Dries

Satellite image of Sau Reservoir captured on March 3, 2023, by Landsat 9.Satellite image of Sau Reservoir captured on March 4, 2024, Landsat 8.The large reservoir in Catalonia shrank to 1 percent of capacity in March 2024.Three subsequent years of record low precipitation have taken a toll on northeastern Spain’s Catalonia region. Satellite images show one of the region’s largest reservoirs dried to a trickle in March 2024.Historical Drought Patterns and Current ImpactAccording to the Meteorological Service of Catalonia,…

Too Long; Didn't ReadThe US Federal Reserve remarked in a press release this week its intention to raise the interest rate benchmark by 25 basis points, resulting in a new target range of between 5.25% and 5.5%. Bitcoin’s 7-day average trading volume hit a 30-month low last week, plunging to levels that were previously witnessed before BTC broke $20K back in December 2020. Clearly, market participants remain largely inactive. Sam Altman's recently launched World Coin has received mixed reactions, with some praising the…

Venture-capital investors, as recently as last year, used to seek out founders who were quitting their tech jobs to launch their own businesses. Now that mass layoffs are pushing many people down the entrepreneurial path, venture investors have grown stingier.  More than 330,000 people have lost their jobs at tech companies since early 2022, with some 168,000 job losses this year, according to data tracker Layoffs.fyi. Venture-capital investors, as recently as last year, used to seek…

Don’t forget to bring a towel Naughty Dog has released another patch for the maligned PC port of its gloomy, over-the-shoulder remake The Last of Us Part I — Update 1.0.2.0, which is now live on the Steam platform, contains over 40 different fixes pertaining to visuals, gameplay, and performance. Among the items fixed in the new update are numerous random crashes, the removal of an issue that was making analog sticks unresponsive, the correction of false information in the Graphics Quality menus, problems with…

Construction companies are counting on a surge in public works projects to keep them busy this year as higher interest rates cause private real estate investment to dry up. “Contractors are optimistic about the construction outlook for 2023, yet they are expecting very different market conditions for the coming year than what they experienced last year,” said Stephen Sandherr, CEO of the Association of General Contractors of America, which released a 2023 outlook on Wednesday. “Even as market demand evolves, contractors…

By tinkering with fine details within wood, engineers in Sweden have come up with an interesting new way of harvesting electricity. The technology leverages natural processes that already take place in drying wood, but supercharges it to capture enough electricity to run LEDs and other small devices.Carried out by nanoengineers as KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the research centers on the sequence of events that play out when wood becomes wet and then dries. Called transpiration, this takes place in all plants as…

A temporary tax break for small businesses has spawned a cottage industry of advisory firms tapping into federal pandemic aid, raising alarms at the Internal Revenue Service that some claims are going beyond what the law allows.The Paycheck Protection Program and other federal aid programs long ago shut their doors. But small businesses and nonprofits battered by Covid-19 can still use a lesser-known lifeline, the employee-retention tax credit, or ERC. Businesses can claim up to $26,000 per employee in refunds by amending…

China’s largest freshwater lake drained by prolonged heat and drought.Between the winter and summer seasons, Poyang Lake, in China’s Jiangxi Province, routinely fluctuates in size. In winter, water levels on the lake are usually low. Then, summer rains cause the country’s largest freshwater lake to swell as water flows in from the Yangtze River.However, the lake has not swelled in the summer of 2022. In fact, a prolonged heat wave and drought across much of the Yangtze River Basin has dried the lake out early and pushed…

A lot of work goes into creating wooden objects like furniture, with the timber needing to be harvested, treated, cut into shape and finished. Some scientists are rethinking this process with some interesting results, and researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have put forward a particularly creative example. The team's technology sees a wood-based ink 3D printed into flat shapes, which then morph into more complex 3D forms as they dry out.The technology hinges on the way water content can influence the shape…

A third set of human remains were found in Nevada's Lake Mead on 25 July as water levels have receded to historic lows during a drought fueled by climate change. The remains were spotted by a witness at Swim Beach on Lake Mead during the afternoon of 25 July, the National Park Service announced. Investigators retrieved the remains, the park service said.  They are at least the third set of remains found as the drought-stricken reservoir, which supplies water to 25 million people across the Southwest, has receded to…