A group of MIT researchers is exploring a radical idea for reversing global warming: using a raft of “space bubbles” to reflect sunlight away from our planet. Freethink reports: The copious amounts of greenhouse gasses humans have been releasing into the air ever since the Industrial Revolution are forming a sort of blanket around our planet, trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing global temperatures to creep ever higher. […] Instead of injecting particles into Earth’s atmosphere to cool the planet, an interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers proposes we take solar geoengineering to space. Specifically, the group is investigating what might happen if we positioned a shield made of bubbles at Lagrangian Point 1 — a point in space where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun form a sort of equilibrium that would keep the shield in orbit there indefinitely.

The proposed shield would be about the size of Brazil, and the bubbles for it could be manufactured and deployed in space, possibly out of silicon — the group has already experimented with creating these “space bubbles” in the lab. “In our preliminary experiments, we succeeded at inflating a thin-film bubble at a pressure of 0.0028 atm, and maintaining it at around -50C (to approximate space conditions of zero pressure and near-zero temperature),” they said in a press release. Because the bubbles would be almost a million miles away from Earth, the MIT team says this approach to solar geoengineering wouldn’t be as risky as methods that directly involve Earth’s atmosphere. […] This isn’t the first time someone has proposed placing a solar shield in space to cool the planet, but creating it out of bubbles would give us a relatively straightforward way to abort the mission if it went awry: just pop the bubbles.

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Source: Slashdot – MIT Proposes Brazil-Sized Fleet of ‘Space Bubbles’ To Cool the Earth

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Artificial intelligence that could improve the welfare of farmed chickens by eavesdropping on their squawks could become available within five years, researchers say. The technology, which detects and quantifies distress calls made by chickens housed in huge indoor sheds, correctly distinguished distress calls from other barn noises with 97% accuracy, new research suggests. A similar approach could eventually be used to drive up welfare standards in other farmed animals.

Each year, about 25 billion chickens are farmed around the world — many of them in huge sheds, each housing thousands of birds. One way to assess the welfare of such creatures is to listen to the sounds that they make. “Chickens are very vocal, but the distress call tends to be louder than the others, and is what we would describe as a pure tonal call,” said Alan McElligott, an associate professor of animal behavior and welfare at the City University of Hong Kong. “Even to the untrained ear, it’s not too difficult to pick them out.” In theory, farmers could use chickens’ calls to gauge their level of distress, and enrich their housing where necessary. However, in commercial flocks containing thousands, or tens of thousands of chickens, deploying human observers is impractical. For one thing, their presence could further stress the flock, but with so many birds, objectively quantifying the number of distress calls is impossible, McElligott said.

Instead, his team has developed a deep learning tool to automatically identify chicken distress calls from recordings of intensively farmed chickens. The tool was trained using recordings that had already been manually classified by human experts, to determine which type of sound they represented. According to an evaluation published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the algorithm correctly identified 97% of distress calls. “Our end goal is not to count distress calls, but to create conditions in which the chickens can live and have a reduced amount of distress,” said McElligott, who estimates that the technology could be commercially deployed within five years. Before that happens, the team will need to ensure that the recording equipment works in different types of chicken shed, as well as testing it in farms with higher or lower welfare standards to confirm the readings correlate.

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Source: Slashdot – AI Could Improve Welfare of Farmed Chickens By Listening To Their Squawks

Rodrigo Perez Ortega writes via Science Magazine: With climate change, heat waves and cold fronts are worsening and taking lives worldwide: about 5 million in the past 20 years, according to at least one study. In a new study published today in Nature Medicine, an international team of researchers estimates that almost 900,000 deaths in the years between 2002 and 2015 could be attributable to extreme temperatures alone in major Latin American cities. This is the most detailed estimate in Latin America, and the first ever for some cities.

To estimate how many people died from intense heat or cold, researchers with the Urban Health in Latin America project — which studies how urban environments and policies impact the health of city residents in Latin America — looked at mortality data between 2002 and 2015 from registries of 326 cities with more than 100,000 residents, in nine countries throughout Latin America. They calculated the average daily temperatures and estimated the temperature range for each city from a public data set of atmospheric conditions. If a death occurred either on the 18 hottest or the 18 coldest days that each city experienced in a typical year, they linked it to extreme temperatures. Using a statistical model, the researchers compared the risk of dying on very hot and cold days, and this risk with the risk of dying on temperate days. They found that in Latin American metropolises, nearly 6% — almost 1 million — of all deaths between those years happened on days of extreme heat and cold. They also created an interactive map with the data for individual cities.

When the team analyzed the specific cause of these deaths in the registries, they found — consistent with previous studies — that extreme temperatures are often linked to deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Extreme heat makes the heart pump more blood and causes dehydration and pulmonary stress. Extreme cold, on the other hand, can make the heart pump less blood and cause hypotension and, in some cases, organ failure. The team also found older adults are especially vulnerable to extreme temperatures, with 7.5% of deaths among them correlated to extreme heat and cold during the study period. Although the numbers varied from year to year, in 2015, for instance, more than 16,000 deaths — out of nearly 855,000 — among people ages 65 or older were attributable to extreme temperatures. Latin America’s aging population is projected to rise more quickly than other parts of the world — from 9% in 2020 to 19% in 2050, by some estimates (PDF). […] Although deaths on extremely cold days — about 785,000 — were much higher than those on extremely hot days — about 103,000 — overall there were more days with intense cold, which could explain this difference. But for some cities, such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Merida, heat is more deadly than cold: The researchers estimated that on very hot days, the chance of dying increases by 5.7% for every 1C increase in temperature.

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Source: Slashdot – Extreme Temperatures In Major Latin American Cities Could Be Linked To Nearly 1 Million Deaths

Thomas Claburn writes via The Register: California lawmakers met in Sacramento today to discuss, among other things, proposed legislation to protect children online. The bill, AB2273, known as The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, would require websites to verify the ages of visitors. Critics of the legislation contend this requirement threatens the privacy of adults and the ability to use the internet anonymously, in California and likely elsewhere, because of the role the Golden State’s tech companies play on the internet.

“First, the bill pretextually claims to protect children, but it will change the Internet for everyone,” said Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University School of Law professor, in a blog post. “In order to determine who is a child, websites and apps will have to authenticate the age of ALL consumers before they can use the service. No one wants this.” The bill, Goldman argues, will put an end to casual web browsing, forcing companies to collect personal information they don’t want to store and protect — and that consumers don’t want to provide — in order to authenticate the age of visitors. And since age authentication generally requires identity details, that threatens the ability to use the internet anonymously.

Goldman also objects to this American state-level bill being modeled after the UK’s Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) because European law makes compliance a matter of engagement and dialogue with regulators, in contrast to the US rules-based approach that allows more certainty about what is or not allowed. Furthermore, he contends that the scope of the bill reaches beyond children’s privacy and implicates consumer protection and content moderation. He thus considers the bill “a trojan horse for comprehensive regulation of Internet services” and would turn the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) into a general internet regulation agency.

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Source: Slashdot – California’s Attempt To Protect Kids Online Could End Adults’ Internet Anonymity

Brazil’s telecoms regulator Anatel has launched a public consultation on a proposal to make USB-C chargers mandatory for all smartphones sold in the country. The Verge reports: It’s the latest example of lawmakers and regulators turning to USB-C as a common charging standard for phones. The EU passed a law on the matter earlier this month, making USB-C mandatory for a range of electronic gadgets (including smartphones) by the end of 2024, and in the US some Democrat politicians are pushing for similar legislation. “Aware of the aforementioned movements in the international market, Anatel’s technical area evaluated the topic and presented a proposal with a similar approach for application in the Brazilian market,” said Anatel in a blog post (English translation via Google Translate).

In documents supporting the public consultation, Anatel said the advantages for making USB-C mandatory were primarily reducing e-waste and increasing convenience for customers. Disadvantages included higher costs to enforce the regulation and the possibility the law would discourage companies from developing new, better standards. Anatel says its public consultation will run until August 26th.

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Source: Slashdot – Brazil Is Also Considering Making USB-C Chargers Mandatory For iPhones