," in order to extend copyrights to corporations for up to 120 years. Instead of issuing copyright protections to create enough monopoly protection in order to foster innovation, companies are getting handouts from Congress for a much longer period than needed.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that she believes the Federal Reserve can bring down inflation without causing a recession because of a strong U.S. job market and household balance sheets, low debt costs and a strong banking sector. From a report: Yellen told a U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee hearing on Thursday that "all of those things suggest that the Fed has a path to bring down inflation without causing a recession, and I know it will be their objective to try to accomplish that."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: President Nayib Bukele's Bitcoin gambit is becoming onerous for cash-strapped El Salvador but that isn't stopping him from adding to his stockpile. Bukele's bought 2,301 Bitcoins for the government since making them legal tender back in September, based on his announcements on Twitter. That includes a purchase of 500 coins yesterday as their price plunged below $31,000, extending a wild six-month sell-off. Those tokens are worth $74 million today. That's 28% less than the $103 million Bukele paid for them, according to calculations by Bloomberg.

Bukele has shown himself to be a true believer in crypto, winning attention and admirers from around the world in the process, and says he trades the nation's stockpile of coins on his phone. The 40-year-old has said he will push ahead with plans to issue a $1 billion blockchain bond to fund the construction of Bitcoin City, an income and capital gains tax-free jurisdiction he hopes to create on the country's coast. Bukele tweeted pictures on Monday of a mockup for the planned city, which includes an international airport. It would use geothermal energy from a nearby volcano. According to JPMorgan's emerging market bond index, El Salvador's dollar bonds have pluged 24% this year, "as concern mounts that the government will fail to pay back $800 million of notes that come due in January," notes Bloomberg. "Moody's cut the government's credit rating to Caa3 last week, citing an increased risk of default."

A coalition of tech giants, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, have pledged support for a New York bill that would ban the use of controversial search warrants that can identify people based on their location data and internet search keywords. From a report: In a brief statement, the coalition known as Reform Government Surveillance said it "supports the adoption of New York Assembly Bill A84A, the Reverse Location Search Prohibition Act, which would prohibit the use of reverse location and reverse keyword searches." The bill, if passed, would become the first state law to ban so-called geofence warrants and keyword search warrants, which rely on demanding tech companies turn over data about users who were near the scene of a crime or searched for particular keywords at a specific point in time. But the bill hasn't moved since it was referred to a committee for discussion in January, the first major hurdle before it can be considered for a floor vote.

Streaming right now on Hulu: a three-hour live special in which two members of something called the "Red Bull Air Force" try to make aviation history, reports People: On Sunday, April 24, Aikins and Farrington will try to switch planes mid-air in a stunt at Sawtooth Airport in Eloy, Arizona, that can be seen exclusively on Hulu, according to a press release from Red Bull. The planes will be "completely empty" and facing the ground when Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington attempt the daring switch, which will air during a three-hour livestream event.

To complete the feat, Aikins and Farrington will fly a pair of Cessna 182 single-seat aircraft up to 14,000 feet before putting them into a vertical nosedive and jumping out, with the goal of skydiving into each other's planes.

The cousins will stop the planes' engines and aim them toward the ground as they complete the stunt. A custom airbrake with the ability to hold the planes in a controlled-descent terminal velocity speed of 140 mph will also be utilized to complete the trick. After catching up to the opposing stuntman's plane, Aikins and Farrington will enter the cockpits and turn the planes back on as normal, piloting them to land.

Aikins is an experienced skydiver, having completed more than 21,000 jumps throughout his career. Farrington, meanwhile, has completed 27,000 jumps.
"I call it more calculated than crazy," Aikins says in an interview with the web site Complex. "We work really hard to make sure that everything's going to be okay. We don't flip a coin and fingers crossed and hope it all works out. We mitigate the risk down to something that's acceptable and what's acceptable to me."

"The U.S. Space Command announced this week that it determined a 2014 meteor hit that hit Earth was from outside the solar system," reports CBS News. "The meteor streaked across the sky off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea three years earlier than what was believed to be the first confirmed interstellar object detected entering our solar system."

After Oumuamua was spotted in 2017, the interstellar comet Borisov appeared in 2019 — discovered in Crimea, Ukraine at a "personal observatory" built by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov"

But CBS notes that despite their theory about a first interstellar meteor in 2014, the two Harvard astronomers — Dr. Amir Siraj and Dr. Abraham Loeb — "had trouble getting their paper published, because they used classified information from the government." Specifically, data from a classified U.S. government satellite designed to detect foreign missiles... The meteor was unusual because of its very high speed and unusual direction — which suggested it came from interstellar space.... Any space object traveling more than about 42 kilometers per second may come from interstellar space. The data showed the 2014 Manus Island fireball hit the Earth's atmosphere at about 45 kilometers per second, which was "very promising" in identifying it as interstellar, Siraj said....

After more research and help from other scientists, including classified information from the government about the accuracy or level of precision of the data, Siraj and Loeb determined with 99.999% certainty the object was interstellar. But their paper on the finding was being turned down, because the pair only had a private conversation with an anonymous U.S. government employee to confirm the accuracy of the data.
"We had thought this was a lost cause," Dr. Siraj told the New York Times — which couldn't resist adding that "it turned out, the truth was out there." Last month, the U.S. Space Command released a memo to NASA scientists that stated the data from the missile warning satellites' sensors "was sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory" for the meteor. The publication of the memo was the culmination of a three-year effort by Siraj and a well-known Harvard astronomer, Avi Loeb.

Many scientists, including those at NASA, say that the military still has not released enough data to confirm the interstellar origins of the space rock, and a spokesperson said Space Command would defer to other authorities on the question.

But it wasn't the only information about meteors to be released. The military also handed NASA decades of secret military data on the brightness of hundreds of other fireballs, or bolides. "It's an unusual degree of visibility of a set of data coming from that world," said Matt Daniels, assistant director for space security at the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, who worked on the data release. "We're in this renewed period of excitement and activity in space programs generally, and in the midst of that, I think thoughtful leaders in multiple places said, 'you know, now is a good time to do this.'"
The Times notes that data from classified military satellites "could also aid NASA in its federally assigned role as defender of planet Earth from killer asteroids. And that is the goal of a new agreement with the U.S. Space Force that aims to help NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office better understand what happens when space rocks reach the atmosphere." Sharing sensitive military satellite data with astronomers has led to significant scientific discoveries in the past.

A group of satellites deployed in the 1960s by the United States to detect covert detonations of nuclear weapons on Earth accidentally became the key instruments used to make the first detection of extraterrestrial gamma ray bursts. The bursts showed up on the satellites, code-named Vela, as single bursts of energy, confusing analysts at Los Alamos who later declassified the data in a 1973 paper that spurred academic debate about the bursts' origins....

A core reason for Space Force's increasing ties with NASA has centered on the agency's congressional mandate to detect nearly all asteroids that could threaten the Earth. When NASA signed an agreement in 2020 to strengthen ties with Space Force, the agency acknowledged it had fallen behind in its asteroid-tracking efforts and would need Pentagon resources to carry out its planetary defense mission.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo Finance: A single mom who signed up for a $30,000 income-share agreement at a for-profit coding bootcamp has filed a lawsuit in California, alleging she entered the agreement under "false pretenses." Redmond, Washington-based Emily Bruner is suing Bloom Institute of Technology, formerly known as Lambda School, and its head Austen Allred, alleging they misrepresented job placement rates, operated without a license during her course of study, and hid the "true nature" of the school's financial interest in students' success. "I feel like Lambda misled me at every turn -- about their job placement rates and about how they would prepare us for jobs in the field. I was even more shocked when I found out they were operating illegally," Bruner said in a press release. "I took time away from my young son and other career opportunities to participate in a program based on lies," added Bruner, who's seeking a refund from the school as well as monetary damages. "While I'm thankful I opted out of arbitration so I can have my day in court, I wish my classmates who were also misled could be here with me."

Income-share agreements, known as ISAs, are an alternative type of student loan financing where a borrower receives a loan, then pays a percentage of their income after graduation. The terms of an ISA depends on various factors, such as their major topic of study and projected future earnings. [...] Bruner, the plaintiff, signed her ISA on June 29, 2019 when she was living in New Mexico because she could not pay the full tuition amount to attend Lambda full-time, according to the lawsuit. She says she moved back home to North Carolina to live with her parents, who would help her take care of her baby. She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science programs offered by San Francisco-based Lambda, according to the complaint. Bruner started school in September 2019 and finished the following August. Students at Lambda agree to pay 17% of their post-Lambda salary for 24 months once they make more than $50,000 a year, according to the lawsuit.

After graduating, she couldn't find a job as a web developer or a software engineer, and was, according to the lawsuit, told by employers that "she did not have the technical skills for the job, and that her education had not prepared her to be a web developer." Bruner ended up going back to program management, a field she was working in prior to attending Lambda. In the lawsuit, she alleged that Lambda misrepresented the fact that it did not have necessary approval from the state regulator, the California Bureau for Postsecondary Education. She also alleged that the school falsified and misrepresented the school's job placement rates. Finally she also alleged that the school hid the true nature of its financial interest in students' success -- specifically by "falsely representing" that Lambda only was compensated when students found jobs and earned income.

Alphabet's Google said on Wednesday it plans to invest about $9.5 billion across its U.S. offices and data centers this year, up from $7 billion last year. From a report: Google said the investment will create at least 12,000 full-time jobs in 2022 and focus on data centers in several states including Nevada, Nebraska and Virginia. The company will open a new office in Atlanta this year, and expand its data center in Storey County, Nevada, it added. "It might seem counterintuitive to step up our investment in physical offices even as we embrace more flexibility in how we work. Yet we believe it's more important than ever to invest in our campuses...," Google said in a statement. Google has been trying to bring back its employees to some of its offices in the United States, the UK and Asia Pacific by mandating working from office for about three days a week, a step to end policies that let employees work remotely because of COVID-19 concerns.

Amazon workers only make up a third of US warehouse employees, but in 2021, they suffered 49 percent of the injuries for the entire warehouse industry, according to a report by advocacy group Strategic Organizing Center (or SOC). The Verge reports: After analyzing data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the union coalition found that Amazon workers are twice as likely to be seriously injured than people who work in warehouses for other companies. The report considers "serious injuries" to be ones where workers either have to take time off to recover or have their workloads reduced, following OSHA's report classification (pdf) of "cases with days away from work" and "cases with job transfer or restriction." The data shows that, over time, the company has been shifting more toward putting people on light duty, rather than having them take time off. The report authors also note that Amazon workers take longer to recover from injuries than employees at other companies: around 62 days on average, versus 44 across the industry.

Amazon employees have said it's not the work itself that's particularly dangerous but rather the grueling pace the company's automated systems demand. Amazon actually had workers go slower in 2020 to help combat COVID-19, which accounts for the notably lower injury rates that year. But, as the report notes, the injuries increased by around 20 percent between 2020 and 2021 as the company resumed its usual pace -- though the injury rates for 2021 were still lower than they were in 2019. [...] Unfortunately, this study's results tell the same story we've been hearing for years. Even with its reduced injury rates in 2020, Amazon workers were still hurt twice as often as other warehouse workers, according to SOC. Further reading: Amazon Workers At 100 More Facilities Want To Unionize (Yahoo Finance)

The newest member of Twitter's board of directors just tweeted "Is Twitter dying?"

That would be Elon Musk — who'd preceded the question with a list of Twitter's ten most-followed accounts, noting that most of them "tweet rarely and post very little content." And in follow-up tweets, Musk pointed out that Taylor Swift hasn't posted anything in three months, while Justin Bieber "only posted once this entire year."

When someone posted a bar graph showing that Twitter's user count continued to grow, Musk posted a reply which he's since pinned to the top of his own Twitter feed.

"Now subtract crypto scam accounts that twitter constantly shows as 'real' people in everyone's feed"

This isn't the first time Elon Musk has posted something interesting on Twitter, reports AFP: On Thursday, Musk tweeted a photo of himself smoking marijuana on a Joe Rogan podcast in 2018, with the caption, "Twitter's next board meeting is gonna be lit."
About an hour ago Musk also shared a graph from YouGov (a British market research and data analytics firm) showing that Democrats and Republicans have starkly different levels of trust in major news sources. On the chart Republicans show an average "trustworthiness" rating above 50% for just two of the 22 news outlets: Fox News and the Weather Channel.

Above the chart Musk added the words, "Truth is the first casualty."

Two minutes later he followed that tweet with an equally cryptic remark.

"69.420% of statistics are false."

The New York Times reports: Pristine slivers of the impactor that killed the dinosaurs have been discovered, said scientists studying a North Dakota site that is a time capsule of that calamitous day 66 million years ago... "If you're able to actually identify it, and we're on the road to doing that, then you can actually say, 'Amazing, we know what it was,'" Robert DePalma, a paleontologist spearheading the excavation of the site, said Wednesday during a talk at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt....

A New Yorker article in 2019 described the site in southwestern North Dakota, named Tanis, as a wonderland of fossils buried in the aftermath of the impact some 2,000 miles away. Many paleontologists were intrigued but uncertain about the scope of DePalma's claims; a research paper published that year by DePalma and his collaborators mostly described the geological setting of the site, which once lay along the banks of a river. When the object hit Earth, carving a crater about 100 miles wide and nearly 20 miles deep, molten rock splashed into the air and cooled into spherules of glass, one of the distinct calling cards of meteor impacts. In the 2019 paper, DePalma and his colleagues described how spherules raining down from the sky clogged the gills of paddlefish and sturgeon, suffocating them.

Usually the outsides of impact spherules have been mineralogically transformed by millions of years of chemical reactions with water. But at Tanis, some of them landed in tree resin, which provided a protective enclosure of amber, keeping them almost as pristine as the day they formed.... Finding amber-encased spherules, he said, was the equivalent of sending someone back in time to the day of the impact, "collecting a sample, bottling it up and preserving it for scientists right now...."

DePalma said there also appear to be some bubbles within some of the spherules. Because the spherules do not look to be cracked, it's possible that they could hold bits of air from 66 million years ago.
In 1998, UCLA geochemist Frank Kyte claimed he'd found a fragment of that meteor in a core sample drilled off Hawaii, the article points out, "but other scientists were skeptical that any bits of the meteor could have survived."

But now DePalma tells the Times that this North Dakota discovery "actually falls in line with what Frank Kyte was telling us years ago."

The western United States, "once a beacon for all that was new and hopeful in America, could become an example of the grim, apocalyptic future the nation faces from climate change," writes USA Today. Long-time Slashdot reader Klaxton shares their report: The last five years already have been harrowing. Whole neighborhoods burned down to foundations. Children kept indoors because the air outside is too dangerous to play in. Killer mudslides of burned debris destroying towns. Blood-red skies that are so dark at midday, the streetlights come on and postal workers wear headlamps to deliver the mail.

And it's going to get worse unless dramatic action is taken, two studies published this week forecast.

The first predicts the growth of wildfires could cause dangerous air quality levels to increase during fire season by more than 50% over the next 30 years in the Pacific Northwest and parts of northern California....

The danger stretches across the United States. Wildfire smoke can travel hundreds and even thousands of miles. In July, smoke from Western wildfires triggered air quality alerts and caused smoky skies and red-orange haze in New York, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston.
Meanwhile, a second study "shows how expected increases in wildfires and intense rain events could result in more devastating flash floods and mudslides across a broad portion of the West," the article reports. Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist/dean at the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability, tells the newspaer, "Even climate scientists are scared."

And Bruce Cain, director of Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West, hoped the studies would inspire a meaningful response. "It's a kick in the pants to get stuff done."