Powderhorn

We're all aware of the microplastics problem. Here's the new hotness.

Marine plastic litter tends to grab headlines, with images of suffocating seabirds or bottles washing up along coastlines. Increasingly, researchers have been finding tiny microplastic fragments across all environments, from the most densely populated cities to pristine mountaintops, as well as in human tissue including the brain and placenta. A study published today reveals yet another hidden source of this deadly waste: nanometre-scale particles are literally everywhere, says co-author Dušan Materić, an environmental analytical chemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany.

Materić and his colleagues sampled water at three depths representative of different environments in the North Atlantic Ocean. Throughout the water column, they found three types of nanoplastic: polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polystyrene (PS) and polyvinylchloride (PVC). These were present at average concentrations of 18 milligrams per metre cubed, which translates to 27 million tonnes of nanoplastics spread across just the top layer of the temperate to subtropical North Atlantic. “Nanoplastics make up the dominant fraction of marine plastic pollution,” Materić says. In the entire world’s oceans, it is estimated that there are around 3 million tonnes of floating plastic pollution — excluding nanoplastics.

Good thing he doesn't go on You Can't do That on Television.

Donald Trump hasn’t been happy with Vladimir Putin lately, and he took out his frustrations with Russia’s president this week by announcing that the United States would resume sending military aid to Ukraine. When he was asked on Tuesday who ordered the aid to be paused in the first place, Trump delivered what has become one of his go-to responses whenever he’s pressed about the chaos his administration is unleashing on the nation and the world.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The pause on aid to Ukraine was apparently ordered last week by beleaguered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who reportedly neglected to tell the White House about the move, leading to internal scrambling. Trump was asked whether he approved the pause while sitting next to Hegseth during a Cabinet meeting. The president only offered that the U.S. needs to keep sending “defensive weapons” to Ukraine because “Putin is not treating human beings right.” When asked who ordered the pause, Trump said he didn’t know. “Why don’t you tell me?” he added.

This would be far more amusing if he got slimed every time he said that.

Also, what kind of strongman doesn't know what's going on in his loyal junta?

I think they misspelled "grift," but that's neither here nor there.

Last week, President Donald Trump signed what is likely the most regressive U.S. tax-and-spending bill in U.S. history, giving the top one percent of families more than $1 trillion in tax cuts while slashing Medicaid health coverage and food assistance for the poor. It is also one of the worst environmental bills in U.S. history.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” provides billions of dollars in giveaways to the fossil fuel industry and its wealthiest executives while taking a machete to our national effort to confront the climate crisis and build healthier, more sustainable, and more just communities.

“The Big Ugly Bill is a direct attack on our communities and our climate,” says Irene Burga of GreenLatinos. “This bill puts profit over people, and it will worsen the heat, pollution, and injustice we are already fighting to survive.”

The new law compounds the already $17 billion in direct federal subsidies U.S. taxpayers pay to oil, gas, and coal companies every year. It cuts hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives for renewable energy, despite it being cheaper, healthier, more efficient, and more reliable than fossil fuels. As a result, the law threatens nearly a million U.S. jobs and will result in higher electricity and transportation costs for people living in every state in the continental U.S.

In early June, The Washington Post published a follow-up to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of “DEI-related content.” Illustrated with more than a dozen samples of the targeted photos (which the Post‘s reporters were able to find reproduced on non-government websites), the Post‘s new story offered more details on the images marked for deletion because they were deemed to touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues—overwhelmingly depicting subjects identified as “gay, transgender, women, Hispanic, and Black.”

The headline over the story didn’t mince words: “Here are the people Trump doesn’t want to exist.”

Identified from a database obtained by the Associated Press, the targeted subjects included Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson, pictured during his Army service before becoming the first Black to reach the major leagues in 1947; the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the nation’s first Black military pilots during World War II; and the Navajo Code Talkers, a Native American Marine Corps unit who used their tribal language on the radio for top-secret communications during the war against Japan. Other banned photos showed women who broke significant gender barriers like Major Lisa Jaster, the first woman to graduate from the Army’s Ranger School, and Colonel Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot.

Also deleted were multiple pictures of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber (named for the pilot’s mother) that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That was thanks to an artificial intelligence technique in which computers searched government websites for a list of keywords indicating possibly unacceptable content and inserted “DEI” into the web addresses where any of those words were found, flagging them for removal. For obvious reasons, “gay” was on the banned-word list and, with no human eyes to spot the context, the Enola Gay photos were excised.

I'm reminded of a likely apocryphal tale of the copyeditor who dutifully changed Enola Gay to Enola Homosexual to conform to then-current AP Style.

But bluntly, I don't think near enough attention is being paid not only to [insert colour of your choice here]washing but also to the mounting attempts to literally erase history. If you're cheering for that, you're not a conservative, and you sure as fuck aren't a patriot.

You're a useful idiot. Have fun losing Medicaid.

When discussing the influence of corporations in the legislative process, and their coordinated efforts to send their opponents to prison, sometimes I fear that I sound like I’m wearing a tinfoil hat. Conversations like this often veer into the territory of conspiracy theories, secret societies, and dark figures gathered around oak tables. The truth is not nearly as sexy. Ag-gag became law through what can only be described as the good ol’ boy network.

In Utah, State Representative John Mathis opened an ag-gag hearing by gesturing to the animal agriculture industry in attendance. “It’s fun to see my good ag friends in this committee,” Mathis said, “all my good friends are here.”

In Idaho, after the ag-gag law passed, industry lobbyists praised the close relationship between politicians and business.

“I think it was another outstanding session where agriculture got a lot of help from the legislature,” one said. “That’s due in no small part to having a lot of people in the legislature who are still very closely tied to agriculture and the industry.”

Such buddy-buddy relationships grease the political wheels. And when industry calls in a favor, they get a quick response. In Kentucky, for example, the Humane Society exposed Iron Maiden Hog Farm. It went viral and became a national story, with news outlets revealing that sick and dead piglets were being ground up and fed back to their mothers. The media called this “piglet smoothies.” The next month, a proposal to outlaw farm investigations was included in what was previously a piece of animal welfare legislation.

Aren't these the same folks who say "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide"?

Datacenters are slurping ever more energy to meet the growing demands of AI, but some estimates of future demand imply an increase in hardware that would be beyond the capacity of global chipmakers to supply, according to an environmental nonprofit.

Warnings about the amount of energy that AI datacenters will consume have been getting more strident. A recent report by Deloitte Insights estimated that the total power required by bit barns in the US will increase by a factor of five by 2035, and consultants Bain & Company issued advice to utility companies to revamp the way they operate to support a rapid scale-up of energy resources.

But what happens if those estimates are overinflated? If power companies invest heavily in additional power generation and transmission infrastructure, but datacenter growth does not come near the forecast level, the cost of that expansion would have to be borne by other customers.

Which ... is already happening. $50-a-month rate hike?! As recently as 2019, I was paying $25 per month for my first MWh, all inclusive.

Meanwhile, some US power companies are already set to impose price hikes on consumers because of those pesky bit barns, according to various reports.

The Financial Times said that National Grid, with users in New York and Massachusetts, is to raise rates by $50 a month, while Northern Indiana Public Service Company is upping monthly rates by $23 a customer.

Reuters reports that PJM Interconnection, which serves a number of states clustered near the east coast, is set to increase its energy bills by more than 20 percent this summer. Its area of coverage includes Virginia, home to the largest concentration of datacenter capacity in the world.

The new Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe 2230 is a single-sided M.2 2230 (22x30mm) form-factor SSD that will be available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities, reaching sequential read and write speeds of up to 6,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s. The Kingston NV3 is also available in the standard M.2 2280 form-factor.

Look, I'll be the first to admit that this is a not-even-glorified press-release rewrite.

That out of the way, it's pretty amazing that 2230 has become viable at large capacities while still hitting PCIe 4 speeds. Sure, it's not the latest gen in the wild, but my guess is you'd need active cooling for PCIe 5 in this form factor.

My first NVMe drive was shockingly tiny -- like, I know millimetres and all, but I'm old enough that our first (20MB) hard drive was full-height 5¼". Being able to get this kind of throughput in such a small space makes a 2280 look like an SD card adapter for a 2230 microSD.

If you can't win on policy, change the rules!

Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, has been accused by political opponents of trying to “fix” next year’s midterms in favor of Republicans after he announced a plan that would see a wide-scale redrawing of the state’s congressional districts.

The move was contained in Abbott’s list of priorities for the upcoming legislative session published Wednesday. It features several items related to the deadly Hill Country flooding that killed at least 120 people and left dozens more missing, including instructions for lawmakers to look at early warning systems and improving disaster preparation.

But Abbott’s directive to redraw congressional maps, which the Texas Tribune reported on Wednesday, was in response from a Trump administration demand for more Republican seats to preserve or expand the party’s narrow House majority, has angered Democrats.

In a statement, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee called the move “an attack on democracy”.

In one of its many changes, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enacted on July 4, 2025, eliminated civil penalties for noncompliance with federal fuel economy standards. Specifically, Section 40006 of the Act amends the language of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) statute to reset the maximum civil penalty to $0.00. Although the statute and its implementing regulations otherwise remain in place, this amendment removes any civil penalties for producing passenger cars and light trucks that do not meet fuel economy requirements.

First established in 1975 in response to the gas crisis of the early 1970s, the CAFE statute empowers the Department of Transportation to set average fuel economy standards for vehicle fleets. Acting by delegation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has periodically promulgated rules that set CAFE standards for vehicle model years. Recent rulemakings have attracted considerable attention, including debates over whether standards may account for the production of electric vehicles, based on those vehicles’ petroleum-equivalent fuel economy values calculated by the Department of Energy.

NHTSA finalized its most recent standard-setting rulemaking in 2024, covering passenger cars and certain types of trucks and vans for upcoming model years. The standard set in that rulemaking culminated in requiring model year 2031 passenger cars to achieve an average fuel economy of about 50.4 miles per gallon.

In a break with decades of tradition, the Internal Revenue Service says it will allow houses of worship to endorse candidates for political office without losing their tax-exempt status.

The surprise announcement came in a court document filed on Monday.

Since 1954, a provision in the tax code called the Johnson Amendment says that churches and other nonprofit organizations could lose their tax-exempt status if they participate in, or intervene in "any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."

The National Religious Broadcasters and several churches sued the IRS over the rule, arguing that it infringes on their First Amendment rights to the freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion.

The IRS rarely enforced the rule. During President Trump's first term, he promised to "get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution."

On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.

Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?

Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.

The chance at an unlikely but substantial monetary reward gets people more jazzed about recycling than a small but certain reward, according to a new study. The findings suggest that implementing “bottle lotteries” as part of deposit return schemes could increase recycling rates, at no extra cost to local governments.

Two trillion beverage containers are produced every year, but only 34% of glass bottles, 40% of plastic bottles, and 70% of aluminum cans get recycled. Fifteen countries, 11 U.S. states, and 12 Canadian provinces have bottle-deposit refund systems in which a small sum (about 5 to 45 cents) added to the price of each beverage sold is refunded when people return the empty container for recycling.

These schemes lead to recycling rates of 78.3% on average – much better, but still leaving millions of tons of recyclables moldering in landfills.

Enter the idea of a bottle lottery, which aims to bring to recycling the same thrill that attends buying a lottery ticket. Norway currently has the world’s only bottle-recycling lottery system, which was implemented in 1997. The country boasts impressive beverage container recycling rates of nearly 97%, but until now there have not been any causal studies to work out to what degree this is due to the lottery.

After spending so much time in Oregon, the idea of not having deposit is insane. The roads in Austin are littered with beverage containers.

In Oregon, a popular thing to do for the homeless was scavenge for bottles and cans. Really a win-win ... cleaning public spaces for admittedly a pittance.