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United wants passengers to donate money to sustainable jet fuel. But is it better than carbon offsets for saving the planet?
United Airlines is giving customers who want to reduce the environmental impact of their travel a way to buy sustainable jet fuel that releases fewer emissions than traditional jet fuel. The Chicago-based airline has already secured commitments from about a dozen companies using the program to help offset emissions from employee travel or their supply chain, including Deloitte, HP, Boston Consulting Group, Nike, Siemens and Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The companies will collectively purchase a total of 3.4 million gallons of sustainable fuel this year, Chicago-based United said Tuesday. Individual...
Chicago Tribune
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News briefs
Biden administration budget request includes nearly $25 billion for NASAPresident Joe Biden submitted on Friday a $1.5 trillion budget request that includes $24.7 billion for NASA for 2022. The ask is part of the budget’s discretionary spending, which needs to be passed by Congress each year. The requested funding if approved would be $1.5 billion more than the funding for 2021, a 6.3% increase. “This $24.7 billion funding request demonstrates the Biden Administration’s commitment to NASA and its partners who have worked so hard this past year under difficult circumstances and achieved unprece...
Tribune News Service
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Biden administration budget request includes nearly $25 billion for NASA
President Joe Biden submitted on Friday a $1.5 trillion budget request that includes $24.7 billion for NASA for 2022. The ask is part of the budget’s discretionary spending, which needs to be passed by Congress each year. The requested funding if approved would be $1.5 billion more than the funding for 2021, a 6.3% increase. “This $24.7 billion funding request demonstrates the Biden Administration’s commitment to NASA and its partners who have worked so hard this past year under difficult circumstances and achieved unprecedented success,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk. The major...
Orlando Sentinel
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4 gray whales wash up on Bay Area beaches since beginning of April
MUIR BEACH, Calif. — Two of four dead whales that washed ashore Bay Area beaches in the last eight days were likely killed when struck by ships, investigators announced Friday. How the other two died remains undetermined, as a team from The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito continues to study them. While gray whales are known to swim along the Northern California coast on their northbound migration this time of year, the center’s pathology director is concerned about how many have died since the first of this month. “It’s alarming to respond to four dead gray whales in just over a week because...
The Mercury News
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‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ review: When Hairy Met Scaly...
These guys. You just want to see them happy. It’s hard to be so alone, and angry, caught up in an ancient Hatfield-and-McCoy grudge up on Earth’s inhospitable surface. Nothing comes easily up there, among the nattering human species, when you just want to go home to Hollow Earth, where (as Robert Frost said) they have to take you in, and you settle your differences with a jaw snap or a skull-crack. No exposition, no explanations. Well into “Godzilla vs. Kong,” a solid roundhouse punch and the fourth film in the current run of Legendary Entertainment’s “MonsterVerse” franchise, we travel to the...
Chicago Tribune
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Naming the hurricanes: With Greek letters going away, a look at how they came to be
ORLANDO, Fla. — Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization announced Greek letters would no longer be used in identifying tropical storms and hurricanes. The system has been used in only two seasons, accounting for six storms in 2005 and nine storms in 2020. The system was done away with to avoid confusion in future seasons. The first introduction of the Greek lettering system fascinated many in 2005, which had never been used since the international, rotating alphabetic name system began in 1953. But why and when did meteorologists decide Greek letters would be the backup plan?...
Orlando Sentinel
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Bluff collapse warning system proposed for North San Diego County coastline
SAN DIEGO — A bill passed by the California Assembly Natural Resources Committee last week would allocate $2.5 million for research that could help create an early warning system for the state's coastal bluff collapses. AB 66 by Assemblywoman Tasha Boerner Horvath, an Encinitas Democrat, would give Scripps Institution of Oceanography the job of researching when and why bluffs fail, so potentially catastrophic failures of the seaside cliffs can be predicted. Three women were killed at Grandview Beach in Encinitas in August 2019 when a 30-by-25-foot block of sandstone broke loose and fell on a f...
The San Diego Union-Tribune
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Did you hear that? Another mystery boom leaves San Diego grasping for answers
SAN DIEGO — Everybody loves a mystery. But we like them solved, too, and so far an answer has been elusive for the Big Border Boom. It rattled windows and shook doors across a large swath of San Diego and Tijuana late Wednesday afternoon, jangling the nerves of residents who’d experienced a similar noisemaker last month, and one a year earlier. What was that? The region joined a list of communities from coast-to-coast that are defined in part by unexplained goings-on. “Mysterious Shaking Rattles San Diego County AGAIN,” the website Strange Sounds trumpeted in a headline this week. It isn’t alw...
The San Diego Union-Tribune
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As we spring forward and push back the nights, experts worry about worsening our ‘social jet lag’
After 12 months in which bright spots were in seriously short supply, the clocks move up an hour Sunday when twilight will linger past 7:30 p.m. and push back the darkness ever longer until the solstice. If a coalition of U.S. senators have their way, the clocks will never go back. Yet the nation remains deeply divided on the question of standard vs. daylight saving time, and why do so many of the world’s leading sleep researchers believe DST is a terrible idea? They hold that snipping an hour of the clock further exacerbates a phenomenon known as “social jet lag,” the gap between the sleep we...
The Philadelphia Inquirer
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I spent hours finding all the secrets and Easter eggs in ‘Marvel’ at Chicago museum. Here are 18
CHICAGO – “Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes,” the massive new traveling exhibit that just opened at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, does a surprisingly evocative job of replicating our experiences with the Marvel Universe itself. If you’re a tourist in this world — you recognize the icons (Spider-Man, Hulk, et al), you’ve seen a few films — you can blow through in 30 minutes and come out with a perfectly breezy appreciation. Or you could spend a lifetime here, soaking in the legacy, sorting out 60 years of plot and character — what Marvel leader Stan Lee’s most recent biographer...
Chicago Tribune
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