“At the time of writing, Make Sunsets has deployed 82 balloons, offsetting the warming caused by 53,800 tons of CO2 (the world emits about 37 billion tons of CO2 annually). It has more than 500 customers, including Casey Handmer, founder and CEO of Terraform Industries, a startup using tech to create natural gas from sunlight and air.”
From Freethink.
“The U.S. military has set a new record for wireless power transmission, beaming a laser carrying more than 800 watts of power across a distance of 5.3 miles (8.6 kilometers).
The test, performed by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) program, is a key step toward unlocking the near-instant beaming of power.
It also smashes previous records set by the POWER program, which previously beamed 230 watts across 1 mile (1.7 km) for 25 seconds, and a smaller, undisclosed amount of power as far as 2.3 miles (3.7 km).”
From Live Science.
“In a warehouse deep in Brazil’s savanna, machines churn through piles of red clay to produce chalky rocks packed with metals critical for making electric cars, smartphones and missiles.
But what is particularly precious about these minerals is their intended destination: They are bound for the U.S., not China.
China mines some 70% of the world’s rare earths, the 17 metallic elements primarily used in magnets needed for civilian and military technologies. But its 90% share of processing for rare earths mined around the world is what really concerns officials from other countries working to secure their supply.
‘China is a formidable competitor,’ said Ramón Barúa, chief executive of Canada’s Aclara Resources, which is opening a rare-earths mine to supply a processing plant it plans to build in the U.S. Aclara said it plans by August to decide where in the U.S. to build its plant for separating rare-earths deposits into individual elements.
It also has a buyer lined up. Aclara signed an agreement last year to supply rare earths to VAC, a German company that is building a factory in South Carolina with $94 million in Pentagon funding to make magnets for clients including General Motors.
‘We’re seeing a tsunami of demand,’ Barúa said.”
From Wall Street Journal.
“In February, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) — a world leader in forecasting global weather conditions up to a few weeks out — quietly went live with the planet’s first fully operational weather forecast system powered by artificial intelligence.
The new A.I. forecasts are, by leaps and bounds, easier, faster, and cheaper to produce than the non-A.I. variety, using 1,000 times less computational energy. And, in most cases, these A.I. forecasts, powered by machine learning, are more accurate, too. ‘Right now the machine learning model is producing better scores,’ says Peter Dueben, a model developer at ECMWF in Bonn, who helped to develop the center’s Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS). The improvement is hard to quantify, but the ECMWF says that for some weather phenomena, the AIFS is 20 percent better than its state-of-the-art physics-based models.
Andrew Charlton-Perez, a meteorologist at the University of Reading who also heads up that institution’s school of computational sciences, expects plenty more operational A.I. forecasts to follow — from both national weather agencies and companies like Google.”
From Yale Environment 360.
“Fervo Energy today [6/10/25] announced the successful drilling and logging of its Sugarloaf appraisal well, an operational achievement that demonstrates the rapid advancement and scalability of enhanced geothermal systems (‘EGS’). The well was drilled to a true vertical depth of 15,765 feet and is projected to reach a bottomhole temperature of 520 °F after full thermal equilibration. Fervo completed the Sugarloaf well in just 16 drilling days, representing a 79% reduction in drilling time compared to the US Department of Energy baseline for ultradeep geothermal wells.
While drilling what is Fervo’s hottest and deepest well to-date, the company was able to achieve multiple drilling performance records, including a maximum bit run length of 3,290 feet, a maximum average rate of penetration (‘ROP’) of 95 feet/hour, and an instantaneous ROP of over 300 feet/hour at depths greater than 15,000 feet. These results expand the window for commercial viability of EGS into a significantly deeper and hotter regime, paving the way to deploy the technology outside of the western US.”
From Fervo.
