doomed

MONTREAL, Canada — On a busy street downtown is a life-size ice sculpture of a polar bear. It’s melting, revealing a fearsome-looking bronze skeleton underneath. Designed by artist Mark Coreth, the display is not a decoration but a warning: Climate change is killing wildlife like polar bears, which depend on sea ice. There are gloomy messages like this all over Montreal this week, as world leaders from more than 190 countries are meeting in the city for a conference known as COP15. It’s the UN’s big meeting on…

An exoplanet so close to its host star that its surface is probably an ocean of magma just became the case study that may reveal how these extreme worlds come into being.The "hell planet" in question is called 55 Cancri e (aka Janssen) and a new analysis of its orbit and the orbits of the other exoplanets circling the star reveals that Janssen most likely formed much farther out from the star, moving slowly towards it over time and melting in the process."We've learned about how this multi-planet system – one of the…

Crypto companies seeking the public markets’ stamp of approval face a rightly skeptical SEC. Banker Bob Diamond was forced to pull the ripcord this week on his attempt to take stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Financial public via a special purpose acquisition company. The ex-Barclays Plc boss's dealmaking ability probably wasn't the issue. Nor was the target's financial performance: Circle earns interest income on the reserves that backstop its stablecoin USDC, and rising interest rates have thus benefited its…

Veteran investor Dan Goldman tells climate tech founders to mind the cash and the carbon In the climate tech world, Dan Goldman has seen just about everything: From the clean tech boom that led to the clean tech bust, the dark years that followed, and today’s bull market that’s transformed climate tech into one of the hottest sectors in the venture world. TechCrunch caught up with Goldman this week to hear what he thinks about today’s market and what he’s telling his portfolio…

NASSAU, Bahamas— Sam Bankman -Fried’s $32 billion crypto-trading empire collapsed in an incandescent bankruptcy last week, prompting irate customers, crypto acolytes and Silicon Valley bigwigs to ask how something that seemed so promising could have imploded so fast. The emerging picture suggests FTX wasn’t simply felled by a rival, or undone by a bad trade or the relentless fall this year in the value of cryptocurrencies. Instead, it had long been a chaotic mess. From its…

Divers with a recent film crew over wreckage identified as part of Challenger.Photo: The HISTORY® ChannelA film crew working on a series about the Bermuda Triangle has made an unexpected discovery off the coast of Florida: a 20-foot segment of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which exploded in flight in one of NASA’s major tragedies. The Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, about 73 seconds after the spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. 46,000 feet above the ground, the Shuttle exploded due to an…

Two thousand years ago, lemurs the size of humans and giant “elephant birds” roamed Madagascar. A thousand years later, they were nearly gone. This mass extinction coincided with a boom in Madagascar’s human population, according to a new study, when two small groups of people linked up and took over the island. It’s an “exciting” study, says Laurie Godfrey, a paleontologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved. The results, she says,…

The transportation of matter has always been a curate’s egg for the sci-fi writer. Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film The Fly conjured up terrible images of horror when its protagonist found his sub-atomic particles sliced and diced with those of an insect after meddling with the untried technology. But it also featured an awful plot hole: why did the machine split our scientist into a tiny man-fly and a huge fly-man, with both parts of the hybrid suitably scaled to match, if it was just swapping over a few atoms?David Cronenberg…

Image via SYFY / USA Network It’s creepy and it’s kooky, mysterious and spooky, it’s all-together ooky — it’s the daily horror roundup at We Got This Covered! Now that the leaves have fully embraced a yellow-orange hue and the hunt for sexy Halloween costumes has officially commenced, a plethora of spooky news is scaring the headlines from behind and putting the bone-chilling genre in an unbreakable chokehold. Amongst a strong line-up of horror-esque updates, the Chucky television series is prompting fans to…

The Epsilon-6 rocket launched from the Uchinoura Space Center in southwestern Japan, on October 12.Photo: KYDPL KYODO (AP)A Japanese rocket had to be intentionally destroyed last week during launch, marking the first failure of the company’s Epsilon-6 rocket. An initial investigation points to the rocket’s attitude control system as the source of the major malfunction. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Epsilon-6 rocket took off from the Mu Pad at the Uchinoura Space Center in southwestern Japan on October 12. About…