#electric car battery issues

[motogadi]

Tata Motors Replaces Nexon EV Battery for Free After Customer Complains of Range Issues

In this article, we will discuss the Tata Nexon EV battery issues, the cost of battery replacement, and the ownership cost of electric cars after the warranty period. We will also provide tips for optimizing your Nexon EV for battery life. #Tatanexonev

Several Tata Nexon EV customers have recently reported a dramatic reduction in the state of charge (SOC) of their vehicles. One such event was reported on T-BHP by cool_dube, who had this problem after driving 15,000 kilometres in his 14-month-old Nexon EV Prime. The incident occurred twice in the last ten days, according to the owner. He said that the battery behaves flawlessly from 100% to…

[mytholegy]

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[jcmarchi]

What’s the best way of warming up your electric car? - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/whats-the-best-way-of-warming-up-your-electric-car-technology-org/

What’s the best way of warming up your electric car? - Technology Org

Until now, car manufacturers and others have been recommending using electricity from the grid to warm up your car on cold winter mornings. This will save the battery and ensure maximum range. But research is showing that this isn’t always necessary. Nor does it save you money.

Electric car charging in a garage. Image credit: dcbel via Unsplash, free license

“We don’t need a fully-charged battery for most car journeys, so preheating in this way puts an unnecessary strain on both the electricity grid and our wallets”, says researcher Åse Lekang Sørensen i SINTEF.

She and her colleagues at NTNU have been calculating how much mains electricity is being used to preheat electric cars (EVs) and how this impacts on the supply grid.

Smart people charge at night

Our increasing use of EVs means that preheating is putting a significant strain on the electricity grid. This makes it important to know how our use of EVs impacts on total electricity consumption and raises issues about the smartest ways of using electricity.

“The amount of electricity we use to preheat EVs is small in terms of the big picture, but it nevertheless impacts on consumption when the load on the grid is greatest.

After parking their EVs at home in the afternoon, many people wait until nightfall before charging them. This is smart because capacity in the grid is greater at night and the electricity least expensive.

However, preheating takes place mostly in the morning on the coldest winter days, when the total load on the grid is at its highest and the electricity at its most expensive.

“The amount of electricity we use to preheat electric cars is small in comparison with the big picture, but it nevertheless impacts on consumption when the load on the grid is greatest”, says Sørensen.

For a single household this will often lead to higher electricity bills because the spot price is normally highest in the mornings.  In some cases, it may also result in a higher grid tariff, if the electricity you use for preheating means that you end up in a higher standing charge band. The standing charge band is that part of your electricity bill calculated based on your highest 24-hour peak use each month.

Many makes of EV allow you to use electricity from the battery for preheating. Sørensen recommends that it is better to charge your EV at night, as many people already do, and use the battery to preheat the car in the morning, without connecting it to the mains. She only recommends preheating from the mains if you are starting out on a long journey in cold weather.

Calculating energy consumption during charging

A research team from SINTEF and NTNU has been testing the preheating of some standard electric car makes under different weather conditions. The project has been carried out at the CEER research centre Zero Emission Neighbourhoods in Smart Cities, also known as ZEN.

Five of the most common EVs sold in Norway were tested as part of the experiment –  the BMW i3, Jaguar I-PACE, Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model 3 and VW eGolf. Together, these make up 38% of the electric cars currently on Norwegian roads. The results were as follows:

Most of the EVs consumed between 3 and 8 kW electricity at the start, which was later reduced to about between 2 and 4 kW after 10 to 20 minutes.

The preheating process lasted between 15 and 45 minutes.

Energy consumption during preheating was up to 2 kWh for the majority of EVs, with a maximum value of 5 kWh.

The researchers also calculated how a number of different variables impacted on energy use.

“We measured how the electricity consumed in the preheating of EV cabins is influenced by the car itself, the charging point, the time it takes to warm the car, the exterior and interior air temperatures, as well as charging habits”, explains Sørensen. “Charging habits refer to when, how long, and how often we connect to the charger”, she says.

Finally, the team compared the energy consumed for EV cabin preheating with other uses of energy in a typical apartment block.

“This is relevant because it tells us how great a proportion of the total electricity consumed by a household goes towards preheating the car, and thus how the preheating process impacts on electricity bills.

Source: Sintef

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Year - 2023 Edition

Welcome to our special edition newsletter recapping the best news from the past year. I've picked one highlight from each month to give you a snapshot of 2023. No frills, just straightforward news that mattered. Let's relive the good stuff that made our year shine.

January - London: Girl with incurable cancer recovers after pioneering treatment

A girl’s incurable cancer has been cleared from her body after what scientists have described as the most sophisticated cell engineering to date.

2. February - Utah legislature unanimously passes ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy

The Utah State Legislature has unanimously approved a bill that enshrines into law a ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy.

3. March - First vaccine for honeybees could save billions

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved the world’s first-ever vaccine intended to address the global decline of honeybees. It will help protect honeybees from American foulbrood, a contagious bacterial disease which can destroy entire colonies.

4. April - Fungi discovered that can eat plastic in just 140 days

Australian scientists have successfully used backyard mould to break down one of the world's most stubborn plastics — a discovery they hope could ease the burden of the global recycling crisis within years. 

5. May - Ocean Cleanup removes 200,000th kilogram of plastic from the Pacific Ocean

The Dutch offshore restoration project, Ocean Cleanup, says it has reached a milestone. The organization's plastic catching efforts have now fished more than 200,000 kilograms of plastic out of the Pacific Ocean, Ocean Cleanup said on Twitter.

6. June - U.S. judge blocks Florida ban on care for trans minors in narrow ruling, says ‘gender identity is real’

A federal judge temporarily blocked portions of a new Florida law that bans transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers, ruling Tuesday that the state has no rational basis for denying patients treatment.

7. July - World’s largest Phosphate deposit discovered in Norway

A massive underground deposit of high-grade phosphate rock in Norway, pitched as the world’s largest, is big enough to satisfy world demand for fertilisers, solar panels and electric car batteries over the next 50 years, according to the company exploiting the resource.

8. August - Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

If the claim by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of South Korea’s Quantum Energy Research Centre holds up, the material could usher in all sorts of technological marvels, such as levitating vehicles and perfectly efficient electrical grids.

9. September - World’s 1st drug to regrow teeth enters clinical trials

The ability to regrow your own teeth could be just around the corner. A team of scientists, led by a Japanese pharmaceutical startup, are getting set to start human trials on a new drug that has successfully grown new teeth in animal test subjects.

10. October - Nobel Prize goes to scientists behind mRNA Covid vaccines

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to a pair of scientists who developed the technology that led to the mRNA Covid vaccines. Professors Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman will share the prize.

11. November - No cases of cancer caused by HPV in Norwegian 25-year olds, the first cohort to be mass vaccinated for HPV.

Last year there were zero cases of cervical cancer in the group that was vaccinated in 2009 against the HPV virus, which can cause the cancer in women.

12. December - President Biden announces he’s pardoning all convictions of federal marijuana possession

President Joe Biden announced Friday he's issuing a federal pardon to every American who has used marijuana in the past, including those who were never arrested or prosecuted.

------

And there you have it – a year's worth of uplifting news! I hope these positive stories brought a bit of joy to your inbox. As I wrap up this special edition, I want to thank all my supporters!

Buy me a coffee ❤️

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Cleantech has an enshittification problem

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

EVs won't save the planet. Ultimately, the material bill for billions of individual vehicles and the unavoidable geometry of more cars-more traffic-more roads-greater distances-more cars dictate that the future of our cities and planet requires public transit – lots of it.

But no matter how much public transit we install, there's always going to be some personal vehicles on the road, and not just bikes, ebikes and scooters. Between deliveries, accessibility, and stubbornly low-density regions, there's going to be a lot of cars, vans and trucks on the road for the foreseeable future, and these should be electric.

Beyond that irreducible minimum of personal vehicles, there's the fact that individuals can't install their own public transit system; in places that lack the political will or means to create working transit, EVs are a way for people to significantly reduce their personal emissions.

In policy circles, EV adoption is treated as a logistical and financial issue, so governments have focused on making EVs affordable and increasing the density of charging stations. As an EV owner, I can affirm that affordability and logistics were important concerns when we were shopping for a car.

But there's a third EV problem that is almost entirely off policy radar: enshittification.

An EV is a rolling computer in a fancy case with a squishy person inside of it. While this can sound scary, there are lots of cool implications for this. For example, your EV could download your local power company's tariff schedule and preferentially charge itself when the rates are lowest; they could also coordinate with the utility to reduce charging when loads are peaking. You can start them with your phone. Your repair technician can run extensive remote diagnostics on them and help you solve many problems from the road. New features can be delivered over the air.

That's just for starters, but there's so much more in the future. After all, the signal virtue of a digital computer is its flexibility. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing complete, universal, Von Neumann machine, which can run every valid program. If a feature is computationally tractable – from automated parallel parking to advanced collision prevention – it can run on a car.

The problem is that this digital flexibility presents a moral hazard to EV manufacturers. EVs are designed to make any kind of unauthorized, owner-selected modification into an IP rights violation ("IP" in this case is "any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers or competitors"):

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

EVs are also designed so that the manufacturer can unilaterally exert control over them or alter their operation. EVs – even more than conventional vehicles – are designed to be remotely killswitched in order to help manufacturers and dealers pressure people into paying their car notes on time:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Manufacturers can reach into your car and change how much of your battery you can access:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

They can lock your car and have it send its location to a repo man, then greet him by blinking its lights, honking its horn, and pulling out of its parking space:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

And of course, they can detect when you've asked independent mechanic to service your car and then punish you by degrading its functionality:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2024/06/26/two-of-eight-claims-in-tesla-anti-trust-lawsuit-will-move-forward/

This is "twiddling" – unilaterally and irreversibly altering the functionality of a product or service, secure in the knowledge that IP law will prevent anyone from twiddling back by restoring the gadget to a preferred configuration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

The thing is, for an EV, twiddling is the best case scenario. As bad as it is for the company that made your EV to change how it works whenever they feel like picking your pocket, that's infinitely preferable to the manufacturer going bankrupt and bricking your car.

That's what just happened to owners of Fisker EVs, cars that cost $40-70k. Cars are long-term purchases. An EV should last 12-20 years, or even longer if you pay to swap the battery pack. Fisker was founded in 2016 and shipped its first Ocean SUV in 2023. The company is now bankrupt:

https://insideevs.com/news/723669/fisker-inc-bankruptcy-chapter-11-official/

Fisker called its vehicles "software-based cars" and they weren't kidding. Without continuous software updates and server access, those Fisker Ocean SUVs are turning into bricks. What's more, the company designed the car from the ground up to make any kind of independent service and support into a felony, by wrapping the whole thing in overlapping layers of IP. That means that no one can step in with a module that jailbreaks the Fisker and drops in an alternative firmware that will keep the fleet rolling.

This is the third EV risk – not just finance, not just charger infrastructure, but the possibility that any whizzy, cool new EV company will go bust and brick your $70k cleantech investment, irreversibly transforming your car into 5,500 lb worth of e-waste.

This confers a huge advantage onto the big automakers like VW, Kia, Ford, etc. Tesla gets a pass, too, because it achieved critical mass before people started to wise up to the risk of twiddling and bricking. If you're making a serious investment in a product you expect to use for 20 years, are you really gonna buy it from a two-year old startup with six months' capital in the bank?

The incumbency advantage here means that the big automakers won't have any reason to sink a lot of money into R&D, because they won't have to worry about hungry startups with cool new ideas eating their lunches. They can maintain the cozy cartel that has seen cars stagnate for decades, with the majority of "innovation" taking the form of shitty, extractive and ill-starred ideas like touchscreen controls and an accelerator pedal that you have to rent by the month:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

Put that way, it's clear that this isn't an EV problem, it's a cleantech problem. Cleantech has all the problems of EVs: it requires a large capital expenditure, it will be "smart," and it is expected to last for decades. That's rooftop solar, heat-pumps, smart thermostat sensor arrays, and home storage batteries.

And just as with EVs, policymakers have focused on infrastructure and affordability without paying any attention to the enshittification risks. Your rooftop solar will likely be controlled via a Solaredge box – a terrible technology that stops working if it can't reach the internet for a protracted period (that's right, your home solar stops working if the grid fails!).

I found this out the hard way during the covid lockdowns, when Solaredge terminated its 3G cellular contract and notified me that I would have to replace the modem in my system or it would stop working. This was at the height of the supply-chain crisis and there was a long waiting list for any replacement modems, with wifi cards (that used your home internet rather than a cellular connection) completely sold out for most of a year.

There are good reasons to connect rooftop solar arrays to the internet – it's not just so that Solaredge can enshittify my service. Solar arrays that coordinate with the grid can make it much easier and safer to manage a grid that was designed for centralized power production and is being retrofitted for distributed generation, one roof at a time.

But when the imperatives of extraction and efficiency go to war, extraction always wins. After all, the Solaredge system is already in place and solar installers are largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, the reasons that a homeowner might want to directly control and monitor their system via local controls that don't roundtrip through the cloud.

Somewhere in the hindbrain of any prospective solar purchaser is the experience with bricked and enshittified "smart" gadgets, and the knowledge that anything they buy from a cool startup with lots of great ideas for improving production, monitoring, and/or costs poses the risk of having your 20 year investment bricked after just a few years – and, thanks to the extractive imperative, no one will be able to step in and restore your ex-solar array to good working order.

I make the majority of my living from books, which means that my pay is very "lumpy" – I get large sums when I publish a book and very little in between. For many years, I've used these payments to make big purchases, rather than financing them over long periods where I can't predict my income. We've used my book payments to put in solar, then an induction stove, then a battery. We used one to buy out the lease on our EV. And just a month ago, we used the money from my upcoming Enshittification book to put in a heat pump (with enough left over to pay for a pair of long-overdue cataract surgeries, scheduled for the fall).

When we started shopping for heat pumps, it was clear that this was a very exciting sector. First of all, heat pumps are kind of magic, so efficient and effective it's almost surreal. But beyond the basic tech – which has been around since the late 1940s – there is a vast ferment of cool digital features coming from exciting and innovative startups.

By nature, I'm the kid of person who likes these digital features. I started out as a computer programmer, and while I haven't written production code since the previous millennium, I've been in and around the tech industry for my whole adult life. But when it came time to buy a heat-pump – an investment that I expected to last for 20 years or more – there was no way I was going to buy one of these cool new digitally enhanced pumps, no matter how much the reviewers loved them. Sure, they'd work well, but it's precisely because I'm so knowledgeable about high tech that I could see that they would fail very, very badly.

You may think EVs are bullshit, and they are – though there will always be room for some personal vehicles, and it's better for people in transit deserts to drive EVs than gas-guzzlers. You may think rooftop solar is a dead-end and be all-in on utility scale solar (I think we need both, especially given the grid-disrupting extreme climate events on our horizon). But there's still a wide range of cleantech – induction tops, heat pumps, smart thermostats – that are capital intensive, have a long duty cycle, and have good reasons to be digitized and networked.

Take home storage batteries: your utility can push its rate card to your battery every time they change their prices, and your battery can use that information to decide when to let your house tap into the grid, and when to switch over to powering your home with the solar you've stored up during the day. This is a very old and proven pattern in tech: the old Fidonet BBS network used a version of this, with each BBS timing its calls to other nodes to coincide with the cheapest long-distance rates, so that messages for distant systems could be passed on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

Cleantech is a very dynamic sector, even if its triumphs are largely unheralded. There's a quiet revolution underway in generation, storage and transmission of renewable power, and a complimentary revolution in power-consumption in vehicles and homes:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

But cleantech is too important to leave to the incumbents, who are addicted to enshittification and planned obsolescence. These giant, financialized firms lack the discipline and culture to make products that have the features – and cost savings – to make them appealing to the very wide range of buyers who must transition as soon as possible, for the sake of the very planet.

It's not enough for our policymakers to focus on financing and infrastructure barriers to cleantech adoption. We also need a policy-level response to enshittification.

Ideally, every cleantech device would be designed so that it was impossible to enshittify – which would also make it impossible to brick:

Based on free software (best), or with source code escrowed with a trustee who must release the code if the company enters administration (distant second-best);

All patents in a royalty-free patent-pool (best); or in a trust that will release them into a royalty-free pool if the company enters administration (distant second-best);

No parts-pairing or other DRM permitted (best); or with parts-pairing utilities available to all parties on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis (distant second-best);

All diagnostic and error codes in the public domain, with all codes in the clear within the device (best); or with decoding utilities available on demand to all comers on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis (distant second-best).

There's an obvious business objection to this: it will reduce investment in innovative cleantech because investors will perceive these restrictions as limits on the expected profits of their portfolio companies. It's true: these measures are designed to prevent rent-extraction and other enshittificatory practices by cleantech companies, and to the extent that investors are counting on enshittification rents, this might prevent them from investing.

But that has to be balanced against the way that a general prohibition on enshittificatory practices will inspire consumer confidence in innovative and novel cleantech products, because buyers will know that their investments will be protected over the whole expected lifespan of the product, even if the startup goes bust (nearly every startup goes bust). These measures mean that a company with a cool product will have a much larger customer-base to sell to. Those additional sales more than offset the loss of expected revenue from cheating and screwing your customers by twiddling them to death.

There's also an obvious legal objection to this: creating these policies will require a huge amount of action from Congress and the executive branch, a whole whack of new rules and laws to make them happen, and each will attract court-challenges.

That's also true, though it shouldn't stop us from trying to get legal reforms. As a matter of public policy, it's terrible and fucked up that companies can enshittify the things we buy and leave us with no remedy.

However, we don't have to wait for legal reform to make this work. We can take a shortcut with procurement – the things governments buy with public money. The feds, the states and localities buy a lot of cleantech: for public facilities, for public housing, for public use. Prudent public policy dictates that governments should refuse to buy any tech unless it is designed to be enshittification-resistant.

This is an old and honorable tradition in policymaking. Lincoln insisted that the rifles he bought for the Union Army come with interoperable tooling and ammo, for obvious reasons. No one wants to be the Commander in Chief who shows up on the battlefield and says, "Sorry, boys, war's postponed, our sole supplier decided to stop making ammunition."

By creating a market for enshittification-proof cleantech, governments can ensure that the public always has the option of buying an EV that can't be bricked even if the maker goes bust, a heat-pump whose digital features can be replaced or maintained by a third party of your choosing, a solar controller that coordinates with the grid in ways that serve their owners – not the manufacturers' shareholders.

We're going to have to change a lot to survive the coming years. Sure, there's a lot of scary ways that things can go wrong, but there's plenty about our world that should change, and plenty of ways those changes could be for the better. It's not enough for policymakers to focus on ensuring that we can afford to buy whatever badly thought-through, extractive tech the biggest companies want to foist on us – we also need a focus on making cleantech fit for purpose, truly smart, reliable and resilient.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

Image: 臺灣古寫真上色 (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Raid_on_Kagi_City_1945.jpg

Grendelkhan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ground_mounted_solar_panels.gk.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[three-dee-ess]

Hey I saw your post about the puffy battery and my 3DS has that (it’s starting to crack the case). I knew it was affecting the battery life but I didn’t know that it was dangerous. How would you go about repairing/replacing this?

ok this is going on my FAQ after this. possibly in my pinned post.

Contact your local *non emergency* number and ask them how to dispose of a puffy lithium ion battery. Follow their instructions.

To remove the battery from the case (which is the best thing to do in that situation) follow the instructions linked in my pinned post "for physical 3DS issues" (https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Nintendo_Handheld_Console)

Be as careful as possible to NOT puncture the battery.

for getting a replacement, just look at the number on your 3DS's battery and type that into amazon. Should be plenty of results, all around $10~$20 USD and they should work perfectly fine. check the reviews if you are worried.

Again, if you have any battery that is bending or breaking the case, is is a legitimate explosion hazard. That battery can explode into a fiery ball of toxic gas. It is in your best interest to dispose of it as soon as possible.

this also goes for batteries inside of ANY electronic device. Switch batteries, macbook batteries, phone batteries, electric bike batteries are also examples of lithium ion batteries that get a lot of usage and often can get overcharged.

resource links:

[violentdelightsandviolentends]

Pretty When You Cry.

Joel realises his morals are fucked. You realise you like it.

Pairing - Joel Miller x female reader

Age Rating - 18+

Warnings - Lots of cursing, sexual content, mentions of prostitution

Word Count - 1750

Author's Note - oh boy. buckle in. i love when a character has a messed up moral compass and is a little rough and jagged around the edges. i also love lana del rey. hence, this joel fic was born. please enjoy.

Masterlist. Requests.

“Stupid fuckin’ girl,” Joel spits at you.

You flinch and step backwards, trying to escape what is inevitably going to be a brutal verbal assault. The older man watches your every move and chuckles darkly.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Nowhere, is the answer. You’re down a dark alleyway in the QZ, a barely lit back street. Even if you run, you’ll just end up circling back around. You’re walled in – both literally and figuratively.

Joel moves towards you, his large frame making you want to shrink away instinctively. He towers over you, broad shoulders blocking your view.

“What the fuck were you thinking?”

You weren’t, is the issue.

✵  ✵    ·　 ✵ 　　 *  · ✵

Joel has been desperate for a car battery for weeks. A few days ago, you’d overheard a guy talking about smuggling spare parts. You’d set up a covert meeting, and asked if he could get you what you needed. He’d told you he could – for a price. It didn’t matter that the currency was you. You’d do what you needed to do. For Joel.

You’d made your way to meet him tonight. His name was Pete, you were pretty sure. He was a sleaze, a real piece of work - but he had connections. He had people working for him, could practically get you anything if you asked nicely and promised to pay.

You had nothing to your name. No one did, these days. You knew you couldn’t pay Pete with alcohol, or cigarettes, or drugs. No, you’d give him something else. You’d give him you. An offer which he eagerly accepted.

He wanted you to pay before he’d give you the battery. You’d argued, but it was no use. You didn’t want to make him angry – it’d only make it worse.

So there you were. He had backed you against the wall of this very alleyway, demanding you take off your shirt. Just as you were lifting the hem over your head, Pete hit the ground.

You looked up to see Joel, more furious than you’d ever seen him before. He’d punched Pete in the head and knocked him out cold.

“What the actual fuck are you doing?” he hissed.

“Well I was doing you a favour. Not anymore, apparently,” you hissed back.

“A favour? You’re whoring yourself out as a favour?”

“Fuck you, Joel,” you spat, turning on your heel to leave.

Joel grabbed your wrist and pulled you backwards with force, taking no care whatsoever. You were worried he was going to snap your arm, the way he was clutching it.

“Stupid fuckin’ girl.”

✵  ✵    ·　 ✵ 　　 *  · ✵

“Are you even listenin’ to me? What the fuck were you thinking?”

He’s looking at you pointedly, clearly expecting some sort of explanation. You’re not really sure what to say. When you don’t answer, he takes another few steps forward, intimidating you until your back is pressed against the rough brick of the wall.

Joel grabs your chin between his fingers and forces you to look at him. His fury hasn’t subsided – you can still feel it rolling off of him in waves. He’s buzzing with adrenaline, the electricity of it infectious, seeping into your pores.

“You better have a damn good reason as to why I just watched you take your shirt off for Pete fuckin’ Davis.”

He spits the man’s name like it tastes disgusting in his mouth. It makes you smirk slightly.

“You think this is funny? Huh?” Joel asks, squeezing your face tighter. You shake your head, not once breaking eye contact with him. He stares you down for a minute before releasing his grip.

“He has a battery,” you explain quietly. “He’s been selling spare parts. Said he could get me what you need if we cut a deal. It’s a small price to pay, Joel.”

“That is not a small price.”

The genuineness of it makes you wince.

The thing is, Joel doesn’t usually care about this kind of stuff. He’s not exactly an upstanding citizen, having made his fair share of dumb deals and below the belt exchanges. He’s usually the one encouraging you to break the rules a little, if it means you both benefit.

Above all, you are convinced that Joel doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t care about anyone, not really. You know that he and Tess have this ambiguous sort of partnership - friendship at a complete stretch. But that’s it. Joel doesn’t care.

So why is he so furious?

His rage has infected you now. You’re exasperated, sick of the mixed signals. You and Joel were partners in crime, acquaintances at most. It didn’t matter that when he looked at you, the whole world fell away. It didn’t matter than when you heard his voice, time stopped temporarily. It didn’t matter that he was the last thing you thought about at night and the first thing you thought about in the morning. None of it mattered.

“Why do you fucking care, Joel?” you spit, shoving at his chest. His scent is suffocating you, making it hard to think. You need to put some distance between you before you do something reckless.

“Why do I care? Why do I fuckin’ care?” he practically yells at your face. “Are you that stupid?”

“Stop calling me stupid!” you retaliate. “I’m smarter than every damn person in this place!”

“Smart enough to turn to prostitution?”

That word makes you scoff.

“It wasn’t like that. It would have been a one time thing. A quick payment.”

“That’s not a fuckin’ payment! That’s the one thing you shouldn’t fuck around with!”

You can tell he’s genuinely upset, but you’re not sure why. It’s none of his business what you choose to do with your body.

“I was doing this for you, asshole! He would have given me the battery, and you could have gone and found Tommy. I did this for you,” you yell, shoving him as hard as you can. He doesn’t move.

“Keep your fuckin’ voice down,” he hisses.

“Don’t tell me what to do!”

“God damn it! You never fuckin’ listen, do you? How stupid are you, huh?”

Joel takes a heavy step forward, one hand reaching out to wrap around your throat. He doesn’t squeeze, just keeps it there, holding you in place. Right where he wants you.

His eyes darken, still alight with fury. He smells like smoke and musk and sweat and spearmint toothpaste. You want to lick the exposed skin of his neck to see if he’d taste the same.

He leans in, almost bumping your nose with his.

“We don’t fuck around with that stuff, alright?” he murmurs. “I’ve seen pretty girls like you get hurt real bad for a lot less. You can’t let them treat you as any less than human.”

You’ve never heard him this sincere. It sends a shiver down your spine.

“Why do you care, Joel?” you whisper. “I’m just as disposable to you as I am to the rest of them.”

He pauses, and you can see the cogs turning in his head. He’s still holding you by the neck, his other hand coming around to tangle in the back of your hair. He’s looking at you so intently that you feel your bravado start to waiver. Your bottom lip quivers, and your eyes begin to well up. A drop runs down your cheek, and the dam breaks.

He’s never seen you get upset like this. You’re trying to stay stoic, but the tears are falling freely, dripping down your face.

This is the moment Joel realises that he’s a changed man. He’s known for years that his morals aren’t what they used to be. They can’t be, not in this world. He’s murdered, robbed, tortured, kidnapped. His moral compass was broken a long time ago. But the change has never dawned on him, until now. He’s holding you roughly, watching you try not to sob, and he doesn’t feel sad. He doesn’t feel sympathy, or regret, or remorse. No. He feels a sick sense of arousal. He’s turned on.

“Fuck,” he murmurs, looking at you carefully. Your lip quivers again, and his resolve breaks completely. He’s surprised he doesn’t hear it shatter.

“You’re so fuckin’ pretty when you cry.”

With that, he’s surging forward, dipping his head to lick at your tear stained cheeks. Your sadness is salty and sweet and real. He’s hooked.

Joel presses forward and kisses you harshly. His hand tightens in your hair, yanking you closer to him. He presses your bodies together, and the warmth of him makes your head spin.

You’re still crying as you moan into his mouth. He’s rough and careless and you want more. He groans, and presses you backwards into the wall, the brick scratching up your back. Everything is blurry for the both of you. He’s grabbing at you, groping anything he can find. He’s searching for skin, hands making their way up and under your shirt. You know how risky it is, making out with Joel in a back alley in the middle of the QZ. You don’t care. Neither of you do. You’re drunk on each other and it’s clouding your judgment.

“You like it when I’m mean to you, honey?” he murmurs, voice jagged and low. He’s kissing at your neck, nipping the skin and leaving purple bruises in his wake. 

“Yeah, Joel, fuck. I love it,” you whine. “I love you.”

The both of you freeze at your confession. You’re honestly not sure if you mean it, or if it’s just the heat of the moment. It doesn’t matter now. You’ve said it, and you can’t take it back.

“You think you do,” he mutters against your throat. “But love doesn’t exist in this world. Not anymore.”

You both pause, heavy breaths filling the air. After a while, you break the silence.

“I’m sorry, Joel,” you whisper. “I’m sorry. So fucking sorry.”

You’re not sure whether you’re apologising for loving him, or admitting it, or for the events of the evening. You’re just sorry.

“Don’t be sorry, sweetheart,” he murmurs gently against your mouth as he kisses you again. “Don’t be sorry.”

He takes you up against the red brick wall, legs wrapped around his waist and arms tangled around his neck. Your back is cut and bleeding, throat sore and pulsing where he’s bitten you. He makes you come twice before he finishes himself, teeth sinking into your shoulder, hands leaving prints on your hips.

Joel says that love doesn’t exist anymore. You think he’s wrong.

[unprettyg1rl]

I’m reading a book on the history of invention and how our cultural views of masculinity vs femininity affect our progress and holy shit if women’s needs and preferences were taken seriously we would’ve been using electric cars since the late 1800s instead of just starting to use them now.

In “Att uppfinna världen” (Mother of Invention in the English translation) by Katrine Marçal there is a chapter dedicated to the process of inventing the modern automobile, where I read that there were multiple ways of constructing a car when the invention was relatively recent, as the field was still open to experimentation. Petrol wasn’t an obvious choice for fuelling the engine – in fact, around the year 1900 a third of all cars in Europe were electric cars, and the percentage was even bigger in America. Electrically powered cars were superior to petrol-fuelled ones in many ways: they were quieter, didn’t expel smelly gas, much safer and more reliable, and easy to start and control from the driver’s seat. Cars fuelled by petrol, on the other hand, were loud, more unreliable and required a lot more maintenance, and to start the engine one had to do some serious manual labour involving a crank – which would often leave you sweaty and with oil stains on your clothes, plus a constant risk of causing an explosion if you weren’t careful enough. Naturally, women preferred the former, being more convenient and comfortable and thus more suited to their travel needs, whereas the petrol-fuelled car was marketed as the more adventurous, macho choice for men.

The one downside to electric cars was that the battery didn’t last for longer journeys, which in the case for women wasn’t that much of a problem since the majority mainly just made trips within the city or town. This was also an issue that could’ve been fixed, and there were many plans to do so, mainly infrastructure-related ones like battery-switching stations and developing better battery solutions. There were even plans for a net of rentable electric cars for anyone to use, and electric trains, trams, and taxis for public transport (seems very ahead of its time, doesn’t it? A much more environmentally conscious system than our good ol’ “everyone has one or multiple cars that individually expel copious amounts of greenhouse gasses” method). However, investments were too few since the male-dominated society deemed these “women’s cars”. After all, a real man isn’t soft, safe and comfortable – he cranks his own car to life and makes a lot of noise as he travels. A report from 1916 by the magazine Electric Vehicle stated that “The thing that is effeminate, or that has that reputation, does not find favor with the American man. Whether or not he is ‘red-blooded’ or ‘virile’ in the ordinary physical sense, at least his ideals are. The fact that anything from a car to a color is the delight of the ladies is enough to change his interest to mere amused tolerance.”

Like, it’s insane that values such as comfort, safety and convenience were seen as “feminine” and thus dismissed, leading to petrol-fuelled cars completely taking over the market in the end. Imagine what the world would’ve looked like if women were the standard instead of men. It really pains me to think how much damage we’ve done to the planet just because of men’s stubborn macho ideals.

(a lot of this research is quoted from The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age by Gijs Mom, a book I’m now very interested in reading in full)

[lemmetreatya]

tow truck driver!reiner who laughs when he gets yet another call from that familiar number.

at this point hes sure he has it remembered off the top of his head. if he hadnt saved your number under your name already, he knows he’d be able to recite the number off by heart.

tow truck driver!reiner arrives at the side of the motorway, the exact location you pin dropped him. he has his jumpstart battery out because he already knows what the issue is.

“i’m telling you, darling. you might aswell just get a new car.” he laughs

with a pout, you lean onto the side of reiner’s pick up truck.

“and ive told you — i no money for a new one! you dont think id have one by now if i could?!”

and tow truck driver!reiner laughs again, but this time theres a mischievous glint in his eye.

“well, you could always just let me drive you around everywhere. at least that way you wont have to worry about breaking down all the time.”

and there’s a non electrical spark that flies between you both once tow truck driver!reiner passes by you to jumpstart his van. you follow him in tow, sly smile on your face as you fold your arms over your chest.

“you’d really dont mind being my personal chauffeur, huh?” your body is unnaturally close to tow truck driver!reiner‘s and the blonde clears his throat once he realises. without trying to be too forward, he allows his hand to brush past your arm as he switches the engine on but in pure mistake, he clips the side of your breast.

“oh?”

your voice goes up in inquisitive discovery but tow truck driver!reiner vividly shakes his head as he waves his arm.

“i-it was a honest accident!” he apologises.

and you’re softly biting the bottom of your lip because never before have you seen such a large man heat up and blush so easily at a simple mistake. if anything, his feigned innocence turned you on.

to reassure him, you laid a hand on top of his arm.

“i know.” you coo, but then when you squeeze the meaty muscle of his biceps, suddenly it changes everything. “it doesn’t have to be though.”

it was as if a switch had been turned on.

“truck. now.” he groans, his hands forfeiting everything that was currently in them.

its honestly star-seeing how vicious tow truck driver!reiner likes to fuck, your asshole gaped wide open as the blonde animalistically abused the puckered hole. your voice was lost as squeaks, barely above the sound of a high pitched whisper, left your throat.

and being the suppressed unhinged man he was, tow truck driver!reiner allowed you to lay down with your tummy flat onto the driver’s seat, but he stood on the elevated platform of the step that helped him get into the vehicle and fucked you standing up, from outside.

tow truck driver!reiner was well pass the irritation of the wind whipping against his bare ass or the occasional honks of the cars passing by that could blatantly see him fuck you with the truck door open.

all tow truck driver!reiner cared about was being able to hagger over you as he groaned profanity into your ears. nothing he said was anything as remotely as innocent as his earlier words, but they were ones he was determined for you to know.

[seat-safety-switch]

One of my neighbours recently had to get his garage lifted up a bit. I guess when you park heavy-ass classic cars in there and never drive them anywhere, all the accumulated market value makes the foundation settle. To fix this problem, he turned to "mud jacking," which is a fancy industry term for spraying a lot of mud under the foundation until the house lifts up or breaks in half, whichever one comes first.

I stood out there in my nightgown, sipping my morning crankcase coffee, and I thought: I could do that shit, too. Unfortunately, my garage was not sinking into the earth at the moment. This is mostly because the surrounding area was already being depressed by approximately fourteen broken cars and their associated internal components. Levels it out a bit, I guess?

Either way, I had a real hankering to apply this new technology I had just discovered, and no safe or legal outlet for that hankering. This is the kind of thing that, in the past, the courts have historically had an issue with. I had to find something else to jack, and fast.

After driving around the neighbourhood for a few minutes, I could find no collapsed driveways, garages, basements, or even statues of losing generals in racist wars. I could already feel the rich tingle of hyperfixation wearing off. That's when I saw it: a city road that had a whole bunch of potholes! I had been driving over it for weeks and simply didn't notice that it was a thing that I could fix, without having to waste the time of brave government workers.

A few minutes and some creative reuse of toilet plumbing and a stolen air compressor later, the road was now fixed. Then the power cord caught fire and welded itself into the outlet of the stolen inverter I was using it power it. Then the cables for that inverter welded themselves to my car battery, along with part of my electrical system. This sudden influx of current made the compressor roar, its ambition to compress all air in creation no longer limited by the pitiful restrictions of mere copper. Rest assured, fair reader: mud was jacked, and jacked good.

So if you're coming through my neighbourhood, watch out for the new speed bump. It's a lot of fun to ramp, but I must admit that it doesn't add much to pedestrian safety, especially since you can't see anyone shorter than about 6'8" who is trying to cross the road anymore.

[quirkwizard]

What do you think Class 1-A's action figures would look like in universe?

Non-quirk related question haha. What do you think class 1A's barbie-ken taglines would be? Not sure how to frame the question but for example for Tokoyami it could be, "This Ken is gothic" or for Ochako it could be, "This Barbie is on cloud nine" (due to her quirk)

I mean, I'm not sure if there is much to say on that. I feel like any taglines for actions figures would just be pretty generic, but I can talk about action figures.

Sato: Comes with a series of small snacks that you can feed him to cause him to bulk up and you pop open the stomach to get them back.

Koda: Just a simple figurine of him with a bunch of small animal models that you can play with as well. Comes with a button to play animal sounds.

Mineta: Orbs on the head are removable and the toy comes with arms that catapult the orbs forward. Possibly with a pointless target pad that no kid will use.

Sero: His tape dispensers can be pulled out like a rip cord, letting the action figure pull itself to whatever you put the doll on. Filling them with regular tape did not work well with test audiences.

Aoyama: Armor is made of a super reflective material that shimmers and has a flashlight in the belt to replicate his beam. Also comes with a lot of costume variants and accessories at Aoyama's instance.

Hakagure: Like Aoyama, her toy is very reflective, almost like a giant prism that gives off colorful lights when put up to any light. A stocking issue made it a hard to find collector's item for a time.

Ojiro: The tail can be curled up and then released, causing the action figure to fling forward. This curling can be used to make it hang on stuff as well. His tail also comes with "kung fu action grip", because of course it does.

Denki: Comes with a bunch of flashing lights and sounds for his electrical attacks. Has a swithcable head for his regular face and his low power face, much to Denki's chagrin. Batteries are not included for some reason.

Jiro: Definitely has some music aspect for it's main gimmick, like being able to use her jacks to plug your MP3 player into it to play music on it or having recordings of her songs on it when you press a button on it.

Kirsihima: Either has a bunch of plates on it that you can put on him to harden him up or you push a button to pop them out of the toy. Had issues in production because of how dangerous the hair spike was for kids.

Mina: Has an action figure with a lot articulation. It's main feature is a goo that comes with it that kids are suppose to put in and fire out of the toy. They fill it up by removing head and pouring the goo in, much to Mina's horror.

Shoji: The main feature would obviously be his arms. They'd either work like super stretchy arms or have a much of attachments that a kid could connect and stack on top of each other to add on whatever organs they want.

Iida: This figure with a set up buttons that can kick the legs forward, able to demolish any stack of cups that you happen to set up. He happens to be bundled a lot with overly complex, Ingeium themed cars, much to Iida's confusion.

Tsuyu: Has a lot of suckers on the hands and feet so you can stick it to surfaces. The tongue can be shoot out as well to grab onto stuff, kind of like those sticky hand toys. Yes, it is water proof and a popular bath toy for young children.

Tokoyami: Probabley has a standard figure with Dark Shadow with larger versions of it being sold separately. The parts of Dark Shadow can be removed and put onto Tokoyami for his armored form. It has a glow in the dark feature, without a doubt.

Shoto: Comes with fire and ice attachment to simulate shooting it out of his hands and feet. The scar was on the wrong side of a better part of it's run and it's occasionally bundled with Endeavor toys to help increase Enji's poor sales.

Momo: Her costume had to be changed on the figurine in order to be sold in stores. She comes with a massive amount of accessories to have her wield, along with little facts and tidbits about them. Momo demanded that her toy had some educational merits.

Katsuki: Probably has some spring power launcher in his arms that you can use to fire out plastic darts. Definitely has something that screams out catchphrases like "Die!" and "I'll kill you!" that would have to be rewrite and recorded several times to get them published.

Uraraka: Has a button that makes her hands glow like she does when she uses her powers along with has wench systems like Sero for her grapple hooks. Probably has a weird spin off line based around it, like Uraravity's Space Adventures featuring the Alien Queen Pinky.

Izuku: The most popular and with the most variations, though the standard ones glows with a button press, has spring shoots for the boots, and an spring in the hand to fire plastic air blasts. Sometimes comes out with special versions that come with other Quirks he had.

[odinsblog]

As cold weather sweeps across the U.S., some electric vehicle owners are learning a bitter truth: Low temperatures can stop the cars dead in their icy tracks.

The issue crystallized this week when some Tesla owners in Chicago discovered their EVs' batteries had died in sub-zero temperatures. Drivers also said some of Tesla charging stations weren't working, or if they did work that the stations were taking longer than usual to charge up their vehicles.

“I've been here for over five hours at this point, and I still have not gotten to charge my car,” Tesla driver Brandon Welbourne told CBS Chicago. “A charge that should take 45 minutes is taking two hours.”

What happens to electric vehicles in cold weather?

Here's what to know.

Electric vehicles are less efficient in cold weather, with Recurrent's research finding that below-freezing temperatures reduced driving range up to 30% on 18 popular EV models.

An EV with a 200 to 215 mile range may only go 150 to 175 miles in the cold, Recurrent's Case said, while noting even that reduced mileage is often sufficient for most drivers. “The average person with an EV drives 30 miles a day,” he said.

Still, a shorter range in cold weather could be an issue for some owners if their EV runs out of juice miles earlier than expected, potentially leaving to hunt for an available charger or, worse, stranded in dangerously frigid conditions.

(continue reading) ❄️ 🚗​ 🥶

[phantomrose96]

Yknow I don't think I've... talked about the absolute smorgasbord of shit what's gone wrong with my condo since I moved in so

day 0 - hadn't moved in yet, was just moving items over, turned the sink on for just a moment. turns out the tube feeding into the sink faucet was full of holes (how???) and this caused a never-ending leak under the sink. the standing water rotted the baseboard under the sink

still day 0 - said leak and water accrual dripped down and damaged downstairs neighbor's ceiling ($$$). she has to call me to tell me about it.

I have to get a plumber out there next day (still not living there yet! empty place! I have to take off work). While waiting for plumber, I discover heat's not working.

Go to basement to investigate boiler. Seller didn't fix the issue they claimed they fixed.

Plumber looks at sink. Declares it full of holes. Says he can come back in a few days to fix it.

(Plumber postpones, then flakes. I chase down a different plumber.)

Plumber 2 says the issue is with the garbage disposal, not the faucet. Can come back x days later to work on that, and the boiler.

Plumber 2 comes back x days later (I have to take off work again), says "oh the disposal was messed up but also the faucet has holes." Says he can come back maybe the NEXT day with a new faucet

Oh also the smoke detector in the back hall is low battery beeping and I don't have a battery for it. It's constant, every minute on the minute.

I bike to a hardware store and buy a faucet and a battery ($$). Get lost on the way home. (All of this back and forth is by bike. I live in the city and do not have a car.)

Plumber replaces the faucet ($$). I replace the smoke detector battery but it's still beeping. Dozens of more stupid minutes later of going up and down and up and down stairs and dragging my big stupid ladder around, I realize it's the carbon monoxide detector which is hidden behind the door I need to open to even get to the back hallway.

Plumber services the boiler ($$$)

I move in. I have a less than great time emptying everything from my apartment, which doesn't have plumbing issues. On a bad foot to start.

Travel for Christmas. Come back. Now the first floor back-hall smoke detector is beeping. (At least I have a fucking battery. Get my big stupid ladder down the back hall, knock every wall on the way down, and replace that battery).

I get first month's heating bill (I'd been living there for 10 days if even.) $334. Jesus christ. Likely due to the boiler issue.

Electricity goes out for the evening, same day as I get this bill from the gas and electric company, because fuck you I guess.

Homeowners insurance log in doesn't work. I haven't received my bill, which I need to pay.

Radiators bang in the middle of the night. Something something about them being old or not level or full of ghosts. Cool I don't need to sleep or whatever.

I've received no correspondence from the bank about my first mortgage payment. It'll be due Jan 1st, which is a holiday, so I reach out early. They say it's in the mail.

I monitor my mail every day. I receive no mail. I contact again. I reach out to my old apartment building in case it's there (they can't tell me). I sign up for a bank account with them online. I jump through various hoops to discover the bank has my address wrong. The address of the place the mortgage is on...

They had the mortgage address right. They had my home address as identical to the mortgage address but with one number missing. No one noticed. They'd been sending my stuff to a non-existent address, or the back of a college warehouse, I haven't quite figured it out.

I jump through more hoops to pay my mortgage payment with a check in the mail (I had to go buy stamps and an envelope) (late, but they assure me there's no penalty, but are you sure.)

^This has all been about 2 weeks. btw.

(I get a therapist, and find my way to being seen by a psychiatrist, which I guess is good but jesus is it $$$. Still figuring out how to use my stupid HSA)

People on floor 1 move out. They've got contractors in constantly renovating the place top to bottom. I get all their paint fumes.

Sound proofing doesn't exist, turns out. I hear my downstairs neighbors' conversations. I hear their tv. I hear street conversations. One night it was pouring rain and I was woken up by the sound of something banging against the house. Like genuinely banging. I go outside and investigate - it's a car idling with their windshield wipers going. Windshield wipers. Why would that be audible. Walls made of paper.

Floor 1 contactors leave the back door open one night. Luckily I wasn't storing anything in the back hall and had the door to my interior locked.

I receive my next month's heating bill. $689. I call the gas company and they shrug. I call the plumber and he shrugs. I turn the heat way down cuz I don't know. I dunno. Something's wrong with the boiler but it just got serviced so I dunno. I have to call someone else.

Speak of the devil, cones appear immediately outside my building declaring there's going to be gas line work. For a month. They start with the jackhammers at 8am every weekday. It's gonna be a month. I miss the windshield wipers.

We have a weekend of arctic freeze. -30F windchill. I go down to the basement Sunday morning to do laundry. Floor 1 contractors have outdone themselves by leaving a window open. Pipe had burst in floor 1 and was pouring water down into the basement, totally flooded.

I have to call the plumber, and flag the Floor 2 people about it and they at least find the master water shutoff. I'm dealing with the plumber and I have no water for half the day and no laundry for me.

I want to lie down in a marsh for a bit.

[frostedpuffs]

got a new car a week ago today

car has been fine up until yesterday, where the check engine and battery light came on

shit. told myself I'd deal with it when I get home from work

on the way home from work it starts having electrical issues (won't tell me what speed I'm going/auto start-stop button keeps turning off on its own)

uh oh

make appointment with the dealership I got it at to be serviced

I bought the full warranty so everything should be covered at least!

warranty takes 30 days to take effect

anything they do I will be required to pay out of pocket

they will need to keep my car for at least a week

I will have to pay for a rental out of pocket

also apparently the kind of car I have can be stolen easily

cannot return the car because I am out of the 5 day return window so I'd lose all the money I put down toward it

HELL ON EARTH

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week

1. Arizona governor Ok's over the counter birth control

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) has expanded access to over-the-counter birth control that will “soon be available to Arizonans,” according to a press release.

Arizonans 18 and older will soon be able to go to their local pharmacy and purchase oral contraceptives without a doctor’s prescription.

2. ‘Great news’: EU hails discovery of massive phosphate rock deposit in Norway

A massive underground deposit of high-grade phosphate rock in Norway, pitched as the world’s largest, is big enough to satisfy world demand for fertilisers, solar panels and electric car batteries over the next 50 years, according to the company exploiting the resource. About 90% of the world’s mined phosphate rock is used in agriculture for the production of phosphorous for the fertiliser industry, for which there is currently no substitute.

3. U.S. Is Destroying the Last of Its Once-Vast Chemical Weapons Arsenal

Decades behind its initial schedule, the dangerous job of eliminating the world’s only remaining declared stockpile of lethal chemical munitions will be completed as soon as Friday.

4. Chinese scientists create edible food packaging to replace plastic

By incorporating certain soy proteins into the structure, Chinese University of Hong Kong scientists successfully created edible food packaging.

5. World's 1st 'tooth regrowth' medicine moves toward clinical trials in Japan

A Japanese research team is making progress on the development of a groundbreaking medication that may allow people to grow new teeth, with clinical trials set to begin in July 2024. The tooth regrowth medicine is intended for people who lack a full set of adult teeth due to congenital factors.

6. No Longer Endangered: The Bald Eagle is an Icon of the ESA

When the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was enacted in 1973, bald eagle population numbers across the country showed that the species was close to disappearing. Before the ESA, in the 1950s and ‘60s, eagles were shot routinely despite the protection. The ESA listing helped bring public attention to the issue.

Through the early 1970s and into the early ‘80s, numbers increased gradually. Then, as you got into the ‘90s, there was still gradual growth. From the late ‘90s into the 2000s, the population really exploded. There was a doubling rate of every several years or so for a while.

7. Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon drops 34% in first half 2023

Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon fell 34% in the first half of 2023, preliminary government data showed on Thursday, hitting its lowest level in four years as President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva institutes tougher environmental policies.

Data produced by Brazil's national space research agency Inpe indicated that 2,649 square km (1,023 square miles) of rainforest were cleared in the region in the half year, the lowest for the period since 2019.

----

That's it for this week :)

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[beautyandlifestyleblog86]

Ways to practice eco-friendly living in your home

1. Reduce energy consumption:

- Install energy-efficient appliances and LED light bulbs.

- Turn off lights and unplug electronics when not in use.

- Use natural light as much as possible.

- Set your thermostat to a lower temperature in winter and higher in summer.

- Insulate your home properly to reduce heating and cooling needs.

2. Save water:

- Fix any leaks in faucets and toilets promptly.

- Install low-flow showerheads and faucets.

- Collect rainwater for watering plants.

- Only run the dishwasher and washing machine with full loads.

- Use a broom instead of a hose to clean outdoor spaces.

3. Practice waste reduction:

- Recycle paper, plastic, glass, and metal.

- Compost kitchen scraps and yard waste.

- Opt for reusable products instead of disposable ones (e.g., cloth napkins, rechargeable batteries).

- Avoid single-use plastics, such as plastic bags and water bottles.

- Use a reusable shopping bag.

4. Use eco-friendly cleaning products:

- Choose natural, non-toxic cleaning products or make your own using ingredients like vinegar, baking soda, and lemon juice.

- Avoid products containing harmful chemicals that can harm the environment and your health.

5. Grow your own food:

- Plant a garden to grow vegetables, fruits, and herbs.

- Use organic and natural fertilizers instead of synthetic ones.

- Compost food scraps to enrich the soil.

6. Opt for sustainable materials:

- Choose furniture made from sustainable materials like bamboo or reclaimed wood.

- Use eco-friendly flooring options like bamboo, cork, or reclaimed hardwood.

- Select paint and other finishes that have low or no volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

7. Reduce plastic waste in the kitchen:

- Use glass or stainless-steel containers for food storage instead of plastic.

- Replace plastic wrap with beeswax wraps or reusable silicone covers.

- Use refillable water bottles and avoid buying bottled water.

8. Conserve energy in the kitchen:

- Use energy-efficient appliances.

- Cook with lids on pots and pans to retain heat and reduce cooking time.

- Opt for smaller appliances like toaster ovens instead of full-sized ovens when possible.

9. Encourage sustainable transportation:

- Use public transportation, walk, or bike whenever possible.

- Carpool or arrange a car-sharing service with neighbors or colleagues.

- Transition to an electric or hybrid vehicle if feasible.

10. Educate and involve your family:

- Teach your family about the importance of eco-friendly practices and involve them in the decision-making process.

- Encourage everyone to adopt sustainable habits and lead by example.

- Discuss environmental issues and brainstorm new ideas for greener living.