Accounting for the emissions of a global tech empire is not a simple task, and what industry standards we do have for disclosure may allow tech companies to systematically understate their carbon footprint. A Guardian report compares official declarations of carbon emissions — including what amount to offsets purchased elsewhere, with “location-based” emissions, another standard […]

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The company is working with Muon Space, the Earth Fire Alliance, and others to launch FireSat.

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Fusion startups have raised $7.1 billion to date, with the majority of it going to a handful of companies. 

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Enlarge / Artist's conception of the state of the Earth during its global glaciations. (credit: NASA)

Earth has gone through many geologic phases, but it did have one striking period of stasis: Our planet experienced a tropical environment where algae and single-celled organisms flourished for almost 2 billion years. Then things changed drastically as the planet was plunged into a deep freeze.

It was previously unclear when Earth became a gargantuan freezer. Now, University College London researchers have found evidence in an outcrop of rocks in Scotland, known as the Port Askaig Formation, that show evidence of the transition from a tropical Earth to a frozen one 717 million years ago. This marks the onset of the Sturtian glaciation and would be the first of two "snowball Earth" events during which much of the planet’s surface was covered in ice. It is thought that multicellular life began to emerge after Earth thawed.

Found in the Scottish islands known as the Garvellachs, this outcrop within the Port Askaig Formation is unique because it offers the first conclusive evidence of when a tropical Earth froze over—underlying layers that are a timeline from a warmer era to a frigid one. Other rocks that formed during the same time period in other parts of the world lack this transitional evidence because ancient glaciers most likely scraped it off.

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Working away on his PhD in Munich only a few years ago, Stephan Herrmann (now a doctor) couldn’t have conceived of a time when his idea for a carbon-negative power plant would attract millions in funding. But now, together with Reverion co-founder Felix Fischer, he has a $100 million backlog of orders for his invention […]

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Tem wants to do for utilities what neobanks have done for the financial sector: disrupt an industry using tech, streamline it, and cut out the middlemen.

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The startup has devised a durable way to store solar power as heat that can then be used for household heating or hot water.

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