“Twenty five years ago I made a bet in the pages of Wired. It was a bet whether the world would collapse by the year 2020.” So writes the 68-year-old founding executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly. He’d made the bet with a “Luddite-loving doomsayer,” according to Wired — author Kirkpatrick Sale. “Sale while a student in the 1950s co-wrote…
Tag: disaster
Carmakers Face $61 Billion Sales Hit From Pandemic Chip Shortage
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: When the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan in 2011, ocean water flooded factories owned byRenesas Electronics Corp.Production at the swamped facilities ground to a halt — a major hit for Renesas, of course, but also a devastating blow to the Japanese car industry, which depended on Renesas for semiconductors. Lacking chips for…
Does Facebook Have a Joe Biden Problem?
Last week the Democratic party took control of all three branches of the U.S. government — and the BBC’s North America technology reporter notes they dislike Facebook even more now than during the Cambridge Analytica scandal: Since then, Democrats — Joe Biden included — have been appalled by what Facebook has allowed on its platform. Talking to a CNN anchor in…
Record number of billion-dollar disasters in U.S. in 2020
Last year, the U.S. experienced a record-smashing 22 weather and climate disasters that killed at least 262 people and injured scores more. Damages exceeded $1 billion each and totaled approximately $95 billion for all 22 events. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/record-number-billion-dollar-disasters-us-2020…
‘Companies Are Fleeing California. Blame Bad Government.’
Bloomberg Editorial Board: Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle said it would decamp for…
The best science books to read in 2021
From Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster to Chiara Marletto’s revolutionary recasting of physics, The Science of Can and Can’t, 2021 is a blockbuster year for popular science books Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24833140-400-the-best-science-books-to-read-in-2021/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Unsafe levels of radiation found in Chernobyl crops
Crops grown near the Chernobyl nuclear site in Ukraine are still contaminated with radiation from the explosive 1986 disaster. Source: https://www.livescience.com/chernobyl-radioactive-isotopes-crops.html
How Bill Gates Would Fight Climate Change
“There’s another global disaster we also need to try to prevent,” Bill Gates wrote on his blog Thursday: “climate change.” As I have tried to make clear on this blog over the past two years, we have only some of the tools we need to eliminate the world’s greenhouse gases. We need breakthroughs in the way we generate and store clean…
Tiny island survived tsunami that helped separate Britain and Europe
A tsunami swept across the North Sea 8150 years ago – but the Dogger archipelago that existed in the area at the time survived the disaster Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2261173-tiny-island-survived-tsunami-that-helped-separate-britain-and-europe/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Double climate disaster may have ended ancient Harappan civilisation
The Harappan lived 5200 years ago in the Indus valley in huge complicated cities before the society eventually disappeared. Now it seems that two droughts in short succession could have been responsible for the downfall Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2261018-double-climate-disaster-may-have-ended-ancient-harappan-civilisation/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…