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The UK’s governing Conservative Party has announced a new package of climate policies , including £220m for research into nuclear fusion reactors to provide clean energy “by 2040”. Although additional funding is welcome news to fusion researchers like me, it isn’t an effective response to climate change. It’s easy to see why such a pledge is appealing though. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers stars like our sun. Unlike current nuclear power plants – which split atoms in a process called fission – nuclear fusion binds atomic nuclei together. This releases much more energy than fission and produces no high-level nuclear waste. A fusion reactor would also produce zero carbon emissions and wouldn’t run the risk of a nuclear meltdown. Fusion could produce energy regardless of wind conditions or daylight hours, and wouldn’t require enriched uranium, which can be repurposed for nuclear weapons. As good as this all sounds, nuclear fusion is unlikely to play a major role in fighting ...

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com . Can we colonize Mars? – Clara, age 9, Newton, Massachusetts In all likelihood, the first Martian will be a person , and the red planet will be humanity’s first extraterrestrial colony . For now, a robot called the Curiosity Rover – sent to Mars to find out if the planet can sustain small lifeforms like bacteria – is all alone there. But Curiosity has laid the foundation for the human explorers who will come next. I’m a professor of astronautics and I study space travel. Today, space agencies across the planet are working to put the first humans on Mars by the 2030s . How will people get to Mars? Engineers have developed new rockets to launch an even larger spacecraft than those that have already transported astronauts to the Moon. These new vehicles are designed to be more energy – efficient . Science fiction writers...

Facebook leader Mark Zuckerberg recently took the unusual step of visiting lawmakers in Washington, including President Donald Trump in the White House. The reason? Congress’s anti-trust sub-committee has started demanding documents from Facebook and other big tech firms. It’s part of the committee’s investigation into whether dominant tech firms are acting anti-competitively. And Zuckerberg’s trip suggests the company is worried. The increasing pressure coming from the US Congress is just one example of how governments all over the world are starting to fight back against the power of Facebook. The company is facing fines, regulation and even calls for it to be broken up. But regulators and politicians still face a significant challenge in reining in Facebook’s financial, political and social might. In summer 2019, Facebook was hit by a US$5 billion fine from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as a US$100m fine from the Securities and Exchanges Commission over its in...

Imagine that you’re a police officer. You spot a car ahead that is swerving all over the road. You pull the driver over and she’s clearly intoxicated. With slurred speech, she swears that she hasn’t had a drop of alcohol all day. Would you believe her? In 2016 , a woman who had a blood alcohol level four times the legal limit was acquitted of her DUI charge after it was discovered that she had an extremely rare condition called “ auto-brewery syndrome .” People with this syndrome carry microbes in their intestines that produce abnormally high levels of alcohol, which they produce when they break down sugars and carbohydrates. While auto-brewery syndrome is an extreme example, it makes one wonder: Could intestinal microbes be influencing other health or behavioral traits? Jing Yuan at the Capital Institute of Pediatrics in Beijing published a new study in Cell Metabolism showing that an intestinal microbe may cause fatty liver disease by producing high levels of alcohol. I am a mic...

I didn’t know what the world looked like at 5:00 a.m. until my son began rowing for the Detroit Boat Club Crew , the oldest continuous rowing program in North America. The sight of young rowers slicing through the water in unison in narrow sculling boats, against the backdrop of dawn on the Detroit River, is simply awe-inspiring. This year, I am working with the Detroit Boat Club Crew, overseen by the nonprofit Friends of Detroit Rowing, to combine the sport of rowing with a new curriculum that teaches middle and high school students science and mathematical concepts. The innovative approach is tackling two areas of concern for Detroit youths: promoting physically active lifestyles and preparing youth for successful careers in scientific and technological fields. Knowledge gap Over the next 10 years, STEM job creation – jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics – will outpace non-STEM jobs significantly. Across the nation, STEM jobs are predicted to grow 17%, as ...

To keep global heating below 2°C , the world’s appetite for meat must change. This will mean reducing meat consumption in most developed countries and limiting the increase in developing countries. But how do you convince people to break the habit of a lifetime? Our recent paper , published in the journal Appetite, looked at how “nudging” might help. This is an approach from behavioural psychology that aims to subtly change a person’s behaviour. In the same way a gentle nudge on the shoulder might alert you to something nearby, subliminal nudges in advertising or on signs help to affect the subconscious choices people make. To change a person’s diet, nudges could help them choose meat substitutes over the real thing. Read more: Can eating less meat really tackle climate change? It’s possible for people to still enjoy the taste of meat with alternatives – varieties of insects are high in protein, and their environmental impact is minimal. About 2 billion people already eat insects ...

In a rare instance of environmental success, the United Nations has just announced it believes the damage to the Earth’s protective ozone layer will be fully restored by the year 2050. This stands in stark contrast to the increasing alarm over the climate emergency , caused by an increasing greenhouse effect. Both the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect ultimately help control how much ultra-violet (UV) radiation from the sun reaches the Earth’s surface, and how much infra-red (IR) radiation escapes to space. Both these forms of radiation have a critical impact on the habitability of a rocket planet. Clearly controlling this radiation is a pressing issue on Earth. But it also presents a challenge for those who dream of colonising Mars. Ultra-violet radiation is a form of light which has a wavelength ranging from 10 – 400 nanometers (1nm is 0.000000001 metres in length). This is shorter and more energetic than visible light. By contrast, the wavelength of a typical 4G phone netwo...

Around 66m years ago, a giant asteroid struck the Earth, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs , ammonites, and many other species. The asteroid was equally devastating at a microscopic level, driving ocean plankton to near-extinction. This crippled the base of the marine food chain and shut down important ocean functions, such as the absorption and delivery of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean floor. Given the real threat of a sixth mass extinction event brought about by human-caused climate breakdown and habitat disruption, we wanted to find out how long the ocean ecosystem took to reboot after the last one. What we found has grave implications for the long-term outlook of marine ecosystems should we tip the critical base of its food chain over the threshold of extinction. Read more: Earth’s sixth mass extinction has begun, new study confirms The nannoplankton almost totally wiped out 66m years ago – also known as coccolithophores – are now widespread once m...

The story of climate change is one that people have struggled to tell convincingly for more than two decades. But it’s not for lack of trying. The problem is emphatically not a lack of facts and figures. The world’s best scientific minds have produced blockbuster report after blockbuster report , setting out in ever more terrifying detail just how much of an impact we humans have had on the Earth since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Many people believe anthropogenic climate change – rapid and far-reaching shifts in the climate caused by human activity – is now the story that will define the 21st century, whether anyone’s good at telling it or not. Nor is it merely a problem of delivery. The past decade has witnessed an explosion of climate change communication efforts spanning nearly every conceivable medium, channel and messenger. Documentaries , popular books and articles, interactive websites, immersive virtual reality , community events — all are being used in increasing...

Runners in the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Qatar will know that, when winning depends on a difference of a few thousandths of a second, getting a good start is crucial. Intuition suggests the way athletes start a race should depend on the event. Hurdlers, for example, need to clear their first barrier after only seven or eight steps, while sprinters are faced with a clear track all the way to the finish line. In fact, it’s a common belief that hurdlers “pop up” out of the blocks. That is, they adopt an upright posture more quickly because they need to clear that first hurdle, compared to sprinters’ continued forward lean for acceleration. Coaching texts have kept the idea of this apparent difference alive. But, until now, no one had directly compared exactly how hurdlers and sprinters start. Our newly published study suggests that, in reality, the two types of athlete start their races in quite a similar way. So there is lots to learn from each other about how they could ...

The discovery of yet another exoplanet is no longer news . More than 4,000 planets around other stars have now been found since the detection of the first one in 1995. As astronomers long suspected, or at least hoped, it seems that planets are ubiquitous in stellar systems and there are probably more planets than stars in our galaxy. But a new discovery of a large planet orbiting the small star GJ3512 is worth noting. The paper, published in Science , challenges our understanding of how planets form – and further blurs the line between small, cool stars known as brown dwarfs and planets . The star itself is a red dwarf , about 30 light years away, with a luminosity less than 0.2% that of the sun. It has around 12% of the sun’s mass and 14% of its radius. Such cool, dim stars are in fact the most common stars in the galaxy, but only one in ten of the known exoplanets have been found to orbit red dwarfs. This is likely to be a selection effect. Red dwarfs are so dim that it is hard to...

A kazoo might seem a world away from the spoken word. But our ability to produce its buzzing, Donald Duck-like sound at will was key in us ever developing the ability to speak at all. And while our capacity for speech is unique, my colleague Robert Shumaker and I have used the novelty instrument to show that great apes aren’t far behind. Speech is one of the defining marks of humanhood. It is the interface of our social and societal relationships, and the baton through which individuals and generations pass information and knowledge from one to the other. Yet, how our species – and our species alone – developed such a powerful method of communication remains unclear. Perhaps chief among the necessary tools for speech is voice control . That is, the uniquely advanced ability to engage our vocal folds to produce sounds at will, as opposed to the reflexive screams and cries that other animals produce as automatic responses to changes in their environment and physiology. [embedded co...