The live camera shows four-year-old female Xin Bao and five-year-old male Yun Chuan. Xin Bao can be “easily recognized by her large, round face and big ears” and Yun Chuan has a recognizable “long, slightly pointed nose,” according to the zoo.
Power outages affect more than 3.3 million customers in Florida, out of the 11.5 million customers tracked by poweroutage.us (which collects data from utilities). Milton made landfall as an “extremely dangerous category 3 hurricane” Wednesday night.
Correction: It is 11.5 million customers, not 11.5.
[poweroutage.us]
We might not hear from them for a while if Milton knocks out power and communicates like Hurricane Helene did. “Life-threatening” hurricane-force winds and flash floods are on the way, the National Hurricane Center warns.
Hurricane Milton has rapidly intensified into a Category 5 storm and is quickly making its way toward the western coast of Florida, threatening communities still recovering from Hurricane Helene.
Major tech firms, in search of carbon pollution-free electricity for data centers, are helping to revive nuclear energy in the US.
Key sites for producing high-purity quartz used in chipmaking “only sustained minor damage,” according to an initial assessment by Sibelco, one of the mining companies in Spruce Pine, NC. But power outages are still a big problem for its operations after the devastating storm.
The Quartz Corp, meanwhile, says “damage is mostly concentrated around ancillary units,” and that it’s confident it can “avoid” supply disruptions.
[www.sibelco.com]
The 320-mile line would connect the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) power grid to other states for the first time. Unlike most states that send each other electricity in times of need, the Lone Star state has historically been isolated. That made it more vulnerable to power outages during extreme weather like deadly Winter Storm Uri in 2021.
The monstrous storm devastated North Carolina, a key swing state in the presidential election. Communities face a long recovery ahead after Helene leveled towns. With so many people displaced and polling locations flooded, officials are worried about how much harder it could be now for people to cast their votes.
[The Washington Post]
NASA and other federal agencies launched a new website last week that shows past, present, and future sea level rise along America’s coastlines. It combines data from satellites with readings from sensors on the ground to create an interactive map.
[U.S. Sea Level Change]
A report by CBS 17 in Raleigh goes into how some of the communities in North Carolina’s mountains are communicating after the floods.
In Asheville, they said some people and organizations with Starlink satellite dishes have set them up at shelters so others can get online, along with “Satellite Cells on Light Trucks” and other temporary cellular towers.
About as much water as a single-use bottle holds, the The Washington Post reports. The electricity it takes is about as much as 14 LED light bulbs might burn through in an hour.
These are rough estimates, but they come with helpful illustrations to show the environmental costs of operating data centers for new AI tools.
