14 Burst results for "Jeffrey Kluger"
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"Fewer Americans are buying new cars. That's a problem for the climate by Jeffrey kluger. There is a new population of the elderly in the U.S.. They are 284 million strong. Their numbers are growing every day and their age is eye popping. 12 and a half years on average. Well, that may not be much for you and me, but this senescent set is not made up of people, but cars. Never before has the American fleet of vehicles spend so old, and that spells bad news for the long dream of phase out of gas powered vehicles, and the environment as a whole. The new news on old cars comes courtesy of a recently released study by S&P Global mobility. An independent research and policy group, which regularly tracks the state of the U.S. auto fleet and has seen some troubling trends of late. For 6 years in a row, cars on American roads have been getting older, with the biggest jump coming in the last three years, thanks in large measure to the COVID-19 pandemic. Supply chain issues caused by the pandemic and the related lockdowns led to a global shortage of computer chips on which new cars are increasingly dependent, driving down automotive supply and driving up vehicle prices. The average sticker price of a new car currently tops $48,000. Interest rate increases to battle inflation have driven the average loan rate for new cars above 6%. All of this has made people who would normally be ready to trade in their old cars, more likely to hold on to them longer. Retail sales for new cars fell 8% from 14.6 million vehicles in 2021 to 13.9 million in 2022. That's the lowest total of new car sales in over a decade. Multiple factors have driven vehicle costs higher, while the cost of eggs and groceries and gasoline and everything else has gone up too. Says Todd Campo, associate director of aftermarket solutions with S&P Global mobility. So the disposable income for households is already constrained and for many people, the thought of taking on a new car loan is something they're reluctant to do. That hits the climate in a number of ways. For one thing, says Campo, cars built 12 and a half years ago, are simply dirtier than cars that have benefited from improvements in fuel efficiency, built into newer gas powered vehicles. What's more, even an old car that started out fuel efficient will become less so as it ages. A car gets worse over time, says Campo, it becomes less efficient, just like humans, as we get older, our bodies do not run at optimum once we get past a certain age. For electric vehicles, the question of age is moving in the opposite direction. There are currently just over 2 million EVs on the road in the U.S., representing less than 1% of the overall fleet, and they're getting younger, not older. The average age of an EV is now 3.6 years, according to S&P, down from 3.7 in 2022. That's because existing owners with money to spend are trading up. While less wealthy buyers are frozen out of the market as they face high interest rates coupled with the sticker shock for EVs, which currently cost close to $59,000 on average. As to what this means for the replacement of the more than quarter billion gas powered vehicles on the road with clean electric ones, the outlook is not good. As owners hold on to their cars longer and the cost of electric vehicles remain high, Campo does not see an electric switch over happening anytime soon. Even if every vehicle sold, going forward, were electric. It was still take a decade to replace just half of the gas powered fleet. Since every vehicle sold most assuredly, won't be electric, Campo doesn't see EVs outnumbering combustion vehicles for decades. I would put it in the 2040s, he says. Maybe even 2050. American motorists may indeed be looking at a climate friendly all electric future, but that future will be a long time and coming..
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"jeffrey kluger" Discussed on TIME's Top Stories
"Fewer Americans are buying new cars. That's a problem for the climate by Jeffrey kluger. There is a new population of the elderly in the U.S.. They are 284 million strong. Their numbers are growing every day and their age is eye popping. 12 and a half years on average. Well, that may not be much for you and me, but this senescent set is not made up of people, but cars. Never before has the American fleet of vehicles spend so old, and that spells bad news for the long dream of phase out of gas powered vehicles, and the environment as a whole. The new news on old cars comes courtesy of a recently released study by S&P Global mobility. An independent research and policy group, which regularly tracks the state of the U.S. auto fleet and has seen some troubling trends of late. For 6 years in a row, cars on American roads have been getting older, with the biggest jump coming in the last three years, thanks in large measure to the COVID-19 pandemic. Supply chain issues caused by the pandemic and the related lockdowns led to a global shortage of computer chips on which new cars are increasingly dependent, driving down automotive supply and driving up vehicle prices. The average sticker price of a new car currently tops $48,000. Interest rate increases to battle inflation have driven the average loan rate for new cars above 6%. All of this has made people who would normally be ready to trade in their old cars, more likely to hold on to them longer. Retail sales for new cars fell 8% from 14.6 million vehicles in 2021 to 13.9 million in 2022. That's the lowest total of new car sales in over a decade. Multiple factors have driven vehicle costs higher, while the cost of eggs and groceries and gasoline and everything else has gone up too. Says Todd Campo, associate director of aftermarket solutions with S&P Global mobility. So the disposable income for households is already constrained and for many people, the thought of taking on a new car loan is something they're reluctant to do. That hits the climate in a number of ways. For one thing, says Campo, cars built 12 and a half years ago, are simply dirtier than cars that have benefited from improvements in fuel efficiency, built into newer gas powered vehicles. What's more, even an old car that started out fuel efficient will become less so as it ages. A car gets worse over time, says Campo, it becomes less efficient, just like humans, as we get older, our bodies do not run at optimum once we get past a certain age. For electric vehicles, the question of age is moving in the opposite direction. There are currently just over 2 million EVs on the road in the U.S., representing less than 1% of the overall fleet, and they're getting younger, not older. The average age of an EV is now 3.6 years, according to S&P, down from 3.7 in 2022. That's because existing owners with money to spend are trading up. While less wealthy buyers are frozen out of the market as they face high interest rates coupled with the sticker shock for EVs, which currently cost close to $59,000 on average. As to what this means for the replacement of the more than quarter billion gas powered vehicles on the road with clean electric ones, the outlook is not good. As owners hold on to their cars longer and the cost of electric vehicles remain high, Campo does not see an electric switch over happening anytime soon. Even if every vehicle sold, going forward, were electric. It was still take a decade to replace just half of the gas powered fleet. Since every vehicle sold most assuredly, won't be electric, Campo doesn't see EVs outnumbering combustion vehicles for decades. I would put it in the 2040s, he says. Maybe even 2050. American motorists may indeed be looking at a climate friendly all electric future, but that future will be a long time and coming..
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"Astronomers explained what caused the largest cosmic explosion ever seen by Jeffrey kluger. It was only last October that telescopes spotted a gamma ray burst, caused by the collapse of a black hole that was so powerful, astronomers quickly dubbed it boat for brightest of all time. That was a fair enough nickname for such a sensational emission for a little while anyway. But boat has just been busted the second most powerful. According to a new study published in the monthly notices of the royal astronomical society, there is a new champion out there, a cosmic explosion known as at 2021 L WX. The explosion, located 8 billion light years from earth, has been erupting for three years now, emitting 2 trillion times the light of our sun and ten times the energy of the brightest supernova ever observed. The very existence of such a formation never before observed by astronomers, is further proof that there are whole new species of astronomical phenomena yet to be discovered. Where there is one AT 2021 LW X, there could be others and still more objects not yet imagined, much less seen. Is an extraordinary event. That does not fit into any common class of transient or stellar eruptions, the research team wrote. Further follow up and modeling of AT 2021 LW X is necessary to reveal more about the scenario that caused the flare. The eruption was initially spotted by telescopes at the Caltech operated zwicky transient facility in 2020. And at first, astronomers thought they might be witnessing a quasar, an eruption that occurs when gas and dust fall into a supermassive black hole. But quasars tend to fluctuate in energy and brightness. While at 2021 LW X, flicked on its high beams and has kept them burning at a steady luminosity ever since its discovery. Whether quasar, we see the brightness flickering up and down over time said professor Mark Sullivan, of the university of Southampton, a co author of the paper, and a royal astronomical society statement. But looking back over a decade, there was no detection of AT 2021 LW X, then it suddenly appeared as one of the most luminous things in the universe, which is unprecedented. The next best gas was a supernova. But the light from such stellar explosions typically lasts four months, not ears. Further observations were conducted by the asteroid terrestrial impact last alert system or Atlas in Hawaii, which typically scans the skies for dangerous, near earth objects, but can also make distant observations, joining the zwicky facility and trying to puzzle out what the astronomers were seeing. With a quasar and a supernova ruled out, the authors of the paper led by astronomer Philip wiseman at Southampton university looked to what is known as a title disruption event. That's when a star is pulled into the maw of a black hole and shredded in the process. But AT 2021 had that beat too. Shedding three times more light than any title disruption ever observed, and lasting much longer as well. We came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by our search algorithm when we were searching for a type of supernova, said weissman in a statement. Most supernovae and tidal disruption events only last for a couple of months before fading away. For something to be bright for two plus years, was immediately very unusual. More telescopes still were brought online to study at 2021, including NASA's orbiting Neil Gerald's swift observatory, the new technology telescope in Chile, and the grand telescopio canaris and la Palma Spain, with those instruments conducting observations of their own, and with other alternatives ruled out, weissman and his colleagues have come to the conclusion that the brilliant steady light of AT 2021 is caused by a massive cloud of gas. Many thousands of times the size of our sun. That was orbiting a black hole, and was somehow disrupted. The astronomers don't yet know how. Causing the gas to fall into the hole. The entire formation they have estimated is 100 times the size of our solar system, and is currently emitting 100 times more energy than the sun will in its entire 10 billion year lifetime. How long it will continue to burn is unclear, but its light is still streaming our way. Weisman's team is not done studying at 2021 LW X. The Vera Rubin observatory's legacy survey of space and time in Chile is set to come online in the next few years. And the astronomers will point that telescope at 2021 LW X's way too. And elsewhere as well. We are hoping to discover more events like this and learn more about them, says wiseman. It could be that these events, although extremely rare, are so energetic that they are key parts of how the centers of galaxies change over time. That fact touches close to home. Our own Milky Way has a supermassive black hole resting at its center..
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"The next challenge for Musk's SpaceX, explaining what happened to starship. By Jeffrey kluger. A beautiful machine came to an ugly end on April 20th when SpaceX's sleek silvery 40 story tall starship rocket consumed itself in an orange and white fireball just four minutes after launch, and 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Texas. As maiden voyages go, it was
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"There's no way to make space travel good for Planet Earth right now. But Jeffrey kluger SpaceX has never been reluctant to brag, especially when it comes to its celebrated falcon 9 rocket. Since 2010, as accompanied tote board shows, 217 falcon 9s have flown with 61 launches in 2022 alone, making it the workhorse of the current global space fleet. So what's not to like? Plenty, actually, at least if you care about the environment. The falcon 9 uses a fuel mixture of liquid oxygen and simple kerosene, and while the oxygen does not do any harm to the skies, the black soot created by the burning kerosene is injected directly into the stratosphere. The layer of air ranging from 12 kilometers, 7.5 miles to 50 kilometers, 31 miles above the earth. There, the soot lingers for up to 5 years, absorbing heat, contributing to climate change, and damaging the ozone layer, which exposes the planet to dangerous ultraviolet, UV, radiation, and SpaceX is not remotely alone. According to a study by the national oceanic and atmospheric administration, NOAA, global rocket launches, of which there were 180 last year, the study notes, inject about 1000 tons of soda into the upper atmosphere per year. That will only get worse, Noah warns as the industry continues to expand. The bottom line is projected increases in rocket launches could expose people in the northern hemisphere where most rocket launches take place to increased harmful UV radiation, environmental scientists, Christopher Meloni, the study's lead author said, in a statement. By themselves rocket launches are small contributors to overall atmospheric pollutants. The aviation industry burns 100 times more fuel each year than all of the rockets launched globally combined. But there is a key atmospheric difference airplanes flying the troposphere about 11 kilometers, 6.6 miles above the ground, soot precipitates quickly from this range compared to stratospheric so it sticks around much longer. Indeed, according to the NOAA report, a single passenger aboard a rocket is responsible for 100 times more climate changing pollution than a passenger aboard an airplane. Not only does all of this warm the planet and damage the ozone, the NOAA scientists born. But the change in temperatures can also slow subtropical jet streams worsening summer monsoons in Africa and India. We need to learn more about the potential impact of hydrocarbon burning engines on the stratosphere and on the climate at the surface of the earth set maloney. The type of fuel used in the rockets can make a difference, SpaceX's massive 33 engine starship spacecraft, for example, uses methane in place of kerosene. While methane is a powerful greenhouse gas by itself, it does burn cleaner than kerosene, putting out less black soot. Blue Origin's new shepherd rocket is cleaner still, burning liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen and producing only water vapor as an exhaust, water vapor in the upper atmosphere still traps and retains heat, but not nearly as much as black soot, methane, or carbon dioxide too. None of this means that the private rocket industry or growing space powers, like China, India, and the United Arab Emirates, to say nothing of the U.S., will be slowing down their launch schedules or becoming less pollution intensive anytime soon, indeed NASA's new space launch system moon rocket, which first launched in November 2022, is an especially dirty machine. When it uses a liquid oxygen hydrogen mix in its four main engines, its two attached solid fuel engines, which account for most of the vehicle's thrust, produce the ozone damaging pollutant, chlorine. The thriving space industries typically seen as a boon for both the economy and for human exploration, and it is, but the launching of a monster rocket with monster exhaust, like SpaceX's anticipated starship, is a reminder that there can be too much of a good thing. If we keep increasing not just the size of rockets, but the number of launches, we do so at a price, and, as with so many other things, it is the climate that pays..
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"SpaceX's starship, the biggest rocket ever built, is poised to fly. By Jeffrey kluger. Time was, nobody gave much thought to the town of Boca chica, a little community at the tow of Texas, hard up against the Gulf of Mexico. Distinguished mostly by its proximity to the city of Brownsville, the county seat of Cameron county. Boca Chico was the site of the Civil War battle of palmetto hill, is home to a state park, a public beach, and a nearby ship channel, and well, that's about it. Or that was about it. Until 9 years ago, today, Boca chica is where the future of human spaceflight is being shaped. And as early as Monday, April 17th, according to a tweet from SpaceX, the town will have distinguished itself as the place from which the tallest, most powerful rocket ever designed, SpaceX's starship will blast off. On April 14th, the federal aviation administration gave its long awaited clearance for the launch, saying in a statement, after a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration, and financial responsibility requirements. The license is valid for 5 years.
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"By Jeffrey kluger. Nobody knows exactly when the 13.8 billion year old universe first switched on its stellar lights. But the best guess for the emergence of the earliest stars and galaxies is sometime in the first 400 million years. Determining precisely when in that ancient epic, the great illumination occurred is one of the main goals set for the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on December 25th, 2021. And has been hard at work scanning the heavens since it completed its deployment, and its instruments came online in the summer of 2022. This week, Webb, hit pay dirt. According to two papers published in the journal nature, an international team of AD astronomers from ten countries has discovered the four oldest galaxies ever observed, including one that dates back to just 320 million years after the Big Bang. When the universe was only 2% of its current age. Our solar system and the earth itself are by contrast, just four and a half billion years old. To find these galaxies in such stunningly beautiful images is a special experience. Set astronomer and co author Brant Robinson of the University of California Santa Cruz, in a statement released by the European space agency. We can be absolutely confident of their fantastic distances. The Quartet of ancient galaxies were found in a patch of sky known as the Hubble Space Telescope's ultra deep field, a relatively small region that is nonetheless home to an estimated 100,000 galaxies. Hubble studied the deep field for more than 20 years, but the telescope was always limited in what it could detect. That's because the Hubble Space Telescope sees principally in the visible spectrum. It is effectively blind to infrared light, and infrared is crucial to finding especially old galaxies and stars. Due to a phenomenon known as redshift. The farther an object in space is from us. The faster it is moving in the ever expanding universe. That causes the wavelength of its light to stretch to the red end of the visible spectrum. Light from the most distant objects stretches even further into the infrared, invisible to Hubble and us, but not to web. Over ten days of observation, the team of astronomers use the web's near infrared camera to scan the deep field region and soon spotted four galaxies whose redshift indicated they ranged in age from 320 million to 350 million years after the Big Bang, making them the oldest galaxies ever detected. Maybe. Ancient galaxies are confirmed by more than just their redshift, their chemistry plays a key role too, and the universe is earliest epics, metals, and relatively heavy elements like oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen had yet to form, since those are created in the explosions of stars known as supernovas, and those stars had yet to form. The two principal ingredients in the universe's initial recipe book were ultra light hydrogen and helium. Find a galaxy with an extreme redshift that is also poor in metals and heavy elements, and you've truly discovered the genuine ancient article. To prove their findings, the researchers thus turned to another web instrument, the near infrared spectrograph, to study the galaxies chemical fingerprints. After 28 hours of observation over the course of three days, they had their result. The galaxies were indeed made principally of hydrogen and helium. Firmly establishing them as the earliest, oldest galaxies ever seen. It was crucial to prove that these galaxies do indeed inhabit the early universe, said astronomer and co author, Emma Curtis Lake of the UK's university of Hertfordshire, in the ESA statement. Seeing the spectrum revealed as we hoped, confirming these galaxies as being at the true edge of our view is a tremendously exciting achievement for the mission. But just because the four newly discovered galaxies are the oldest ones found the date. By no means proves they are the oldest ones period. The same team of researchers has more observing time reserved on web and intends to continue searching the Hubble ultra deep field later in 2023, looking for older galaxies still. So many questions about galaxies have been waiting for the transformative opportunity of Webb. Said astronomer and co author, sandro T'Challa, from the UK's University of Cambridge, in a statement. We're thrilled to be able to play a part in telling this story..
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"Scientists solve the mystery behind the ʻOumuamua alien spacecraft comet by Jeffrey kluger. The astronomers operating the pan starrs one telescope on the island of Maui were not expecting to hit cosmic pay dirt on October 19th, 2017, but they did. On what was otherwise an ordinary night of sky gazing, they suddenly spotted what is easily the oddest comet ever detected. Its high speed, 87 km/s, or about 54 miles per second. And highly elliptical angle indicated that it originated from deep space. The first known interstellar object ever to enter our solar system. It was cigar shaped, and, as comets go, tiny. Just 377 feet long and 62 feet wide. Most important, the comet, which was dubbed ʻOumuamua, Hawaiian, for a messenger from afar arriving first, actually accelerated during the latter part of its transit, more than the gravitational influence of the sun could explain. That left even sober scientists to speculate that the object might actually be an alien spacecraft. Speeding up under its own power during its barn storming of our solar system. And the years since ʻOumuamua's discovery, most people have put aside the ET talk, but no one has yet explained how, in fact, the object defied traditional cometary physics, and hit the gas as it was leaving our solar system. Now, at last, a new paper in nature might have the answer, and it has everything to do with molecular hydrogen. Every comet that passes through our solar system speeds up on the way out. For one thing, as it swings around the far side of the sun, the solar gravity gives it a sort of whip crack push. What's more, dust on the surface of the comet out gases due to solar heating, providing a natural jet that adds even greater acceleration. But ʻOumuamua was too small to have any surface dust, denying it the glowing halo or coma, that circles the body of common comets, as well as creating the comet's characteristic tail. When astronomers looked for common signatures of outgassing activity, they couldn't find them on ʻOumuamua, says Ginny bergner, Professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the new paper. And while ʻOumuamua did pick up some energy from the sun's gravitational push, calculations showed its increase in speed was too great to be explained by that factor alone. The most mysterious thing about ʻOumuamua was this very significant non gravitational acceleration, says Darrell seligman, a post Doc in astronomy at Cornell University, and the co author of the paper. One possible answer, seligman, says, was what's known as the yarkovsky effect. A phenomenon by which small bodies like asteroids or tiny comets like ʻOumuamua absorb photons from the sun and re radiate them in a kind of propulsive plume. But this effect too was too small to account for the degree of ʻOumuamua's acceleration. That left three possible explanations. Propulsion provided by nitrogen, carbon monoxide, or molecular hydrogen, henceforth H two. All three of these gases are present in comets and all three are what is known as hypervolemia. They really want to be in the gas phase all the time. Says berkner. But sometimes, they can be frozen. When ʻOumuamua was in deep space, the hyper volatiles were frozen indeed, exposed to temperatures as low as negative 450°F. In theory, as the comet approached the sun, those hyper volatiles could have warmed up and outgassed as plumes giving ʻOumuamua, the push it needed to explain its extra gravitational acceleration. The same process would take place on other comets, but they are too large to be affected much by such a subtle notch. A tiny comet like ʻOumuamua would be a different matter. And the course of their work, bergner and selick men ran computer models to determine both the overall composition of the comet and its so called budget of hyper volatiles. How much carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and H two would be present. They also conducted thermal modeling to estimate how the change in temperature from deep space to the warmer inner solar system would affect those materials. On the whole, they determined that the quantities of carbon monoxide and nitrogen onboard ʻOumuamua would be too low to explain the outgassing and acceleration. But H two would be a different matter. ʻOumuamua, like most comets, is rich in water, before the comet entered the solar system, the extreme cold of deep space would cause the water to freeze into ice. And what is known as an amorphous state, rather than the solid crystalline structure of ordinary ice, amorphous ice is porous, dotted by pockets, exposure to deep space, would have a second effect on the ice too, with cosmic radiation causing some of the H two and the H2O molecules to break away. That H two would collect in the pores of the amorphous ice like fuel and tiny fuel tanks. When ʻOumuamua entered the inner solar system, it warmed up just enough for the ice to convert to its crystalline state, essentially closing the pockets and forcing the H two out of the comet, providing the propulsive push that explained the acceleration. When the water matrix has enough energy, it rearranges to a more stable and more compact configuration, says berkner, and the process you lose those pores and the hydrogen can escape through the surface. So question answered problem solved and alas, no alien spacecraft in the mix. Bergner, seligman, and other astronomers will be looking for a similar small and dark comets when the national science foundation's Vera C Rubin observatory goes into operation in Chile's Atacama desert in 2025 with the specific charge to spend part of its observation time looking for hydrogen outgassing from comets. Before 2017, astronomers did not even know that a species of comet like ʻOumuamua existed. Now, thanks to the Rubin observatory and the astronomers who will make use of it, we'll learn more about their behavior, composition, population, and more. The main.
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"Maybe that annoying thing will. Learn more at DMV now dot com. A message from Virginia, DMV. A new report says more than half of the world will be obese by 2035 by Jeffrey kluger. Obesity has often been thought of as a problem of the developed world, with wealthy countries eating themselves into a state of ill health with an abundance of ultra processed foods, and poorer ones, more often suffering from food and security. But that's no longer true, according to a March report from the world obesity Atlas or WOA. More than half of the global population, 51% or over 4 billion people will have obesity by 2035, and the condition will touch all regions and continents of the world. The total cost of treating illnesses related to obesity will be an estimated $4 trillion per year, which is about how much the COVID-19 pandemic costs the world in healthcare expenses in 2020. The new projection marks a sharp jump from current 2023 numbers. Right now, about 3.12 billion people or a 39% of the global population have obesity. But 15 years ago in 2008, the global obesity rate was 23.9%, affecting 1.63 billion people. The WOA, a non governmental organization which files its reports with both the World Health Organization and the UN surveyed current obesity rates and trends in 180 different countries to arrive at its newly projected figures. The nations with the highest obesity rates tend to cluster in the South Pacific with Kiribati and Tonga leading the world in projected 2035 obesity rates at 67% followed by Samoa at 66%. French Polynesia at 65% and Micronesia at 64%. The U.S. registers near the top with a rate of 58%. The lowest projected obesity rates are found in Asia with Vietnam at 7% followed by Japan at 8%, Singapore at 9 and both India and Bangladesh at 11%. Especially affected by the growing epidemic will be children ages 5 through 19, and whom obesity rates are predicted to double, climbing from ten to 20% for boys and 8 to 18% for girls. Even in Southeast Asia, with its relatively low projected obesity rates, weight gain in the youngest cohort is expected to be significant, with obesity rates among boys increasing from 5 to 16% and in girls from three to 11%, and the South Pacific a bad problem will likely only grow worse. As boys are predicted to go from a 19% obesity rate to 41% and girls to climb from 9 to 28%. The Americas will see their numbers grow as well. When the share of obese boys rising from 20 to 33% and girls climbing from 16 to 26%. The WOA posits a lot of causes for the current trend beyond the growing global popularity of cheap, highly processed western style food. Also to blame are so called obesogens or chemical pollutants like BPA that act as endocrine disruptors, and are found in plastics, food packaging, household furnishings, paints, cosmetics, and more. Things only get worse when obesogens and poor diet co occur. The increase in ultra processed foods and countries globally, particularly lower middle income countries, the report states is likely to increase plastic based products in food packaging and plastic waste. In turn, the exposure to obesogenic pollutants may rise rapidly. That is only part of the report's discouraging takeaway. Every nation is affected by obesity, with some lower income countries showing the highest increases in the last decade, the author's right. No country has reported a decline in obesity prevalence across their entire population. While preventing and treating obesity requires financial investment, the cost of failing to prevent and treat obesity will be far higher..
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"Scientists sound the alarm over a growing trash problem in space by Jeffrey kluger. 60 6 years ago, there was just a single human built object in Earth orbit. It was Sputnik, the Soviet unions and the worlds first satellite launched on October 4th, 1957. Now, take a moment and try to guess how many objects, including active satellites, defunct satellites, and bits of debris from all of that space traffic are currently circling the planet. Have you made your guess? Good. Your answer is wrong. Or let's put it this way. It's wrong unless the figure you guessed is 100 trillion. That's the jaw dropping number sided by an international team of researchers, writing an open letter in last week's issue of science, calling for a global treaty to curb the amount of satellites and rubbish that have been forming an ever growing debris belt in low earth orbit for more than three generations now. The researchers report that there is currently 9000 active satellites in orbit. A number expected to grow to over 60,000 by 2030. The 100 trillion figure includes everything from spent boosters and stray bolts to metal flex and floating paint chips that went along with launching all of that hardware. And don't think something as small as a paint chip is harmless. Orbiting the earth at 28,200 km/h, which is equivalent to 17,500 mph. So small a piece of rubbish can strike a spacecraft or other orbiting object like a bullet. Astronauts spacewalking outside the International Space Station report that the skin of the 25 year old orbiting lab looks and some spots as if it's been hit by buckshot. The astronauts routinely have to shelter in place in one of the attached Soyuz or SpaceX spacecraft to wait out a passing swarm of space debris in case the station gets catastrophically struck. And they have to bail out on a hurry. Ultimately, all of this debris will fall back to earth and incinerate in the atmosphere. But we're replacing the junk at a faster pace than its orbit can decay. Each of the 7 researchers riding in science are experts in one of two fields. Satellite technology and ocean plastic pollution. Why the latter? Because as they write, the mess we've made of the oceans, witness the great Pacific garbage patch, a mass of floating junk that measures twice the area of Texas. Mirrors the mess we're in the process of making in space. The difference, we've had centuries to foul the oceans and only decades to do the same in space. And yet we're not wasting time. As a marine biologist, I never imagined writing a paper on space, said Heather called away, a senior marine technical adviser at the zoological society of London, and a co author of the letter in a statement that accompanied its release. But through this collaborative research, we identified so many parallels with the challenges of tackling environmental issues in the ocean. We just need to get better at the uptake of science and the management and policy. The researchers see hope for space in the progress that has been made so far in cleaning up the oceans, or at least in nations agreeing to try, and March 2022, world leaders representing 170 nations signed a global plastics treaty at the United Nations environment assembly. In an attempt to curb continued dumping of plastics in the oceans and eliminate what is already there. Other negotiations are already underway on a more ambitious global plastics treaty. Similar initiative should be taken now the authors, right? To implement treaties that hold both government and commercial space launch services liable for minimizing the amount of debris there launches create, deorbiting satellites after they've reached the end of their functional life and developing technologies to clean up at least some of the 100 trillion strong rubbish swarm. Most nation states have neglected to implement the necessary local space regulations that could promote long-term equitable and sustainable use of earth's orbit. The authors of the letter, right, there is no international treaty that seeks to minimize orbital debris. That must change. And fast. To avoid repeating the mistakes that have left the high seas and all who depend on them vulnerable, we need collective cooperation and formed by science to develop a timely, legally binding treaty to protect earth's orbit. A species that is smart enough to have gotten itself to space, an order of magnitude more difficult than initially learning to sail, and foul the oceans, should be smart enough not to make a mess of things once it gets there. As Reba John co author and associate Professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, put it in the statement, marine debris and space debris are both an anthropogenic detriment that is avoidable..
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"jeffrey kluger" Discussed on TIME's Top Stories
"Alex Murdoch and the evolutionary reason, we're drawn to violent crime. By Jeffrey kluger. If you haven't heard the name, Alex Murdoch over the course of the past few months, you may just not have been paying attention. The disgraced South Carolina attorney was convicted of the murder of his wife and son last week following a 6 week trial that was must watch TV for much of the nation. Cable news carried Murdoch's testimony live and uninterrupted as it unfolded. And it's near obsessional public following the case was, in many ways, reminiscent of the O. J. Simpson murder trial, which saw 150 million Americans to an end to learn the verdict on October 3rd, 1995. But why? What is it about sensational and often sensationally gruesome murder trials that fascinates us so. Are humans as a whole and Americans in particular simply morbid simply voyeurs? Or is there something more complex going on? There is an answer, and it turns out to be equal parts evolution, self protection, and in some measure the media attention that cases like Murdoch's regularly draw. Like other animals, we humans are acutely aware of and alert two threats in our environment. The world is a dangerous place, and especially for a soft, slow, un fanged, unclogged, and thus easy to kill species like ours. It pays to be exceedingly alert to dangers. Humans broadly are built to be intrigued by an alerts two, potentially dangerous situations, says psychologist Colton scrivener, research scientist at her university in Denmark. We're curious about threats in our environment. So anytime we get a hint that there might be information about danger out there, the attention mechanisms in our minds sort of kick on and guide us toward that information. That danger, of course, could be a lion or a Tiger or a hurricane, or a wildfire. But the danger, another human, like a Murdoch poses, captures a particular part of our focus. Humans are very good at being sneaky, says scrivener. We're very good at being premeditated in our violence and in our approach to hurting others, whereas other animals tend to be reactive. If you make an animal angry, they react right away. If you make a human angry, they can go home and conspire or plot against you. And so if we get a hint of secrecy or planning or anything like that, that also tends to capture our attention. Just who does the killing also plays a role in our fascination with cases like Murdoch's. There were more than 26,000 homicides in the U.S. in 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but that hardly meant there were 26,000 investigations or trials that drew the kind of attention Murdoch's dead. What those other cases lacked was celebrity. Murdoch has been widely described as the wealthy scion of a prestigious South Carolina family. Simpson was a Hall of Fame football player in movie star. That makes a difference. There's an element of status involved in all of that, says scribner, and we again have attention mechanisms in our minds that are particularly tuned to that. If a high status individual is doing something, we tend to pay attention because they're a person who not only has the desire to do something bad or conspiratorial or threatening, but also the ability to carry it out. Joni Johnstone a San Diego based forensic psychologist notes that there is also an element of schadenfreude at play in the Murdoch case. You have a family that has a long legacy of wealth and power. And I think a lot of people are interested in seeing justice done. It ties into the sense that the rich get away with whatever they want. While the poor gets charged for things, they didn't do. Then there is the gruesomeness of this particular crime, much was made at trial of the horrific effect Murdoch's shotgun had on the bodies of his wife and son, similar to the primacy given to the slashings sustained by the victims in the Simpson trial. It is more than more business that causes us to be so fascinated by such gory details. It is, again, evolution and self protection. I wrote a paper on this a few years ago, reports scribner. What we found was that when people heard of a crime where the perpetrator behaved in a gruesome way, they perceived or envisioned the perpetrator to be particularly big and large and strong. Big and large and strong as a person he was specially wanted to avoid, and it pays survival dividends to attend closely to such a menace. It's Tapping into a very old system in the mammalian brain for a mapping strength, scribner says, we expect larger, stronger individuals to be more capable and more dangerous. Then two, there is the role of the media, newspapers, websites, magazines, and cable news programmers are no fools. And they recognize a target rich story when they see one. Johnston sees a sort of self reinforcing cycle in the public's natural fascination with a case like Murdoch's, giving rise to saturation coverage that satisfies that interest, which, in turn, draws still more eyeballs. The media is both a driver of our attention and reflects our interest, she says. We've been able to basically be inside the courtroom from day one. If they didn't think we were going to be interested in that, they wouldn't be broadcasting. So it becomes a kind of a circle. Scribner thinks this kind of coverage has a lasting impact on our view of crime, and not for the better. Excessive coverage of true crime cases by the media could signal to the minds of viewers that the frequency of rare crimes is higher than it really is. He says, which could make them more likely to seek out information about true crime cases. This probably isn't an issue in many cases, but does skew the perception of how likely these kinds of crimes are. For the media and the public. Attention will now be focused elsewhere. Murdoch himself will be going nowhere, sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. As for his wife and son, the silent centers of this terrible story, we can only offer thoughts of sympathy and a bit.
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"jeffrey kluger" Discussed on TIME's Top Stories
"The Webb telescope spotted 6 galaxies that should not exist by Jeffrey kluger. It isn't easy to build a galaxy. The universe is a good 13.8 billion years old, and the earliest galaxies ever detected spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope last November did not form until 350 million years after the Big Bang. Not only did that infant universe take its time bringing forth its first galactic masses, it also didn't build very big ones once it got around to it. The first galaxies were often dwarf galaxies, containing perhaps 100 million stars compared to the size of modern galaxies, like our Milky Way, which is believed to contain a minimum of 100 billion stars. Early galaxies, so the rule goes were pip squeaks. Or at least that's what the rule used to be. According to a new paper published yesterday in nature. Objects that are thought to be at least 6 galaxies dating back as far as 500 million years after the Big Bang have been discovered with populations of tens or even hundreds of billions of stars. The largest of the 6 is thought to have a collective mass, 1 trillion times greater than our sun, or ten times the size of the Milky Way. It's bananas, said Erica Nelson, an assistant Professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a co author of the paper in a statement that accompanied its release. You just don't expect the early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly. These galaxies should not have had time to form. The observations conducted by the Webb telescope last summer were of a patch of sky near the big dipper that had previously been imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble had detected nothing special in that region of space, but Hubble sees principally in the visible spectrum, while Webb operates in the infrared, essentially bringing a completely fresh eye to an otherwise familiar piece of cosmic real estate. Straight away, the new survey yielded something intriguing. Popping out from the otherwise unremarkable background image were 6 blotches of light, which, though fussy, were extremely bright, and extremely rad. It was the color that caught the astronomers eyes first, the universe is continually expanding, and as objects move away from us, their wavelength of light is stretched into the red spectrum, the redder the color, the farther the object. These half dozen objects were so red, they were calculated to be far enough away to have formed up to 13.3 billion years ago. What's more, they were big. Big enough, not to be point sources of light like a bright star or a supernova. But galactic in scale. That initial estimate of size, however, could have been an illusion. As Albert Einstein first postulated and as more than a century of observations have confirmed, light from a distant object in space can be bent by the gravity of foreground objects, causing it to appear larger than it is. A phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. It was entirely possible that the seemingly galactic scale objects the authors of the new paper discovered were actually much smaller than they appeared, and were simply being optically magnified. That idea, however, was quickly dismissed. Closer scrutiny of the entire image revealed no foreground bodies near enough to the 6 bright objects to have distorted their shape or size. That left galaxies, as the likeliest explanation for what the objects are, though even the researchers admit, it will take follow-up observations to confirm that fact. Still, the possibility that they are indeed galaxies raises as many questions as it answers. For one thing, the galaxies would have to have been explosively prolific. The Milky Way is thought to give birth to perhaps two new stars every year for the 6 galaxies detected in the new observations to have gotten as big as they did as fast as they did, they'd have had to be forming hundreds of new stars a year for hundreds of millions of years. For another thing, in the early days of the universe, heavier elements found in modern stars weren't around. The principle elements that formed stars were hydrogen and helium, and that made for relatively small galaxies. If one's this big formed so early, it would mean that heavier matter was indeed more plentiful and present than scientists thought. If even one of these galaxies is real, Nelson said in a statement, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology. That if is a small word with big implications, and the area of the sky that is home to the new objects will surely be scoured by other observations. Currently, the web team receives about a thousand requests for telescope observing time per year from astronomers around the world. And is able to approve only about 200 of the applications. Some of those studies are certain to include observations of the new bodies with the telescope's near infrared spectrograph, which analyzes the temperature, mass, and chemical composition of target objects. If the 6 candidate galaxies are indeed actual galaxies, the telescopes near infrared spectrograph should confirm that fact. In the process, it will completely transform our current understanding of how quickly large and mature galaxies could evolve and form..
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"jeffrey kluger" Discussed on TIME's Top Stories
"Not everything is a spy balloon, or UFO. Here's what else is flying in our skies. By Jeffrey kluger. Ever since February 4th, when the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina, the military has been in something like skeet shooting mode. Blasting three more unidentified aerial objects out of the sky on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. February 10th, 11th and 12th. The first of the three spotted by North American aerospace defense command or norad radar over the northern coast of Alaska was described by fighter pilots as a metallic cylindrical airship. It was flying at about 40,000 feet, low enough to menace civilian aircraft, how it stayed aloft was not clear. It could be a gaseous type of balloon inside a structure or it could be some kind of propulsion system, said norad commander, general Glenn van herck, in a Sunday Night news conference, reported by CNN. The object shot down Saturday also flying at 40,000 feet over Canada's Yukon territory was a more traditional balloon with a metal payload hanging from it. Sunday's object flying at 20,000 feet and shot down over Lake Huron, was the most mysterious of all, described as octagonal in shape with strings or cables hanging from it. It means of staying aloft was unclear. Either way, the shoot downs were both preemptive and unprecedented. I believe this is the first time within the United States or American airspace that norad or United States northern command has taken kinetic action against an airborne object, said van herk. They also raised troubling questions about just how much hardware is flying around up there. What its origins are, and what its intent hostile and military or scientific and benign might be. Just how do we distinguish aerial friend from aerial foe? And have we entered a new phase of shooting first at whatever casts a radar shadow and asking questions later about what exactly we destroyed?
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Africa now free of wild poliovirus, but polio threat remains
"The World Health Organization declares Africa polio-free. By Jeffrey Kluger. Nobody will ever know the identity of the thousands of African children who were not killed or paralyzed by polio this year, they would have been hard to keep track of no matter what because in ordinary times they would've followed thousands last year and thousands the year before and on back in a generations long trail of suffering and death instead, no African children were claimed by polio. This year or last year or the year before it was in two thousand sixteen that the last case of wild circulating polio was reported in Nigeria the final country on the fifty four nation African continent where the disease was endemic and with the required multi year waiting period. Now, having passed with no more cases, the World Health Organization today officially declared the entirety of, Africa polio-free. A disease that as recently as the late nineteen eighties was endemic in one hundred, twenty, five countries claiming three hundred, fifty, thousand children per year has now been run to ground in just two remaining places, Pakistan and Afghanistan where there have been a collective one, hundred, two cases so far twenty twenty that's one hundred to too many. But there's no denying the scope of the whol announcement today's victory over the wild poliovirus in the. African region is a testament to what can happen when partners from a variety of sectors join forces to accomplish a major global health goal says John Hueco, general, secretary, and CEO of Rotary International. It is something the world can and should aspire to during these turbulent times. It was Rotary and International Nonprofit Service Organization that kicked off the polio endgame in Nineteen Eighty eight with the launch of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative the GPA. That program aimed to leverage the power of rotaries thirty, five, thousand clubs and one point twenty, two, million members in two hundred countries and territories worldwide to make polio only the second human disease after smallpox to be pushed over the brink of extinction.