Well that escalated quickly

The 95 metre-long ferry designed by LMG Marin will use renewable shore power, with electricity stored in a 3MWh battery system, alongside auxiliary biodiesel generators for severe weather and emergency operations. She will be classed to 1B Ice Class, enabling operation in ice of up to 60cm thick.

The project aims to create a digital tool that can remotely verify compliance with sustainable agricultural practices over several years. This is particularly important for agricultural producers, as it simplifies access to financing from international partners and facilitates operations in the EU market.

This summer, Australia could face some of its most extreme wildfire conditions ever due to the severity of an ever-strengthening El Niño. And for many Australians, memories of catastrophic natural disasters are still painfully fresh.

...

Our research examined their aftermath—what worked best in meeting people's immediate housing needs and supporting longer-term housing recovery. Three key lessons emerged, calling on us to rethink our current approach now, ahead of the next disaster.

...

Our first finding is that large-scale, expensive temporary housing villages with associated infrastructure should be avoided. Despite the name, such temporary housing is rarely quick to deliver and is anything but temporary.

It can take months to procure the housing, prepare sites and build, and it just pushes the problems to later.

...

Although recovery is a large and complex subject, the second clear lesson from our research is the importance of prioritizing community-centered recovery. Providing coordinated support from assisting organizations is one part of this.

The NSW Reconstruction Authority's Recovery Centers, for example, seek to bring services together so people do not have to navigate multiple organizations independently.

Another is recognizing the central role of local community organizations and ensuring they have the support and resources to assist. Local councils are also often expected to shoulder a significant recovery workload, but with limited resources.

State and federal governments need to support this more seriously and ensure local government has the capacity, funding and authority it needs to play its role effectively.

...

The third lesson from our research is that communities are also anything but homogeneous. The proportion of renters to homeowners is one such divide.

Affected homeowners with insurance policies need speedy insurance support. The cost of insurance is, however, skyrocketing—or for some, becoming unavailable—and government needs to work with insurers to address this increasing problem.

Many others rent their properties, adding landlords to the complexity of recovery. Cash assistance is one way to give renters some ability to exercise agency in recovery (as it does for homeowners also). Global evidence that cash grants after a disaster are helpful, efficient and effective is overwhelming.

All this can sound relatively straightforward on paper. The reality, of course, is that a disaster has occurred, and recovery takes time. Add trauma, family breakdown and loss to the equation.

Housing recovery needs to recognize these realities. Support should be flexible, sustained and responsive rather than dictated through top-down solutions without proper and realistic consultation, as all too often happens.

Fuck war and fuck robots only designed for narrow killing tasks, imagine what this machine can do for livesaving missions all over the world!!!!

The absolutely ESSENTIAL thing to keep in mind here is that these machines are immediate lifesaving gifts to humanity no matter how mature the technology is since in situations where a traditional human rescue crew in a helicopter or otherwise that are too dangerous to attempt a rescue there is now another option that can be tried repeatedly without the risk of anyone dying. There is of course the risk of the aircraft crashing with the rescue victim on it, and that needs to be treated seriously but again... when we are talking about no other options that is simply a risk that has to be taken.

Additionally once this technology becomes mature and extremely safe this might actually be a very practical method of moving people with spinal injuries (or who are otherwise very physically frail) who can't have their back moved from a straight position and because of other injuries cannot be safely jostled around over rough terrain on a stretcher.

All this rescue method would involve is movement of the victim on to the stretcher of the aircraft and then it could fly a short distance out of an area of exceedingly rough terrain and land, then allowing another method of transportation to take the victim the rest of the way. In this way there are lots of rescue situations that this category of aircraft might be useful in that are not immediately obvious and could also facilitate a high volume of rescue even though this aircraft can only carry a single person at a time.

Also see https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-medevac-drone-russia-war-stargate-c93f86db16cc34fcc75deb5efc8af5fe

It’s 9:15 in the morning. The wind is roaring at 110 miles per hour (177 kph); the sound is deafening. Dust swirls through the air. We are watching a single-wide manufactured home rock back and forth, as it is pounded by turbulent wind.

Then, in an instant, the screws shear off and the entire unit tumbles backward, rolling two full revolutions before it stops.

In any other situation, this would be terrifying. But here, we are conducting a first-of-its-kind experiment at Florida International University’s Wall of Wind, a test facility that can reproduce wind speeds the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/72203368

A question you have to consider when evaluating these electric aircraft, what is the cost of "fueling" these in areas with abundant alternative energy sources that sometimes provide demand when it is not optimal or needed in the grid?

I would argue that it goes to zero or perhaps even past zero in a certain sense under conditions of abundant energy supply when demand is low.

Sure you can attempt to store the energy and pay the efficiency loss related to that, but if you can more immediately put that energy into medical flights for patients, organs or other very sensitive medical cargo in a way that is arguably the most efficient use you could possibly get out of that electricity.

Another key element to this question that makes it even more compelling is that excess grid energy supply can be physically moved by electric aircraft to more widely exploit abundant energy supply outside of the immediate locality it is generated in. Used intelligently and in the collective interest of society this could drastically reduce the effective costs and environmental impact of lightweight regional air transport in a transformative way.

also see https://aviationnews.eu/news/2026/10/beta-technologies-demonstrates-electric-aircraft-for-critical-medical-transport-during-five-day-flight-operations-in-utah/

The tests focused on building a new regional transportation network for radiopharmaceuticals, which are highly perishable medicines essential for diagnosing and treating diseases like cancer. Because these lifesaving compounds decay within hours, traditional ground transport or scheduled air freight often proves too slow. BETA Technologies partnered with the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), regional aerospace coalition 47G, and cargo operator Alpine Air Express to execute the multi-day flight series.

Abstract

Solar geoengineering is a set of controversial emerging technologies that seek to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight. These technologies may be able to reduce the worst impacts of climate change by lowering global temperatures temporarily. They also come with great risks, including as related to technological lock in and mitigation deterrence, among others. Balancing these potential risks and benefits demands a careful interrogation of justice and ethics. Unlike many scholars who assert a clear justice landscape, we argue here that the terrain is complicated, nuanced, and not fully mapped. In this essay we explore three core narratives at the intersection of solar geoengineering and justice: intergenerational ethics; participatory justice; and recognitional/reparational justice. We conclude that discussions, debates, and research surrounding justice in the solar geoengineering space should be more focused on the justice of the procedures and practices used in this space, rather than on the justice of specific outcomes that could be secured by solar geoengineering. In focusing on just processes and practices for technological innovation and governance we could enhance our capacity to co-create a world where any decisions on solar geoengineering, whether to ban it or move it forward, are based on thoughtful, ethical, and participatory decision-making that speaks to the interests of all people potentially affected by solar geoengineering.

The practical middle is a cooperative. Lemmer-Webber is on social.coop, one of several instances where members contribute money and take part in decisions, and that money pays for technical maintenance that would otherwise require volunteers. Bonfire is a member of Co-op Cloud – a community first and a set of deployment tools and recipes second. Its other members include hosting cooperatives such as CoQuest, which hosts jacobin.social and helps maintain the recipe that enables straightforward Bonfire deployment. A community that needs managed hosting gets infrastructure people and software developers in the same conversation when something breaks. Bonfire’s phrasing is “do it together” rather than “do it yourself.”

Lemmer-Webber’s answer to what remains unsolved starts with an admission. “ActivityPub was not supposed to be as instance-centric as it is.” She originally envisioned a distributed social network where identity was decoupled from domain name, so moving between instances would be ordinary. But the ecosystem adopted ActivityPub in a client-server shape and then settled into it.

What does exist today is account migration. De Borniol names it first when asked what organizations must have before opening a community space: Members need to be able to export their data, move their account, and bring their follower networks with them. This keeps communities protected during shutdowns and sets the stage for portable identity and content.

A bit of a question mark here for whether this is solar punk technology or not, Boston has never been able to fully escape its Puritan and conservative past, you can see it in the way the city continually self sabotages its progressive potential. You can also feel the cold edge of Boston as a stark departure from cities born of criminals and outcasts from the Puritan colonies such as Providence, RI.

“So, is this the thing,” he asked, “or are we going to end up in another quagmire of an unproven technology?”

Case in point, this is precisely what conservative old money in Boston likes to happen to these bold visions of progressive mass transit systems so they can say "Look see THIS is why we [excluding them of course] can't have nice things!".

It's can't be that hard to generate — it's a linear character sequence just like text — and there's gigabytes of public domain training data literally floating around us

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11481668

...

The European Commission will not extend its November 1 deadline for phasing out Chinese-made power inverters from EU-funded energy projects, despite calls from investors and the renewable energy industry for more time.

...

From November 1, projects connected or due to be connected to the EU electricity grid will have to exclude high-risk suppliers or progressively switch to inverters from suppliers not deemed high-risk.

...

Earlier this year, the EU executive adopted interim policy guidance restricting the use of EU funding for clean energy projects, namely solar, wind and storage, that rely on inverters from high-risk suppliers, meaning Chinese companies such as Huawei.

The move was driven by cybersecurity concerns, particularly the risk that manufacturers could remotely access and manipulate inverters, potentially destabilising electricity grids and triggering blackouts.

...

Following a business roundtable in June convened specifically to address these concerns, industry and investor stakeholders had hoped for derogations to the 1 November deadline.

...

The Commission, for its part, says that a viable alternative supply of non-Chinese inverters already exists, and that the price of guaranteeing the security of Europe's energy infrastructure is a modest one to pay.

...

removepaywall.com

In Madre de Dios, in the Peruvian Amazon, thousands of people depend on gold mining, while the spread of mercury and deforestation are transforming the country’s most biodiverse tropical forest. In La Pampa, one of the region’s main gold mining hubs, a formalized artisanal mining operation is trying to prove that another way of mining is possible. While facing roadblocks, violence, informal economies, and government neglect, it seeks to produce “clean gold” using mercury-free technologies. Through the daily lives of workers, merchants, and small-scale miners, the film explores the tensions between survival, pollution, and legitimacy in one of the Amazon’s most complex extractive economies.

Interview with CEO, interesting tho