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“Altman’s gaslighting reached new heights this week as he cited wildly deflated numbers for OpenAI’s water and electricity usage compared to numerous past studies. … [He] cited internal figures for how much energy and water a single ChatGPT query uses. The OpenAI CEO claimed a single prompt requires around 0.34 Wh, equivalent to what ‘a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes.’ For cooling these data centers used to process AI queries, Altman suggested a student asking ChatGPT to do their essay for them requires ‘0.000085 gallons of water, roughly one-fifteenth of a teaspoon.’ Altman did not offer any evidence for these claims and failed to mention where his data comes from. … If we took the AI monger at his word, we only need to do some simple math to check how much water that actually is.”

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“Hydrogen has the potential to be a climate-friendly fuel since it doesn’t release carbon dioxide when used as an energy source. Currently, however, most methods for producing hydrogen involve fossil fuels, making hydrogen less of a ‘green’ fuel over its entire life cycle. A new process developed by MIT engineers could significantly shrink the carbon footprint associated with making hydrogen. Last year, the team reported that they could produce hydrogen gas by combining seawater, recycled soda cans, and caffeine. The question then was whether the benchtop process could be applied at an industrial scale, and at what environmental cost…”

“Trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses and single-celled organisms travel the globe high in the atmosphere. Scientists are discovering they play a vital role in the weather and even our health. … It took decades for people to accept the reality of the aerobiome. In the 1930s, a few scientists took to the sky in airplanes, holding out slides and Petri dishes to catch fungal spores and bacteria in the wind. Balloon expeditions to the stratosphere captured cells there as well. Today, 21st-Century aerobiologists deploy sophisticated air-samplers on drones and use DNA-sequencing technology to identify airborne life by its genes. The aerobiome, researchers now recognize, is an enormous habitat filled only with visitors.”

Image Source - Giphy

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“This Friday the 13th, watch out for deep sea serpents and deathwatch beetles, and even something as innocent as a rainbow. The origins of Friday the 13th are murky, with possible connections to Judas being the 13th guest at the Last Supper, or the Knights Templar being condemned on a Friday the 13th. Just like the holiday, many superstitions have mysterious origins. We often hang on to old ideas without knowing how they came about. Explore these five stories of superstition, from human sacrifice to the rise of sleep paralysis demons.”