Live coverage of Friday's first Formula 1 practice session for the 2026 Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia.
fjo3 shares a report from The Guardian: Communities across California are rushing to prepare for the imminent arrival of the so-called "Kelvin wave," a massive underwater band of warm water threatening to inundate swaths of the vast North American shoreline. The wave is nearing southern California and expected to reach the San Francisco Bay Area by early October, as it crawls toward Alaska. Waters could rise by a foot along the California coast, according to scientists, who have warned that this could dramatically double the 8-12in rise in sea levels already caused by climate change over the last century.
The Kelvin wave doesn't climb and crash like a typical ocean wave; rather, it swells the tides from beneath the surface. It's effectively a massive slosh of warm water, driven by El Nino conditions, that moves across the Pacific before colliding with the South American coastline and surging north. It also won't transport water in the way a tsunami might, but creates conditions that enable higher sea levels to linger. On their own, Kelvin waves aren't always hazardous, according to Mike Jacox, a research oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service, though they can reduce the growth of phytoplankton that form the base of the marine food web. "But when there are very high tides or storm surges, their effects can be amplified," he said.
If the rising waters coincide with other climatic events, such as rainstorms and high tides, the phenomenon could swallow beaches, chew away bluffs and coastlines, and submerge streets, homes and businesses. "This coming Kelvin wave is just the beginning," said Dr Jonathan Warrick, a research geologist at the US Geological Survey. "The thing to look out for is what will happen in January, February and March -- that's when we get the biggest storms, we get our largest waves and we have some very large tides." If these events align, their effects will compound, setting the stage for a tumultuous winter. Together, Warrick said, the systems will pack a far bigger punch. "When it comes to these storms and the tides," he said, "we really are kind of rolling the dice."
The Kelvin wave doesn't climb and crash like a typical ocean wave; rather, it swells the tides from beneath the surface. It's effectively a massive slosh of warm water, driven by El Nino conditions, that moves across the Pacific before colliding with the South American coastline and surging north. It also won't transport water in the way a tsunami might, but creates conditions that enable higher sea levels to linger. On their own, Kelvin waves aren't always hazardous, according to Mike Jacox, a research oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service, though they can reduce the growth of phytoplankton that form the base of the marine food web. "But when there are very high tides or storm surges, their effects can be amplified," he said.
If the rising waters coincide with other climatic events, such as rainstorms and high tides, the phenomenon could swallow beaches, chew away bluffs and coastlines, and submerge streets, homes and businesses. "This coming Kelvin wave is just the beginning," said Dr Jonathan Warrick, a research geologist at the US Geological Survey. "The thing to look out for is what will happen in January, February and March -- that's when we get the biggest storms, we get our largest waves and we have some very large tides." If these events align, their effects will compound, setting the stage for a tumultuous winter. Together, Warrick said, the systems will pack a far bigger punch. "When it comes to these storms and the tides," he said, "we really are kind of rolling the dice."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Alongside a refreshed Kindle lineup, Amazon today introduced two accessories that bring physical buttons back to its touchscreen e-readers. The $34.99 Kindle Click is a Bluetooth remote that lets readers turn pages and adjust brightness without touching the device, while a new $79.99 magnetic cover is available for select Paperwhite and Colorsoft models. GeekWire reports: Amazon says [the Kindle Click is] meant for reading under the covers, on a treadmill, or on an airplane tray table. It's available for preorder and ships Oct. 28. It recharges over USB-C, includes side buttons for adjusting brightness, and works with Kindles released in 2024 or later. The company cited BookTok as an inspiration, Bloomberg reported, a reference to the community of readers on TikTok who post book recommendations, reviews and their reading setups. Kindle fans there have been showing off third-party clickers for years.
Amazon is also bringing back physical page-turn buttons, which disappeared when the company discontinued the Kindle Oasis in 2024. This time they come in a separate $79.99 magnetic cover, which works only with the new Signature Edition versions of the Paperwhite and Colorsoft. The new Kindles have screens that sit flush with the edges, colors that wrap around to the front, and optional aluminum housings. They also have user-replaceable batteries to comply with European Union rules, Amazon told The Verge.
The base Kindle starts at $149.99, or $189.99 in aluminum. The Paperwhite starts at $199.99 and the Colorsoft at $289.99, with Signature Editions at $249.99 and $319.99. Those prices match what Amazon has charged since August, when it raised Kindle prices by $40 to $50, citing memory and storage costs. The base Kindle is available now. The Paperwhite and Colorsoft ship Oct. 28.
Amazon is also bringing back physical page-turn buttons, which disappeared when the company discontinued the Kindle Oasis in 2024. This time they come in a separate $79.99 magnetic cover, which works only with the new Signature Edition versions of the Paperwhite and Colorsoft. The new Kindles have screens that sit flush with the edges, colors that wrap around to the front, and optional aluminum housings. They also have user-replaceable batteries to comply with European Union rules, Amazon told The Verge.
The base Kindle starts at $149.99, or $189.99 in aluminum. The Paperwhite starts at $199.99 and the Colorsoft at $289.99, with Signature Editions at $249.99 and $319.99. Those prices match what Amazon has charged since August, when it raised Kindle prices by $40 to $50, citing memory and storage costs. The base Kindle is available now. The Paperwhite and Colorsoft ship Oct. 28.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In een woning in Hellevoetsluis heeft de politie donderdagavond zwaar vuurwerk aangetroffen. Een paar honderd kilo aan vuurwerk is in beslag genomen en het huis is volledig doorzocht door de politie.
Vanochtend komt eerst plaatselijk mist voor, deze lost vrij snel op en volgt een dag met veel zonneschijn. Soms zit er ook sluierbewolking in de lucht, maar het blijft overal droog. De temperaturen blijven met 20 graden aan de warme kant voor begin oktober. Er staat weinig wind, langs de kust een matige wind uit het zuidwesten.
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
My condition is severe, so I have to a keep close watch on my body temperature and can’t eat chilled foods
In 2012, when I was 37, I started noticing that my fingers would get swollen and red whenever I held an iced drink. I thought it was strange, but I didn’t know what was going on. Then the same thing would happen when I handled food from the fridge. My instinct was to put my hands under hot water, but that made it worse.
For a while, that’s all I experienced. I thought it was weird but not dangerous. I was busy with my three children, so didn’t worry.
Continue reading...Returning for a 20th album of sumptuous synthpop, Andy Bell and Clarke open up about difficult recent years, being happily uncool and battling resurgent homophobia
Andy Bell is rabbiting away on multiple topics. There’s his farm in Mallorca, where he and his husband Stephen Moss have had a fine year harvesting pomegranates, kiwis and lemons. Then there’s the Erasure frontman’s fascination with clowns (“Would the makeup help you avoid facial recognition technology?”), memories of 90s nightclubbing (“You could do anything and get away with it!”) and a worry that he’s turning into “a fussy old grandpa”. Suddenly, he catches himself: “But what about you, Vince? You’re being very quiet!”
Bell’s bandmate, whose only contribution since joining the video chat from his San Diego home has been to say hello, smiles. “No, no, I just love listening to you, man. I’m really enjoying this.”
Continue reading...Gieß den Kiez app shows trees in critical need of watering and can be adopted by other heat-stressed cities around the world
Amanda Gläser-Bligh sometimes attracts puzzled looks when she goes to water the eight-year-old street tree she has adopted outside her door in Charlottenburg, Berlin.
“I named her Linda the linden,” she says. “Berliners are not always known for being super friendly but most people react really positively when they find out what I’m doing.”
Continue reading...We can’t count on tomorrow so it would be rational to own less. Yet we make our homes nicer, just to anchor ourselves in the here and now
I was standing in front of a locked basement door in a building in our neighbourhood, laughing, as Ukrainian air defence shot down drones directly above me. I had run into the first residential building I could reach, and I even took a photo of the locked door – a shelter, and the shelter locked – because I wanted to remember it. I was on my way to buy curtains.
I hadn’t checked whether there was an alert before I left home. I had simply set out for the shop, 20 minutes away through our residential district, on foot. But somewhere along the way, things started exploding in the sky above me – and I was suddenly walking through a city under attack because I had decided that my windows needed new curtains. What the fuck was I laughing at? I should have been terrified, and I was. It was just that I still wanted the curtains, and the absurdity was hilarious.
Diana Berg is a Ukrainian artist, writer and cultural manager from Mariupol, and the founder of Platform TU, an independent cultural initiative now operating in exile after Russia’s full-scale invasion
Continue reading...
Franciscus van Assisi is misschien wel „de meest populaire heilige”, ná Maria. Op 4 oktober viert de katholieke kerk zijn 800ste sterfdag. Wie was dit ‘arme kereltje’?
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Zondag gaat Brazilië naar de stembus. Blijft de linkse Lula da Silva president, of kiest het grootste land van Zuid-Amerika met Flávio Bolsonaro ook voor radicaal rechts?
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Google’s first “Suncatcher” datacenter satellite has made it into space, but the company has cast doubt on whether its orbital ambitions can scale. As The Register reported last week, Project Suncatcher aims to test whether Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) can survive a launch and the harsh environment of space. The Big G hopes to validate theories that the limitless supply of solar energy available in space makes the cost of putting servers into orbit sensible. In its announcement of a successful Suncatcher launch, Google linked to its own peer-reviewed research about the endeavor – which outlines many thorny challenges that must be met to make orbital datacenters fly. The paper, titled “Toward a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design,” notes that SpaceX and others have suggested that orbital datacenters become viable when launch costs fall to $200/kg. Google’s researchers also note that SpaceX has managed to reduce the cost to launch a kilogram into orbit by 20 percent after every doubling of the cumulative mass it launched. If SpaceX can keep that up, which will mean launching 370,000 t additional cumulative mass, the equivalent of around 1,800 successful launches of its giant Starship rocket, and re-using components 100 times, Google thinks $200/kg is “plausible under reasonable assumptions.” Google doesn’t know the mass of its future datacenter satellites, but points to Starlink’s second-gen sats weighing 575kg and then compares the cost of sending a satellite into space with the price to power servers on Earth. “If launch costs reach ≲$200/kg, annualized cost per unit of power in space could be approximately comparable to terrestrial spend,” is Google’s conclusion. The paper’s calculations on future launch costs use data from SpaceX and other rocket operators. The other technologies needed to make datacenters in space remain largely theoretical. For example, the paper notes that existing network technologies probably aren’t suitable to link multiple satellites into functioning clusters. The need for rapid comms between satellites means Google’s plans require a design “significantly larger and entail much closer formation flight … than any previous or current satellite constellations.” Google also thinks that satellite design will need to evolve. “Our system design work to this point assumes a relatively conventional, discrete compute payload, satellite bus, thermal radiator, and solar panel design,” the paper states. “However, as has been seen in other industries (such as smartphones), massively scaled production motivates highly integrated designs (such as the system on chip, or SoC). Eventually, scaled space-based computing would similarly involve an integrated compute, radiator, and power design based on next-generation architectures, such as computational substrates based on neural cellular automata.” Google’s researchers also found “robust optical satellite-ground communications will also be critical for scaled operation but will necessitate overcoming challenges including atmospheric turbulence, high-speed relative motion errors, and precision beam tracking.” NASA’s TeraByte Infrared Delivery (TBIRD) mission, which has demonstrated 200 Gbps ground-low-earth-orbit comms, is cited as a promising approach. Google’s researchers therefore concluded that realizing its space datacenter ambitions “will require sustained research, iterative refinement of our design, and the achievement of several critical future milestones.” ®
