Aurelia Butler

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    in Heart

    Solar geoengineering moves into the spotlight as climate concerns grow

    Earth’s average temperature is continuing to tick inexorably upward as the world’s nations stall at reducing their atmosphere-warming emissions. In the face of that grim future, strategies to try to turn down the planet’s thermostat are gaining traction. One strategy in particular — solar geoengineering, which aims to cool the planet by reflecting solar radiation back into space — may be having a moment in the sun.

    Depending on whom you ask, it’s potentially highly dangerous, highly promising or highly uncertain. There aren’t any real guidelines. But, with the future of emissions restrictions also highly uncertain, some researchers say solar geoengineering needs to be on the table. More

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    in Heart

    The ozone layer shields life on Earth. We’ll soon lose a key way to monitor its health

    Humankind will soon lose a great deal of vigilance over the ozone layer, which shields life on Earth from harmful solar radiation.

    The impending loss of NASA’s Aura and the Canadian Space Agency’s SCISAT satellites threatens scientists’ ability to closely monitor compounds that destroy ozone and alter stratospheric circulation. With no planned missions to replace either satellite, a data desert in the stratosphere appears imminent, researchers warn in the March Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. More

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    Splitting seawater offers a path to sustainable cement production

    A new cement-making process could shift production from being a carbon source to a carbon sink, creating a carbon-negative version of the building material, researchers report March 18 in Advanced Sustainable Systems. This process might also be adaptable to producing a variety of carbon-stashing products such as paint, plaster and concrete.

    Cement production is a huge contributor to global carbon dioxide emissions, responsible for about 8 percent of total CO2 emissions, making it the fourth-largest emitter in the world. Much of that carbon comes from mining for the raw materials for concrete in mountains, riverbeds and the ocean floor. More

  • 125 Shares109 Views

    in Physics

    Physicists are mostly unconvinced by Microsoft’s new topological quantum chip

    ANAHEIM, CALIF. — At the world’s largest gathering of physicists, a talk about Microsoft’s claimed new type of quantum computing chip was perhaps the main attraction. 

    Microsoft’s February announcement of a chip containing the first topological quantum bits, or qubits, has ignited heated blowback in the physics community. The discovery was announced by press release, without publicly shared data backing it up. A concurrent paper in Nature fell short of demonstrating a topological qubit. Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak, a coauthor on that paper, promised to provide solid evidence during his March 18 talk at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    JWST spots the earliest sign yet of a distant galaxy reshaping its cosmic environs

    The James Webb Space Telescope has caught a distant galaxy blowing an unexpected bubble in the gas around it, just 330 million years after the Big Bang.

    The galaxy, dubbed JADES-GS-z13-1, marks the earliest sign yet spotted of the era of cosmic reionization, a transformative period in the universe’s history when the first stars and galaxies began to reshape their environment, astronomers report in the March 27 Nature.

    “It definitely puts a pin in the map of the first point where [reionization] very likely has already started,” says astrophysicist Joris Witstok at the University of Copenhagen. “No one had predicted that it would be this early” in the universe’s history. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    A map of 14 million galaxies and quasars deepens a dark energy mystery

    ANAHEIM, Calif. — Change is in the air. New data strengthen a hint that dark energy, long thought to be constant force in the universe, might change over time.Dark energy explains the observation that the universe’s expansion rate is accelerating. But its origins are unknown. It’s typically expected to have constant density across the billions of years of the universe’s history. So when researchers from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, reported in 2024 that dark energy might vary over time based on their first year of data, it shook cosmology to its core.

    Many scientists expected that the standard picture would prevail with additional data from DESI. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, with three years of DESI data, the preference for a changing, or dynamical dark energy has grown. More

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    in Physics

    A quantum computing milestone is immediately challenged by a supercomputer

    The tug-of-war between quantum computers and classical computers is intensifying.

    In just minutes, a special quantum processor, called a quantum annealing processor, solved a complex real-world problem that a classical supercomputer would take millions of years to complete, researchers claim March 12 in Science. And that supercomputer, the team reports, would consume more energy to run the whole computation than the entire globe uses in a year. However, another group of researchers claims to have already found a way for a classical supercomputer to solve a subset of the same problem in just over two hours. More

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    in Heart

    Some trees are coping with extreme heat surprisingly well

    Ecologist Akhil Javad felt the thrill of fieldwork quickly fade when he was faced with the prospect of scaling trees over five times his height. But for some of the trees he was studying in India’s Western Ghat mountains, that was the only way to take their temperature.

    So, Javad got climbing. Sensors that he placed on leaves in the upper canopy are providing unprecedented insights into how tropical forests are weathering global warming. The findings suggest that the trees may be in better shape than scientists thought, he and colleagues report in the February Global Change Biology.

    Ecologist Akhil Javad (shown) and colleagues found that tropical trees’ ability to photosynthesize may be more resilient to rising global temperatures than previously thought.Akhil Javad

    In the summer, which lasts from March through June in the region, daily high temperatures in the mountains can cross 37° Celsius and are projected to rise by about 4 degrees Celsius in the next 60 years. That could be a problem for trees, since leaves can get much hotter than the surrounding air.

    As the temperature of a leaf rises, its ability to harness sunlight to make sugar and oxygen becomes less efficient. On average, when leaves surpass 46.7° C, their photosynthetic machinery shuts down, lab studies have shown. When that happens, trees don’t get the energy they need. Many trees in the tropics are already experiencing temperatures beyond that average limit. More