In a shock to no one, Elon bends the rules to his liking.
Friday, September 12, 2025
Shell promises 10-minute EV charging with its magical battery fluid
This is a pretty remarkable breakthrough. Shell has developed a means to cut EV charging time down to 10 minutes, which would be much closer to the time to gas up a car.
Excellent. Hopefully they can prove this in the field.
Study links frequent, severe heat waves to pollution from major fossil fuel producers
Worth a minute of your time:
A new study has determined that 55 heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change
Why a non-Pride mural in West Palm Beach remains untouched by the Florida Department of Transportation
Funny how this works. The FDOT is inconsistent in its effort to "remove all murals" from the streets.
Here's a large mural that isn't about pride - and they haven't said a thing about it.
I guess it really is about attacking gays after all.
Exclusive: US warns hidden radios may be embedded in solar-powered highway infrastructure
Apparently, we've reached a point where "the powers that be" are seeing the boogeyman everywhere.
Hidden radios in solar power led highway signs … for what purpose? And of course we have tools to intercept and disrupt radio waves. So are we trying to understand (if these exist) how these are being used?
Or is it just "hey it's a problem" with nothing to back it up?
I'm quite certain it's the latter. Dumbassery is alive and well.
Thursday, September 11, 2025
Did the Perservance Rover find life on Mars?
The headlines would certainl;y suggest that they did.
But the truth (as always) is a little more complicated. What they found were possible bio signatures.
"The combination of these minerals [ iron-containing minerals vivianite and greigite], which appear to have formed by electron-transfer reactions between the sediment and organic matter, is a potential fingerprint for microbial life, which would use these reactions to produce energy for growth."
These samples were collected after analysis, and will be part of the payload that NASA intends to return to Earth at some point in the not-too-distant future. These samples will then be analyzed here on Earth, and we can decide if they do, in fact, indicate there is life.
So for now, set aside the hyperbole. It may be that these are building blocks. But we won't know for at least a few years.
I'll take victories, large and small
Two groups - PennEnvironment and Three Rivers Waterkeeper - filed a lawsuit against a company called Styropek, for the dumping of plastic particles in the waterways around their factory near Pittsburgh.
The National Environmental Law Center handled the suit, and said this:
Concerned citizens first found plastic pellets floating in the Ohio River and nearby Raccoon Creek. They eventually traced the plastic upstream to a Styropek facility that manufactures plastic pellets. Outside the facility, they documented the pellets floating in the water and covering aquatic vegetation and the banks of the creek.
Now, with this settlement, Styropek is agreeing to completely redesign its stormwater collection to capture all of its pellet waste. This will have a direct impact on the Ohio River Basin and help protect clean water in western Pennsylvania.
After the redesign, Styropek must install new, cutting-edge monitoring technology to track and capture any plastic pellets that otherwise would have escaped the property and entered local waterways like Raccoon Creek and the Ohio River. The settlement imposes an automatic fine if that tech should detect even a single pellet.
In addition, Styropek will pay a $2.6 million penalty for violating the Clean Water Act. That penalty is one of the largest of its kind in Pennsylvania history, and will support efforts to clean up the plastic pellets that are already polluting the Raccoon Creek and Ohio River watershed.
Plastic pellets, frequently referred to as "nurdles," are typically about the size of a lentil. Once released into the environment they act as "toxic sponges," absorbing toxic substances from the surrounding water, including pesticides, heavy metals, and even bacteria and viruses. Fish, birds and other wildlife can then accidentally swallow these toxic plastic bits.
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