WIND TURBINES
Recent reports illuminate that wind turbine blades can release not only sharp-edged, large fragments but also respirable fibre dust. These fibres are as carcinogenic as asbestos. They get into bodies through skin and lungs, posing risks to human and wildlife health.
Some call the broken wind turbine's giant shards that washed up on Nantucket beaches 'highly unusual and rare.' Others say it's not rare. The broken blade was 351 feet long. Turbine maker GE Vernova blames the break on "insufficient bonding" (glue).
The possibility of offshore wind turbines in Kaiwi, Hawaii channel waters gets major pushback.
Wonderful news: Reuters' Nichola Groom reports that U.S. offshore wind opponents seek to form national group to fight projects.
VEHICLES
Two and a half days after its owner parked a Mercedes EV in an underground parking lot, it caught fire, injured 23 people with toxic smoke inhalation and destroyed 140 other cars. Here's more on this story.
When self-driving WAYMO cars blast their horns in San Francisco at 4am, who can you call?
In Western Australia, since 2020, structure fires caused by lithium-ion batteries have increased by more than 85%.
A.I.
Here's a case of regulations not keeping up with technology: A.I.-generated child pornography is usually not illegal. Only a handful of states have enacted legislation that combats sexually-explicit A.I. images of minors. While there are also no federal laws about this, male high school students have used A.I. to create fake sexually explicit images of female classmates.
Our lives depend now on computers-- and we're also realizing that a single software error can disable, destroy or commandeer them. Connecting the power grid, hospitals and cars to the Internet with defective software turns critical systems into weapons of mass destruction. The Dawn Project aims to make safety-critical software unhackable-- and to ban unsafe software from key industries such as transportation, healthcare, communications, water treatment plants and power grids.
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