As climate change accelerates, the United Nations Environment Assembly will this week consider whether to start assessing, and setting rules on, technologies that could pull carbon out of the atmosphere or block some of the sun’s warmth to cool the Earth.

Delegates at the week-long meeting in Nairobi will debate a proposal from Switzerland, backed by 10 other countries, to begin examining geoengineering technologies, which backers say could help fend off the worst impacts of runaway climate change.

If adopted, the proposal could lead to the highest-level examination yet of the controversial technologies, which have gained prominence as efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions fall short.

“We need to have an understanding on the implications of using such technologies, and how they would be governed in the future,” Siim Kiisler, Estonia’s environment minister and president of the Nairobi meeting, told journalists on Monday.

“Just ignoring the issue does not help. We have to talk about it,” he said.

Franz Xaver Perrez, Switzerland’s environmental ambassador and head of its delegation in Nairobi, said his nation had concerns that sun-dimming technology, in particular, could have “a tremendous negative impact.”

Nonetheless, “we should not be guided by concerns, but have a better understanding of the situation first”, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, noting that “we might need multilateral control of these technologies.”

Opponents say the technologies present huge potential risks to people and nature, and could undermine efforts to cut emissions, not least because many are backed by fossil-fuel interests.

“These technologies provide a perfect excuse for delaying action or weakening our current emissions reduction targets,” warned Carroll Muffett, president of the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law, in a telephone interview.

Rapidly slashing emissions – by switching to greener power, preserving forests and similar measures – remains the cheapest and safest way to fend off worsening droughts, floods, storms and other impacts of global warming, he said.

But research is moving ahead fast on two groups of alternative technologies to curb climate change, as emissions continue to rise.

One set aims to suck heat-trapping carbon out of the atmosphere and store it underground, or use it in other ways.

The other focuses on cooling the planet by blocking some of the sun’s energy, through measures such as high-altitude planes that spray reflective sulphur particles into the stratosphere.

‘Light’ use

In a paper published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists modeling the use of solar geoengineering technology said limited deployment – to halve expected warming over the next century, rather than stop it entirely – could dramatically lessen risks from stronger tropical cyclones, for instance.

Earlier modeling of solar geoengineering to avert all projected warming flagged the possibility of changes in water availability, sparking fears the technology could shift monsoons, and create “winners” and “losers.”

Opponents of the technology have suggested it could even be “weaponized,” with a water-short country deploying the technology to improve its rainfall at the expense of neighbors.

But the new modeling suggests no region would see dramatic shifts with lighter use of the technology, although the scientists noted the results were based on an “idealized” study.

Lead author Peter Irvine, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University, said solar management would need to work hand-in-hand with reducing emissions, and could not “replace mitigation.”

David Keith, the leader of a team focused on solar geoengineering research at Harvard and a co-author of the study, said the modeling suggested “geoengineering could enable surprisingly uniform benefits” if used with mitigation efforts.

Option to ban

A high-profile report released by climate scientists last October, exploring how to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, the most ambitious goal set by governments in the 2015 Paris Agreement, specifically did not consider the use of solar geoengineering.

It said the technology was untested, had “substantial” risks, and would not address the problem of oceans becoming more acidic as they absorb growing amounts of carbon dioxide.

Muffett said bodies such as the U.N. Environment Assembly, if they did begin exploring geoengineering technologies, should leave open the possibility of banning them entirely, as progress on their development could boost pressure to deploy them.

The assembly also should make sure any panel assessing the technologies included representatives of poorer countries and indigenous groups, while excluding those who held patents on the technologies or stood to profit from them, he said.

This week’s meeting is not the first effort to explore and potentially regulate the emerging technologies.

Member nations of the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010 set a non-binding moratorium on the use of geoengineering technologies, though agreed to permit research on them.

And an ocean pollution convention has banned the dumping of iron into the sea to boost uptake of carbon dioxide by algae, while also allowing research on the topic.

Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative, which hopes to spur effective governance of the emerging technologies, described the U.N. Environment Assembly’s focus on them as a positive step.

“What is needed is governments to engage and start a serious conversation about these issues,” he said.

If approved, the Swiss-backed proposal being presented in Nairobi this week would require U.N. Environment to analyze the technologies and report by August 2020 on how they could be governed and used at scale, among other things.
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The United States and Brazil have negotiated an accord to safeguard U.S. space technology the South American nation hopes will be used in commercial rockets lifting off from its launch site near the equator, the Brazilian government said on Monday.

The agreement is being wrapped up in time to be signed next week during a visit to Washington by President Jair Bolsonaro.

“Negotiations are being concluded with a view to signing an agreement during the presidential visit to Washington,” a foreign ministry official said.

Brazil hopes to get a piece of the $300 billion-a-year space launch business by drawing U.S. companies interested in launching small satellites at a lower cost from the Alcantara base run by the Brazilian Air Force on the South American country’s north coast.

Because of its location close to the equator, launches burn 30 percent less fuel and rockets can carry larger payloads, though Brazil is aiming for the cost micro-satellite niche market that is growing fast, Air Force officers said.

Space cooperation between the United States and Brazil took a big step forward when they signed a Space Situational Awareness (SSA) agreement last year during a visit to Brasilia by former U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis.

The accord on sharing real-time tracking data on objects and debris in space is needed to develop a satellite launching business without the risk of collision.

In December 2017, Boeing and Lockheed Martin visited the Alcantara space center, which is especially attractive to smaller firms, such as Tucson, Arizona-based rocket-maker Vector Launch Inc because of its location.

But without the technology safeguard agreement (TSA) that protects sensitive American space launch and satellite technology, no U.S. rocket could blast off from Brazil.

A previous attempt at a U.S.-Brazilian space partnership was scuttled in 2003 when the TSA ran into resistance from the leftist government of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and was thwarted by Brazilian lawmakers.

It floundered because U.S. unverified access to the Alcantara base was not acceptable to Brazilian politicians on sovereignty grounds.

The TSA is seen by Washington as opening opportunities for greater cooperation in aerospace and defense between the two countries.
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The fraying World Wide Web needs to rediscover its strengths and grow into maturity, its designer Tim Berners-Lee said on Monday, marking the 30th anniversary of the collaborative software project his supervisor initially dubbed “vague but exciting.”

Speaking to reporters at CERN, the physics research center outside Geneva where he invented the web, Berners-Lee said users of the web had found it “not so pretty” recently.

“They are all stepping back, suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections, realising that this web thing that they thought was that cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well,” he said.

“It seems we don’t finish reeling from one privacy disaster before moving onto the next one,” he added, citing concerns about whether social networks were supporting democracy.

People who had grown up taking the internet’s neutrality for granted now found that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump had “rolled that back.”

There was also a threat of fragmentation of the Internet into regulatory blocs – in the United States, the European Union, China and elsewhere – which would be “massively damaging.”

In an open letter to mark the anniversary, Berners-Lee said many people now felt unsure about whether the web was a force for good, but it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that it could not change for the better in the next 30 years.

“If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web,” he wrote. “It’s our journey from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future.”

But he was optimistic because of a strong resolve among governments to avoid balkanization of the Internet, and a strong resolve among people in social networks who had – surprisingly – been shocked at people trying to hack elections.

He said the editorial power of Facebook’s algorithm was “scary”, but Facebook was clearly thinking about such questions a great deal, and that it and other social media firms backed the principle of letting users extract and move their data.

Amid the concern, Berners-Lee said the anniversary was something to celebrate, and warmly recalled how his boss ordered a computer model that CERN did not possess, a deliberate “plot” to enable his project under the guise of testing the interoperability of different computers.

The boss, Mike Sendell, had penciled in an assessment of his idea as “vague but exciting.”

“Thank goodness it wasn’t ‘Exciting but vague,'” Berners-Lee said.
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A company that designs and develops musical instruments for people with physical disabilities has created a conductor’s baton which allows the visually-impaired to follow its movements. As Faith Lapidus reports, this opens up the potential for blind musicians to join more orchestras.
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Investigators rushed to the scene of a devastating plane crash in Ethiopia on Sunday, an accident that could renew safety questions about the newest version of Boeing’s popular 737 airliner.

The Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed shortly after taking off from the capital of Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board.

The plane was new. The weather was clear. Yet something was wrong, and the pilots tried to return to the airport. They never made it.

In those circumstances, the accident is eerily similar to an October crash in which a 737 Max 8 flown by Indonesia’s Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 people on the plane.

Safety experts took note of the similarities but cautioned against quickly drawing too many parallels between the two crashes.

Alan Diehl, a former National Transportation Safety Board investigator, said the similarities included both crews encountering a problem shortly after takeoff, and reports of large variations in vertical speed during ascent, “clearly suggesting a potential controllability problem” with the Ethiopian jetliner.

But there are many possible explanations, Diehl said, including engine problems, pilot error, weight load, sabotage or bird strikes. He said Ethiopian has a good reputation, but investigators will look into the plane’s maintenance, especially since that may have been an issue in the Lion Air investigation.

By contrast, the Ethiopian Airlines CEO “stated there were no defects prior to the flight, so it is hard to see any parallels with the Lion Air crash yet,” said Harro Ranter, founder of the Aviation Safety Network, which compiles information about accidents worldwide.

“I do hope though that people will wait for the first results of the investigation instead of jumping to conclusions based on the very little facts that we know so far,” he said.

Boeing representatives did not immediately respond for comment. The company tweeted that it was “deeply saddened to learn of the passing of the passengers and crew” on the Ethiopian Airlines Max airplane.

The Chicago-based company said it would send a technical to the crash site to help Ethiopian and U.S. investigators.

A spokesman for the NTSB said the U.S. agency was sending a team of four to assist Ethiopian authorities. Boeing and the U.S. investigative agency are also involved in the Lion Air probe.

Indonesian investigators have not stated a cause for the Lion Air crash, but they are examining whether faulty readings from a sensor might have triggered an automatic nose-down command to the plane, which the Lion Air pilots fought unsuccessfully to overcome. The automated system kicks in if sensors indicate that a plane is about to lose lift, or go into an aerodynamic stall. Gaining speed by diving can prevent a stall.

The Lion Air plane’s flight data recorder showed problems with an airspeed indicator on four flights, although the airline initially said the problem was fixed.

Days after the Oct. 29 accident, Boeing sent a notice to airlines that faulty information from a sensor could cause the plane to automatically point the nose down. The notice reminded pilots of the procedure for handling such a situation, which is to disable the system causing the automatic nose-down movements.

Pilots at some airlines, however, including American and Southwest, protested that they were not fully informed about a new system that could automatically point the plane’s nose down based on sensor readings. Boeing Chairman and CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in December that the Max is a safe plane, and that Boeing did not withhold operating details from airlines and pilots.

Diehl, the former NTSB investigator, said the Ethiopian Airlines pilots should have been aware of that issue from press coverage of the Lion Air crash.

The 737 is the best-selling airliner in history, and the Max is the newest version of it, with more fuel-efficient engines. The Max is a central part of Boeing’s strategy to compete with European rival Airbus.

Boeing has delivered about 350 737 Max planes and has orders for more than 5,000. It is already in use by many airlines including American, United and Southwest.

The Lion Air incident does not seem to have harmed Boeing’s ability to sell the Max. Boeing’s stock fell nearly 7 percent on the day of the Lion Air crash. Since then it has soared 26 percent higher, compared with a 4 percent gain in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s abrupt Wednesday declaration of a new “privacy vision” for social networking was for many people a sort of Rorschach test.

Looked at one way, the manifesto read as an apology of sorts for Facebook’s history of privacy transgressions, and it suggested that the social network would de-emphasize its huge public social network in favor of private messaging between individuals and among small groups.

Looked at another way, it turned Facebook into a kind of privacy champion by embracing encrypted messaging that’s shielded from prying eyes — including those of Facebook itself.

Yet another reading suggested the whole thing was a public relations exercise designed to lull its users while Facebook entrenches its competitive position in messaging and uses it to develop new sources of user data to feed its voracious advertising machine.

As with many things Facebook, the truth lies somewhere in between. Facebook so far isn’t elaborating much on Zuckerberg’s manifesto. Here’s a guide to what we know at the moment about its plans.

What’s happening to Facebook?

In one sense, nothing. Its existing social network, with its news feeds and pages and 2.3 billion global users and $22 billion in 2018 profit, won’t change and will likely continue to grow. Although user growth has been stagnant in North America, Facebook’s global user base expanded 9 percent in the last quarter of 2018.

But Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook’s future growth will depend more on private messaging such as what it offers with its WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct services. The Facebook CEO said private messaging between individuals and small groups is “by far” the fastest growing part of online communications.

Naturally, Facebook wants to be there in a big way.

What’s changing in messaging?

Its first step will be to make its three messaging services communicate better with each other. That would let you message a friend on WhatsApp from Facebook Messenger, which isn’t currently possible. It would also link your messaging accounts to your Facebook ID, so people can find you more easily.

Zuckerberg also promised to greatly increase the security of these messages. It will implement so-called end-to-end encryption for messaging, which would scramble them so that no one but the sender and recipients could read them. That would bar access by governments and Facebook. WhatsApp is already encrypted this way, but Messenger and Instagram Direct are not.

The first change users might notice is their address book, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. While your Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp contacts might be quite different now, if the services combine to some degree, your contact lists will, too.

“As these services merge, we might end up basically having these huge combined address books from three messaging services,” he said.

​When will this happen?

You’re not likely to see any of these changes soon. In his blog post, Zuckerberg said the plan will be rolled out “over the next few years. … A lot of this work is in the early stages.”

And it’s subject to change. EMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson points out that previous Facebook visions of the future haven’t quite panned out. A few years ago, for instance, Zuckerberg predicted that video and augmented and virtual reality would be a much bigger part of Facebook than what materialized.

But it shows that Facebook is trying to adapt as people shift toward services like Instagram and WhatsApp over Facebook, which today has 15 million fewer U.S. users than in 2017, according to Edison Research. In his post, Zuckerberg said he expects Messenger and WhatsApp will eventually become the main ways people communicate on Facebook’s network.

“There’s not a sense that things will fundamentally change overnight, or even probably this year,” Williamson said, “But it signals Facebook is thinking more seriously about embracing the way people communicate today.”

What will it mean for privacy?

Encrypted messaging is in many ways a big plus for privacy. But the way Facebook collects information about you on its main service site isn’t changing, said Jen King, director of consumer privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society

“This is limited to a very specific part of the platform and it doesn’t really address all the ways Facebook is still collecting data about you,” she said. So users should still be alert about privacy settings and careful about what they choose to share on Facebook.

Facebook is likely to collect data about your messaging — so-called metadata that, according to security experts, will let it know whom you communicate with, when and how often you text them, where you are when you do it and for how long. That can tell Facebook a lot about you even if it can’t read the contents of your messages.

​What about vanishing posts?

Though the timeline is hazy, Zuckerberg did outline other changes users will eventually see. He said the company is looking at ways to make messages less permanent, a la Snapchat or Instagram “Stories,” which disappear after 24 hours.

“Messages could be deleted after a month or a year by default,” Zuckerberg wrote. “This would reduce the risk of your messages resurfacing and embarrassing you later.” Zuckerberg said users will have the ability to change the time frame or turn off auto-deletion. “And we could also provide an option for you to set individual messages to expire after a few seconds or minutes if you wanted.”

What about payment procedures?

Facebook will likely also expand the way users can use its platform to pay for things, said Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy and technology policy for Consumer Reports. Zuckerberg didn’t mention any new payment plans specifically but did bring up payments four times in his post.

Currently, Facebook lets its users pay friends or businesses digitally by linking a credit card or PayPal account, and that method is not likely to change soon. But as Facebook looks to emulate Chinese behemoth WeChat, it could let you reserve a table through Facebook instead of going through an outside app, or order an Uber.

“Ideally, Facebook will try to get a cut of all transactions,” Brookman said. A digital currency of Facebook’s own is also rumored to be in the works.

“Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of blockchain technology,” Facebook said in a statement. “This new small team is exploring many different applications. We don’t have anything further to share.”
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In a technology that’s been heralded as a breakthrough in conservation, remote recording devices are ‘eavesdropping’ on one of the rarest birds in New Zealand to monitor how they are adjusting after being released into a protected reserve. Faith Lapidus reports.
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U.S. scientists say they are using a unique method of analyzing DNA and researching genealogy to help investigators solve decades-old murder cases. Maxim Moskalkov visited Parabon Nanolabs in Reston, Virginia to learn more.
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Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren says the technology industry is too heavily concentrated among the biggest companies and she has a plan to address that.

The Massachusetts senator is proposing legislation targeting tech giants with annual revenue of $25 billion or more. It would limit their ability to expand and break up what she calls “anti-competitive mergers” — such as Facebook’s purchase of Instagram and Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods.

Warren says the biggest tech companies have “too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy.” She says they’ve “bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.”

She’s releasing the plan before a visit to New York City, where Amazon recently scrapped a plan to open a new headquarters.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking the social media company in a new direction by focusing on messaging. Chinese tech giant Tencent got there years ago with its app WeChat.

Zuckerberg outlined his vision to give people ways to communicate privately, by stitching together Facebook’s various services so users can contact each other across all of the apps.

That sounds strikingly similar to WeChat, which has become essential for daily life in China. WeChat, or Weixin as it’s known in Chinese, combines functions and services that in the West are done by a number of separate companies — think of Facebook and its Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram services combined with PayPal and Uber.

WeChat, launched in 2011, has the usual chat features — instant messaging and voice and video calling, though it doesn’t employ top-notch encryption like Facebook’s Whatsapp. Here’s a look at what else it does.

Mobile money

The WeChat Pay digital wallet is one big reason the app has become an indispensable part of life for people in China. By linking a credit card or bank account, users can pay for almost anything: movie tickets, food delivery orders, and subway and bus tickets.

You can split restaurant bills with your friends, pay your electricity bill, store digital coupons, and donate to charities. There’s a “quick pay” function that lets users scan a matrix barcode to pay instead of pulling out cash or a payment card.

You can also hail a ride from Didi Chuxing, China’s equivalent of Uber.

And in a uniquely Chinese touch, WeChat users can send each other virtual “hong bao” or “red packets,” money that is traditionally gifted in red envelopes during the Lunar New Year holiday.

Social

The app hosts group chats where users can discuss topics like sports, technology, social issues, investment ideas, celebrities, breaking news and beyond. WeChat Moments is a scrolling social media feed where users can write posts and share photos and videos.

The app rolled out a new feature this year, Time Capsule, that removes user videos after 24 hours, in an apparent attempt to mimic Facebook’s Stories feature.

Users can also send friends digital stickers, get access to online games and find out who’s nearby by shaking their phone.

Companies and organizations both inside and outside China can use the app for marketing by setting up an official account. Travel booking platform AirBnb, luxury goods company Chanel and Chinese tech giant Huawei are among brands with a presence on WeChat.

The Chinese model

WeChat and Weixin had nearly 1.1 billion users as of September, up 2.3 percent from the previous quarter and 10 percent from the previous year, according to its most recent quarterly earnings report.

It is wildly popular in mainland China and less so in other countries, which is unsurprising because the communist leaders in Beijing have blocked its citizens from accessing Facebook and other Silicon Valley services for years.

But there’s one thing that WeChat doesn’t let users do: Speak freely. Politically sensitive posts are regularly scrubbed from the service, illustrating how the app has become a key part of China’s censorship regime because of its huge user base and outsize social influence. Hong Kong University researchers found that about 11,000 articles were removed from WeChat last year, a number that doesn’t include posts blocked before publication by automatic keyword filters.

WeChat also lacks so-called end-to-end encryption, considered the gold standard for privacy and used by Facebook and other services like Signal and Apple’s iMessages.

Chinese dissidents and activists have long suspected that authorities are able to monitor what they’ve been saying on the app. The company, however, has denied it keeps a record of user chats.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking the social media company in a new direction by focusing on messaging. Chinese tech giant Tencent got there years ago with its app WeChat.

Zuckerberg outlined his vision to give people ways to communicate privately, by stitching together Facebook’s various services so users can contact each other across all of the apps.

That sounds strikingly similar to Tencent Holdings’ WeChat, which has become essential for daily life in China. WeChat, or Weixin as it’s known in Chinese, combines functions and services that in the West are done separately by a number of separate companies — think of Facebook and its Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram services combined with PayPal and Uber.

WeChat, launched in 2011, has the usual chat features — instant messaging and voice and video calling. But there’s a lot more. Here’s a look at what else it does.

Mobile money

The WeChat Pay digital wallet is one big reason the app has become an indispensable part of life for people in China. By linking a credit card or bank account, users can pay for almost anything: movie tickets, food delivery orders and subway and bus tickets.

You can split restaurant bills with your friends, pay your electricity bill, store digital coupons, and donate to charities. There’s a “quick pay” function that lets users scan a matrix barcode to pay instead of pulling out cash or a payment card.

You can also hail a ride from Didi Chuxing, China’s equivalent of Uber.

And in a uniquely Chinese touch, WeChat users can send each other virtual “hong bao” or “red packets,” money that is traditionally gifted in red envelopes during the Lunar New Year holiday.

Social

The app hosts group chats where users can discuss topics like sports, technology, social issues, investment ideas, celebrities, breaking news and beyond. WeChat Moments is a scrolling social media feed where users can write posts and share photos and videos.

The app rolled out a new feature this year, Time Capsule, that removes user videos after 24 hours, in an apparent attempt to mimic Facebook’s Stories feature.

Users can also send friends digital stickers, get access to online games and find out who’s nearby by shaking their phone.

Companies and organizations both inside and outside China can use the app for marketing by setting up an official account. Travel booking platform AirBnb, luxury goods company Chanel and Chinese tech giant Huawei are among brands with a presence on WeChat.

The Chinese model

WeChat and Weixin had nearly 1.1 billion users as of September, up 2.3 percent from the previous quarter and 10 percent from the previous year, according to its most recent quarterly earnings report .

It is wildly popular in mainland China and less so in other countries, which is unsurprising because the communist leaders in Beijing have blocked its citizens from accessing Facebook and other Silicon Valley services for years.

But there’s one thing that WeChat doesn’t let users do: speak freely. Politically sensitive posts are regularly scrubbed from the service, illustrating how the app has become a key part of China’s censorship regime because of its huge user base and outsize social influence. Hong Kong University researchers found that about 11,000 articles were removed from WeChat last year, a number that doesn’t include posts blocked before publication by automatic keyword filters.

Chinese dissidents and activists have long suspected that authorities are able to monitor what they’ve been saying on the app. The company, however, has denied it keeps a record of user chats.
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The U.S. space agency NASA has confirmed that it has scheduled a spacewalk by two female astronauts for the first time.

A NASA spokeswoman told CNN Wednesday, “As currently scheduled, the March 29 spacewalk will be the first with only women.”

The spacewalk, staffed by astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch will be the second spacewalk of three during Expedition 59, which launches March 14.

Koch is a member of Expedition 59, while McClain is currently part of the three-person crew of the International Space Station.

In addition to the two women in space, another woman, Canadian Space Agency flight controller Kristen Facciol, is expected to be on the console at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, providing support on the seven-hour spacewalk.

Male astronauts Nick Hague and David Saint-Jacques will participate in the first and third spacewalks.

It is unclear yet what is to be accomplished on the spacewalk. NASA says spacewalks are conducted for repairs, testing equipment and conducting experiments.
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