New Scientist Australian Edition 11-Jun-22

Tour The science of whisky: Scottish Hebrides cruise Join us on a whisky lover’s dream cruise around the islands of Islay and Jura in Scotland. You will visit traditional and state-of-the-art distilleries, and enjoy exclusive tours, talks and tastings. Learn how whisky is made and explore its complexity via a set of sensory experiences delivered by Barry Smith from the University of London’s Centre for the Study of the Senses. From 4 October for eight days. The cost is £1999. newscientist.com/tours Online event Nuclear waste and the geological solution The UK government has decided that higher-activity nuclear waste should be disposed of in a deep underground facility. This debate brought together leading thinkers to explore the science involved and examine the engineering, economic and social challenges at play. It also asked how similar projects elsewhere are…

NEGOTIATORS from nearly 200 countries are meeting in Bonn, Germany, to discuss how to put the world on track for its climate change ambitions. Chief among those is holding global warming to 1.5°C. Scientists maintain that the temperature target is still achievable, in the sense that hitting it wouldn’t require breaking the physical laws of science. But the 1.5°C goal has long since moved beyond these realms, into the arena of politics. Here, most climate researchers fear to tread. They say their job is to lay out the evidence and model scenarios estimating the planet’s thermostat depending on how policy-makers and leaders act. As Katharine Hayhoe at Texas Tech University puts it, they “stay in their lane”. Is this enough, though? Maintaining an objective viewpoint, unsullied by politics, is crucial to science, but…

RATHER than jumping to humans from animals recently, the monkeypox virus variant currently cropping up around the world may have been undetected in people for years, DNA sequencing appears to show. “We therefore suggest that the pattern we see… means that there has been sustained human to human transmission since at least 2017,” states an initial report by Áine O’Toole and Andrew Rambaut at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Because monkeypox normally circulates in animals in some African countries and occasionally jumps to people there, person-to-person spread is more likely to have gone unnoticed for years on that continent, says Emma Hodcroft at the University of Bern in Switzerland. But sometime this year, the virus spread to Europe and beyond. As of 7 June, monkeypox infections have been confirmed in more…

FOR almost a year, climate scientists have sounded one clear message. The world’s totemic goal of holding average global temperature rises to 1.5°C is still technically within our grasp, but will slip without a dramatic course correction by humanity. “Unless there are immediate, strong, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting global warming to 1.5°C will be beyond reach,” said climate scientist Valérie Masson-Delmotte last August, launching the first of three landmark reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet, three months later at COP26 in Glasgow, UK, at the climax of a pivotal UN summit designed to alter the trajectory of our emissions, COP26 president Alok Sharma admitted that even with new commitments, 1.5°C was on “life support”. Fast forward to this April and Jim Skea at Imperial…

Most of the scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for how to limit pre-industrial warming to 1.5°C involve some overshoot. The idea is that while Earth may go over the threshold for a number of years, countries could remove enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, through everything from massive amounts of tree-planting to as-yet unproven industrial methods, that global average temperature rises would fall back below 1.5°C by the end of the century. In one ambitious IPCC scenario, the world would warm by 1.6°C between 2041 and 2060, then get to net-zero emissions around the middle of the century. We would then remove so much CO₂ from the air that we would settle at a rise of 1.4°C by 2100. Some in climate science circles privately say there is a…

NASA’S mission to go back to the moon is set to begin in the next few weeks with the launch of a craft to test the orbit of a planned lunar space station. It is the first step in the Artemis programme, which aims to put a man and the first woman on the moon by 2025. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) is due to blast off between 13 and 22 June, depending on weather conditions, from the Māhia peninsula in New Zealand. It will do so using an Electron rocket and Lunar Photon upper stage, both created by the firm Rocket Lab. CAPSTONE will take around three months to reach the moon. It will then spend six months in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, which ranges…