Picture, for a moment, the first human base on Mars. Perhaps you’re thinking of a modest habitat, a communications dish, or a return ship on a launchpad at a distance. As you look around, though, you might be surprised to see a line of wind turbines spinning in the Martian breeze, providing power to the first astronauts to walk on another planet.

This vision of a wind-powered Mars base is not only feasible, it could actually open up novel locations on the Martian surface for exploration, reports a new study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. The study assessed the viability of turbines as an energy source for future Mars missions, and the results hint that wind power could be an important pillar of energy generation on the red planet, assuming humans are able to successfully land there in the coming decades. 

Scientists have generally written off wind power as a key energy source for Mars missions, compared to solar and nuclear power, because Martian winds are extremely weak. Now, a team led by Victoria Hartwick, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, has used global climate models of Mars to show that, contrary to past assumptions, “wind power represents a stable, sustained energy resource across large portions of the Mars surface,” according to the study.

“Using a state-of-the-art Mars global climate model, we analyze the total planetary Martian wind potential and calculate its spatial and temporal variability,” Hartwick and her colleagues said in the study. “We find that wind speeds at some proposed landing sites are sufficiently fast to provide a stand-alone or complementary energy source to solar or nuclear power.”

“Wind energy represents a valuable but previously dismissed energy resource for future human missions to Mars, which will be useful as a complementary energy source to solar power,” the team added. 

Any human mission to Mars will require multiple reliable sources of power to support the astronauts and their operations, but all of the options for extraterrestrial energy generation have their pluses and minuses. Nuclear power is widely regarded as a key enabler to crewed Mars missions, but placing nuclear devices near human habitats could present safety risks. Solar power has been used on many past Mars rovers, but this form of energy is diminished during the Martian night and during dust storms that obscure the Sun’s light. 

What’s more, many of the most promising landing sites for humans on Mars are located at higher latitudes in and around the poles, where liquid water could potentially be harvested from extraterrestrial ice. However, these areas also experience larger variations in the availability of solar power, presenting the need for a secondary source of energy.

To assess whether wind power could fill that gap, Hartwick and her colleagues used the NASA Ames Mars global climate model to estimate wind speeds across the planet. 

Since Mars’ atmosphere is very thin, with only 1 percent the density of Earth’s atmosphere, Martian winds are pretty wimpy everywhere. Even so, the researchers found that several tantalizing locations could theoretically use wind as the only source of power, and that a combination of solar and wind power would unlock sites across a huge swath of the planet—including icy locations at the poles. 

“During Northern Hemisphere winter, winds blow from cooler surface ice deposits to warm regolith,” the researchers said. “This effect, analogous to a ‘sea breeze’, may be particularly important at proposed high-latitude sites adjacent to seasonal ice deposits. In several locations, the annual average wind power exceeds available solar power by up to 3.4 times.”

“Many sites at these latitudes have been dismissed due to solar energetic limitations during polar night,” they noted. “We demonstrate that if the availability of water outweighs other challenges, wind energy could act as the dominant energy source when solar energy is seasonally depleted, opening a large fraction of the polar landscape to human exploration. Similarly, wind energy resources maximize at night when solar energy is at its minimum.”

To that point, the team identified several sites that would be particularly conducive to wind power, including locations within the icy northern regions of Deuteronilus Mensae and Protonilus Mensae. The researchers envision setting up medium-sized turbines, measuring 50 meters (160 feet) tall, to catch the stronger winds in these areas, allowing astronauts to subsist in the strange glacial terrain of an alien world. Turbines could also be effective if placed near topographical gradients, such as crater rims or the slopes of ancient volcanoes, to catch the gusts generated by these landscapes. 

Of course, wind power also has drawbacks, including the bulky heft of turbines that would need to be packed off on economical missions to Mars. But overall, the results of the new study suggest that wind power could expand exploration options for the Martian landscape, and serve a key role as either a standalone or backup source of power on humanity’s first interplanetary adventure. 

“We encourage additional study aimed at advancing wind turbine technology to operate efficiently under Mars conditions and to extract more power from Mars winds,” the team concluded

Scientists hoping to harness nuclear fusion—the same energy source that powers the Sun and other stars—have confirmed that magnetic fields can enhance the energy output of their experiments, reports a new study. 

The results suggest that magnets may play a key role in the development of this futuristic form of power, which could theoretically provide a virtually limitless supply of clean energy. While this is an exciting prospect, most experts believe that it will take decades to engineer a working fusion reactor, assuming it is possible at all.

Fusion power is generated by the immense energy released as atoms in extreme environments merge together to create new configurations. The Sun, and all the stars in the night sky, are fueled by this explosive process, which occurs in their cores at incredibly high temperatures and pressures. Scientists have spent roughly a century unraveling the mechanics of nuclear fusion in nature, and trying to artificially replicate this starry mojo in laboratories. 

Now, a team at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is a fusion experiment based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has reported that the magnetic fields can boost the temperature of the fusion “hot spot” in experiments by 40 percent and more than triple its energy output, which is “approaching what is required for fusion ignition” according to a study published this month in Physical Review Letters.

“The magnetic field comes in and acts kind of like an insulator,” said John Moody, a senior scientist at the NIF who led the study, in a call with Motherboard. “You have what we call the hot spot. It’s millions of degrees, and around it is just room temperature. All that heat wants to flow out because heat always goes from the hot to the cold and the magnetic field prevents that from happening.”

“When we go in and we put the magnetic field on this hotspot, and we insulate it, now that heat stays in there, and so we're able to get the hot spot to a higher temperature,” he continued. “You get more [fusion] reactions as you go up in temperature, and that's why we see this improvement in the reactivity.” 

The hot spots in the NIF’s fusion experiments are created by shooting nearly 200 lasers at a tiny pellet of fuel made of heavier isotopes (or versions) of hydrogen, such as deuterium and tritium. These laser blasts generate X-rays that make the small capsule implode, producing the kinds of extreme pressures and temperatures that are necessary for the isotopes to fuse together and release their enormous stores of energy. 

NIF has already brought their experiments to the brink of ignition, which is the point at which fusion reactions become self-sustaining in plasmas. The energy yields created by these experiments are completely outweighed by the energy that it takes to make these self-sustaining reactions in the plasmas in the first place. Still, achieving ignition is an important step toward creating a possible “breakeven” system that produces more energy output than input.

Fusion experiments are so complex that even the most minor changes to their setups can have big repercussions. With that in mind, Moody and his colleagues developed their magnetized experiment at NIF by wrapping a coil around a version of the pellet made with specialized metals. 

The research follows a 2012 experiment at the OMEGA facility at the University of Rochester, which found that magnets can increase the temperature of fusion fuel. However, the NIF team was able to create the biggest temperature and energy increase ever achieved with a magnetized fusion experiment because of their unique experimental setup. The hot spot at NIF was 40 percent hotter, and produced more than three times the energetic yield, compared to previous experiments, a result that was even better than predictions. 

The researchers plan to conduct more fusion experiments with magnetic fields, including a version with an ice-covered cryogenic fuel capsule, to better understand the mysterious physics at work in these extreme systems. 

“The fact that we saw a greater improvement in the yield [than predicted] was actually kind of surprising,” Moody said. “We're still trying to understand why. Anytime there's a difference between the experiment and the theory, there's a lot you can learn by trying to figure out what happened. 

“Is it because there are unexpected things that happened that are good, and those things will carry over when we do the ice-layered implosion?” he added. “I'd like to think that but it doesn't really matter what I'd like to think. What is the reality?”

Indeed, magnets are one cog in an incredibly complicated machine and it will take many more years to assess their potential role in fusion power. The advances at NIF, and at other fusion experiments around the world, can at times seem painstakingly incremental, but this slow progress may have an incalculable payoff down the line, which is a dream that is, like fusion reaction plasmas, self-sustaining. 

To that end, future experiments at NIF will help scientists assess how magnets could potentially enhance the efficiency of fusion reactions, while also opening a new window into a host of unanswered scientific questions.

“We could do some really interesting studies where you can generate really high magnetic fields in these hotspots, so we might do some never-done-before science experiments in the laboratory,” Moody concluded.  

Researchers have exposed galling new details about how ExxonMobil, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, predicted the disastrous effects of climate change driven by the consumption of fossil fuels more than 40 years ago, even as the company’s leadership publicly denied its own internal data, reports a new study. 

The authors of the study hope it could bolster efforts to hold bad actors in the oil and gas industry accountable for misleading the public about the dangers of climate change, and squandering precious time in the effort to mitigate its worst consequences.  

ExxonMobil’s flagrant hypocrisy about anthropogenic climate change was dragged into view in 2015 by investigative journalists who obtained internal company documents that proved the company was aware of global warming—and its causes—as early as 1977. The report provoked a massive public backlash, encapsulated by the popular hashtag #ExxonKnew, that has galvanized activists, lawyers, politicians, and other stakeholders to seek justice for the company’s deception.  

Now, experts led by Geoffrey Supran, a historian of science at Harvard University, have revealed that ExxonMobil not only knew that fossil fuels were driving climate change decades ago, it actually produced some of the most accurate and skillful projections of global warming at that time. These predictions have so far largely held true until now, when rising temperatures have caused escalating natural disasters, biodiversity loss, and other calamities. 

Whereas past reports focused on textual evidence of the company’s knowledge, Supran and his two co-authors—Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at Potsdam University, and fellow Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes—present the first quantitative review of ExxonMobil’s early numerical and graphical data on climate science.

The results revealed that “ExxonMobil was aware of contemporary climate science, contributed to that science, and predicted future global warming correctly,” according to the team’s new research, which was published on Thursday in Science. While many scientists who worked for ExxonMobil have come forward about this knowledge, the company’s leadership denied those results in public for years.

“This is #ExxonKnew2.0,” Supran said in an email to Motherboard. “We now have airtight, unimpeachable evidence that ExxonMobil accurately predicted global warming years before it turned around and publicly attacked climate science and scientists. Our findings show that ExxonMobil’s public denial of climate science contradicted its own scientists’ data. This corroborates and adds statistical precision to the prior conclusions of scholars, journalists, lawyers, and politicians.”

Todd Spitler, senior advisor of corporate media relations at Exxon Mobil Corporation, emailed the following statement to Motherboard in response to the study.

“This issue has come up several times in recent years and, in each case, our answer is the same: those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are wrong in their conclusions,” Spitler said. “In 2019, Judge Barry Ostrager of the NY State Supreme Court listened to all the facts in a related case before him and wrote: ‘What the evidence at trial revealed is that ExxonMobil executives and employees were uniformly committed to rigorously discharging their duties in the most comprehensive and meticulous manner possible….The testimony of these witnesses demonstrated that ExxonMobil has a culture of disciplined analysis, planning, accounting, and reporting.”

The new study by Supran and his colleagues was born a few years ago on Twitter, after Rahmstorf tweeted a graphic that overlaid ExxonMobil's 1982 climate projection graph with real-world temperature increases in recent decades. 

“Stefan [Rahmstorf] reached out to us about his initial work on this, and collectively we began to realize that despite all the scrutiny on ExxonMobil’s climate rhetoric over the past few years, the company’s actual climate projections have never been assessed,” Supran recalled. “The data have been hiding in plain sight.” 

“We decided to expand that Twitter meme, and subject it to peer-review!” he added. “In that sense, our investigation uncovers new data in old documents.” 

The similarities between Exxon’s climate predictions, and what has actually unfolded, are so striking that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the Rahmstorf’s work to question Martin Hoffert, a climate scientist who worked as a consultant for ExxonMobil in the 1980s, during a 2019 House Committee Hearing (Oreskes was also a witness at the hearing). Hoffert memorably quipped to Ocasio-Cortez that he and his colleagues were “excellent scientists” who accurately foresaw the trajectory of anthropogenic climate change. 

“We were doing really quality work and I was very happy with what we were doing,” Hoffert said in a call with Motherboard. “I was also very happy that we were able to get a major energy company, an oil company, involved in the research because I thought that would increase the credibility of climate change” at a time when “climate change had started to become a politically controversial issue.”

Hoffert is now a retired professor emeritus of physics at New York University, but he has continued to speak out about his experience working with ExxonMobil, as have many other scientists who produced climate research for the company from the 1970s onward. 

Supran and his colleagues refer to the work of Hoffert and his colleagues frequently in their new study, which is based on a comprehensive analysis of 32 internal documents written by ExxonMobil scientists between 1977 and 2002, as well as 72 peer-reviewed scientific publications that ExxonMobil scientists participated in between 1982 and 2014.

The results lay out ExxonMobil’s mostly-accurate projections of global mean surface temperatures, and also show that the company “correctly rejected the prospect of a coming ice age, accurately predicted when human-caused global warming would first be detected, and reasonably estimated the ‘carbon budget; for holding warming below 2°C,” according to the study.

The researchers also revealed that climate projections presented during a 1982 internal briefing entitled the “CO2 ‘Greenhouse’ Effect” were subsequently widely distributed within ExxonMobil management, and were labeled as “proprietary information for authorized company use only.”

“Exxon was privately explicit about the purpose of its engagement in climate science research, which…was essentially for a combination of information gathering and legitimacy building,” Supran said. 

This information “fed into the company’s broader corporate issues management strategy for managing the potential threat of global warming to its business interests,” he continued. “When they and the broader fossil fuel industry launched their massive campaign to discredit climate science and scientists in the late 1980s, they appear to have done so well aware of the emerging consensus on human-caused global warming.”

In an interview, Hoffert said it became “more and more aggravating” to watch ExxonMobil leaders, such as its former CEO Lee Raymond, spread “incredibly ill-informed” information that concealed the scientific consensus on climate change. 

“Lee Raymond was giving talks and he would say most of the CO2 in the atmosphere is coming from the biosphere, which emits so much carbon into the atmosphere, without saying that it also absorbs almost the same amount of carbon,” Hoffert said. “If I had a graduate student who did that on an exam, he would not do very well.” 

Today, people and ecosystems around the world are suffering the mounting damage of anthropogenic climate change. Warming global temperatures are intensifying natural disasters, such as wildfires, hurricanes, and heatwaves. Sea level rise is literally wiping communities off the map. The pace of change is pushing species across the globe beyond their limits, threatening biodiversity and the global food supply. The future that ExxonMobil so accurately projected, and so unscrupulously lied about in public, has unfolded into a very real and catastrophic present.

Supran and his colleagues hope their work might help to ensure accountability for the cynical strategies employed by ExxonMobil, and similar organizations that deliberately muddied the waters about climate change. The new study offers more grist for these efforts, which include lawsuits, political movements, and civil activism. 

“I’m not a lawyer of course, but the impression I get from those I’ve spoken with is that quantitative evidence such as ours can be compelling,” Supran said. “Our previous research, which has also taken a quantitative approach to a topic traditionally dominated by qualitative historical and journalistic techniques, is cited in many ongoing climate accountability cases, including litigation, political investigations, and grassroots advocacy. So I imagine that our new paper has the potential to help inform further accountability efforts.”

“There’s also, of course, the court of public opinion, in which I suspect simple visuals proving Exxon knew and misled on climate may prove powerful,” he concluded.

After a years-long battle, a national group that represents farmers has reached an agreement with John Deere that would make it easier to do many tractor repairs. The agreement has been widely celebrated as a huge win for the right-to-repair movement, but the agreement is explicitly meant to be an alternative to  legislation, which would be stronger than this agreement. 

Deere and the American Farm Bureau Federation, a lobbying group that represents farmers’ interests nationwide, announced the memorandum of understanding (MOU) Sunday. 

According to Deere and the AFBF, the agreement will let farmers repair their tractors, which, as Motherboard has reported, has become increasingly hard as Deere has restricted access to parts and embedded software on its farm equipment. The agreement, however, is designed for Deere to pre-empt and potentially avoid government regulation and state-level legislation that would have the force of law behind it. It is pitched in the agreement as “a voluntary private sector commitment to outcomes rather than legislative or regulatory measures.” 

The Farm Bureau—which is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country—agrees to “encourage state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize the commitments made in this MOU and refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state ‘Right to Repair’ legislation that imposes obligations beyond the commitments in this MOU.” Deere and the Farm Bureau also both retain the right to pull out of the agreement if any state passes right-to-repair legislation.

Experts who’ve been working on the issue are skeptical of the MOU. “This isn't the first time that a manufacturer has made an announcement claiming that all of farmers' repair problems will be solved. So, there's reason for some cynicism here. We're heavy on ‘verify’ and much lighter on ‘trust,’” Kevin O'Reilly, Right to Repair Campaign Director at U.S. PIRG, told Motherboard. 

Willie Cade, a Repair.org board member with a long history of calling out John Deere, didn’t quite trust the tractor giant either. “Given all the other failed promises, this is too good to be true,” he told Motherboard, calling the MOU a “PR stunt.”

Farmers have been here before with farm equipment manufacturers. In 2018, the Equipment Dealers Association, a lobbying group that represents Deere and other manufacturers, reached a similar agreement with the California Farm Bureau to provide greater access to parts and repair manuals. Three years later, many of the specifics promised in that agreement weren’t being offered to farmers.

“Manufacturer shall ensure that any Farmer, including any staff or independent technician assisting a Farmer at a Farmer's request, and any Independent Repair Facility that provides assistance to Farmers, has electronic access on Fair and Reasonable terms to Manufacturer's Tools, Specialty Tools, Software and Documentation,” the memo said.

The memo also said that Deere will ensure that farmers and independent repair facilities will be able to access the tools, software, special tools, and documentation that Deere uses to do repairs for “fair and reasonable terms.” The MOU also made some important exceptions. It does not require manufacturers to “divulge trade secrets, proprietary or confidential information, allow owners or Independent Repair Facilities to override safety features or emissions controls or to adjust Agricultural Equipment power levels; or, violate any federal, state, or local laws or regulations.”

Like everything else in the MOU, this sounds reasonable until you remember that farmers are already routinely jailbreaking tractors in ways that technically override safety and emission features so they can fix their equipment. This language gives John Deere a lot of wiggle room and what it will and won’t allow.

“Ultimately, farmers need to be able to fix every problem with their tractors without dealer intervention,” O'Reilly said. “Will farmers actually be able to reset the immobilizer, disable electronic locks and install the payload files required to authorize a replacement part? Or is this just another announcement about the same Customer Service ADVISOR tool timed to take the wind out of the sails of state legislation? One thing I would add to concerns is the cost. If these tools are priced so high that the average farmer can't afford them, it doesn't offer them the repair relief they deserve.”

The MOU comes at a time when the right-to-repair movement has gained momentum, and at a time when state-level legislation is starting to look inevitable. Thanks to software locks and lack of competition, farmers have struggled to do basic maintenance and repairs of their tractors. The problem is so bad that used tractors manufactured before the advent of computers are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Last year, Democratic senator Jon Tester introduced the Agricultural Right to Repair Act into Congress. Right now, the bill is stalled in committee but various other similar bits of legislation are working their ways through state and local legislature. In New York, the first state-level electronics right to repair law passed at the end of last year. President Biden has formally adopted right-to-repair, signed executive orders supporting it, and directed the FTC to push for it.

The U.S. The Department of Agriculture mentioned this executive order when reached for comment on the MOU. “USDA is proud to play a role in implementing President Biden’s executive order on promoting competition in the American economy, particularly by increasing competition in agricultural markets,” a USDA Spokesperson told Motherboard. “USDA is also supportive of a robust right to repair and the executive order’s direction to FTC to address unfair anticompetitive restrictions.” 

“This could be a significant step forward. If Deere truly provides farmers and independent mechanics with the same repair materials that its dealers have, then we would shout our praise from the rooftops,” O'Reilly said in a statement. “But the MOU contains limited enforcement mechanisms and the best aspects of this agreement could get lost in the legalese. Like Charlie Brown, farmers have lined up for the kick too many times to let Lucy pull the ball away again.”

John Deere did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.