New Scientist Australian Edition 30-Jul-22

Academy Greener Living: Your guide to climate change and leading a more sustainable life The world’s climate is changing. It isn’t too late to reduce your impact on global warming through green living, however. This CPD-accredited course will arm you with the knowledge to implement simple changes to your life that will help lessen your environmental footprint and let you live more sustainably. academy.newscientist.com NS Live Schools’ Day For the first time at our event in London, New Scientist Live has a dedicated day just for schools. We have a packed programme of engaging talks and a show floor full of interactive demonstrations, all dedicated to bringing science to life. Visit with your class at London ExCel on 7 October. newscientistlive.com Podcast Weekly Following record temperatures in the UK, the…

THE World Health Organization has finally sounded its most serious alarm over the spread of monkeypox, declaring it a “public health emergency of international concern”, just as it did for covid-19 in 2020. Many researchers think this decision should have been taken a month ago when the WHO first considered it. The disease is spreading rapidly around the world, with more than 16,000 cases confirmed so far this year (see page 7). But the real issue isn’t this delay. It is that we have had decades to stop this outbreak happening and failed to do so. We have known monkeypox can jump to people since the 1970s. In particular, after an outbreak in Nigeria in 2017, there were warnings that human-to-human transmission seemed to be increasing. Throughout this period, we…

THE World Health Organization (WHO) has declared monkeypox a global health emergency. It announced on 23 July that the spread of the viral infection constitutes a “public health emergency of international concern”, its highest alert level, putting it on a par with the coronavirus pandemic and global efforts to eradicate polio. The decision follows more than 16,000 reported cases of monkeypox across 75 countries this year. There have been more than 2000 in the UK so far, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). But the WHO panel behind the decision was split on whether to declare monkeypox a global emergency, with director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acting as a tiebreaker. Some members of the panel argued that the disease isn’t so severe and that case numbers don’t seem to…

FLIGHTS will endanger the Paris climate agreement’s goals if efforts to achieve net-zero aviation don’t account for the warming effect of streaks of clouds created by planes, a study has found. The research comes after the UK government announced its Jet Zero Strategy on 19 July, with a target of cutting carbon emissions from flights to net zero by 2050 (see page 23 for more on UK plans). Nicoletta Brazzola at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and her colleagues found that even if such efforts to reduce emissions succeed, the world’s aviation sector could increase average temperatures by between 0.1°C and 0.4°C. The world has already warmed by 1.1°C since the industrial revolution, so the extra warming could compromise the Paris deal’s aim of holding temperature rises to 1.5°C, says Brazzola’s…

THE term “growing pains” is often used to refer to sore or aching limbs in children. Yet, there is no clear definition of what growing pains are, and now it looks like they may not be related to growth at all. A recent analysis of studies about growing pains notes that 93 per cent make no mention of how the symptoms of bone or muscle pain are related to growth. “Kids and teens are being told they have growing pains, but that is inaccurate based on our findings,” says Mary O’Keeffe at the University of Sydney in Australia, who led the review. Most children diagnosed with growing pains are told the pain will subside with age and that they can take children’s ibuprofen or paracetamol (acetaminophen) to manage the discomfort if…

JUST weeks into its mission, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has broken the record for the oldest galaxy ever observed by nearly 100 million years. Seeing some of the most distant and earliest galaxies to form after the big bang 13.8 billion years ago is one of the key goals of JWST. When these emerged is currently unknown: the previous oldest identified galaxy, found by the Hubble Space Telescope, is called GN-z11 and dates back to 400 million years after the birth of the universe. Rohan Naidu at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues think they have already found an older one in a publicly released JWST data set called GLASS. Known as GLASS-z13, the galaxy dates back to just 300 million years after the big bang.…