Two missions will study the hellish planet to piece together its climate past, look for volcanoes, and see if it was ever habitable.
NASA Administrator and former astronaut Senator Bill Nelson announced today that the agency would be sending two missions to Venus. The two missions, called DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, will respectively study the planet’s atmosphere and geological history.
“These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface,” Nelson said during his State of NASA address. “They will offer the entire science community the chance to investigate a planet we haven’t been to in more than 30 years.”
These two new projects have been awarded $500 million in funding each, and are expected to launch between 2028 and 2030. They were selected from a batch of four possible missions selected by NASA’s Discovery Program in 2020.
These space “mushrooms” were not the first claim of alien life. On August 7, 1996, the then-President Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn and announced the possibility that scientists had discovered the ancient, fossilized remains of micro-organisms in a meteorite that had been recovered from Antarctica in 1984.
The meteorite, ALH 84001, is one of a handful of rocks we have from Mars. These were blasted off the surface of the planet by volcanic eruptions or meteorite impacts, drifted through space probably for millions of years, before ending up on Earth.
Germany will invest more than 8 billion euros ($9.74 billion) to fund large-scale hydrogen projects, the Economy and Transport ministries said on Friday, in a step to scale up hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels to meet climate targets.
The 62 German projects, supporting chemical, steel and transport industries, are part of a joint European hydrogen project called Hydrogen-IPCEI, the ministries added.
“The fact is: we must and WANT to urgently promote the switch to climate-friendly mobility,” said Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer in a statement.
Rift Valley fever used to mostly affect livestock in Africa. But the virus that causes it is also spread by mosquitoes whose habitats are expanding because of climate change. If it were to make its way to the rest of the world, it would decimate livestock causing agricultural collapse as well as affecting human health.
In 2015 the Zika virus triggered a global health crisis that left thousands of parents devastated. The virus can cause serious problems in pregnancy, leading to babies with birth defects called microcephaly and other neurological problems. But Zika is not the only virus that can be devastating to pregnant women and their babies; there is another with pandemic potential that could be even more deadly – Rift Valley fever.
The placenta that encases the baby acts as a fortress against many pathogens, but a few can evade its defences. Rift Valley fever is one of them – a 2019 study shows that the virus has the ability to infect a specialised layer of placental cells that carry nutrients to the baby, something that even Zika may not be capable of. In cattle and other livestock, in which the virus spreads, infection can cause more than 90% of pregnant cows to miscarry or deliver stillborn calves. Although the virus kills fewer than 1% of people it infects, it is the risk to babies, and the lasting neurological effects in adults, that is of great concern.
Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, is an innovative conservation biologist, who is Founder and President of the non-profit Amazon Biodiversity Center, the renowned Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, and the person who coined the term “biological diversity”.
Dr. Lovejoy currently serves as Professor in the department of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University, and as a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation based in Washington, DC.
Dr. Lovejoy has also served as the World Bank’s chief biodiversity advisor and the lead specialist for environment for Latin America and the Caribbean, the first Biodiversity Chair of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, President of the Heinz Center, and chair of the Scientific Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) for the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the multibillion-dollar funding mechanism for developing countries in support of their obligations under international environmental conventions.
Spanning the political spectrum, Dr. Lovejoy has served on science and environmental councils under the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. At the core of these many influential positions are seminal ideas, which have formed and strengthened the field of conservation biology.
In the 1980s, Dr. Lovejoy brought international attention to the world’s tropical rainforests, and in particular, the Brazilian Amazon, where he has worked since 1965.
With multiple co-edited books (including Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere; Drones for Conservation — Field Guide for Photographers, Researchers, Conservationists and Archaeologists; Costa Rican Ecosystems; Climate Change and Biodiversity; On the Edge: The State and Fate of the World’s Tropical Rainforests), Dr. Lovejoy is credited as a founder of the field of climate change biology. He also founded the series Nature, the popular long-term series on public television.
Here’s what we already know about Ford’s electric F-150.
Ford is set to unveil its next major electric vehicle, the F-150 Lightning, at 9:30PM ET on Wednesday, May 19th. But this isn’t just another EV event. An electric version of the automaker’s iconic F-series pickup truck is a very big deal for Ford, for the auto world, for car buyers, and even for the US economy.
Ford is very proud of its F-series trucks, and for good reason. It’s the bestselling truck in the US for 44 years. It’s also the bestselling vehicle in the country, period. According to Edmunds, F-series trucks are the most popular vehicle in 30 out of 50 states in the US.
That means the F-Series trucks is central to Ford’s profitability. The Detroit automaker raked in around $42 billion in revenue in 2019 from nearly 900000 F-series truck sales in the US, according to a Boston Consulting Group study commissioned by Ford — more than most major companies and about four times as much as Tesla made in all of 2020.
A lava flow from Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano enters the ocean near Isaac Hale Beach Park on August 5, 2018. The volcano’s 2018 eruption was its largest in over 200 years. Credit: USGS
Scientists have figured out what triggers large-scale volcanic eruptions and what conditions likely lead to them.
Hawaii’s Kilauea is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. Because of this and its relative ease of accessibility, it is also among the most heavily outfitted with monitoring equipment – instruments that measure and record everything from earthquakes and ground movement to lava volume and advancement.
Whether it’s turning forests into cropland or savannah into pastures, humanity has repurposed land over the last 60 years equivalent in area to Africa and Europe combined, researchers said Tuesday.
If you count all such transitions since 1960, it adds up to about 43 million square kilometres (16.5 square miles), four times more than previous estimates, according to a study in Nature Communications.
“Since land use plays a central role for climate mitigation, biodiversity and food production, understanding its full dynamics is essential for sustainable land use strategies,” lead author Karina Winkler, a physical geographer at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, told AFP.
New images taken by the Gemini North telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have captured Jupiter in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light, revealing unique atmospheric features of the gas giant in detail. These include superstorms, cyclones and the Great Red Spot.
