New Scientist Australian Edition 29-Oct-22

Virtual event Memory, the brain and who we are How do our brains store past experiences to make us who we are? Why can memories feel so real? Are there such things as “true” and “false” memories? Psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane offers a new way of thinking about our personal experiences. Watch online at 6pm GMT/1pm EST on 10 November. Also available on demand. newscientist.com/events Tour Norway: Wonders of the Arctic Explore Norway’s beautiful fjords, view the Northern Lights, glimpse whales and polar bears and discover the frozen Svalbard archipelago. Led by New Scientist podcast editor Rowan Hooper, this nine-day tour begins on 2 March 2023 and includes two marine safaris, a dog sled journey that will take you to explore under a glacier, and a plethora of Arctic science. The…

Virtual event Memory, the brain and who we are How do our brains store past experiences to make us who we are? Why can memories feel so real? Are there such things as “true” and “false” memories? Psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane offers a new way of thinking about our personal experiences. Watch online at 6pm GMT/1pm EST on 10 November. Also available on demand. newscientist.com/events Tour Norway: Wonders of the Arctic Explore Norway’s beautiful fjords, view the Northern Lights, glimpse whales and polar bears and discover the frozen Svalbard archipelago. Led by New Scientist podcast editor Rowan Hooper, this nine-day tour begins on 2 March 2023 and includes two marine safaris, a dog sled journey that will take you to explore under a glacier, and a plethora of Arctic science. The price is £5549. newscientist.com/tours Podcast Weekly Podcast editor Rowan Hooper…

ON 6 NOVEMBER, the next international climate summit, called COP27, will begin in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Global leaders will once again shake hands, smile for the cameras and get down to the difficult business of negotiating how to mitigate global heating at the end of a year when its devastating effects became more obvious than ever before. Last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, UK, was billed as the world’s last chance to keep the goal of restricting warming to 1.5°C alive. The Glasgow Climate Pact called on countries to come up with more ambitious plans for limiting or cutting emissions ahead of COP27. Hardly any have done so. Egypt’s own plans would lead to a 50 per cent rise in emissions by 2030, so it isn’t exactly leading by example. And yet…

EASTERN Australia is experiencing major flooding for the fifth time in 19 months due to record-breaking wet weather that is predicted to stretch into next year. Across October, heavy downpours have flooded large swathes of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, resulting in four people dying, thousands of people being evacuated, homes and shops being inundated and roads being cut off and damaged. In New South Wales, the worst-affected state, 43 local government areas have now flooded, mostly in rural areas, with some floods spanning hundreds of kilometres. To try to limit the damage, more than half a million sandbags have been dispatched in recent weeks. “We are quite literally sandbagging the state,” said Steph Cooke, emergency services minister for New South Wales, on 22 October. The state was also badly hit by the…

ON 6 NOVEMBER, the next international climate summit, called COP27, will begin in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Global leaders will once again shake hands, smile for the cameras and get down to the difficult business of negotiating how to mitigate global heating at the end of a year when its devastating effects became more obvious than ever before. Last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, UK, was billed as the world’s last chance to keep the goal of restricting warming to 1.5°C alive. The Glasgow Climate Pact called on countries to come up with more ambitious plans for limiting or cutting emissions ahead of COP27. Hardly any have done so. Egypt’s own plans would lead to a 50 per cent rise in emissions by 2030, so it isn’t exactly leading by example.…

MAJOR engineering companies are looking at plans to slow the melting of a gigantic Greenland glacier, in what would be the first large-scale intervention to preserve ice anywhere in the world. If the scheme goes ahead, and if it works, it could suggest a way to slow sea level rise from Antarctic melt, too. Norway’s Aker Solutions and the Arup Group, based in London, sent representatives to a meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, on 12 October in which proposals were discussed to construct a physical barrier to slow the ingress of relatively warm seawater to the base of the glacier. “The design concept, essentially, is you take a heavy, premade set of concrete foundations that would be gently lowered onto the sea floor and they provide the anchor for a buoyant curtain,” says…