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Brianheise

29 Jun 2025 - 06:26 am

Beirut, Lebanon
CNN
—
A deadly Israeli airstrike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut on Friday has left over a dozen people dead, including a high-ranking Hezbollah commander, sharply escalating the conflict between the two sides and raising fears of all-out war.

Senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil, part of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, was assassinated along with “about 10” other commanders, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari said, accusing them of planning to raid and occupy communities in Galilee in northern Israel.

Hezbollah confirmed Aqil’s death on Friday, saying he was killed “following a treacherous Israeli assassination operation on 09/20/2024 in the southern suburbs of Beirut.”

According to Hagari, the targeted commanders were “underground underneath a residential building in the heart of the Dahiyeh neighborhood, using civilians as a human shield” at the time of the attack.

Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 14 people were killed and 66 others injured in the airstrike, which leveled a multistory building in a densely populated neighborhood.

Aqil had a $7 million bounty on his head from the United States for his suspected involvement in the 1983 strike on the US Embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, as well as the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, which killed 241 US personnel later that year.

A CNN team on the ground in Beirut saw a frantic effort to rescue people from underneath the rubble and rush the wounded to hospital. Witnesses said nearby buildings shook for nearly half an hour after the strike, which the IDF said it had carried out at around 4 p.m. local time.


A week of surprise attacks
Friday’s strike marked the fourth consecutive day of surprise attacks on Beirut and other sites across the country, even as Israeli forces continued deadly strikes and operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

The first major attack against Hezbollah this week came Tuesday afternoon when pagers belonging to the militant groups’ members exploded near-simultaneously. The pagers had been used by Hezbollah to communicate after the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, encouraged members to switch to low-tech devices to prevent more of them from being assassinated.

Almost exactly 24 hours later, Lebanon was rocked by a second wave of explosions, after Hezbollah walkie-talkies detonated in Beirut and the south of the country on Wednesday.

At least 37 people were killed, including some children, and more than 3,000 were injured in the twin attacks.

In a United Nations Security Council meeting on Friday, UN human rights chief Volker Turk on Friday warned that the detonation of communication devices could violate international human rights law.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib and Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon clashed at the heated meeting, with Bou Habib calling on the council to condemn Israel’s actions and Danon slamming the Lebanese envoy for not mentioning Hezbollah.

Hhangbymn

29 Jun 2025 - 06:14 am

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Jamesgak

29 Jun 2025 - 03:10 am

A nuclear fusion power plant prototype is already being built outside Boston. How long until unlimited clean energy is real?
жесткий анальный секс
In an unassuming industrial park 30 miles outside Boston, engineers are building a futuristic machine to replicate the energy of the stars. If all goes to plan, it could be the key to producing virtually unlimited, clean electricity in the United States in about a decade.

The donut-shaped machine Commonwealth Fusion Systems is assembling to generate this energy is simultaneously the hottest and coldest place in the entire solar system, according to the scientists who are building it.

It is inside that extreme environment in the so-called tokamak that they smash atoms together in 100-million-degree plasma. The nuclear fusion reaction is surrounded by a magnetic field more than 400,000 times more powerful than the Earth’s and chilled with cryogenic gases close to absolute zero.

The fusion reaction — forcing two atoms to merge — is what creates the energy of the sun. It is the exact opposite of what the world knows now as “nuclear power” — a fission reaction that splits atoms.

Nuclear fusion has far greater energy potential, with none of the safety concerns around radioactive waste.

SPARC is the tokamak Commonwealth says could forever change how the world gets its energy, generating 10 million times more than coal or natural gas while producing no planet-warming pollution. Fuel for fusion is abundant, derived from deuterium, found in seawater, and tritium extracted from lithium. And unlike nuclear fission, there is no atomic waste involved.

The biggest hurdle is building a machine powerful and precise enough to harness the molten, hard-to-tame plasma, while also overcoming the net-energy issue – getting more energy out than you put into it.
“Basically, what everybody expects is when we build the next machine, we expect it to be a net-energy machine,” said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, a trade group representing fusion companies around the globe. “The question is, how fast can you build that machine?”

Commonwealth’s timeline is audacious: With over $2 billion raised in private capital, its goal is to build the world’s first fusion-fueled power plant by the early 2030s in Virginia.

“It’s like a race with the planet,” said Brandon Sorbom, Commonwealth’s chief science officer. Commonwealth is racing to find a solution for global warming, Sorbom said, but it’s also trying to keep up with new power-hungry technologies like artificial intelligence. “This factory here is a 24/7 factory,” he said. “We’re acutely aware of it every minute of every hour of every day.”

Jeffreyhoops

29 Jun 2025 - 12:02 am

Curve Finance: Leading DeFi Liquidity and Stablecoin Protocol
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Curve Finance is a decentralized exchange (DEX) optimized for stablecoin and low-volatility asset trading. Known for its efficient liquidity pools and low slippage, Curve has become a cornerstone in the DeFi ecosystem for stable asset swaps and liquidity provision.

Curve Fi
Curve Fi refers to the platform's core protocol that enables users to swap stablecoins and other similar assets with minimal slippage and low fees. It leverages specialized liquidity pools to facilitate efficient trading.

Curve Finance Crypto
Curve finance crypto encompasses the native tokens (such as CRV), liquidity provider tokens, and other assets within the Curve ecosystem. These tokens are used for governance, staking, and earning rewards.

Curve DeFi
Curve DeFi describes the broader decentralized finance ecosystem built around Curve’s liquidity pools and protocols. It includes yield farming, liquidity mining, and integrations with other DeFi platforms like Yearn, Convex, and more.

Curve Finance Liquidity Pool
A Curve liquidity pool is a smart contract that holds assets like stablecoins or similar tokens, allowing users to deposit and earn fees or rewards. These pools are optimized for low slippage and high efficiency, supporting large trading volumes.

Curve Finance Borrow
While primarily known for liquidity provision and swaps, Curve also supports borrowing mechanisms indirectly through integrations with lending protocols like Aave or Compound, where users can collateralize assets and borrow against their liquidity pool tokens.

Michaeltwile

28 Jun 2025 - 07:41 pm

The CO2 that is extracted from the water is run through a purification process that uses activated carbon in the form of charred coconut husks, and is then ready to be stored.
tripscan
In a scaled up system, it would be fed into geological CO2 storage. Before the water is released, its acidity is restored to normal levels, making it ready to absorb more carbon dioxide from the air.

“This discharged water that now has very low carbon concentrations needs to refill it, so it’s just trying to suck CO2 from anywhere, and it sucks it from the atmosphere,” says Halloran. “A simple analogy is that we’re squeezing out a sponge and putting it back.”

While more tests are needed to understand the full potential of the technology, Halloran admits that it doesn’t “blow direct air capture out the water in terms of the energy costs,” and there are other challenges such as having to remove impurities from the water before releasing it, as well as the potential impact on ecosystems. But, he adds, all carbon capture technologies incur high costs in building plants and infrastructure, and using seawater has one clear advantage: It has a much higher concentration of carbon than air does, “so you should be able to really reduce the capital costs involved in building the plants.”
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Mitigating impacts
One major concern with any system that captures carbon from seawater is the impact of the discharged water on marine ecosystems. Guy Hooper, a PhD researcher at the University of Exeter, who’s working on this issue at the SeaCURE site, says that low-carbon seawater is released in such small quantities that it is unlikely to have any effect on the marine environment, because it dilutes extremely quickly.

However, that doesn’t mean that SeaCURE is automatically safe. “To understand how a scaled-up version of SeaCURE might affect the marine environment, we have been conducting experiments to measure how marine organisms respond to low-carbon seawater,” he adds. “Initial results suggest that some marine organisms, such as plankton and mussels, may be affected when exposed to low-carbon seawater.”

To mitigate potential impacts, the seawater can be “pre-diluted” before releasing it into the marine environment, but Hooper warns that a SeaCURE system should not be deployed near any sensitive marine habitats.

There is rising interest in carbon capture from seawater — also known as Direct Ocean Capture or DOC — and several startups are operating in the field. Among them is Captura, a spin off from the California Institute of Technology that is working on a pilot project in Hawaii, and Amsterdam-based Brineworks, which says that its method is more cost-effective than air carbon capture.
According to Stuart Haszeldine, a professor of Carbon Capture and Storage at the University of Edinburgh, who’s not involved with SeaCURE, although the initiative appears to be more energy efficient than current air capture pilot tests, a full-scale system will require a supply of renewable energy and permanent storage of CO2 by compressing it to become a liquid and then injecting it into porous rocks deep underground.

He says the next challenge is for SeaCURE to scale up and “to operate for longer to prove it can capture millions of tons of CO2 each year.”

But he believes there is huge potential in recapturing carbon from ocean water. “Total carbon in seawater is about 50 times that in the atmosphere, and carbon can be resident in seawater for tens of thousands of years, causing acidification which damages the plankton and coral reef ecosystems. Removing carbon from the ocean is a giant task, but essential if the consequences of climate change are to be controlled,” he says.

Alfredavasp

28 Jun 2025 - 07:39 pm

UK project trials carbon capture at sea to help tackle climate change
tripskan
The world is betting heavily on carbon capture — a term that refers to various techniques to stop carbon pollution from being released during industrial processes, or removing existing carbon from the atmosphere, to then lock it up permanently.

The practice is not free of controversy, with some arguing that carbon capture is expensive, unproven and can serve as a distraction from actually reducing carbon emissions. But it is a fast-growing reality: there are at least 628 carbon capture and storage projects in the pipeline around the world, with a 60% year-on-year increase, according to the latest report from the Global CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) Institute. The market size was just over $3.5 billion in 2024, but is projected to grow to $14.5 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.
https://tripscan.biz
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Perhaps the most ambitious — and the most expensive — type of carbon capture involves removing carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air, although there are just a few such facilities currently in operation worldwide. Some scientists believe that a better option would be to capture carbon from seawater rather than air, because the ocean is the planet’s largest carbon sink, absorbing 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

In the UK, where the government in 2023 announced up to ?20 billion ($26.7 billion) in funding to support carbon capture, one such project has taken shape near the English Channel. Called SeaCURE, it aims to find out if sea carbon capture actually works, and if it can be competitive with its air counterpart.

“The reason why sea water holds so much carbon is that when you put CO2 into the water, 99% of it becomes other forms of dissolved carbon that don’t exchange with the atmosphere,” says Paul Halloran, a professor of Ocean and Climate Science at the University of Exeter, who leads the SeaCURE team.

“But it also means it’s very straightforward to take that carbon out of the water.”

Pilot plant
SeaCURE started building a pilot plant about a year ago, at the Weymouth Sea Life Centre on the southern coast of England. Operational for the past few months, it is designed to process 3,000 liters of seawater per minute and remove an estimated 100 tons of CO2 per year.

“We wanted to test the technology in the real environment with real sea water, to identify what problems you hit,” says Halloran, adding that working at a large public aquarium helps because it already has infrastructure to extract seawater and then discharge it back into the ocean.

The carbon that is naturally dissolved in the seawater can be easily converted to CO2 by slightly increasing the acidity of the water. To make it come out, the water is trickled over a large surface area with air blowing over it. “In that process, we can constrict over 90% of the carbon out of that water,” Halloran says.

Jamesgex

28 Jun 2025 - 07:30 pm

Study reveals how much energy AI uses to answer your questions
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Whether it’s answering work emails or drafting wedding vows, generative artificial intelligence tools have become a trusty copilot in many people’s lives. But a growing body of research shows that for every problem AI solves, hidden environmental costs are racking up.

Each word in an AI prompt is broken down into clusters of numbers called “token IDs” and sent to massive data centers — some larger than football fields — powered by coal or natural gas plants. There, stacks of large computers generate responses through dozens of rapid calculations.

The whole process can take up to 10 times more energy to complete than a regular Google search, according to a frequently cited estimation by the Electric Power Research Institute.
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So, for each prompt you give AI, what’s the damage? To find out, researchers in Germany tested 14 large language model (LLM) AI systems by asking them both free-response and multiple-choice questions. Complex questions produced up to six times more carbon dioxide emissions than questions with concise answers.

In addition, “smarter” LLMs with more reasoning abilities produced up to 50 times more carbon emissions than simpler systems to answer the same question, the study reported.

“This shows us the tradeoff between energy consumption and the accuracy of model performance,” said Maximilian Dauner, a doctoral student at Hochschule Munchen University of Applied Sciences and first author of the Frontiers in Communication study published Wednesday.

Typically, these smarter, more energy intensive LLMs have tens of billions more parameters — the biases used for processing token IDs — than smaller, more concise models.

“You can think of it like a neural network in the brain. The more neuron connections, the more thinking you can do to answer a question,” Dauner said.
What you can do to reduce your carbon footprint
Complex questions require more energy in part because of the lengthy explanations many AI models are trained to provide, Dauner said. If you ask an AI chatbot to solve an algebra question for you, it may take you through the steps it took to find the answer, he said.

Craigerary

28 Jun 2025 - 06:09 pm

Lido Finance: Leading Liquid Staking Protocol
lido finance crypto
Lido Finance is a decentralized platform that enables users to stake their cryptocurrencies and earn staking rewards while maintaining liquidity through tokenized assets. It is one of the most popular liquid staking solutions in the DeFi ecosystem, supporting multiple blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, and more.

Lido Overview
Lido allows users to stake their assets without locking them up, providing flexibility and liquidity. When users stake their tokens via Lido, they receive a corresponding staked token (e.g., stETH for Ethereum), which can be used in other DeFi protocols, traded, or held for rewards.

Lido Fi
Lido Fi refers to the broader ecosystem of decentralized finance activities built around Lido’s staking tokens. It includes yield farming, liquidity pools, and integrations with various DeFi platforms, enabling users to maximize their crypto assets' utility.

Lido Staking
Lido staking involves depositing supported cryptocurrencies (like ETH, SOL, or others) into the Lido protocol. In return, users receive staked tokens that accrue staking rewards over time. This process is designed to be user-friendly, secure, and accessible to both individual and institutional investors.

Lido Finance ETH Staking
Lido Finance ETH staking is one of its flagship features, allowing users to stake ETH without needing to run a validator node. By staking ETH through Lido, users receive stETH, which represents their staked ETH plus accrued rewards, and can be used across DeFi applications.

Lido Finance Crypto
Lido finance crypto encompasses the native tokens (like stETH for Ethereum, stSOL for Solana, etc.), governance tokens, and other assets within the Lido ecosystem. These tokens facilitate staking, liquidity provision, and governance participation.

Henrydauby

28 Jun 2025 - 03:54 pm

NASA scientists are in a state of anxious limbo after the Trump administration proposed a budget that would eliminate one of the United States’ top climate labs – the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS – as a standalone entity.
kra34.cc
In its place, it would move some of the lab’s functions into a broader environmental modeling effort across the agency.

Career specialists are now working remotely, awaiting details and even more unsure about their future at the lab after they were kicked out of their longtime home in New York City last week. Closing the lab for good could jeopardize its value and the country’s leadership role in global climate science, sources say.

“It’s an absolute sh*tshow,” one GISS scientist said under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. “Morale at GISS has never been lower, and it feels for all of us that we are being abandoned by NASA leadership.”

“We are supposedly going to be integrated into this new virtual NASA modeling institute, but (we have) no idea what that will actually look like,” they said.

NASA is defending its budget proposal, with a nod toward the lab’s future.
“NASA’s GISS has a significant place in the history of space science and its work is critical for the Earth Science Division, particularly as the division looks to the future of its modeling work and capabilities,” NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said in a statement.

“Fundamental contributions in research and applications from GISS directly impact daily life by showing the Earth system connections that impact the air we breathe, our health, the food we grow, and the cities we live in,” Warner said.

GISS has a storied history in climate science on the global scale.

James Hansen, a former director, first called national attention to human-caused global warming at a Senate hearing during the hot summer of 1988. The lab, founded in 1961, is still known worldwide for its computer modeling of the planet that enable scientists to make projections for how climate change may affect global temperatures, precipitation, extreme weather events and other variables.

Michaelmot

28 Jun 2025 - 02:56 pm

NASA scientists are in a state of anxious limbo after the Trump administration proposed a budget that would eliminate one of the United States’ top climate labs – the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS – as a standalone entity.
kra35cc
In its place, it would move some of the lab’s functions into a broader environmental modeling effort across the agency.

Career specialists are now working remotely, awaiting details and even more unsure about their future at the lab after they were kicked out of their longtime home in New York City last week. Closing the lab for good could jeopardize its value and the country’s leadership role in global climate science, sources say.

“It’s an absolute sh*tshow,” one GISS scientist said under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. “Morale at GISS has never been lower, and it feels for all of us that we are being abandoned by NASA leadership.”

“We are supposedly going to be integrated into this new virtual NASA modeling institute, but (we have) no idea what that will actually look like,” they said.

NASA is defending its budget proposal, with a nod toward the lab’s future.
“NASA’s GISS has a significant place in the history of space science and its work is critical for the Earth Science Division, particularly as the division looks to the future of its modeling work and capabilities,” NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said in a statement.

“Fundamental contributions in research and applications from GISS directly impact daily life by showing the Earth system connections that impact the air we breathe, our health, the food we grow, and the cities we live in,” Warner said.

GISS has a storied history in climate science on the global scale.

James Hansen, a former director, first called national attention to human-caused global warming at a Senate hearing during the hot summer of 1988. The lab, founded in 1961, is still known worldwide for its computer modeling of the planet that enable scientists to make projections for how climate change may affect global temperatures, precipitation, extreme weather events and other variables.