The astronauts who rode Boeing's Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station last month still don't know when they will return to Earth.

The problems are twofold. The spacecraft's reaction control thrusters overheated, and some of them shut off as Starliner approached the space station June 6. A separate, although perhaps related, problem involves helium leaks in the craft's propulsion system.

On Thursday, NASA and Boeing managers said they still plan to bring Wilmore and Williams home on the Starliner spacecraft. In the last few weeks, ground teams completed testing of a thruster on a test stand at White Sands, New Mexico. This weekend, Boeing and NASA plan to fire the spacecraft's thrusters in orbit to check their performance while docked at the space station.

The problems have led to speculation that NASA might decide to return Wilmore and Williams to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. There's one Crew Dragon currently docked at the station, and another one is slated to launch with a fresh crew next month. Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program, said the agency has looked at backup plans to bring the Starliner crew home on a SpaceX capsule, but the main focus is still to have the astronauts fly home aboard Starliner.

Changes by the tests' maker in recent years have shifted scores upward. That has led to hundreds of thousands of additional students getting what's considered a passing score -- 3 or above on the 1-to-5 scale -- on exams in popular courses including AP U.S. History and AP U.S. Government.

The nonprofit behind the tests, College Board, says it updated the scoring by replacing its panel of experts with a large-scale data analysis to better reflect the skills students learn in the courses. Some skeptical teachers, test-prep companies and college administrators see the recent changes as another form of grade inflation, and a way to boost the organization's business by making AP courses seem more attractive.

"It is hard to argue with the premise of AP, that students who are talented and academically accomplished can get a head start on college," said Jon Boeckenstedt, the vice provost of enrollment at Oregon State University. "But I think it's a business move." The number of students cheering their higher AP scores could rise again next year. The College Board said it is still recalibrating several other subjects, including its most popular course, AP English Language, which attracts more than half a million test takers.

Somehow, this two and a half minute skit perfectly captures the essence of the entire series.

Shamelessly posted based on a comment in another post from @Heikki@lemm.ee

The FTC has sent mandatory notices for information to eight companies it says engages in "surveillance pricing", the process by which prices are rapidly changed using AI based on data about customer behavior and characteristics. This process, the FTC claims, allows companies to charge different customers different prices for the same product.

The list includes Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, Accenture and consulting giant McKinsey. It also includes software firm Task, which counts McDonald's and Starbucks as clients; Revionics, which works with Home Depot, Tractor Supply and grocery chain Hannaford; Bloomreach, which services FreshDirect, Total Wine and Puma; and Pros, which was named Microsoft's internet service vendor of the year this year. "Firms that harvest Americans' personal data can put people's privacy at risk," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a news release. "Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices."

Phoebus 2A, the most powerful space nuclear reactor ever made, was fired up at Nevada Test Site on June 26, 1968. The test lasted 750 seconds and confirmed it could carry first humans to Mars. But Phoebus 2A did not take anyone to Mars. It was too large, it cost too much, and it didn’t mesh with Nixon’s idea that we had no business going anywhere further than low-Earth orbit.

But it wasn’t NASA that first called for rockets with nuclear engines. It was the military that wanted to use them for intercontinental ballistic missiles. And now, the military wants them again.

These notes cover 1.4.1 through 1.4.4 since I didn't do release announcements for them.

1.4.4

Infrastructure

• Reworked dependencies and Dockerfile to reduce image size by 55% (444 MB -> 203 MB)

ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract 1.4.4 567d91c9e56f 9 hours ago 203MB ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract 1.4.3 451323e66686 5 days ago 444MB

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug where editing a post and changing the image would cause the image upload modal to disappear
• Add try/catch and fallback behavior when migrating settings to fix bug discovered where a very, very old version of the settings is still in your local storage
• Fixed omission of "Preview" button for tagline editor in admin panel
• Force instance domain names to lowercase when storing into profile and setting guest instance

Changes

• Put site taglines in card effect
• Relative dates now auto update
• Added ability to edit an existing tagline in admin panel

---

1.4.3

Bugfixes

• Fix reactivity on subscribed status on community browser when switching instances.

Changes

• Add 'Community Settings' button to community profile modal if you are a mod of the community or the community is local and you are an admin
• Use 'capitalize' class on community display names to make them title cased
• "Reasons" in modlog now render as markdown
• Added additional Invidious instances

---

1.4.2

Starting with 1.4.1, I'm trying out a new, faster release cadence with just one or two feature updates per point release rather than larger releases every 4-5 weeks. Hopefully this keeps things feeling fresher and lets me focus on specific features rather than trying to overhaul everything all at once.

This release is all about enhancing the reactivity of Tesseract.

Bugfixes

None, for once. Doesn't mean there aren't any, just none new discovered or reported.

Misc Changes

• Increased scroll height of quick settings
• Added a few more quick options for easy access.
• Changed card/compact switcher to toggle, moved into quick settings area

Reactivity Enhancements

Being able to do all the actions is great, but it's annoying to have to refresh the contents to see that they have taken effect. This release is working on increasing the reactivity througout the application for as many actions as possible.

User, Community, and Instance Blocking

The behavior has changed when blocking users, communities, and instances from the feed:

• When blocking a user from the feed, all of their submissions in the current feed should now disappear.
• When blocking a community from the feed, all posts to that community in the current feed will disappear.
• When blocking an instance from the feed/instance menu, all posts from users on that instance and to communities from that instance will disappear.

Previously, at most, only the post where you initiated the block would disappear until you refreshed the feed. Now, all posts fitting the block criteria will be hidden immediately.

Community / Instance Bans

New: When users are community banned, they now they have green "no" symbols on them (I'm hitting the limits of Hero icons). This was not indicated previously.

Community and instance bans now dispatch events that update all relevant items:

• Feed: Updates the banned indicator and, if selected, flag them as removed if "remove content" is selected while banning.
• Post Page: Updates the post heading and any comments to indicate the user is banned and the post/comment removed.

Previously, only the item that initiated the ban action would be updated to reflect the new state. Now, all relevant items in the current view (feed or post/comment) will be updated to reflect the action(s) taken.

Subscribe / Unsubscribe

Subscribing and unsubscribing from the quick button in the community icon or the community modal will update all post cards with the new/current subscription state.

---

1.4.1

Infrastructure

• Update SvelteKit from 1 to 2 and update underlying dependencies
• Update other project dependencies to latest versions
• Update NodeJS from 20 to 22
• Update lemmy-js-client to 0.19.4 so latest features can be utilized.
• Removed svelte/adapter-auto and only use Node adapter.
• Remove some discrete, one-off logic and replace with shared/standardized components
  • Federation block/allow list editor in admin panel

Bugfixes

• Fixed modlog action menus clipping
• Fixes reactivity and blocked/unblocked status on profile modals and user pages. Added a call to getSite after blocking/unblocking to update person blocks list.
• Fix mobile reflow in modlog
• Fixed bug with non-default instance not showing
• Fixed but with re-authenticating to the first profile (index 0 was getting ignored and creating a new profile vs reauthorizing)
• Fix heading/icon in "Create" menu not being properly justified
• Fixed bug when inline images are disabled, the link isn't shown
• Fixed bug when refreshing profile page, sometimes the wrong comment data would be shown in the edit of another comment (added index to 'each' iterator)
• Fixed bug where setting the guest instance required clicking it twice to update the site info / logos.
• Non-embed media posts were showing full URL regardless of user setting to only show the domain

New Features

Community Profile Modals

When clicking on a community in the feed, instead of taking you directly to the /c/ community page, a modal will pop up with relevant options for the community. Works the same way as the user profile modal.

• Browse Community
• Create Post
• Modlog
• Favorite/Unfavorite Community
• Add/remove community to group
• Subscribe/Unsubscribe
• Block / Unblock Community
• View Community Details
• View Community Moderators (click the mod username entries to bring up their profile modal + options)
• Zoom in on the community icon

Post Flairs

There's a new user option, enabled by default, that will extract any [tag] items from post titles and convert them into flair badges. Anything in [] in the post title will be converted into a flair tag, and the [whatever] removed from the displayed title.

It also supports nested, comma-delimited flars in the same brackets. e.g. [Music, Sludge Metal, 2000s Rock] becomes [Music] [Sludge Metal] [2000s Rock].

Clicking a flair badge will perform a prepared search for other posts with the same flair (e.g. search?type=Posts&q=[tag]). They work more or less the same as hashtags do (if you have those enabled).

This had been half-implemented in a branch for some time now, but I wasn't sure if other front-ends were handling them in a similar way. Saw an post from the Photon dev saying they're adding them, and it's compatible with my implementation, so figured it was time to dust off that branch and merge it in.

Misc Changes

• Removed Fediseer badge option for posts (rarely used and accessible via Instance menu and from instances page)

  • I'm assuming rarely used. I don't (and won't) have any kind of telemetry, but from the instances I have seen running Tesseract in the wild, none have had those badges enabled.

• Removed the "Community" menu from posts; all of those options are now available in the Community Profile modal (access by clicking the community name in the post heading)

  • Also allows accessing these options from comments (such as on profile pages) which normally do not have the "Community" menus.
  • The option "More from {user} in {community} has been moved to the post action menu.

• Removed "Block {user}" from post action menu; access it from the user profile modal by clickin the user's name in the post/comment header.

• Add dark/light theme switcher to sidebar footer (near logo/version and Lemmy/Matrix/Github buttons)

• Removed background on image zoom toolbar

• SettingEditArray component is now filterable and can accept a comma-delimited list of entries

• De-cluttered main menu (top right).

  • Removed User Settings Button
  • Removed App Settings Button
  • Added "Settings" button to go to /settings, moved to old "User Settings" slot
  • Moved "Manage Accounts" out of profile submenu and into main menu

• Added user profile settings to /settings in addition to the application settings

  • Still accessible from Profile->Settings

• Slight updates to admin panel

  • Changed layout of tagline editor
  • Taglines are now previewed as markdown (as they would be elsewhere)
  • Federation block/allow list configuration now uses the SettingEditArray component rather than being a discrete editor.

A solar superstorm in May caused thousands of satellites to simultaneously maneuver to maintain altitude due to the thickening of the upper atmosphere, creating potential collision hazards as existing prediction systems struggled to cope. Space.com reports:

>According to a pre-print paper published on the online repository arXiv on June 12, satellites and space debris objects in low Earth orbit -- the region of space up to an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) -- were sinking toward the planet at the speed of 590 feet (180 meters) per day during the four-day storm. To make up for the loss of altitude, thousands of spacecraft began firing their thrusters at the same time to climb back up. That mass movement, the authors of the paper point out, could have led to dangerous situations because collision avoidance systems didn't have time to calculate the satellites' changing paths.

>The solar storm that battered Earth from May 7 to 10 reached the intensity of G5, the highest level on the five-step scale used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess the strength of solar storms. It was the strongest solar storm to hit Earth since 2003. The authors of the paper, however, pointed out that the environment around the planet has changed profoundly since that time. While only a few hundred satellites were orbiting Earth twenty years ago, there are thousands today. The authors of the paper put the number of "active payloads at [low Earth orbit]" at 10,000. [...] The new paper points out that space weather forecasts ahead of the May storm failed to accurately predict the duration and intensity of the event, making satellite collision predictions nearly impossible.

>On the upside, the storm helped to clear out some junk as defunct satellites and debris fragments spiraled deeper into the atmosphere. The authors of the report estimate that thousands of space debris objects lost several kilometers in altitude during the storm. More powerful solar storms can be expected in the coming months as the peak of the current solar cycle -- the 11-year ebb and flow in the number of sunspots, solar flares and eruptions -- is expected in late 2024 and early 2025.

The paper can be found here.

> At EPFL, the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (EM+) specializes in this technology and has developed a program that turns the terabytes of data generated from the tokamak simulations and testing carried out by EPFL’s Swiss Plasma Center (SPC) into an immersive 3D visualization experience. For the general public, the visualization is a journey into a ring of fireworks illustrating a possible future source of energy; for scientists, it’s a valuable tool that renders the complex phenomena of quantum physics tangible and helps them grasp the results of their calculations.

> The 3D visualization – a panorama measuring 4 meters high and 10 meters in diameter – is a faithful reproduction of the interior of EPFL’s variable-configuration tokamak (TCV), rendered in such stunning detail that it rivals even the best-quality gaming experience.

---

Note: The 3D visualization is a physical display at their facility. I spent far too long parsing multiple articles trying to find a link to an online visualization. The article is still good, and there are images of the visualization.

Scientists were stunned on May 30 when a rock that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover drove over cracked open to reveal something never seen before on the Red Planet: yellow sulfur crystals. Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich with sulfates, a kind of salt that contains sulfur and forms as water evaporates. But where past detections have been of sulfur-based minerals -- in other words, a mix of sulfur and other materials -- the rock Curiosity recently cracked open is made of elemental (pure) sulfur. It isn't clear what relationship, if any, the elemental sulfur has to other sulfur-based minerals in the area.

While people associate sulfur with the odor from rotten eggs (the result of hydrogen sulfide gas), elemental sulfur is odorless. It forms in only a narrow range of conditions that scientists haven't associated with the history of this location. And Curiosity found a lot of it -- an entire field of bright rocks that look similar to the one the rover crushed. "Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert," said Curiosity's project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "It shouldn't be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting."

Two male skeletons showed signs of severe fracture and trauma injuries.

Archaeologists have hotly debated the precise cause of death of those who perished in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. Did they die of asphyxiation, from the extreme heat, or from a combination of factors? A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science examines the complicating effects of earthquakes that occurred just prior to and concurrently with the eruption. Of most interest was the discovery of two skeletons of people who likely died when their shelter collapsed around them, weakened by the seismic tremors.

The image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in "magic mushrooms," to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner. The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain.

!

The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders. "Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we've tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected," said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. "It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size." Brian Mathur, a systems neuroscientist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, says these findings cannot show exactly what causes the therapeutic benefit of psilocybin, but "it's possible psilocybin is directly causing" the brain-network changes. That, or it is creating a psychedelic experience that in turn causes parts of the brain to behave differently.

The next step is to determine whether psilocybin's blood-flow changes in the brain or its direct effects on neurons, or both, are responsible for the brain-network disruptions. "The best part of this work is that it's going to provide a means forward for the field to develop further hypotheses that can and should be tested," Mathur says.

> We're over halfway through 2024, and already this year we have seen some of the biggest, most damaging data breaches in recent history. And just when you think that some of these hacks can't get any worse, they do. From huge stores of customers' personal information getting scraped, stolen and posted online, to reams of medical data covering most people in the United States getting stolen, the worst data breaches of 2024 to date have already surpassed at least 1 billion stolen records and rising. These breaches not only affect the individuals whose data was irretrievably exposed, but also embolden the criminals who profit from their malicious cyberattacks. Travel with us to the not-so-distant past to look at how some of the biggest security incidents of 2024 went down, their impact and. in some cases, how they could have been stopped.

• AT&T's Data Breaches: AT&T experienced two data breaches in 2024, affecting nearly all its customers and many non-customers. The breaches exposed phone numbers, call records, and personal information, risking account hijacks for 7.6 million customers.

• Change Healthcare Hack: A ransomware attack on Change Healthcare resulted in the theft of sensitive medical data, affecting a substantial proportion of Americans. The breach caused widespread outages in healthcare services across the U.S. and compromised personal, medical, and billing information.

• Synnovis Ransomware Attack: The cyberattack on U.K. pathology lab Synnovis disrupted patient services in London hospitals for weeks, leading to thousands of postponed operations and the exposure of data related to 300 million patient interactions. Snowflake Data Theft (Including Ticketmaster): Cybercriminals stole hundreds of millions of records from Snowflake's corporate customers, including 560 million records from Ticketmaster. The breach affected data from multiple companies and institutions, exposing vast amounts of customer and employee information.

• Snowflake Data Theft: (Including Ticketmaster): Cybercriminals stole hundreds of millions of records from Snowflake's corporate customers, including 560 million records from Ticketmaster. The breach affected data from multiple companies and institutions, exposing vast amounts of customer and employee information.

OW2, the non-profit international consortium dedicated to developing open-source middleware, published an open letter to the European Commission today. They're urging the European Union to continue funding free software after noticing that the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs were no longer mentioned in Cluster 4 of the 2025 Horizon Europe funding plans.

OW2 argues that discontinuing NGI funding would weaken Europe's technological ecosystem, leaving many projects under-resourced and jeopardizing Europe's position in the global digital landscape. The letter reads, in part: NGI programs have shown their strength and importance to support the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations.

Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 millions euros to:

• "Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe";
• "A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life";
• "A structured eco-system of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons."

In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organizations managing these European funding consortia.

Let me start off by saying, in my official admin capacity, that I really don't know if I want to be here anymore (see the problem outlined below). That has implications beyond me just deleting my account and going outside since I would not allow the instance to run unattended. I'm also unsure if my backup admin would have any interest in taking over full time.

If it does come to that, there will be a subsequent announcement and either a transition plan or a sunset plan.

That is still up in the air, but for now....

The Problem

I just wanted to take a moment here to address Lemmy's extremism problem / lynch-mob mentality and how DubVee is responding to that.

Last month, a new site rule was added expressly forbidding any form of extremism with regards to violence. Every rule is there for a reason, and this was added as a direct response to the increasingly violent rhetoric I've been seeing from users.

In full:

> I don't care which end of the spectrum you're on. Any post/comment calling for or glorifying violence, especially political violence, will be removed. Offenders will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, but bans will be the norm and swift for violating this rule.

After running reports against the database, there have been a very large number of bans issued in the last few days for both explicit and implicit violations of that rule:

Explicit Extremism

• Explicitly praising or justifying acts of violence
• Explicitly justifying / advocating for violence / "revolution" / whatever
• Suggesting, justifying, or advocating political violence, vigilantism, and/or breaking with the foundational principles of this country in order to "solve" a problem.
• Hypocritical posts/comments that amount to "Fascism / authoritarianism / whatever -ism is bad, but a little bit is okay when it's my side doing it"
• Stirring the pot by jumping into otherwise civil discussions and suggesting acts of violence (I'll admit, those were mostly new accounts and likely provocateur trolls seizing on current events, but established accounts are also guilty)

Implicit Extremism

• Patterns of upvoting or boosting posts/comments that explicitly praise, endorse, or advocate for violence (or any of the 'explicit' items above)
• Patterns of downvoting posts/comments that denounce violence or those that advocate for lawful/peaceful solutions.

> Note: Before you cry "thought crime!" about issuing bans based on vote patterns, it is a well-known tactic for trolls to operate bot or sockpuppet accounts to manipulate votes to serve an agenda. Owing to the federated nature of Lemmy, this becomes easier to do and harder to detect since those can be distributed among different instances that have varying moderation, signup, monitoring, and administrative policies and procedures. So, no, I have no compunction about banning accounts that express support for extremism by way of voting; there's simply no straightforward way to tell bot from person from my point of view.

Even accounting for gallows humor, I must reiterate that extremism and violence are absolutely forbidden, and there will be zero tolerance shown.

While I'm aware there's a certain "mob mentality" inherent to social media in general, "lynch-mob mentality" will not be tolerated; we're better than that, and DubVee is not here to spread hate, violence, or fan the flames.

In Conclusion

If it turns out that we end up blocking 90% of the Fediverse because of this, then I'll just shut this whole instance down. DubVee, by way of federation, will not devolve to 4chan (or 8chan or wherever the shitty little edgelords post their green text nowadays), and I will (figuratively) burn it to the ground before it gets to that point.

What Can You Do as a User?

First and foremost, make sure you report any content that violates this rule and refrain from violating it yourself.

If you're seeing less comments than you were a few days ago or are no longer seeing content from certain users, this is most definitely why. You can check the modlog to see if someone you're expecting to see has been banned.

If you (local user) wish to challenge a ban and advocate for someone who has been blocked, you may send me a DM with your request, and I will review the account further (accounts were reviewed prior to banning, but it never hurts to take a second look).

If you have a problem with this rule and our enforcement of it, there's plenty of other instances you can choose from.

Mod Note: I'm bending the "no politics' rule to highlight a disgusting trend I've been seeing on Lemmy lately. Due to the sheer volume of comments fitting that trend and the huge number downvotes given to anyone who speaks out against it, I'm convinced this opinion is truly unpopular in the Lemmy-verse. This is also topical and important enough to merit discussion or at least to provide a point of reflection. So while it touches on politics, that's merely the framing device of current events being used to highlight a larger problem.

As you're inevitably downvoting this, at least take a good, long look in the mirror while you do so.

---

The sheer number of people here praising the shooter, advocating for, glorifying, or just flat out calling for violence has been a real eye opener and litmus test for the kind of people I've surrounded myself with on this platform. Suffice it to say, a lot of you have failed that test spectacularly.

A rational, independent thinker should be able to condemn this kind of violence even when it's targeted towards their "enemies." Political violence has absolutely NO PLACE in a healthy society, and no one should be praising or advocating for it. No one. Ever. This is one thing that, regardless of the paradox of tolerance, should be universally condemned.

There are, apparently, a ton of extremists here that don't see themselves as such because they believe their extremism is justified and that they're on the right side of history. Ironically, which is what all extremists think.

This goes back further than just yesterdays's events. For example, it's been a common refrain since the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision that, paraphrased, "The current non-dictator president should do dictator things to stop the other dictator". Which is just another flavor of "Extremism is bad except when it's my flavor of extremism".

Don't give me that "it's just gallows humor", "I'm oppressed, and he deserved it", "if you had a time machine, wouldn't you go back to 1934...", "we haven't been a healthy society for X years...", or other excuses. This is a BFD with major implications and ramifications, and y'all Lemmings are treating like we just missed the exit ramp to Utopia and are trying to find a wide spot to make a U-turn.

It's certainly fine to have no sympathy for the guy (I sure as hell don't), but it's another thing entirely to be cheering on, promoting, and/or advocating for extremist stances like those being thrown out lately.

You say you want a better society? Then act like it!

Moments like this are the true test of one's character and intellectual honesty, and I'm beyond disappointed in so many of you.

Title ☝️

The surge is startling scientists, amplifying impacts such as hurricane storm surges.

>Across the American South, tides are rising at accelerating rates that are among the most extreme on Earth, constituting a surge that has startled scientists such as Jeff Chanton, professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University.

> “It’s pretty shocking,” he said. “You would think it would increase gradually, it would be a gradual thing. But this is like a major shift.”

> Worldwide sea levels have climbed since 1900 by some 1.5 millimeters a year, a pace that is unprecedented in at least 3,000 years and generally attributable to melting ice sheets and glaciers and also the expansion of the oceans as their temperatures warm. Since the middle of the 20th century the rate has gained speed, exceeding 3 millimeters a year since 1992.

> In the South the pace has quickened further, jumping from about 1.7 millimeters a year at the turn of the 20th century to at least 8.4 millimeters by 2021, according to a 2023 study published in Nature Communications based on tidal gauge records from throughout the region. In Pensacola, a beachy community on the western side of the Florida Panhandle, the rate soared to roughly 11 millimeters a year by the end of 2021.

> The vast majority of the massive, metallic towers the city commissioned to help low-income neighborhoods access high-speed 5G internet still lack cell signal equipment -- more than two years after hundreds of the structures began sprouting across the five boroughs. Just two of the nearly 200 Link5G towers installed by tech firm CityBridge since 2022 have been fitted with 5G equipment, company officials said. Delayed installations and cooling enthusiasm around 5G technology have discouraged carriers like Verizon from using the towers to build out their networks, experts say. The firm only has an agreement with a single telecommunications carrier to deliver high-speed internet, stymieing its efforts to boost mobile connectivity citywide.

> The 32-foot-tall structures, which resemble giant tampon applicators emerging from the sidewalk, offer the same services as the LinkNYC electronic billboards that popped up around the city in 2016. Those were also installed by CityBridge. Both the original Link kiosks and the 5G towers provide free limited-range Wi-Fi, charging outlets and a tablet to connect users to city services. Data shared by the company shows that 16 million people have used the internet at kiosks since 2016, and the attached tablets are used to call for city services thousands of times each month. But unlike the LinkNYC kiosks, each new tower is topped with a 12-foot-tall cylindrical mesh chamber containing five empty shelves reserved for companies like Verizon and T-Mobile to store the equipment they use to transmit high-speed 5G internet service to paying customers.

Emphases mine because of that hilarious but completely spot-on description..

A group of astronomers want to change the definition of a planet. Their new proposed definition wouldn't bring Pluto back into the planetary fold, but it could reclassify thousands of celestial bodies across the universe. From a report:

> The International Astronomical Union's (IAU) current definition of a planet, established in 2006, includes only celestial bodies that are nearly round, are gravitationally dominant and orbit our Sun. This Sun-centric definition excludes all of the bodies we've discovered outside our solar system, even if they may fit all other parameters. They are instead considered exoplanets. Those behind the new proposal critiqued the IAU's definition in an upcoming paper in the Planetary Science Journal, arguing it's vague, not quantitative and unnecessarily exclusionary.

Their new proposal would instead classify planets based on their mass, considering a planet to be any celestial body that:

1. orbits one or more stars, brown dwarfs or stellar remnants and,
2. is more massive than 10ÂÂ kilograms (kg) and,
3. is less massive than 13 Jupiter masses (2.5 X 10^28Âkg).