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Apple Shares 2024 Environmental Progress Report Ahead of Earth Day

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Apple today announced that it has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by more than half since 2015, advancing towards its 2030 carbon neutrality goal.

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Apple’s latest Environmental Progress Report details the company’s efforts and innovations in clean energy, efficient recycling practices, and sustainable material usage that have contributed to this substantial decrease in emissions. According to the report, the major reduction has been driven by extensive use of clean energy, including the integration of recycled materials across Apple’s product lines and improvements in energy efficiency throughout its global supply chain.

Apple has fostered significant advances in recycling and material recovery as part of its broader environmental strategy for several years. The company has increased the use of recycled cobalt and lithium in its batteries, with last year’s statistics showing that 56% of the cobalt and 24% of the lithium used were sourced from recycled materials. These efforts are part of a larger initiative to transition to 100% recycled and renewable materials across all products.

The report also highlights achievements in energy efficiency and renewable energy sourcing. Over 16.5 gigawatts of clean energy are now being produced as a result of Apple’s Supplier Clean Energy Program, which supports projects around the world. The program has been essential in reducing the carbon footprint Apple and its suppliers, who collectively saved more than two billion kilowatt-hours of electricity last year. The company is also actively removing plastics from its packaging, shifting towards fiber-based alternatives.

Apple also provides financial support to various organizations and programs aimed at improving environmental conditions and promoting sustainability education. In the U.S., for example, Apple supports Justice Outside’s Network for Network Leaders program, which focuses on outdoor and environmental education.

See Apple’s full 2024 Environmental Progress Report for more information.

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iOS 18 Will Add These New Features to Your iPhone

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NES Emulator for iPhone and iPad Now Available on App Store [Removed]

The first approved Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator for the iPhone and iPad was made available on the App Store today following Apple’s rule change. The emulator is called Bimmy, and it was developed by Tom Salvo. On the App Store, Bimmy is described as a tool for testing and playing public domain/”homebrew” games created for the NES, but the app allows you to load ROMs for any…

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All iPhone 16 Models to Feature Action Button, But Usefulness Debated

Last September, Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro models debuted with a new customizable Action button, offering faster access to a handful of functions, as well as the ability to assign Shortcuts. Apple is poised to include the feature on all upcoming iPhone 16 models, so we asked iPhone 15 Pro users what their experience has been with the additional button so far. The Action button replaces the switch …

Game Boy Emulator for iPhone Now Available in App Store Following Rule Change [Removed]

A week after Apple updated its App Review Guidelines to permit retro game console emulators, a Game Boy emulator for the iPhone called iGBA has appeared in the App Store worldwide. The emulator is already one of the top free apps on the App Store charts. It was not entirely clear if Apple would allow emulators to work with all and any games, but iGBA is able to load any Game Boy ROMs that…

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Apple Promotes Recycling Your Devices ‘For Free’ Ahead of Earth Day

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Ahead of Earth Day on April 22, Apple has added a banner to its website that reminds customers they can recycle their Apple devices “for free” with the company’s recycling partners. The process can be initiated on Apple’s trade-in page in many countries, with customers able to submit a form to receive a prepaid shipping label for their devices.

Apple Recycling iPhones
“We’ll recycle your Apple devices, cables, cases, accessories, and other similar electronics for free,” says Apple. “You’ll help protect the earth’s precious resources and reduce waste as we work toward a better future for the planet.”

On a related note, Apple today shared a new “Recycling Robots” video on its YouTube channel in the U.K. that says Apple’s recycling robots are now able to recover recyclable materials from a total of 23 different iPhone models.

“Our custom recycling robot Daisy can disassemble 23 different iPhone models to recover crucial materials like gold and rare earth elements,” says Apple. “Robot Dave extracts tungsten from Taptic Engines, while robot Taz takes care of audio modules. Together, they’re leading the way in recovering recycled materials for the next generation of products.”

Apple will likely release its 2024 Environmental Progress Report soon, and share other Earth Day announcements over the coming days.

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iOS 18 Will Add These New Features to Your iPhone

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Game Boy Emulator for iPhone Now Available in App Store Following Rule Change [Removed]

A week after Apple updated its App Review Guidelines to permit retro game console emulators, a Game Boy emulator for the iPhone called iGBA has appeared in the App Store worldwide. The emulator is already one of the top free apps on the App Store charts. It was not entirely clear if Apple would allow emulators to work with all and any games, but iGBA is able to load any Game Boy ROMs that…

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Apple’s First AI Features in iOS 18 Reportedly Won’t Use Cloud Servers

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M4 Macs Are Expected to Launch in This Order Starting Later This Year

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Apple Celebrating Earth Day and International Dance Day With New Apple Watch Activity Challenges

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Apple will launch its next Apple Watch activity challenge on Saturday, April 22 in celebration of Earth Day.

apple earth day 2024
To complete the challenge, Apple Watch owners will need to complete a workout that lasts for 30 minutes or longer, with the activity recorded through the Workout app or an app that adds information to the Health app.

Let’s get moving for the planet. On April 22, do any workout for 30 minutes or more to earn this award. Record it with the Workout app or any app that adds to Health.

Apple Watch owners who earn the award will unlock a dedicated in the Fitness app, plus they will get a series of animated stickers that can be used in the Messages and FaceTime apps.

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After the Earth Day challenge, Apple will also launch another challenge for International Dance Day, which takes place on April 29. The Dance Day award can be earned by completing a dance workout that lasts 20 minutes or longer, and it too will unlock a badge and animated stickers.

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The April Earth Day challenge and Dance Day challenge follow the the February heart month challenge, and for those curious, it does appear that Apple has trimmed down the number of activity challenges that it is offering in 2024.

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NASA admits plan to bring Mars rocks to Earth won’t work — and seeks fresh ideas

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This animation shows NASA's Perseverance Mars rover collecting a sample from a rock using a coring bit on the end of its robotic arm.

NASA’s Perseverance rover collects a sample from a Martian rock using a bit on the end of its robotic arm.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA announced today that it is abandoning its longstanding plan for ferrying rock and soil samples from Mars to Earth. Instead the agency will seek proposals for quicker and cheaper ways to deliver the samples to Earth.

An independent review board concluded last year that NASA’s Mars sample return mission could cost as much as US$11 billion, more than what it cost to launch the James Webb Space Telescope. In a report released today, a separate NASA review team concluded that even if the agency spent that much money, the dropoff of the samples on Earth would be delayed until 2040. The agency had originally sought to land the samples on Earth in the early 2030s.

The $11 billion price tag is “too expensive,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson at a press briefing, and “not returning the samples until 2040 is unacceptable.” Nelson said the agency “is committed to bringing at least some of the samples back” and later said NASA would return “more than 30” of the 43 planned samples.

Scaling back

NASA’s Perseverance rover has already collected more than 20 rock samples from Jezero Crater, where the rover landed in 2020. Scientists think that the crater was once filled with a lake of water, and samples from the crater and its surroundings could provide a window into the planet’s history and, perhaps, evidence of past life on the red planet.

In the agency’s original vision, a NASA spacecraft would have flown to Mars carrying a two-part retrieval system: a half-ton lander — which would have been the most massive vehicle to ever land on Mars — and a rocket to fly the lander and samples into Martian orbit. There they were to meet a spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency that would fly the samples to Earth.

Now NASA plans to solicit proposals — from companies as well as NASA centres — for a streamlined system, perhaps one that uses a lighter lander, Nicky Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said at the briefing. The deadline for proposals is 17 May, and the revised mission will be chosen later this year. Fox did not respond directly to reporters’ questions about when the samples will reach Earth under the new scheme.

NASA recommends spending $200 million of its planetary-science budget in 2025 on assessing alternative architectures for Mars sample return, Fox said. Dedicating any more money to the mission threatened to “cannibalize” other planetary science missions, Nelson said.

Back to the drawing board

Vicky Hamilton, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, expressed disappointment that eight months after the independent review board released its report, the agency still lacks a solid plan for “a very valuable science goal.”

Returning these samples would also demonstrate capability for two-way trip to Mars before we can send astronauts, says Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. “The sample return technology is here, it exists,” she says. “It’s a matter of putting the pieces together.”

But scientists were relieved by one announcement: Fox said the revised timeline for sample return will not affect the science goals for Perseverance, including plans for it to explore terrain beyond Jezero Crater.

Among samples collected outside the crater will be “some of the ancient crust of Mars, representing rocks older than we have seen yet in Jezero Crater, some of which may have been altered by near-surface water,” says Meenakshi Wadhwa, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe and principal scientist for the Mars Sample Return program.

So far, the only Mars samples that scientists have been able to study on Earth are bits and pieces ejected from the red planet that made it to Earth as meteorites. All known Martian meteorites are “igneous” rocks, meaning that they solidified from lava, and all are very old. As a result, they provide valuable timestamps for Mars’ geological evolution, but carry little information about how the planet’s surface was shaped by the water that once flowed across it.

To achieve the mission’s main goal of searching for signs of past life, the real treasures are layered sedimentary rocks formed by minerals and organic matter deposited over the aeons by water. Perseverance’s instruments have already detected organic molecules in Martian samples, but whether those molecules are a marker of past life can only be determined by closer scrutiny in laboratories on Earth.

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Did ‘alien’ debris hit Earth? Startling claim sparks row at scientific meeting

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An electron microprobe image of a grey sphere on a black background. The sphere has a partially irregular surface and is about 200 micrometres across according to the scale bar.

Avi Loeb and his team say that metallic balls found near Papua New Guinea could be of extraterrestrial origin.Credit: Avi Loeb’s photo collection

The Woodlands, Texas

A sensational claim made last year that an ‘alien’ meteorite hit Earth near Papua New Guinea in 2014 got its first in-person airing with the broader scientific community on 12 March. At the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, scientists clashed over whether a research team has indeed found fragments of a space rock that came from outside the Solar System.

The debate occurred at a packed session featuring Hairuo Fu, a graduate student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is a member of the team that found the fragments. Team leader Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard who did not attend the conference, has made other controversial claims about extraterrestrial discoveries. Many scientists have said that they don’t want to spend much of their time analysing and refuting these claims.

During his presentation, Fu described tiny metallic blobs that Loeb’s expedition dredged from the sea floor near Papua New Guinea last year, and said that the spherules have a chemical composition of unknown origin1. He then faced questions from a long line of scientists sceptical of the implications of extraterrestrial material. “At the very least, it is something different from what we know,” Fu responded.

New work questions the team’s findings. In a manuscript posted on the arXiv preprint server on 8 March2, ahead of peer review, a researcher argues that the debris collected by Loeb and his co-workers is actually molten blobs generated when an asteroid hit Earth 788,000 years ago.

“What they found has all the characteristics of microtektites — little pieces of melted Earth that came from this impact,” says preprint author Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Meanwhile, other studies are challenging different aspects of Loeb’s claim, such as whether the meteor that reportedly produced the fragments was on the trajectory Loeb says it was. Together, the findings show how the broader scientific community is engaging with Loeb’s extraterrestrial claims, in spite of reluctance to do so.

A unique find?

‘Interstellar’ objects remained in the realm of theory until 2017, when astronomers spotted the first known celestial object to be on a trajectory that meant it could only have come from outside the Solar System. Loeb made headlines when he speculated that the object, a comet-like body named ‘Oumuamua, was an artefact sent by an extraterrestrial civilization.

‘Oumuamua passed through the Solar System far from Earth, but Loeb hoped to find another interstellar object that had hit the planet. He later proposed that a bright meteor that appeared in the sky north of Papua New Guinea in January 2014 had an interstellar trajectory and could have scattered debris in the ocean.

Three people use a vacuum tool on a metallic sledge on board a ship.

Avi Loeb (in hat) and colleagues recover particles from a magnetic sledge on their 2023 expedition.Credit: Avi Loeb’s photo collection

In June 2023, Loeb led a privately funded expedition to the site that used magnetic sledges to recover more than 800 metallic spherules from the sea floor. About one-quarter of the spherules had chemical compositions indicating that they came from igneous, or once-molten, rocks. Of those, a handful were unusually enriched in the elements beryllium, lanthanum and uranium. The researchers concluded that those spherules are unlike any known materials in the Solar System1.

However, Desch counters that the spherules could have come from an asteroid impact in southeast Asia. Key to his proposal2 is a kind of soil called laterite, which forms in tropical regions when heavy rainfall carries some chemical elements from the topmost layers of soil into deeper ones. This leaves the upper soil enriched in other elements, including beryllium, lanthanum and uranium — similar to the composition of the spherules collected by Loeb and his colleagues. Desch says that an asteroid known to have struck the region around 788,000 years ago3 probably hit lateritic rock and created the molten blobs found by Loeb’s team.

In an e-mail to Nature, Loeb argues that spherules from an impact 788,000 years ago should have been buried by ocean sediments. Desch counters that sedimentation rates are relatively low in the offshore area where the spherules were collected.

But others are sceptical of Desch’s proposal, too. Scientists have yet to find any confirmed tektites from lateritic rock, notes Pierre Rochette, a geoscientist at Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence, France, who is not affiliated with either team. And very few tektites are magnetic, he says, so it would be difficult for Loeb and his colleagues to have pulled up hundreds from the sea floor.

Fiery critiques

Desch was not the only scientist to challenge Loeb’s work this week.

After Fu’s conference presentation, Ben Fernando, a seismologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, spoke and took aim at claims concerning the 2014 meteor. Fernando and his colleagues, including Desch, analysed seismic and acoustic data gathered by ground-based sensors at the time the meteor hit the atmosphere4. Data from a seismometer on nearby Manus Island, which Loeb and his team studied as they were deciding where to dredge, show no characteristics of a high-altitude fireball — but do indicate a vehicle driving past, Fernando said. “This is almost certainly a truck,” he told the meeting. A second set of observations, made using infrasound sensors that listen for clandestine nuclear tests, seems to have detected the meteor hitting the atmosphere, but suggests it happened around 170 kilometres away from where Loeb’s team calculates.

Loeb told Nature that such critiques do not take into account US Department of Defense data that he says confirm the exact trajectory of that fireball. But because those data are held by the government, they have not been independently cross-checked by other scientists.

As conference-goers poured out of the room after his talk, Fu told Nature that Loeb’s team is working on further analyses, such as isotopic studies, that could shed more light on what the spherules are. After that, Fu said, he is looking forward to graduating and working on a new project — on how the Moon was formed.

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