YOUR WEEKLY NEWS UPDATE
- Extreme weather events – including powerful heat waves and devastating floods – are now the new normal, says the World Meteorological Organisation. The State of the Climate report for 2021 highlights a world that is “changing before our eyes.” The 20-year temperature average from 2002 is on course to exceed 1C above pre-industrial levels for the first time and global sea levels rose to a new high in 2021, according to the study.
- The climate crisis is no longer a future concern. In many parts of the world, it has already begun. Millions of people are living with extreme temperatures, facing a growing threat of flooding or wildfires. Here, five people explain how extreme temperatures have changed their lives. Climate change means many cities in India are now hitting 50C. Densely populated, built-up areas are particularly affected by something known as the urban heat island effect. Materials like concrete trap and radiate heat, pushing temperatures higher. And there’s no respite at night, when it can actually get hotter.
- A major experiment has been used to search for an elusive sub-atomic particle: a key component of the matter that makes up our everyday lives. The search failed to find the particle, known as the sterile neutrino. This will now direct physicists towards even more interesting theories to help explain how the Universe came to be. That is because a sizeable proportion of physicists have been developing their theories on the basis that the existence of the sterile neutrino was a possibility.
- Hypernova Space Technologies has developed a thruster system that could give even the smallest types of satellites the capacity to move around. The company is hopeful that their technology could be applied to nanosatellites weighing under 10kg and, even applied to the tiniest of them all, the 10cm cubes known as cubesats. There are an estimated 3,200 nanosatellites floating around in orbit, and is expected to grow rapidly in the near future: SpaceX alone is in the process of launching a constellation of around 42,000 satellites.
- Nearly 5,000 “exoplanets” – worlds orbiting stars beyond our Sun have been found so far, but all of these have been located within the Milky Way galaxy. The possible Saturn-sized planet discovered by Nasa’s Chandra X-Ray Telescope is in the Messier 51 galaxy. This is located some 28 million light-years away from the Milky Way. This new result is based on transits, where the passage of a planet in front of a star blocks some of the star’s light and yields a characteristic dip in brightness that can be detected by telescopes.
- The build-up of warming gases in the atmosphere rose to record levels in 2020 despite the pandemic, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The amounts of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide rose by more than the annual average in the past 10 years. The WMO says this will drive up temperatures in excess of the goals of the Paris agreement. They worry that our warmer world is, in turn, boosting emissions from natural sources.
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