The United States takes pride in being a technological leader in the world. Companies such as Apple, Alphabet, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft have shaped our (digital) lives for many years and there is little indication of that changing anytime soon.
When it comes to infrastructure however, the U.S. is lagging behind the world’s best, be it in terms of home broadband or wireless broadband speeds. According to OpenSignal’s latest State of LTE report, the average 4G download speed in the United States was 16.31 Mbps in Q4 2017. That’s little more than a third of the speed that mobile device users in Singapore enjoy and ranks the U.S. at a disappointing 62nd place in the global ranking. While U.S. mobile networks appear to lack in speed, they are on par with the best in terms of 4G availability. According to OpenSignal’s findings, LTE was available to U.S. smartphone users 90 percent of the time, putting the United States in fifth place.
The U.S. isn’t alone in its struggles to keep up with the […]
While the Eastern United States simmered in some of its warmest February weather ever recorded Tuesday and Wednesday, the Arctic is also stewing in temperatures more than 45 degrees above normal. This latest huge temperature spike in the Arctic is another striking indicator of its rapidly transforming climate.
On Monday and Tuesday, the northernmost weather station in the world, Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland, experienced more than 24 hours of temperatures above freezing according to the Danish Meteorological Institute.
“How weird is that?” tweeted Robert Rohde, a physicist and lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit organization that conducts analyses of the Earth’s temperature. “Well it’s Arctic winter. The sun set in October and won’t be seen again until March. Perpetual night, but still above freezing.”
The Danish Meteorological Institute wrote that only twice before had it measured temperatures this high during February at this location, in 2011 and 2017. It is a mere 400 miles from the North Pole.
This thaw occurred as a pulse of extremely mild air shot through the Greenland Sea.
Warm air is spilling into the Arctic from all sides. […]
Katrin Jakobsdottir, the 41-year-old chairwoman of the Left-Green Movement, has been elected Prime Minister of Iceland. One of the most well-liked politicians in Iceland, Jakobsdottir, a former education minister and avowed environmentalist, has pledged to set Iceland on the path to carbon neutrality by 2040. As Iceland’s fourth prime minister in only two years, Jakobsdottir will take office at a time when national politics have been tainted by public distrust and scandal. A democratic socialist, Jakobsdottir is viewed as a bridge-building leader that may lead the country towards positive, incremental change. “She is the party leader who can best unite voters from the left and right,” said Eva H. Onnudottir, a political scientist at the University of Iceland, according to the New York Times. “Because this coalition includes parties from the left to the right, their work will be more about managing the system instead of making ‘revolutionary’ changes.”
Since forming its governing coalition, Jakobsdottir’s Left-Green party has already taken bold steps to assert its environmentalism. Rather than appointing a party member of parliament, Read the Full Article
