Tesla is losing $6,500 every minute and needs another $2 billion to get through the year. With losses continuing to mount, the spotlight of scrutiny has ramped up on the former media darling.

There is now a "genuine risk" that Elon Musk's electric car company will not survive until the end of the year, Bloomberg reports.

Tesla is failing to meet its own production targets for its Model 3 sedan, a Tesla driver was killed while using his cars autopilot feature and a shareholder in the company urged the board to boot Musk as chairman.

On April Fool's day, Musk joked on Twitter that his company had gone bankrupt and now Bloomberg is reporting that that is a distinct possibility. "Tesla is going through money so fast that, without additional financing, there is now a genuine risk that the 15-year-old company could run out of cash in 2018," the financial news agency said on Monday.

As the current solar cycle nears an end, it will go down as the weakest in close to 200 years. And as inhabitants of the northern hemisphere dig themselves out of an especially icy and snowy winter and Arctic sea ice rebounds, it may all be in part linked to low solar activity as many scientific studies have long suggested.

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The Sun in March 2018

By Frank Bosse and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
(Translated /edited by P Gosselin)

In March our supplier of energy was more inactive than in the previous months. The sunspot number was only 2,5, which is only 8% of what is normal for this month into the average cycle (month 112).

A sunspot was detected only on 6 of 31 days.

A first clear photo of Russia's Su-25SM3 attack aircraft in Syria has appeared online. The photo was made at the Khmeimim airbase in April, 2018. The Su-25SM3 is a deeply modernized modernized version of the Su-25, which entered service with the Russian Aerospace Forces (previously known as the Russian Air Force) in the early 1980s.

Su-25SM3 version differs significantly even from upgraded Su-25SM strike-fighters. The Su-25SM3 incorporates a host of sensor and defensive systems upgrades. The core of the modernization package is the Vitebsk-25 EW system, avionics, and weapon control systems.

The Vitebsk-25 includes an L-370-3S digital active jamming station. It can locate the likely enemy's azimuth and the radar emission type as well as suppress the signal in different frequency ranges. It also poses protective measures against various missiles. External elements of the L-370-3S digital active jamming station are marked by red squares.

In 2018, UK tabloid newspaper The Sun ran a very disturbing story.

"The Earth's magnetic poles could be about to flip, sparking chaos and making large parts of the planet uninhabitable, it has emerged," the paper reported.

And while it is true that Earth's magnetic field has reversed in the past - multiple times, in fact - and that doing so today would very likely cause some serious problems, not least to navigation equipment, new modelling suggests it's not going to happen any time soon.

And that's genuinely reassuring. Research shows that the magnetic north and south poles historically flip about every 300,000 years, but that the last time it happened was 780,000 years ago. Technically, therefore, the next one is long overdue.

According to the British Geological Survey, however, the periodicity of the changes is much more apparent than real. At some stages in the Earth's history millions of years have passed between reversals.

Blue Origin, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, launched a New Shepard suborbital capsule from West Texas on Sunday, boosting a suite of microgravity experiments and an instrumented dummy astronaut known as Mannequin Skywalker to the edge of space in the company's eighth test flight.

Perched atop a reusable booster powered by a single hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine, the New Shepard spacecraft blasted off from the company's Van Horn, Texas, test facility at 1:06 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) and smoothly climbed away, generating 110,000 pounds of thrust and trailing a brilliant jet of flame.

Designed to carry up to six "space tourists" to altitudes above 62 miles, the widely recognized threshold of space, the unmanned New Shepard capsule separated from its booster, as planned, at an altitude of about 47 miles, before soaring on its own to a height of 351,000 feet, or 66.5 miles.

Worse than the 1906 earthquake. Worse than eight Hurricane Katrinas. Worse than every wildfire in California history, combined. The world's first trillion-dollar natural disaster.

A wintertime megaflood in California could turn out to be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history by far, and we are making it much more likely, according to an alarming study published this week in Nature Climate Change.

The odds are good that such a flood will happen in the next 40 years, the study says. By the end of the century, it's a near certainty. (And then another one hits, and another - three such storms are possible by 2100). By juicing the atmosphere, extreme West Coast rainstorms will happen at five times their historical rate, if humanity continues on roughly a business-as-usual path, the new research predicts.

The study's lead author, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a lifelong Californian, says the best way to understand what we're doing to California's weather is to think of earthquakes.

The Earth will experience a number of (relatively) close calls in one day, as NASA reports that an alarming total of five asteroids will hurtle towards - but happily not quite at - our planet.

The Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California publishes a comprehensive list of space rocks that are worth keeping an eye on, just to prepare yourself for any potential armageddons or extinction-level collisions. These rocks can range in size from a few meters in length to asteroids more akin to skyscrapers.

The series of space rock flybys begins at 10:29 UTC Sunday as asteroid 2013 US3, travelling at a respectable 7.69 km/s (27,646 kph) with a diameter of between 160-360 meters whizzes past us. For comparison, the Eiffel Tower measures 324 meters from ground to tip.

On March 24, 1993, in the midst of a photographic search for near-Earth objects at the fabled Palomar Observatory, Drs. Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and Dr. David Levy acquired an image in the vicinity of planet Jupiter using surplus film. This image surprised the observers when they first examined it. Expecting to find yet another small asteroid trail, they instead found an elongate object comprising several large clumps all strung out in a chain thousands of kilometers long in the night sky, each with its own cometary tail. Its orbital position proved to be quite close to Jupiter, and it did not take long to determine that it was in fact orbiting that giant planet and would come very close to the cloud tops the following year.The discovery of this strange comet was both serendipitous and completely unexpected, and the rest of the world was startled when the image was released three days later. No object like it had ever been seen before. It would be named P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 after its discoverers (SL-9 for short). We had observed comets break apart during close encounters with the Sun into irregular clumps, but the linear geometry of this object indicated that it had passed very close to Jupiter in July 1992 and been ripped apart by tidal forces, something we had not observed or even predicted before. The original comet may have been captured by Jupiter as far back as 1929 or so. More surprises were to come.

The acceleration of human progress and knowledge about health has reached a breakneck pace, and it appears as though there are two distinct camps emerging: people who believe natural health is the answer to a long and healthy life, and those who would rather side with modern medicine.

At the end of the day, both methods have their benefits and drawbacks, and have been instrumental in increasing human lifespan even at a time when chronic diseases are out-of-control.

But now, mainstream medicine is entering into unchartered territory, and it could change the future of our species for good. Whether or not it ends up being a positive development, however, remains to be seen.

For environmentalists of a certain vintage, the words "acid" and "lakes" can stir strangely fond memories. Back in the 1970s and 80s, acid rain from coal-fired power stations was turning lakes across the northern hemisphere into vinegar. Scientists identified the problem, activists campaigned, governments listened. Today, in the West at least, acid rain is largely a thing of the past.

But acid lakes are not. Even while many are still recovering from being deluged with acid rain, they face a resumed assault - this time from carbon dioxide. High concentrations of the gas in the atmosphere means more is dissolving in the world's lakes and rivers. Goodbye sulphuric acid, hello carbonic acid.

The new acid invasion shouldn't come as a surprise. For over a decade, marine biologists have been on alert for the effects of acidifying oceans as rising amounts of atmospheric CO₂ dissolve into them. But until now, the parallel acidification of rivers and lakes has largely escaped attention. That changed in January with the publication of the first research to pinpoint freshwater lakes accumulating CO₂ from the air, and growing more acidic as a result. "The rate of acidification is really quite fast - three times faster than in the world's oceans," says Linda Weiss of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, who led the study (Current Biology, vol 28, p 327).

That is obviously a cause for concern. Ocean acidification - sometimes known as "the other CO₂ problem" - is expected to have severe effects on marine ecosystems. About a third of all the CO₂ released into the atmosphere dissolves in seawater and turns into carbonic acid. Since the industrial revolution, the pH of the ocean surface has fallen from 8.16 to 8.05, a 30 per cent increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions. This isn't a concern yet, but if it continues it will eventually cause some corals and shells to dissolve.