About Half of Global Wastewater Is Treated, Instead of Previous Estimate of 20%, Study Finds

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: The study published Monday in the journal Earth System Science Data, estimated 359 billion cubic meters of wastewater is produced each year — which is “equivalent to 144 million Olympic-sized swimming pools,” Edward Jones, a doctoral researcher at Utrecht University and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. Researchers found that 52% of that…

Party Like It’s 1925 On Public Domain Day

Neda Ulaby, writing for NPR: What a year it was for Anglo-American literature and the arts! 1925 was the year of heralded novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, seminal works by Sinclair Lewis, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Agatha Christie, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley … and a banner year for musicians, too. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, the Gershwins,…

Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestle Named Top Plastic Polluters For Third Year In a Row

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé have been accused of “zero progress” on reducing plastic waste, after being named the world’s top plastic polluters for the third year in a row. Coca-Cola was ranked the world’s No 1 plastic polluter by Break Free From Plastic in its annual audit, after its beverage bottles were…

SpaceX Launches a Falcon 9 Rocket Carrying a Crew Dragon Capsule With Four Astronauts

The big launch finally happens in 2 minutes. “All systems are go for tonight’s launch at 7:27 p.m. EST of Crew Dragon’s first operational mission with four astronauts on board,” SpaceX tweeted this morning. But live coverage is already streaming on SpaceX’s web site. Space.com explains it’s the first operational flight of SpaceX’s “astronaut taxi,” the Crew Dragon:
Called Crew-1, this will…

Why Apple Silicon Needs an Open Source Fortran Compiler

“Earlier this week Apple announced their new, ARM-based ‘Apple Silicon’ machines to the world in a slick marketing event that had many of us reaching for our credit cards,” writes Mike Croucher, technical evangelist at The Numerical Algorithms Group. “Simultaneously, The Numerical Algorithms Group announced that they had ported their Fortran Compiler to the new platform. At the time of writing…

You Can Microwave This Notebook When It’s Full – Then Reuse It Again

A new product wants to upgrade the act of taking notes in a spiral-bound notebook — with the resuable “Rocketbook Wave Smart Notebook”: You can write on it using any Pilot Frixion pen, marker, or highlighter, and once you’re done, you can scan the notes, doodles, and drawings into the Rocketbook app to store them in a cloud. Used up all…