Day: January 7, 2020

The wildfires currently tearing through Australia aren’t just unprecedented—they’re catastrophic, as one fire researcher put it. Climate change and fierce heat waves have dried the landscape into swaths of tinder, and all it takes is a single spark to unleash wildfires so powerful, they create their own weather.

Researchers have been catching Australia’s fires in the act of producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs. These ominous phenomena take two ingredients: a mass of hot air that produces an updraft, in this case columns of smoke-filled air. And two, they need an unstable atmospheric environment that allows the updraft to continue rising higher than it otherwise would, says Scott Bachmeier, a research meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As the mass climbs higher, the smoky air cools and forms into a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a soup of water and smoke particles towering miles into the sky. (Though to be clear, the cloud itself isn’t on fire.)

If you take a look at the GIF above, you can see two pyroCbs sprouting, captured by satellite in the infrared spectrum. In the top panel we see the fires, and the bottom panel shows cloud-top temperatures. Red pixels indicate the heat of the wildfire, whereas violet indicates a cloud-top temperature of -70 degrees C. The colder it is, the higher the altitude. The low temperatures reveal that a pyroCb is soaring into the sky.

And another one forming here.

For hundreds of millions of years, thunderclouds and their lightning have been natural partners to fire. Any wildfire is likely to spread when strong surface winds carry embers perhaps miles ahead. “But what’s carried aloft by the pyroCb updraft are copious amounts of smoke particles, which then get carried up to or even ejected above the pyroCb cloud top,” says Bachmeier. If wildfires are sprouting pyroCbs that strike the landscape with lightning without also dumping water, the conflagration will spread all the more readily.

SpaceX successfully launched another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit on Monday evening. With 180 satellites (plus two prototypes launched two years ago) now orbiting the planet, SpaceX operates the largest commercial satellite constellation. 

What happened: A Falcon 9 rocket delivered 60 more Starlink satellites into a 180-mile altitude orbit. They’ll eventually move up to a 340-mile altitude. The company landed the first stage booster (the vehicle’s fourth flight and landing) on its Atlantic Ocean drone ship, but failed in its attempt to catch a payload fairing half (which costs roughly $3 million).

Starlink, starbright: SpaceX’s constellation puts it ahead of Planet’s 150-strong remote sensing satellite network, but the achievement is not without scrutiny. The company has come under major heat in the last year for its Starlink network creating disturbances in astronomy observations of the night sky. One satellite in the latest batch will test out a new dark coating that could remedy this problem, but it remains to be seen whether this will work. 

Moreover, Starlink’s growing network is exacerbating space traffic concerns, especially with at least three satellites going offline and one experiencing a near-miss collision with an ESA weather satellite.

Next: SpaceX intends to grow the constellation to 12,000 satellites, and perhaps up to a whopping 42,000. It aims to launch 60 Starlink satellites every two weeks from now on.

If you’re reading this, you probably know how to upgrade one version of Windows to another. Even though it’s an easy process, it’s still tedious and boring to watch Windows download and install, and then you have to spend more time moving through screens and tweaking settings. Meh.

If you, or someone you know, has been clinging to Windows 7 until the bitter end, you should know that your operating system won’t receive any more security updates past January 15. Now is as good a time as any to finally upgrade your system to Windows 10, especially since it might be free—and because I found a super-simple PowerShell script that makes it easy to perform an unattended upgrade.

In other words, you start the upgrade process, click a dialog box or two in the beginning, and you can then get up and go do something else while Windows 10 downloads and installs automatically. Your system will reboot when it needs to, and the next time you need to click the mouse, you’ll be a minute away from your brand-new OS. Upgrading doesn’t get much easier than this.

Getting started with PowerShell in Windows 7 SP1

Since we need PowerShell to do this quick little upgrade, and PowerShell comes baked into any version of Windows since Windows 7 SP1, make sure you’ve upgraded the operating system at least that far. In other words, just run Windows Update and install whatever it wants you to install (if anything).

Once you’re ready to begin, click on the Start button, type in Powershell, right-click on “Windows Powershell,” and select “Run as Administrator.”

As a security measure, PowerShell is set to not run scripts by default until you change a certain registry key. To do that, type this into Powershell and hit Enter when you’re done:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

You can close PowerShell now. Yes, that’s right.

Typing up your installation script

On your desktop, open up a new text file and copy and paste the following (courtesy of the incredibly helpful /r/PowerShell subreddit):

$dir = “c:\temp”mkdir $dir$webClient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient$url = “https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=799445"$file = “$($dir)\Win10Upgrade.exe”$webClient.DownloadFile($url,$file)Start-Process -FilePath $file -ArgumentList “/quietinstall /skipeula /auto upgrade /copylogs $dir” -verb runas

Feel free to delete the extra blank spaces between the lines, too. Once you’ve done this, close Notepad and save your file with whatever name you want, but change its extension to .PS1 (from .TXT).

Starting your unattended upgrade

Right-click on your new .PS1 file and select “Run with PowerShell.” You’ll probably have to confirm at least one prompt, allowing “Microsoft Windows” to make changes to your computer, but that’s it. A PowerShell window will briefly appear and disappear, and then you won’t see anything else for some time.

If you’re paranoid, like me, you can check that the installation is running by pulling up Task Manager and making sure that the “Windows10UpgraderApp.exe” application is running. (You should see it early on in the process.) Otherwise, go do something else. Your system will automatically restart when it needs to, and the Windows 10 installation will fire off without any additional input from you.

You’ll know it’s done when your computer asks you to do something, which should look like this:

You’re basically just a screen or two away from completion, which should take you all of 15 seconds to check out. Once you hop into Windows 10, you’ll hopefully notice two things: One, all of your data and apps should be where they were originally (since we upgraded from Windows 7, rather than performing a clean install). There’s no guarantee that everything is there—certain programs may have been incompatible and couldn’t be brought along for the ride—but that’s an issue I’ll address in a later article.

The upgrade aspect is critical, though, as you should also have a fully activated version of Windows 10, assuming you came from an activated version of Windows 7. If not, entering your Windows 7 key should be all you need to activate Windows 10, and logging in with your Microsoft account should make the activation process even easier for any subsequent installations.

Don’t forget to reset PowerShell’s execution policy

Remember when we unshackled PowerShell and allowed it to run any scripts it wanted? Well, now’s a great time to reverse that, for security’s sake. Open up PowerShell with administrative privileges (same as before), and enter this:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Restricted

Once you’ve done that, you can close PowerShell and start tricking out Windows 10 to your liking. You probably won’t need to run Windows Update right away, however, as you should already have the most up-to-date version of the OS that Microsoft has available.