🌍 A big pollution vacuum

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Here’s what you need to know

Nissan’s profits surged 92% last year as sales grew in every major market — except China. The Japanese automaker recorded a profit of 426.6 billion yen ($2.7 billion) for its fiscal year that ended in March.

Amazon’s stock hit a 52-week high. Investors are responding positively to its latest earnings report and its efforts in the AI space.

Wall Street and the U.S. Treasury Department are trying to curb cyber attacks. The entities even have a fancy name for their offensive and defensive efforts: Project Fortress.

A Boeing plane skidded off the runway in Senegal and caught fire yesterday. Ten people were injured, including the pilot, and were taken to the hospital.

The great vac in the sky

OK, maybe it’s not in the sky. But a Swiss company that is selling carbon removal to companies just opened the world’s biggest pollution “vacuum” in Iceland, shown above.

What exactly is a carbon vacuum? Well, the Climeworks Mammoth project aims to remove 36,000 metric tons of emissions a year from the atmosphere through 72 air scrubbers. The company has some big name clients buying into its services, with Microsoft and H&M Group among them.

But not everyone is impressed with the technology. Jonathan Foley, the executive director of the climate non-profit Project Drawdown, wrote in Scientific American in December that such projects remove too little carbon and themselves consume too much (possibly carbon-emitting) energy to live up to the hype that surrounds them. Instead, he writes, efforts should be focused on directly reducing emissions in the first place.

Quotable: AI’s godmother isn’t focused on the apocalypse

“I [worry] about the overhyping of human extinction risk. I think that is blown out of control.” — Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist who created a massive database, ImageNet, that laid the foundation for modern artificial intelligence. She was speaking at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco Thursday.

Li’s accomplishments have earned her the nickname “godmother of AI.” She’s now an AI policy adviser to the Biden Administration and the co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and thinks a much better use of our time is focusing on the immediate, tangible, and useful impacts of artificial intelligence.

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🍩 Krispy Kreme had its best sales day ever — on Valentine’s Day

✈️ A union protest over an airline merger caused chaos for dozens of flights

🔌 Trump offers to gut Biden’s EV and environmental rules for oil execs’ support

Surprising discoveries

Hertz charged a customer who rented a Tesla nearly $300 for gas. Yep, you read that right.

Engineers have a plan for freeing the Dali, the ship that crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore back in March: Blow up the rest of the bridge.

Gene therapy helped a toddler in the U.K. regain hearing. The surgery to administer the treatment took a mere 16 minutes.

Tuna crabs aren’t tuna nor crabs. But they’re coating the ocean floor off of San Diego.

A rocky planet? With an atmosphere?? Outside of our solar system??? Astronomers have found one — but it’s quite hellish.

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Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, tuna salad, and crab cakes to [email protected]. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Morgan Haefner.

Correction: In yesterday’s Daily Brief, we did not clarify that Foxconn’s $10 billion investment in Wisconsin was not successful. We apologize for this error.