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After spending nearly half a year, every year, gathering and calculating carbon emissions data on spread sheets, Salesforce.com’s climate team was fed up. So in 2017 they built an app to crunch the numbers – and now they sell it for $4,000 (roughly Rs. 3 lakh) a month.

As global companies prepare pledges to help stop climate change, one of the first problems they face is quantifying their emissions. The second is understanding if their solutions work.

That need is fuelling a boom in carbon accounting software by big companies like Salesforce and startups as well, along with some skepticism of parts of the process.

Microsoft is previewing a tool for calculating emissions called Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, aiming to make it available by mid-2022.

On Thursday, Arizona-based carbon accounting startup Persefoni said it raised over $100 million (roughly Rs. 750 crore), the biggest venture capital funding round so far in the field.

That takes total fundraising this year to nearly $300 million (roughly Rs. 2,250 crore), six times the total for 2020 and over 21 times the funds raised in 2019, according to a Reuters review of data from PitchBook and Climate Tech VC.

Carbon accounting is complex, especially when including emissions beyond a company’s direct control, such as suppliers and use of products, which many companies are trying to do. How does, for example, an automaker account for the steel it buys and the miles driven by its customers? Some in the accounting business call these indirect emissions, often the bulk of a firm’s emissions, the “Pandora’s box” of carbon accounting.

“You have a massive problem in our world of companies that are creating their own methodologies and then black-boxing them. Those are not auditable. In the worst cases, they’re helping companies greenwash,” said Kentaro Kawamori, CEO of Persefoni, which uses a system called the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to compute numbers that get added up into total emissions.

Some argue the accounting is not always worth the effort and skews the focus.

Science Based Targets initiative, a non-profit that helps companies set emissions goals, does not push small companies to produce the emissions beyond the company’s direct control, for example, even as it creates a “net zero” program with a strong focus on indirect emissions.

Snocap, a new climate tech venture capital firm, does not think startups should be asked to measure their environmental impact, especially if their technology is designed to change an industry fundamentally, such as making lab-grown meat.

Taylor Francis, a co-founder of Watershed, a carbon accounting software startup created as fintech firm Stripe tracked its own emission data, hopes customers will use the tool to make decisions about suppliers and emissions.

“If this whole space becomes just about disclosure and publishing a sustainability report once a year, I think that will fall short of what we need to actually beat climate change,” he said.

© Thomson Reuters 2021


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Earth’s Oldest Impact Crater Turns Out to Be Much Younger Claims New Study

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Earth’s Oldest Impact Crater Turns Out to Be Much Younger Claims New Study

A location in Western Australia that used to be named as the oldest meteorite impact crater on Earth is now actually a lot younger than that, scientists announced today in Science Advances. The structure — previously dated to 3.5 billion years ago and located within Western Australia’s North Pole Dome region of the Pilbara — was believed to be older than any of Earth’s known impact craters. Today, new research published in the journal Geochemistry found that what we now call the Miralga impact structure is, in fact, much younger, at 2.7 billion years old, and considerably smaller in diameter. This recasts earlier ideas on the early Earth’s geological activity and questions previous theories regarding impact-driven crust formation or perhaps even early life.

Miralga Crater Loses Oldest Impact Title but Gains New Scientific Relevance

As per The Conversation article republished by Space.com, the teams that explored the crater could only point to one thing that was likely — it had been formed by an impact. However, they ultimately disagreed as to whether this event had been and how large it was. Younger rocks contain shatter cones, indicating Earth’s early continental geology shielded the impact to a specific 2.7 billion-400 million-year period despite earlier assertions.

They made the determination to honour the cultural revision of one site from 100 km across to a more manageable 16 km wide crater named Miralga. It’s the site – still affected by seawater – of events too recent to influence the Earth’s crust.

The Miralga basalt feature (unique to basalt) is a rare site for an instrument to practice on before heading to Mars, while advancing our understanding of impacts and early life prospects.

Isotopic dating to clarify the crucial part played by this, the oldest crater on Earth and unique in a geological sense, in planetary science and early Earth history is presently ongoing at Miralga.

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NASA’s TRACERS Satellites Begin Solar Wind Study Despite SV1 Glitch

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NASA's TRACERS Satellites Begin Solar Wind Study Despite SV1 Glitch

NASA’s TRACERS mission twin satellites were launched on July 23, 2025, to study how solar activity causes magnetic reconnection in Earth’s atmosphere. After launch, a power subsystem anomaly had affected one of the satellites (Space Vehicle 1, SV1) on July 25, causing periodic communication loss. NASA said satellite 2 (Space Vehicle 2, SV2) is “healthy,” and transition is beginning to the instrument commissioning phase. The idea behind TRACERS was to develop a complete toolkit that would allow us, for the first time, to observe all of these complex solar wind connection processes at once. NASA engineers are actively working to recover SV1. Single vector views (SV2) spacecraft are completing a healthy checkout and readying themselves for their science mission.

Recovery Efforts for SV1 Satellite

According to NASA, controllers detected a problem with SV1’s power subsystem in late July that led to intermittent contacts and a loss of communication. Data suggest SV1 can only remain active when its solar panels receive sufficient sunlight. Because of the spacecraft’s current orientation, engineers plan to wait until later in August — when SV1’s panels will receive more sun — to reestablish contact and continue recovery steps.

Meanwhile, mission teams are reviewing onboard data to diagnose the issue and plan next steps. Any time contact is regained, the team will assess SV1’s status and check for impacts on the mission’s science goals. For now, no significant updates on SV1 are expected for several weeks.

SV2 Operational Status

The mission’s other satellite, SV2, is in good health and fully operational. Mission teams have been testing SV2’s onboard instruments and systems through a standard commissioning process. This checkout is proceeding as expected, with NASA anticipating that commissioning will finish by the end of August.

Once SV2 is fully checked out, it will begin coordinated science operations with its twin to study magnetic reconnection – the process that shapes how solar activity affects Earth’s magnetic environment. For now, SV2 continues its planned tests and will soon be ready to collect valuable science data as part of the TRACERS mission.

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Scientists Explore Role of Space Radiation in Powering Alien Microbial Life

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Scientists Explore Role of Space Radiation in Powering Alien Microbial Life

The search for alien life traditionally focuses on planets in the “Goldilocks zone” — the orbital band where surface water can exist. But new research suggests life might thrive far from starlight in a so-called “radiolytic habitable zone,” where penetrating cosmic rays break buried water molecules (a process called radiolysis) into hydrogen, oxygen and energy-rich electrons. Simulations of icy worlds like Mars, Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus show cosmic rays can reach subsurface water. Researchers suggest these electrons could fuel microbes in hidden reservoirs, effectively creating underground oases of life.

Radiation as a Power Source

According to the new study, cosmic rays are fast-moving particles (electrons, protons or nuclei) blasted out by supernovas and distant stars. On Earth, most are stopped by our magnetic field and thick atmosphere. But Mars and the icy moons (which lack such shields) get hit directly; their thin air or vacuum allows rays to penetrate deep into ice and rock. When these particles strike water or ice, they trigger radiolysis – shattering molecules and freeing hydrogen, oxygen and electrons. Some Earth microbes already exploit this: for example, a bacterium 2.8 km underground in a gold mine lives entirely on hydrogen produced by radioactive decay.

Expanding the Search for Life

Dubbed the “Radiolytic Habitable Zone,” this hidden-energy band lies beneath ice or rock where cosmic rays can sustain life. Simulations show Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus has the highest radiolytic potential, followed by Mars and then Jupiter’s moon Europa. NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission and telescopes like ALMA will probe these frozen worlds for chemical signs of life. Even more intriguingly, cosmic-ray impacts can directly create complex organic molecules (for example, amino-acid precursors) in ice. Because cosmic rays pervade the galaxy, even a rogue planet adrift in space would be bathed in intense radiation.

As Dimitra Atri, an astrophysicist and co-author of the new study puts it, “life might be able to survive in more places than we ever imagined”, suggesting hidden biospheres could exist in many cold, dark niches.

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