An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The U.S. designated helium as a critical material on Friday because it's indispensable for making semiconductors that are essential to energy generation, and the global supply is at risk of disruption, according to the Energy Department. The designation by the Energy Department means that more federal financing will be available for helium producers and that the government will monitor it more closely. Helium is primarily produced as a byproduct of natural gas processing. The United States is the world's largest producer of natural gas and of helium. Qatar and Russia are the other top helium producers.
[...] Helium makes balloons rise, but that's not why the DOE is interested in it. Helium plays an important role in wind, solar and nuclear energy production, space exploration, medical imaging and research. Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said helium's unique properties make it irreplaceable, such as the fact that it's non-combustible and has the lowest boiling point of any gas. The nation needs an ample supply for semiconductors, quantum and super computing, and superconducting magnets, added Robertson, who oversees the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.
[...] Despite environmental concerns with recovering helium from natural gas, there are also opportunities, said Greeshma Gadikota, director of the Lenfast Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. "If we burn the natural gas, there are a lot of CO2 emissions associated with that," Gadikota said. "But if you just extract the helium and use it, the uses of it don't contribute necessarily to greenhouse gas emissions. "So from a climate standpoint, if we are going to continue down the line of extracting natural gas and recovering helium," she added, "I would prefer to see natural gas being used in a form where we directly produce hydrogen and we produce solid carbon." Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel, and solid carbon can provide permanent carbon sequestration and can be used widely in industrial applications, including rubber and pigments.
[...] Helium makes balloons rise, but that's not why the DOE is interested in it. Helium plays an important role in wind, solar and nuclear energy production, space exploration, medical imaging and research. Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said helium's unique properties make it irreplaceable, such as the fact that it's non-combustible and has the lowest boiling point of any gas. The nation needs an ample supply for semiconductors, quantum and super computing, and superconducting magnets, added Robertson, who oversees the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.
[...] Despite environmental concerns with recovering helium from natural gas, there are also opportunities, said Greeshma Gadikota, director of the Lenfast Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. "If we burn the natural gas, there are a lot of CO2 emissions associated with that," Gadikota said. "But if you just extract the helium and use it, the uses of it don't contribute necessarily to greenhouse gas emissions. "So from a climate standpoint, if we are going to continue down the line of extracting natural gas and recovering helium," she added, "I would prefer to see natural gas being used in a form where we directly produce hydrogen and we produce solid carbon." Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel, and solid carbon can provide permanent carbon sequestration and can be used widely in industrial applications, including rubber and pigments.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Most polling shows prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition will lose its majority, with Gadi Eisenkot the leading opposition contender
In Jerusalem
Israel is holding its first election since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, the deadliest day in the country’s history, which resulted in the deaths of about 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians.
Continue reading...The AI company’s first public financial disclosures reveal explosive growth, huge costs and risks ranging from cyber-attacks to the limits of safeguards
Anthropic has filed to go public on the US stock market, revealing for the first time the AI research lab’s financials and all the risks – more than 90 pages of them – that might negatively impact its business.
The company’s investor prospectus, released Monday, veers from hyperbolic predictions about AI’s “incredible potential” to existential risks of the technology to the reality of its current business: explosive but incredibly expensive growth. The filing to US financial regulators, known as an S-1, provides the public’s first look at an audited version of Anthropic’s finances.
Continue reading...I saw a remarkable experiment take shape in Belgrade. Its lessons should be studied by other European countries struggling with unrest
More than a decade ago, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told an interviewer in Belgrade that Serbia was “a country where the future happens first”. The phrase circulated widely on Serbian social media in the weeks before Sunday’s election, but in a way that could not have seemed possible 10 years ago. Who would then have imagined that Serbia today could be at the forefront of global democratic change?
The images from Belgrade on Sunday night – people dancing and crying in the streets, while in Novi Sad, the city that sparked the student movement, a flag bearing the image of the convicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj, which had hung from a building since the 1990s, was torn down – reinforced the feeling that the future had truly arrived.
Aleksandar Matković is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona and a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. He works on environmental history, political economy and the history of Yugoslavia
Continue reading...Would you pay to have the ‘best baby’? Liberal eugenics and the troubling quest for human perfection
For decades the idea of eugenics has been taboo. Now it is returning in a new commercial guise
For a very long time, I dreamed of being cured. I was born in 1981. I learned to walk early enough, but I stumbled and fell more easily than other children. My parents began to worry that something was wrong, that my muscles were weaker than they should be. Eventually, at the age of three, I was diagnosed with a form of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). In the 1980s, the precise mechanics were not yet understood, but the condition was known to be hereditary, probably linked to a recessive gene. It was also known to be progressive. As I aged, my muscles would not keep pace. At eight, I began to use a wheelchair for longer distances. By the time I was 18, I rarely walked outdoors any more.
It is hard to be young and to know that you are growing weaker rather than stronger. I had all the same aspirations that my nondisabled friends did, but I lived in fear of the future in a way they did not. I spent a lot of time thinking about what my life would have been like if I didn’t have SMA. The images in my head were of something like a double: myself, only rid of this one deficit, imprecisely defined, but encoded somewhere in my body.
Continue reading...In 2021, the young soldier took her life after being sexually assaulted by a sergeant major, then sent thousands of messages by her line manager. She was just 19. Five years on, Leighann McCready is still searching for answers
When Leighann McCready phoned her 19-year-old daughter, Jaysley Beck, on 15 December 2021, she got no reply, but brushed away her worries. “Jays always, always answered her phone, but it was early, eight in the morning,” she says. Beck, an army soldier in the Royal Artillery, had been at a party the night before at her Wiltshire barracks. She was probably asleep.
It was a busy time, the Christmas countdown. Soon, Beck was expected to be back home in Cumbria, where her parents – McCready and Anthony Beck – own a village pub. McCready had already bought matching Christmas pyjamas for Beck and her older sister Emilli to wear on the day.
Continue reading...Oxfam says investing by rich in disaster recovery widens inequality and gives incentive to delay climate action
The world’s wealthiest people are not just profiting from the polluting causes of climate breakdown, they are also increasingly cashing in on the catastrophic consequences, according to a study by Oxfam.
The global equality organisation has found that the richest 0.1% of the world’s population are heavily invested in disaster preparedness, recovery and reconstruction – a market that is projected to grow from $70bn to $92bn a year by 2029.
Continue reading...A low-budget building by the Olympic site that was never meant to last has been given a £4m revamp full of Italian pizzazz. Now The Yard is putting bums on (heated) seats – and Ian McKellen is soon to star
Since the 2012 Olympics, the skyline of Hackney Wick in east London has bristled with cranes. The athletes may be long gone but the legacy of the sporting spectacle rolls on, as developers continue to extract profits from rising land values around the Olympic park. Across the canal, in this former industrial edgeland, there are more cranes than ever, busily hoisting prefabricated brick cladding panels into place, wrapping the latest loft-living concepts with a veneer of industrial chic. Where factories once stood, replicas of factories have risen, complete with sawtooth roofs and Crittall-esque windows, offering concierge-serviced views of the surrounding regeneration-scape.
But among all the crane towers, one is different from the rest. It stands still, now relieved of its duties, and encased in a silvery sheath of polycarbonate. Big red letters cling to the shimmering shaft, spelling out the new home of the Yard theatre. Once used to haul bits of buildings, the steel crane tower now serves as a beacon-cum-ventilation shaft, glowing by night while exhausting stale air from the theatre below.
Continue reading...Lack of profits and the threat posed by western countries are raising concern about the sustainability of Beijing’s AI boom
Trillions of dollars have been wiped from China’s stock markets in recent months amid increasing anxiety about the future of artificial intelligence, as Beijing races against the United States for dominance in the sector.
The STAR 50 Index, which tracks technology and innovation companies on the Shanghai stock exchange, has plunged 40% since June. Other indexes of major companies dropped by about 20% over the same time period.
Continue reading...3Arena, Dublin
Several unannounced guests feature on the first European date of the rapper’s sold-out benefit tour, including video messages from Mark Ruffalo and Cynthia Nixon
“We’d like to thank Ed Sheeran for organising this concert,” offers a member of Kneecap, one of several unannounced guests who have turned up for the first European date of Macklemore’s Free Palestine tour. It’s a characteristically two-fisted approach to the matter in hand from a band who have seldom shied away from controversy, but it has more than a grain of truth in it.
The events of the last six weeks are quite something, and perhaps not what Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, had in mind when he led efforts to pressurise Sheeran to remove Macklemore from his summer US tour, after the rapper made a speech about Palestine on stage at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Macklemore was duly removed from the tour, but the rapper saw his profile rise dramatically as a result – in fairness, he was hardly unknown, but his biggest hits are a decade old – while every other artist on Sheeran’s tour quit in solidarity. Sheeran’s tour limped on amid much opprobrium, while Macklemore was able to translate the publicity into a tour of his own, in noticeably bigger venues than he played on his last European tour, with proceeds donated to organisations assisting Palestinians. Dublin’s 13,000-capacity 3Arena is sold out, as is every other date on the tour.
Continue reading...
Vandaag zijn er wolkenvelden met tussendoor af en toe zon. Vanochtend blijft het droog. Halverwege de middag begint het langs de kust te regenen. De regen breidt zich vervolgens over de rest van de regio uit. Het wordt voor de tijd van het jaar zacht weer, met een middagtemperatuur van 17 graden.
Je overwintert al jaren aan de Costa Blanca en vraagt je af of je niet beter zelf iets kunt kopen. Dan sta je niet alleen, en je landgenoten leggen er het meeste geld neer. Volgens SpanjeVandaag betalen Nederlandse kopers in de provincie Alicante gemiddeld 369.270 euro per woning. Dat is meer dan elke andere nationaliteit.
Toch betekent een hoge prijs nog niet dat kopen voor jou de slimste keuze is.
Nederlanders bovenaan, Belgen op vier
De cijfers komen van de Spaanse notarissen en gaan over het eerste kwartaal van 2026. Buitenlanders kochten in die drie maanden 6.557 woningen in de provincie Alicante, de populairste regio van Spanje bij internationale kopers. Zo veel betaalden de kopers per woning, volgens El Español en Bladna, op basis van een rapport van PROVIA:
- Nederlanders: €369.270
- Zwitsers: €353.659
- Noren: €332.641
- Belgen: €311.675
- Britten: €252.544
- Alle buitenlanders samen: €245.431
In de Marina Alta kopen vooral Nederlanders
Wie er koopt, verschilt per plaats. In Torrevieja kopen vooral Polen, in Orihuela Britten en in de stad Alicante Algerijnen. In de Marina Alta, de winterregio in het noorden van de provincie, staan Nederlanders in bijna elke gemeente bovenaan, meldt El Español. Er gaan daar minder woningen van eigenaar wissel dan in het zuiden, maar sommige kopers geven er gemiddeld meer uit.
- Jávea (Xàbia): 181 woningen naar buitenlanders, waarvan 79 naar Nederlanders
- Dénia: 174 woningen, waarvan 39 naar Nederlanders, vóór Duitsers (29)
- Teulada, de gemeente waar Moraira bij hoort: 103 woningen, waarvan 41 naar Nederlanders
Minder kopers, maar hogere prijzen
In heel Spanje kochten buitenlanders in het eerste halfjaar 62.327 woningen. Dat is 13 procent minder dan een jaar eerder, volgens de Spaanse notarissenkoepel Consejo General del Notariado. Volgens Idealista is het de grootste daling sinds corona. Goedkoper werd het niet: de gemiddelde prijs steeg met 9,4 procent naar 2.644 euro per vierkante meter, het hoogste bedrag sinds de notarissen dit bijhouden.
Als overwinteraar betaal je meer per vierkante meter
Dat gemiddelde van 2.644 euro geldt voor alle buitenlanders samen. Buitenlanders die niet in Spanje wonen, betaalden gemiddeld 3.493 euro per vierkante meter, 11,8 procent meer dan een jaar eerder, meldt Ejecutivos. Buitenlanders die er wel wonen, kwamen uit op 2.102 euro. Overwinteraars horen meestal bij de eerste groep: volgens SpanjeVandaag wonen vier van de vijf Nederlanders met een huis in de regio het grootste deel van het jaar in Nederland.
Vijf maanden huren of kopen: de rekensom
Neem een appartement van 90 vierkante meter. Huur je dat vijf maanden per jaar, dan reken je met de vraaghuur in de provincie Alicante. Die kwam in september volgens Idealista uit op 12,70 euro per vierkante meter per maand. Koop je het, dan betaal je bij een bestaande woning in de regio Valencia sinds 1 juni 9 procent overdrachtsbelasting (ITP). Tot dan was dat 10 procent.
- Huren: 90 m² x €12,70 = €1.143 per maand, dus €5.715 voor vijf maanden.
- Kopen tegen het gemiddelde van €2.644 per m²: €237.960, plus €21.416 overdrachtsbelasting.
- Kopen tegen de €3.493 die niet-inwoners gemiddeld betalen: €314.370, plus €28.293 overdrachtsbelasting.
- Alle bijkomende kosten samen (belasting, notaris, register, advocaat) liggen volgens Homevested meestal tussen 10 en 13 procent van de koopprijs.
Alleen de overdrachtsbelasting op het goedkoopste voorbeeld kost dus al zo veel als bijna vier winters huren.
Bij die huur komen nog meer kosten kijken, net als bij kopen. In ons stuk "Een maand overwinteren in Spanje: de huurprijs vertelt maar het halve verhaal" lees je wat er bij een wintermaand nog bovenop komt.
Wat de cijfers niet zeggen
De 369.270 euro is een gemiddelde per verkochte woning. Volgens Bladna is het niet gecorrigeerd voor oppervlakte, type woning of ligging. Dat Nederlanders het meest betalen, kan dus ook betekenen dat ze grotere huizen of duurdere plekken kiezen. De 12,70 euro huur per vierkante meter is bovendien een vraagprijs voor gewone verhuur. Voor een paar wintermaanden betaal je vaak een andere prijs.
Wil je kopen, kijk dan eerst wat een vergelijkbaar huis in jouw winterplaats kost. Reken daar ongeveer 10 tot 13 procent bij op en zet dat af tegen het aantal winters dat je verwacht te blijven.
Bronnen: SpanjeVandaag, SpanjeVandaag, El Español, Bladna, Idealista, Ejecutivos, CBNoticias, Homevested, Spaansnieuws
De babyboomers van het eerste uur worden dit jaar tachtig. Was het de generatie van vrije seks, vinexwijken, gillen bij The Beatles, zitkuilen, eigenwijze hebberigheid en…
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De hele wereld kijkt vandaag naar Israël, waar de Israëliërs naar de stembus gaan. Er is een kans dat Benjamin Netanyahu hierna niet langer de scepter zwaait.
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