One day last year, Hooman Kazemi, a deputy public defender for Los Angeles County, received a digital alert about a client who had been suffering from mental health issues.

The agency’s software revealed that the client’s case had come up for a possible probation violation after a missed appointment. As a result of the alert, Kazemi called the client the same day, and ultimately appeared in court alongside him to avoid a warrant being issued for his client’s arrest.

Before the office put its new software system in place, these kinds of incidents tended to result in a bench warrant and subsequent arrest, according to Mohammed Al Rawi, chief information officer at the LA County Public Defender’s Office.

“The judge was surprised to see them both standing there, because that’s not the norm,” Al Rawi said.

“Before the [software], 99% of the time, the attorney will not happen to be in the courtroom to know about this. A bench warrant will be issued, the client will be arrested, they’ll lose their job, they’ll lose their home, they’ll lose their car—because they’ll have to wait for two weeks until they are released from county jail.”

Keep reading here.—PK

Meet the real X-Engine™, LiquidPiston’s answer to the $400b combustion engine market.

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Microsoft is betting big on a creative new method for reducing its carbon footprint: limestone rock powder.

The tech giant recently announced a multiyear deal to purchase 315,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal from a startup called Heirloom Carbon, which claims to use the natural properties of limestone to siphon the gas from the atmosphere. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, estimated the contract to be worth upward of $200 million, making it one of the biggest purchases of carbon-removal credits to date.

The blockbuster investment comes as companies continue to see potential in the nascent industry around carbon removal and capture, despite the tech behind it remaining fairly experimental. A BloombergNEF report last year found that while the direct air capture tech hasn’t made much of a dent in overall carbon emissions, its capacity could increase sixfold by 2030 as companies and investors pour billions into developing it.

Rocks on a roll: The Microsoft deal is just the latest vote of confidence for Heirloom, which also recently won up to $600 million in funding from the Department of Energy (DOE) to build a new facility in Louisiana. The company will work with Microsoft at that plant as well as another site it’s planning in the United States in an attempt to help the software behemoth reach its goal of being carbon negative by 2030.

Keep reading here.—PK

A set of business moves will soon make life easier for EV drivers road-tripping anywhere near a Hilton hotel.

First off, Tesla and Hilton announced plans to install up to 20,000 of the carmaker’s Universal Wall Connectors across 2,000 of the hotel chain’s properties in the US, Mexico, and Canada.

Meanwhile, Honda said it would become the latest automaker to switch over to Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug with its new EV models beginning in 2025, giving customers access to Tesla’s expansive charger network.

The news adds up to more convenience for anyone making the switch to electric cars, who currently face warring charging standards and too few refueling options for cross-country road trips in the US.

Keep reading here.—PK

Stat: 40%. That’s the percentage of “American adults [who] said social media was an important source of coronavirus vaccine news,” according to 2021 Pew Research Center data cited by the Washington Post. “Covid,” “coronavirus,” “vaccines,” and “vaccination” are among the search terms the Post found blocked on Meta’s Threads platform.

Quote: “This type of work is the future, and if we want to prepare prisoners for life outside prison, a life without crime, these types of skills might be at least as important as the traditional work types that prisons provide.”—Metroc founder and CEO Jussi Virnala, to Wired in a story about how prisoners are training the company’s AI

Read: Artificial intelligence emerges as a union-buster (The American Prospect)

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