Apple is working on ways to help detect and diagnose conditions such as depression, anxiety and cognitive decline using an iPhone, WSJ is reporting. Techcrunch: Researchers hope that analysis of data such as mobility, sleep patterns and how people type could spot behaviors associated with those conditions, according to The Wall Street Journal. ther measurements could include facial expression analysis and heart and respiration rates. All of the processing would take place on the device, with no data sent to Apple servers. The company is working on research projects that could lead to the development of these features. The University of California, Los Angeles, is studying stress, anxiety and depression, with Apple Watch and iPhone data for 3,000 volunteers being tracked in a study that starts this year. A pilot phase that began in 2020 recorded data from 150 participants.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to retire the International Space Station by the end of this decade, so the U.S. space agency is turning to private companies to build new space stations in orbit -- and expects to save more than $1 billion annually as a result. CNBC reports: NASA earlier this year unveiled the Commercial LEO Destinations project, with plans to award up to $400 million in total contracts to as many as four companies to begin development on private space stations. In response to NASA's request, director of commercial spaceflight Phil McAlister told CNBC that the agency "received roughly about a dozen proposals" from a variety of companies for contracts under the project. "We got an incredibly strong response from industry to our announcement for proposals for commercial, free fliers that go directly to orbit," McAlister said. "I can't remember the last time we got that many proposals [in response] to a [human spaceflight] contract announcement."

The ISS is more than 20 years old and costs NASA about $4 billion a year to operate. The space station is approved to operate through the end of 2024, with a likely lifespan extension to the end of 2028. But, moving forward, McAlister says that NASA wants "to be just one of many users instead of the primary sponsor and infrastructure supporter" for stations in low Earth orbit. "This strong industry response shows that our plan to retire the International Space Station in the latter part of this decade and transition to commercial space destinations is a viable, strong plan," McAlister said. "We are making tangible progress on developing commercial space destinations where people can work, play, and live," McAlister added. NASA is now evaluating the proposals, and McAlister said the agency hopes to announce the contract winners "before the end of the year," although he is "pushing for earlier." NASA "will not need anything near as big and as capable" as the ISS moving forward, said McAlister. He said the private space stations "could be very large, but NASA will only be paying for the part that we need."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Small doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 mRNA vaccine in children ages 5 to 11 appeared to produce strong antibody responses and comparable side effects to those seen in older age groups, according to the first top-line results from a Phase 2/3 clinical trial released by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech early Monday. The trial data involved 2,268 children ages 5 to 11 years, and these children were given a series of two 10-microgram doses of the vaccine, 21 days apart. The dosage is just a third of the 30-microgram doses given to people ages 12 and above. One month after the second dose, researchers measured the children's levels of antibodies able to neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a lab experiment. The geometric mean titer of antibody in the 5 to 11 year olds was 1,197.6 (95 percent confidence interval of 1,106.1 to 1,296.6), which is comparable to the geometric mean titer of 1,146.5 seen in people ages 16 to 25. Pfizer described the vaccine as being well tolerated in children, with side effects generally comparable to what's seen in people ages 16 to 25. But the company did not provide further data on the side effects. It also did not provide any further data on vaccine efficacy, though experts expect that comparable neutralizing antibody levels will provide comparable levels of protection against infection, hospitalization, and death. The company said it plans to submit the data to the FDA as soon as possible. It also aims to submit the data for emergency use authorization to the FDA by the end of the month. "Once data is submitted to the FDA, it will take regulators several weeks to review the data and make a decision," the report adds. "That places the earliest estimates for vaccine authorization and availability for the 5-to-11 group at the end of October."

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed that of the 1918 flu pandemic, according to a tracker from Johns Hopkins University. The Hill reports: The U.S. has passed 675,000 deaths, the estimated toll from the 1918 pandemic, which for a century had been the worst pandemic to hit the country. "The number of reported deaths from Covid in the US will surpass the toll of the 1918 flu pandemic this month," Tom Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tweeted earlier this month. "We cannot become hardened to the continuing, and largely preventable, tragedy."

Deaths from COVID-19 are also far from over. The U.S. is averaging about 2,000 more deaths from the virus every day, according to a New York Times tracker. Those deaths are overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated, though, highlighting that the continuing toll of COVID-19 is now largely preventable now that vaccines are widely available in the U.S. In 1918, there was no vaccine to help stop the flu pandemic. Still, the U.S. population was far smaller a century ago, meaning that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic is still higher than for COVID-19. E. Thomas Ewing, a Virginia Tech history professor, wrote in Health Affairs earlier this year that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic was about six in every 1,000 people, given the U.S. population at the time of around 100 million. The death rate from COVID-19 in the U.S. is about two in every 1,000 people. A disproportionate share of COVID-19 deaths are also in the United States. Worldwide, the 1918 flu killed far more people than COVID-19 has so far, at about 50 million compared to about 5 million.

Oregon Health & Science University reported Friday that in the 45 days before September 14, five Oregonians had to be hospitalized "because they consumed a potent antiparasitic drug despite there being no clinical data supporting its use for COVID-19...

"Two people were so severely ill that they had to be admitted to an intensive care unit." The Oregon Poison Center has managed 25 cases involving Oregonians intentionally misusing ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19 between Aug. 1 and Sept. 14... The Oregon Poison Center's recent cases involved a variety of symptoms, including mental confusion, balance issues, low blood pressure and seizure. The patients were in their 20s through their 80s, although most were older than 60. The cases were fairly evenly split between both men and women, and between people attempting to either prevent or treat COVID-19. Some cases involved individuals obtaining a prescription for either human or veterinary forms of the drug.

Both the Food and Drug Administration and Merck, which makes ivermectin for human use, have announced there is no scientific data that supports its use for COVID-19. Neither the FDA nor the National Institutes of Health have endorsed its use for COVID-19, and OHSU doesn't recommend any use of ivermectin for COVID-19.
They add that "The Oregon Poison Center strongly recommends the public only use scientifically proven and FDA-approved methods to combat the novel coronavirus."

But there's also been more hospitalizations from ivermectin overdoses in other states, reports the Arizona Republic. Banner Health, a 50,000-employee health non-profit managing 30 hospitals in six states (and staffing a local poison control hotline) reports that their "Poison and Drug Information Center" received at least 30 calls this year, including 10 in August, and "at least seven cases have resulted in hospitalization, health system officials said." "That is the bare minimum. We expect that there are probably more adverse effects," said Dr. Daniel Brooks, medical director for Banner Health's Poison and Drug Information Center. "We are very concerned that people are using this medication inappropriately because we don't know what dose they are using. We don't even know what product they are getting their hands on..." ivermectin has side effects in up to 10% of people who are treated with it, Brooks said. Side effects can include diarrhea, confusion, nausea, vomiting, balance problems and blurred vision...

"If they have side effects, then they could end up in the emergency department, further overwhelming the health system in Arizona and the rest of the United States and potentially getting COVID from sitting in a busy emergency department waiting room, or being admitted to the hospital because of ongoing nausea and vomiting."
And even in the same state, other organizations also reported more hospitalizations from ivermectin overdoses. "The University of Arizona's Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, which has had 19 reports related to ivermectin so far this year, including eight who were hospitalized, center director Steve Dudley wrote in an email."

A Pennsylvania newspaper tracked down Dr. Kenneth Brown — who wrote Merck's original research protocols in the 1980s for studying ivermectin as a "river blindness" treatment.

They describe Brown as 85 years old, retired, and "proud of his association with Ivermectin." More than 4 billion doses of ivermectin (renamed Mectizan) have been administered globally in the effort to eliminate river blindness, the leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide. Historically, river blindness — transmitted by the bites of black flies that breed near rivers and streams — is prevalent in 36 countries in Africa, Latin America and Yemen. Brown saw firsthand in west Africa the miracle at work, often administered by local townspeople — who could neither read nor write — trained through Merck's donation program.

"We want to celebrate Ivermectin for what it's done around the world," said Polly Ann Brown, Brown's wife.
They asked how he feels about people "willing to bypass evidence...collected through traditional scientific studies" to try self-administering their own levels of the drug in home experiments seeking remedies for Covid-19. (The article notes that even the author of an often-cited Australian study that initially claimed a benefit from ivermectin has since said "[T]he potential repurposing plausibility if any is at present not very likely, because the antiviral concentrations would be attainable only after massive overdose.") Brown tracks questionable claims about medicines as a retirement job... The main thrust of many pushing the use of ivermectin [as an unproven Covid-19 treatment] goes something like this: Big pharma doesn't want the public to use ivermectin...because the pharmaceutical companies don't make vast sums of money on what is, essentially in the U.S., a horse dewormer. Billions of people — they will argue — have taken the drug safely.

What they don't say, or don't know, is that ivermectin has been administered billions of times. But because ivermectin is not a one-and-done treatment (it has to be administered once annually) that's an exaggeration. And while it's been used for decades, there are no established safety protocols for its use as a COVID-19 treatment. The way Brown sees it, the affection for ivermectin rather than one of the COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. reveals an anti-science bias.

Brown's advice?

"Don't get your information or medical advice from Facebook or Instagram," Brown said. "No social media can be reliably accurate."
Elsewhere in the article, Brown stresses that Ivermectin is "not magic..."

"It is a danger to trust the dream we wish for rather than the science we have.'

"The whitest paint in the world has been created in a lab at Purdue University," reports USA Today, "a paint so white that it could eventually reduce or even eliminate the need for air conditioning, scientists say.

"The paint has now made it into the Guinness World Records book as the whitest ever made."

Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace shared their report: "When we started this project about seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind," said Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue, in a statement. The idea was to make a paint that would reflect sunlight away from a building, researchers said. Making this paint really reflective, however, also made it really white, according to Purdue University. The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat.

Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power. Using this new paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. "That's more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses," Ruan said. Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80% to 90% of sunlight and can't make surfaces cooler than their surroundings...

Researchers at Purdue have partnered with a company to put this ultra-white paint on the market, according to a news release.
"This white paint is the result of research building on attempts going back to the 1970s," adds a statement from Purdue University, "to develop radiative cooling paint as a feasible alternative to traditional air conditioners.

"Ruan's lab had considered over 100 different materials, narrowed them down to 10 and tested about 50 different formulations for each material..." Two features make this paint ultra-white: a very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate — also used in photo paper and cosmetics — and different particle sizes of barium sulfate in the paint. What wavelength of sunlight each particle scatters depends on its size, so a wider range of particle sizes allows the paint to scatter more of the light spectrum from the sun.

Watch the video here!

"SpaceX safely returned its Crew Dragon spacecraft from orbit on Saturday, with the capsule carrying the four members of the Inspiration4 mission back to Earth after three days in space..." reports CNBC: "Thanks so much SpaceX, that was a heck of a ride for us and we're just getting started!" Inspiration4 commander Jared Isaacman said from the capsule after touching down.

Elon Musk tweeted his congratulations to the crew shortly after splashdown.

The historic private mission — which includes Isaacman, pilot Sian Proctor, medical officer Hayley Arceneaux and mission specialist Chris Sembroski — orbited the Earth at an altitude as high as 590 kilometers, which is above the International Space Station and the furthest humans have traveled above the surface in years. A free-flying spaceflight, the capsule did not dock with the ISS but instead circled the Earth independently at a rate of 15 orbits per day.

Inspiration4 shared photos from the crew's time in orbit, giving a look at the expansive views from the spacecraft's "cupola" window.

This is the third time SpaceX has returned astronauts from space, and the second time for this capsule — which previously flew the Crew-1 mission for NASA on a trip that returned in May.

"A CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology that has shown promise in clearing HIV from mice is headed into human testing," reports Fierce Biotech: We don't like to throw the word "cure" around here. But Excision BioTherapeutics thinks the therapy could replace standard-of-care retroviral therapy, which keeps HIV from replicating but does not remove it from the body. That means patients stay on the treatment, which can cause serious side effects and affect quality of life. Now with the start of human testing, the real path to see if this new and lauded tech can accomplish this really begins.

HIV integrates its genetic material into the genome of a host cell, meaning available therapies just can't remove it. A team of scientists at Temple University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center managed to remove the virus completely from mice during preclinical testing using a combination of CRISPR and antiretroviral therapy. They also found no adverse events that could be linked to the therapy in the study, published back in 2019... EBT-101 has since been tested in nonhuman primates, which showed it reached every tissue in the body where HIV reservoirs reside.

Excision licensed the therapy from the universities with a goal of moving it into clinical trials. Now, the FDA is on board. The biotech plans to initiate a phase 1/2 clinical trial later this year, according to the statement.

The technology used by Excision was licensed from the lab of famed CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna. The company is also working on similar treatments for other viruses, including herpes and hepatitis B.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: [R]esearchers in Finland are experimenting with growing coffee from plant cells in bioreactors. There are several reasons why it might make sense to have such an alternative, says Heiko Rischer, a research team leader at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the state-owned organization developing the coffee. "Conventional coffee production is notoriously associated with several problematic issues, such as unsustainable farming methods, exploitation, and land rights," he says. "Growing demand and climate change add to the problems." In Vietnam, for example, coffee production is driving deforestation.

The researchers are using the same techniques to make coffee that others are using to make "lab-grown," or cultivated, meat. Coffee plant cells were cultured in the lab, and then placed in bioreactors filled with nutrient medium to grow. It's a little easier to grow coffee than something like beef. "The nutrient media for plant-cell cultures are much less complex, i.e., cheaper, than those for animal cells," Rischer says. "Scaling up is also easier because plant cells grow freely, suspended in the medium, while animal cells grow attached to surfaces."

The process results in an off-white biomass that's dried into a powder, then roasted to a dark brown color that looks like coffee grounds. The scientists recently brewed their first cups of the lab-grown coffee, which they say tastes and smells like ordinary coffee. It's also possible to make different varieties. "Cell cultures of different coffee cultivars can be established, and the roasting process can be modified, in order to produce coffee with very different character," says Rischer. "The cultivation process can be modified in order to generate more or less of certain compounds, such as caffeine or flavors." The lab plans to work with companies that can commercialize the new process.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: An influential Food and Drug Administration advisory committee on Friday resoundingly rejected a plan to administer booster shots of Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine to the general public, saying they needed more data. The panel, however, could still recommend the shots for other populations. Scientists continued debating the need for a third dose of the vaccines for people 65 and older and other vulnerable populations after their initial vote. "It's likely beneficial, in my opinion, for the elderly, and may eventually be indicated for the general population. I just don't think we're there yet in terms of the data," Dr. Ofer Levy, a vaccine and infectious disease specialist at Boston Children's Hospital, said after voting against the original proposal. The final tally failed 16-2.

In a paper published days before the advisory committee meeting, a leading group of scientists said available data showed vaccine protection against severe disease persists, even as the effectiveness against mild disease wanes over time. The authors, including two high-ranking FDA officials and multiple scientists from the World Health Organization, argued Monday in the medical journal The Lancet that widely distributing booster shots to the general public is not appropriate at this time. In outlining plans last month to start distributing boosters as early as next week, administration officials cited three CDC studies that showed the vaccines' protection against Covid diminished over several months. Senior health officials said at the time they worried protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death "could" diminish in the months ahead, especially among those who are at higher risk or were vaccinated during the earlier phases of the vaccination rollout. Before the vote, some committee members said they were concerned that there wasn't enough data to make a recommendation, while others argued third shots should be limited to certain groups, such as people over age 60 who are known to be at higher risk of severe disease. Some members raised concerns about the risk of myocarditis in younger people, saying more research is needed.

Cosmologists have found signs that a second type of dark energy -- the ubiquitous but enigmatic substance that is pushing the current Universe's expansion to accelerate -- might have existed in the first 300,000 years after the Big Bang. From a report: Two separate studies -- both posted on the arXiv preprint server in the past week -- have detected a tentative first trace of this 'early dark energy' in data collected between 2013 and 2016 by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile. If the findings are confirmed, they could help to solve a long-standing conundrum surrounding data about the early Universe, which seem to be incompatible with the rate of cosmic expansion measured today. But the data are preliminary and don't show definitively whether this form of dark energy really existed.

"There are a number of reasons to be careful to take this as a discovery of new physics," says Silvia Galli, a cosmologist at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. The authors of both preprints -- one posted by the ACT team, and the other by an independent group -- admit that the data are not yet strong enough to detect early dark energy with high confidence. But they say that further observations from the ACT and another observatory, the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica, could provide a more stringent test soon. "If this really is true -- if the early Universe really did feature early dark energy -- then we should see a strong signal," says Colin Hill, a co-author of the ACT team's paper who is a cosmologist at Columbia University in New York City.

RockDoctor writes: A recent flurry of posts to astronomy news sites points to an amateur astronomer spotting a new impact on Jupiter. Every such case documented improves our estimates of how many bodies are flying around in the (inner) solar system, and improves our estimates of how likely we are to get another hit in a year, a decade, or a century. Sky and Telescope has been pulling in more information. SpaceWeather.com has an image of the impact. (Note: some of these images have been "flipped" to an "on sky" orientation, and others haven't because astronomical telescopes generally produce an inverted image since it requires fewer reflections.) Estimates of the impactor size are unclear, but minimum sizes seem to be in the several kg range. Depending on how long the flash lasted, it could go up into the tons, which is important for estimating the number of potentially hazardous objects in the inner solar system. Space and Telescope's correspondents put the size at "up to" (important words!) the 30m range (100ft in Tudor measure), which would be around 10,000 tons -- a Chelyabinsk 2013-size body.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: Scientists say the Southern Hemisphere ozone hole is larger than usual and already surpasses the size of Antarctica. The European Union's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) said Thursday that the ozone hole, which appears every year during the Southern Hemisphere spring, has grown considerably in the past week following an average start. "Forecasts show that this year's hole has evolved into a rather larger than usual one," said Vincent-Henri Peuch, who heads the EU's satellite monitoring service. "We are looking at a quite big and potentially also deep ozone hole," he said. The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, led to a ban on a group of chemicals called halocarbons that were blamed for exacerbating the annual ozone hole. Experts say it's likely to take until the 2060s for ozone-depleting substances to be completely phased out. "[S]cientists have been closely monitoring the development of this year's ozone hole over the South Pole, which has now reached an extent larger than Antarctica," says the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. "After a rather standard start, the 2021 ozone hole has considerably grown in the last two weeks and is now larger than 75% of ozone holes at that stage in the season since 1979."

Vincent-Henri Peuch, Director of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, adds: "This year, the ozone hole developed as expected at the start of the season. It seems pretty similar to last year's, which also wasn't really exceptional until early September, but then turned into one of the largest and longest-lasting ozone holes in our data record later in the season. Now our forecasts show that this year's hole has evolved into a rather larger than usual one. The vortex is quite stable and the stratospheric temperatures are even lower than last year, so it may continue to grow slightly over the next two or three weeks."

Scientists found evidence that a region of northern Mars called Arabia Terra experienced thousands of "super eruptions," the biggest volcanic eruptions known, over a 500-million-year period. NASA reports the findings in a post: Some volcanoes can produce eruptions so powerful they release oceans of dust and toxic gases into the air, blocking out sunlight and changing a planet's climate for decades. By studying the topography and mineral composition of a portion of the Arabia Terra region in northern Mars, scientists recently found evidence for thousands of such eruptions, or "super eruptions," which are the most violent volcanic explosions known. Spewing water vapor, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide into the air, these explosions tore through the Martian surface over a 500-million-year period about 4 billion years ago. Scientists reported this estimate in a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in July 2021. "Each one of these eruptions would have had a significant climate impact -- maybe the released gas made the atmosphere thicker or blocked the Sun and made the atmosphere colder," said Patrick Whelley, a geologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who led the Arabia Terra analysis. "Modelers of the Martian climate will have some work to do to try to understand the impact of the volcanoes."
[...]
One remaining question is how a planet can have only one type of volcano littering a region. On Earth volcanoes capable of super eruptions -- the most recent erupted 76,000 years ago in Sumatra, Indonesia -- are dispersed around the globe and exist in the same areas as other volcano types. Mars, too, has many other types of volcanoes, including the biggest volcano in the solar system called Olympus Mons. Olympus Mons is 100 times larger by volume than Earth's largest volcano of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and is known as a "shield volcano," which drains lava down a gently sloping mountain. Arabia Terra so far has the only evidence of explosive volcanoes on Mars. It's possible that super-eruptive volcanoes were concentrated in regions on Earth but have been eroded physically and chemically or moved around the globe as continents shifted due to plate tectonics. These types of explosive volcanoes also could exist in regions of Jupiter's moon Io or could have been clustered on Venus. Whatever the case may be, Richardson hopes Arabia Terra will teach scientists something new about geological processes that help shape planets and moons.

Aalto University reports via Phys.Org: When two substances are brought together, they will eventually settle into a steady state called thermodynamic equilibrium; examples include oil floating on top of water and milk mixing uniformly into coffee. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland wanted to disrupt this sort of state to see what happens -- and whether they can control the outcome. In their work, the team used combinations of oils with different dielectric constants and conductivities. They then subjected the liquids to an electric field. "When we turn on an electric field over the mixture, electrical charge accumulates at the interface between the oils. This charge density shears the interface out of thermodynamic equilibrium and into interesting formations," explains Dr. Nikos Kyriakopoulos, one of the authors of the paper. As well as being disrupted by the electric field, the liquids were confined into a thin, nearly two-dimensional sheet. This combination led to the oils reshaping into various completely unexpected droplets and patterns.

The droplets in the experiment could be made into squares and hexagons with straight sides, which is almost impossible in nature, where small bubbles and droplets tend to form spheres. The two liquids could be also made to form into interconnected lattices: grid patterns that occur regularly in solid materials but are unheard of in liquid mixtures. The liquids can even be coaxed into forming a torus, a donut shape, which was stable and held its shape while the field was applied -- unlike in nature, as liquids have a strong tendency to collapse in and fill the hole at the center. The liquids can also form filaments that roll and rotate around an axis. One of the exciting results of this work is the ability to create temporary structures with a controlled and well-defined size which can be turned on and off with voltage, an area that the researchers are interested in exploring further for creating voltage-controlled optical devices. Another potential outcome is the ability to create interacting populations of rolling microfilaments and microdroplets that, at some elementary level, mimic the dynamics and collective behavior of microorganisms like bacteria and microalgae that propel themselves using completely different mechanisms. The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

SpaceX has successfully launched the crew of Inspiration4 into orbit. It's the first-ever orbital flight crewed entirely by tourists. From a report: The SpaceX rocket blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center just after 8 p.m. ET. The crew includes 38-year-old billionaire Jared Isaacman, who personally financed the trip; Hayley Arceneux, 29, a childhood cancer survivor and current St. Jude physician assistant; Sian Proctor, 51, a geologist and community college teacher with a PhD; and Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old Lockheed Martin employee and lifelong space fan who claimed his seat through an online raffle. The passengers will now spend three days aboard their 13-foot-wide Crew Dragon capsule in orbit at a 350-mile altitude.

The global pipeline of new coal power plants has collapsed since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, according to research that suggests the end of the polluting energy source is in sight. From a report: The report found that more than three-quarters of the world's planned plants have been scrapped since the climate deal was signed, meaning 44 countries no longer have any future coal power plans. The climate groups behind the report -- E3G, Global Energy Monitor and Ember -- said those countries now have the opportunity to join the 40 countries that have already signed up to a "no new coal" commitment to help tackle global carbon emissions. "Only five years ago, there were so many new coal power plants planned to be built, but most of these have now been either officially halted, or are paused and unlikely to ever be built," said Dave Jones, from Ember. "Multiple countries can add their voices to a snowball of public commitments to 'no new coal,' collectively delivering a key milestone to sealing coal's fate."

An anonymous reader shares a report (paywalled): Gas made up the largest share of the UK's energy mix in 2020, at 34%; followed by wind on a quarter; nuclear at 17%; biomass at 6.5% and solar at 4.4%. Despite the progress of renewables, detractors note the problems arise when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Until reliable battery storage for renewable energy is developed, these sources can only ever be intermittent, critics argue, and some infrastructure will continue to use oil for back-up generation. It is a case made by the nuclear industry, which says that it is uniquely placed to provide the zero-emissions baseload the grid requires. Runaway gas prices are already sparking concern across the energy sector, with fears that consumers are facing a "bill shock" this winter. Personal finance expert Martin Lewis warned his readers last week: "This autumn's signature noise will be a deep thud... the sound of jaws hitting the floor as people finally see the practical evidence of the energy bill catastrophe laid bare."

UK gas prices reached 130p per therm last week, compared to 30p a year ago. In an unusual inversion, gas prices are trading above the equivalent price of Brent, the benchmark for crude oil. Both supply and demand factors are at play. The reopening of economies after Covid lockdowns has pushed up demand for gas. Countries are also trying to cut their use of coal, and switching to less polluting gas as a result. Europe is thus competing with Asia for shipments of liquid natural gas (LNG), a more mobile form of gas that is increasingly popular. Supply is also tight: a particularly cold winter meant Europe used up more reserves than usual and these have not been replenished. A spate of outages at gas production plants in different parts of the world have compounded the problem. To make matters worse, the UK has relatively low levels of gas storage. The country has eight gas storage sites that can hold an estimated 12 days of supply. Storage capacity was drastically reduced when the Rough site under the North Sea was closed in 2017 for safety and economic reasons. Rough, a disused oil field, could hold around 70% of UK gas reserves. "The market hasn't been able to fill up storage as we move into this winter. And hence we are very exposed, especially if it is another cold winter like last year," said James Huckstepp, analyst at S&P Platts. "Consumers are starting to recognise that their energy bills are going to be much higher this winter."

The world's first crew of "amateur astronauts" is preparing to blast off on a mission that will carry them into orbit before bringing them back down to Earth at the weekend. From a report: The four civilians, who have spent the past few months on an astronaut training course, are due to launch on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8.02pm local time on Wednesday (1.02am UK time on Thursday). Barring any glitches, the two men and two women on the Inspiration4 mission are expected to orbit the planet for three or four days, performing experiments and admiring the view through a glass dome fitted to their Dragon capsule, before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.

Touted as "the world's first all-civilian mission to orbit," the launch is the latest to promote the virtues of space tourism and follows suborbital flights in July by Sir Richard Branson on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo -- which has since been grounded for going off course -- and Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket. While the Inspiration4 crew has had flying lessons, centrifuge sessions to experience the G-forces of launch, and hours of training in SpaceX's capsule simulator, the mission will be almost entirely automated. The capsule is due to orbit Earth at an altitude of 360 miles (575km), about 93 miles higher than the International Space Station. UPDATE: They did it.