By Walt Hickey

Vapes

As teens have switched off cigarettes, with their obvious odors and detritus, they’ve switched to vapes, which have new odors and new types of detritus, and schools are attempting to catch up in the technological arms race that is vape enforcement. The number of high school students who vaped in the past 30 days is down from 20.8 percent in 2018 at the height of Juul’s hegemony to 10 percent last year, still quite high. Some counties are buying trained dogs that undergo 160 hours of training to detect nicotine and THC, which sure sounds like great employment for the canines that wash out of bomb sniffing school. Other schools are spending $749 a pop on a vape detection sensor from Triton or $1,000 a sensor from Zeptive, which have hawked thousands of detection systems to schools and workplaces. That said, how hard is it to sniff out the most obnoxious cotton candy bubble gum scents you have ever smelled that you have to pay $1,000 for a robot that can do it?

Talal Ansari, The Wall Street Journal

Smuggler

For the first time, a person has been charged with smuggling banned greenhouse gases across the U.S. border. A 58-year-old San Diego man has been charged with smuggling banned hydrofluorocarbons and HCFC-22 purchased in Tijuana, Mexico, across the border, reselling them for profit on Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp. Those chemicals are banned because they’re capable of causing thousands of times more warming than CO2, and it’s illegal to import the refrigerants. Authorities said he’d buy from a network of suppliers in Mexico, transport 15 to 20 tanks of chemicals into the country every week in the bed of a pickup, and then sell them to buyers in California. He’s charged with one count of conspiracy, five counts of importation contrary to law, and seven counts of sale of merchandise imported contrary to law, which in addition to possible decades of jail time all carry potential fines of $250,000 apiece.

Justin Rohrlich, The Daily Beast

eRecovery

The government of Ukraine has rolled out an ambitious compensation program for homes of its citizens damaged or destroyed during the course of the ongoing war. The country, which has long sought to nurture a vibrant local technology scene, has launched eRecovery, an app based on the government’s digital platform Diia. Already, it has processed 83,000 compensation claims for damaged or destroyed property and has paid out over 45,000 claims, with 566,000 property damage reports filed through the Diia-based system as of December. It’s a potential model for future recovery efforts in conflicts or disasters.

Yuliya Panfil and Allison Price, Foreign Policy

1010101010101010

Voyager 1, the spacecraft that we have done all we can to hurl out of the solar system and is currently 15 billion miles away at the very edge of it, has been sending back confusing messages since mid-November that’s got the scientists working on the project concerned. Instead of sending back messages in binary, it’s now just sending back an alternating series of 1s and 0s, which is either an extremely unlikely measurement or the result of a comms system on the fritz, specifically concerning the part of the onboard computer — which I must remind you is from 1977 and has the calculation power of a key fob — that packages observations to send home. While the reliable options to reset the issue have been exhausted, there remains a list of possible fixes, and some of those get increasingly risky for the spacecraft.

Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR

Solar

For the first time since World War II, a renewable energy resource — hydroelectric back then, solar today — has accounted for more than half of the additional energy generation added to U.S. grids. All told, the U.S. added 32.4 gigawatts of solar generation, or 53 percent of new generation added, smashing the 23.6-gigawatt record set in 2021. Texas and California were responsible for 22.5 gigawatts of those utility-scale installations.

Tik Root, Grist

Rooster Teeth

In what experts are calling the single most devastating thing to happen to people born in the late ‘90s, Warner Bros. is folding Rooster Teeth, a company that was behind such iconic features as Red vs. Blue and more. This company has seen everything: In 2014, it was bought by Fullscreen, then Otter Media — a combination of AT&T and Chernin — and then WarnerMedia, which then obviously murdered it. Their video-on-demand service, First, peaked at 225,000 subscribers, and fell to 60,000 today.

Todd Spangler, Variety

Hot Dogs

Kraft Heinz, which owns the concept of Oscar Meyer hot dogs, will pursue plant-based alternatives to their iconic hot dogs. All told, the U.S. plant-based meat market is projected to double, hitting $19 billion by the end of the decade, and the Oscar Meyer company is poised to pounce. Listen, if you had any idea what was in a hot dog, which parts of which beasts made this cylinder actually happen, you’d beg for a plant-based solution to a devastating reality.

Christopher Doering, FoodDive

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