Short Takes – 5-28-25

2025 IEEE Power & Energy Society Summit: “Achieving a more reliable and resilient energy future”. SCADAMag.infracritical.com blog post. Pull quotes: “Because this was an engineering conference, there was no mention of the term “Operational Technology-OT” as that is a cybersecurity term. Cybersecurity was assumed to be a data issue and therefore not critical to a reliable and resilient grid. Consequently, there were no cybersecurity sessions, and no cybersecurity companies exhibited. All questions about cybersecurity were referred to the utilities or vendors IT organizations.” I know Joe rants, but damn, somebody ought to listen.

Apex announces Comet satellite bus for constellations. SpaceNews.com article. Pull quote: “Comet incorporates lessons learned from Aries and Nova, including developing a more vertically integrated supply chain. “Being able to take those and then basically put them over into the larger form factor of Comet,” he said of those in-house components, “has let us create a vehicle that not only has the very unique shape that lets you put as many as possible in a Falcon 9 or any five-meter fairing, but it also lets us drive down on the price point to something where business cases actually start to make sense.””

Withdrawal of National Environmental Policy Act Guidance on Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Change. Federal Register CEQ guidance withdrawal. Summary: The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is withdrawing its interim guidance titled “National Environmental Policy Act Guidance on Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Change,” for which notice was published [link added] in the Federal Register on January 9, 2023.

Bedbugs may have been one of the first urban pests. ScienceNews.org article. Pull quote: “The timing of this dramatic pivot from dwindling to thriving aligns with the emergence of the earliest known cities in western Asia and their subsequent expansions over the following millennia. Before, humans were mostly nomadic and didn’t intermingle with other groups of humans as regularly as people do today. So the bedbugs didn’t mix and mingle either. But when humans began gathering in cities, it was a whole new world for the bedbugs along for the ride. The team proposes that the bugs interbred, exploded in numbers and adapted to the fledgling urban ecosystem.”

Overcoming conservatism in the autonomous space revolution. SpaceNews.com commentary. Pull quote: “The benefits of autonomous spacecraft extend far beyond operational convenience. They will dramatically reduce costs by eliminating the need for constant monitoring, enable new mission profiles previously impossible due to communication constraints, and potentially increase reliability by removing the most common source of spacecraft failures: human error, often jokingly referred to as PEBCAK — “Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.””

Court of International Trade blocks Trump’s tariffs in sweeping ruling. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: ““Regardless of whether the court views the President’s actions through the nondelegation doctrine, through the major questions doctrine, or simply with separation of powers in mind, any interpretation of IEEPA that delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional,” the opinion continued.”