Green banks are starting to draw attention in the U.S., particularly since the federal government announced its first grant competitions under a national green bank program to bring clean technology and more affordable energy to low-income communities.

. . .

What is a green bank?

Despite the name, green banks aren’t traditional banks. They function more like investment funds with a mission to promote sustainability.

Green banks are public, quasi-public or nonprofit entities that use public funds to encourage private investment in low-carbon, climate-resilient infrastructure.

By using innovative financing strategies, green banks can lower the risks for private investors to support projects, which reduces the amount of public money needed to reach government goals like expanding renewable energy or, in this case, affordable housing.

. . .

A little more than 15 years ago, astronaut Garrett Reisman was among a crew of seven who launched into orbit aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour. The shuttle remained attached to the Space Station for nearly two weeks, but when the orbiter departed, it left Reisman behind for an extended stay.

During his time at the station, Reisman would often pass through the Harmony module, which serves as a corridor connecting laboratory modules built by NASA and the European and Japanese space agencies. Sometimes, he would look up and see a small placard that said, “To CAM.” The arrow, however, pointed out into space.

“When I was up there on the space station, there was still the sign that says, ‘To CAM,’” Reisman said in an interview. “But there’s just a closed hatch. It was tragic. It was just kind of taunting me when I saw that because I think that could have been one of the most important scientific discoveries that we made.”

The “CAM” was the Centrifuge Accommodations Module, originally built by the Japanese space agency. It was intended to provide an environment for artificial gravity experiments, from just slightly above zero gravity all the way to 2 gs. However, NASA canceled the final development and launch of the centrifuge module in 2005 due to budgetary concerns.

. . .

Gravitational wave astronomy is such a boon in detecting these types of events early. One of the few consistently positive things to be alive with right now.

Some abbreviations:

• TDE: tidal disruption event
• AGN: active galactic nucleas

Using NASA's Swift spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has discovered a luminous and slowly-evolving nuclear transient event. The origin of the newly detected transient, designated Swift J221951-484240, is yet to be determined. The finding was reported July 3 on the preprint server arXiv.

Nuclear astrophysics is key to understanding supernova explosions, and in particular the synthesis of the chemical elements that evolved after the Big Bang. Therefore, detecting and investigating nuclear transient events could be essential in order to advance our knowledge in this field.

Recently, a group of astronomers led by Sam Oates of the University of Birmingham, U.K., has conducted follow-up Swift observations of a gravitational wave alert known as S190930t in order to find its electromagnetic counterpart. In result, they identified Swift J221951-484240 (or J221951 for short) with Swift's Ultra-Violet/Optical Telescope (UVOT).

. . .

BENGALURU, July 14 (Reuters) - India’s space agency launched a rocket on Friday that sent a spacecraft into orbit and toward a planned landing next month on the lunar south pole, an unprecedented feat that would advance India’s position as a major space power.

The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) LVM3 launch rocket blasted off from the country’s main spaceport in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh on Friday afternoon, leaving behind a plume of smoke and fire.

About 16 minutes later, ISRO’s mission control announced that the rocket had succeeded in putting the Chandrayaan-3 lander into an Earth orbit that will send it looping toward a moon landing next month.

If the mission succeeds, India would join a group of three other countries that have managed a controlled lunar landing, including the United States, the former Soviet Union and China.

. . .

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/465531

This isn't so much a support request as a piece of advice. I just wanted to pass along a heads-up to save someone else some work.

The Bionic Reader Firefox extension breaks my ability to comment and reply on Lemmy.

This Image is With the Extension Enabled.

As you can see, the reply button has been clicked. It's grayed out. But the page stays stuck there. And when I refresh, my attempted comment is nowhere to be found.

The Firefox error codes are also different between having this extension enabled and not having it enabled. I'll post those in the comments.

Not only is Florida sizzling in record-crushing heat, but the ocean waters that surround it are scorching, as well. The unprecedented ocean warmth around the state — connected to historically warm oceans worldwide — is further intensifying its heat wave and stressing coral reefs, with conditions that could end up strengthening hurricanes.

Much of Florida is seeing its warmest year on record, with temperatures running 3 to 5 degrees above normal. While some locations have been setting records since the beginning of the year, the hottest weather has come with an intense heat dome cooking the Sunshine State in recent weeks. That heat dome has made coastal waters extremely warm, including “downright shocking” temperatures of 92 to 96 degrees in the Florida Keys, meteorologist and journalist Bob Henson said Sunday in a tweet.

“That’s boiling for them! More typically it would be in the upper 80s,” tweeted Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist at WFLA-TV in Tampa.

The temperatures are so high that they are off the scale of the color contours on some weather maps.

. . .

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/1122944

The Space Telescope Science Institute's Office of Public Outreach has released a new scientific visualization of data from the CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science) Survey. The video represents Webb's exploration of the region known as the Extended Groth Strip, revealing many galaxies that have never been seen before. It displays a wealth of galaxies across the universe and concludes on Maisie's Galaxy, which resides 13.4 billion light-years away from Earth.

This video, a scientific visualization of the galaxies captured as a part of the CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science) Survey, showcases a large undertaking by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. It flies by thousands of galaxies, starting with those nearby and ending with less-developed galaxies in the very distant universe, including one never seen before Webb.

The area highlighted in this visualization is a small part of the Extended Groth Strip, a region between the Ursa Major and Boötes constellations originally observed by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2004 and 2005. While this vast region contains about 100,000 galaxies, the visualization focuses on approximately 5,000—with the nearest and more complex galaxies, shown in the beginning, located within a few billion light-years of Earth. As the visualization proceeds, showing galaxies farther away from Earth, we see different stages of the universe's history and evolution.

. . .

Direct link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1n82zTBwQY

The Space Telescope Science Institute's Office of Public Outreach has released a new scientific visualization of data from the CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science) Survey. The video represents Webb's exploration of the region known as the Extended Groth Strip, revealing many galaxies that have never been seen before. It displays a wealth of galaxies across the universe and concludes on Maisie's Galaxy, which resides 13.4 billion light-years away from Earth.

This video, a scientific visualization of the galaxies captured as a part of the CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science) Survey, showcases a large undertaking by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. It flies by thousands of galaxies, starting with those nearby and ending with less-developed galaxies in the very distant universe, including one never seen before Webb.

The area highlighted in this visualization is a small part of the Extended Groth Strip, a region between the Ursa Major and Boötes constellations originally observed by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2004 and 2005. While this vast region contains about 100,000 galaxies, the visualization focuses on approximately 5,000—with the nearest and more complex galaxies, shown in the beginning, located within a few billion light-years of Earth. As the visualization proceeds, showing galaxies farther away from Earth, we see different stages of the universe's history and evolution.

. . .

Direct link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1n82zTBwQY

The news about Meta is not the real reason I'm sharing this; rather the parenthetical question in the subject is. Does anybody know if this law affect Lemmy instances at all?

. . .

So far, the most promising dark matter candidates are axions, neutrinos, and weakly interacting massive particles. Recently, however, some physicists also started investigating the possibility that another type of hypothetical particles, massive gravitons, could be viable dark matter candidates.

Theory suggests that massive gravitons were produced during collisions between ordinary particles in the hot and dense environment of the early Universe, in the few instants following the Big Bang. While theories predict their existence, these particles have so far never been directly detected.

Researchers at Korea University and University of Lyon have recently carried out a theoretical study exploring the possibility that massive gravitons could be good dark matter candidates. The results of their theoretical calculations were published in a paper in Physical Review Letters.

. . .

The calculations performed by Cai, Lee and Cacciapaglia show that instead of being associated with unknown physics occurring shortly after the Big Bang, the production of massive gravitons is most effective below the energy scale in which Higgs bosons reside. Higgs bosons are elementary particles that carry the Higgs field, the field that gives mass to fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks.

"This draws a direct connection between the physics studied at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and the early Universe physics of gravity and Dark Matter," Cacciapaglia said. "Our results imply that gravitational dark matter is produced 1 picosecond after the Big Bang, at a time when particle physics is well described by the current theories."

. . .

Potentially this means that Fedora and CentOS stream do not get timely updates implemented in RHEL.

Canonical must be throwing a party, and I bet SUSE is not hating it either

A leaked document alleges a #Russian plan to annex #Belarus by #2030 with the ultimate objective being a 'union state'.

Another source here: Russia plans Belarus 'absorption' by 2030 — media reports | DW News