James' World 2

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The concert is in London. You’re watching it live from your home in Atlanta. What makes that possible is a network of subsea cables draped across the cold, dark contours of the ocean floor, transmitting sights and sounds at the speed of light through strands of glass fiber as thin as your hair but thousands of miles long.

These cables, only about as thick as a garden hose, are high-tech marvels. The fastest, the newly completed transatlantic cable called Amitié and funded by Microsoft, Meta, and others, can carry 400 terabits of data per second. That’s 400,000 times faster than your home broadband if you’re lucky enough to have high-end gigabit service.

And yet subsea cables are low-tech, too, coated in tar and unspooled by ships employing basically the same process used in the 1850s to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. SubCom, a subsea-cable maker based in New Jersey, evolved from a rope manufacturer with a factory next to a deep-water port for easy loading onto ships.

Though satellite links are becoming more important with orbiting systems like SpaceX’s Starlink, subsea cables are the workhorses of global commerce and communications, carrying more than 99% of traffic between continents. TeleGeography, an analyst firm that tracks the business, knows of 552 existing and planned subsea cables, and more are on the way as the internet spreads to every part of the globe and every corner of our lives.

You probably know that tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google run the brains of the internet. They’re called “hyperscalers” for operating hundreds of data centers packed with millions of servers. You might not know that they also increasingly run the internet’s nervous system, too.

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Zooey Liao/CNET

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Photograph: GETTY IMAGES

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Thinking of spring cleaning? Whether you’re finally cleaning up the junk drawer or upgrading your tech, don’t condemn your old device to your in-home gadget graveyard — or worse, the garbage. We all hang onto outdated tech for our own reasons, but there are also multiple ways to repurpose old devices for your smart home, using them as security cameras and more.

Whatever the tech, when it’s finally time to say goodbye, there’s a right way to dispose of your old gadgets — and there are a lot of wrong ways. We’ll show you which is which.

What to do before you get rid of a device

When you’re finished with a gadget, make sure it’s also finished with you. Make sure to back up anything you want off the device — photos, videos, songs — and then perform a factory reset. Here are a few CNET articles to help clarify the finer points of wiping a device:

Here are the best places here in the US to recycle, repurpose, or give new life to your old technology.

How to recycle smartphones

Smartphone Recycling lets you print a free FedEx shipping label or request a recycling kit. Ship your old smartphone, and you might even get paid, depending on the device’s condition and age. Smartphone Recycling accepts devices in bulk, so you have to ship a minimum of 10. Depending on how long you’ve been hoarding phones, you might meet this quota on your own. If not, check with friends and family and make it a group effort.

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What do you do with your phone when it’s served its purpose? We’ll give you some options.  Sarah Tew/CNET

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On Aug. 4, 2020, Clorox’s chief executive officer, Benno Dorer, told Reuters that there would likely be a shortage of the company’s name-brand disinfectant wipes until 2021. Even though the company increased its production by 40%, the Covid-19 pandemic increased demand for the wipes by more than 500%—far more than annual spikes related to flu season.

But even though Clorox wipes may not be on grocery store shelves as much as they used to, there are plenty of alternative disinfectants, including ones you can make yourself. And some of them are better for the planet, too.

The shortage of Clorox wipes stems from crushing demand, but also from its supply chain. While most of its products will bounce back from shortages in the next six months (predicted at the time this article was written in August 2020), Dorer told Reuters, disinfecting wipes “will probably take longer because it’s a very complex supply chain to make them,” including the IP-protected material Clorox uses for the wipe itself.

“What people like about Clorox wipes is that they’re consistent and quality-controlled,” says Rachel Noble, an environmental microbiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In other words, they feel like they can trust the product—which is especially important in such uncertain times.

Fortunately, there are plenty of effective alternatives. The US Environmental Protection Agency has a list of nearly 500 different disinfectant products that work to kill SARS-CoV-2 if you’re looking for something store-bought in lieu of Clorox wipes.

There are ways to make your own wipe substitutes at home, says Noble, but in order to be effective, they have to be made properly.

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So many more ways to clean. Photo by Reuters/Chip Somodevilla

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They turned up in shifts, all through the course of lockdown: mice, ants, weevils, moths, a fox and, on one unhappy occasion, a magpie in the kitchen. I have been obliged to show the door to all manner of wildlife, with varying degrees of success. The magpie was eager to leave. The ants less so. The moths are still with us.

It’s easy to get angry with household pests, and sometimes – on encountering a particularly rapacious mouse, say – it’s possible to wish them great harm. But most people, I suspect, would rather be as humane as possible when getting rid of invaders. And even when kindness can’t stop you killing things, squeamishness often will. Unfortunately, many pest control products still associate effectiveness with lethality. The ant trap I bought says it “destroys ants and their nests!” I really just wanted them off the worktop. Is it possible to keep your home pest-free using only humane, nonlethal means?

The first thing I had to learn about humane pest control is that the people who promote it don’t like the word pest. Rodents and insects are all wildlife, with a vital part to play in our ecosystem. “Commonly, people call them pests, but they have the same right to live on this planet as we do,” says Laura-Lisa Hellwig, campaigns manager at the vegan charity Viva!. “And some of them have been here for a much longer time than we have. Really, we should find a peaceful way to live together instead of eradicating or cruelly killing some of them.”

Step one, then, is to check if you can simply coexist with your would-be pest.

“When people see, you know, a bee nest in their guttering on the side of their house, the first thing they think is: ‘We need to find a way to control that,’” says Kevin Newell, the founder of Humane Wildlife Solutions, a pioneering nonlethal wildlife control company based in Scotland. He is speaking to me by phone over the peeping of recently rescued baby lesser black-backed gulls, which are temporarily living in his office before being rehomed at a wildlife refuge.

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Tim Dowling … ‘It’s easy to get angry with household pests.’ Photo by Philippe TURPIN/Getty Images

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Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

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Natural gas is a fossil fuel. Like other fossil fuels such as coal and oil, natural gas forms from the plants, animals, and microorganisms that lived millions of years ago.

There are several different theories to explain how fossil fuels are formed. The most prevalent theory is that they form underground, under intense conditions. As plants, animals, and microorganisms decompose, they are gradually covered by layers of soil, sediment, and sometimes rock. Over millions of years, the organic matter is compressed. As the organic matter moves deeper into Earth’s crust, it encounters higher and higher temperatures.

The combination of compression and high temperature causes the carbon bonds in the organic matter to break down. This molecular breakdown produces thermogenic methane—natural gas. Methane, probably the most abundant organic compound on Earth, is made of carbon and hydrogen (CH4).

Natural gas deposits are often found near oil deposits. Deposits of natural gas close to Earth’s surface are usually dwarfed by nearby oil deposits. Deeper deposits—formed at higher temperatures and under more pressure—have more natural gas than oil. The deepest deposits can be made up of pure natural gas.

Natural gas does not have to be formed deep underground, however. It can also be formed by tiny microorganisms called methanogens. Methanogens live in the intestines of animals (including humans) and in low-oxygen areas near the surface of Earth. Landfills, for example, are full of decomposing matter that methanogens break down into a type of methane called biogenic methane. The process of methanogens creating natural gas (methane) is called methanogenesis.

Although most biogenic methane escapes into the atmosphere, there are new technologies being created to contain and harvest this potential energy source.

Thermogenic methane—the natural gas formed deep beneath Earth’s surface—can also escape into the atmosphere. Some of the gas is able to rise through permeable matter, such as porous rock, and eventually dissipate into the atmosphere.

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Photograph by David Cupp: Burgan Field/ The Burgan oil field, in Kuwait, is one of the richest oil fields in the world. Natural gas, some of which is seen burning here, is often found near deposits of oil and coal. Oil, coal, and natural gas are fossil fuels.

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Take only pictures, leave only footprints. We’ve all heard it, but how many of us actually heed it? Today, with more than 1 billion people traveling every year, it’s imperative for frequent travelers to engage in sustainable practices that tread lightly on the Earth. To that end, a multitude of useful apps and websites have emerged to help us be greener globe-trotters: before, during, and after the journey. The following digital resources feature functions that range from finding flights with the lowest C02 emissions to locating sustainably sourced, seasonal food. What’s more—each of these environmentally friendly tools is totally free to use.

Locavore 

If you like eating local, Locavore will be your friend for life. This free iOS app uses your phone’s GPS to help you determine which fruits and vegetables are in season wherever you are in the world. In addition, it pinpoints the location of nearby farmers’ markets, farms open to the public, and community-supported agricultural venues. The mobile app also offers quick and easy recipes for an extra fee and prompts users to share their finds on Facebook, inspiring other farm-to-table travelers to join the locavore movement.

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Sustainability-minded apps and websites help reduce the environmental impact of travel by making it easier to find fuel-efficient flights, seek out eco-friendly hotels, and calculate carbon emissions in real-time. Illustration courtesy of alexacrib / Shutterstock.

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