Science

In recent years, climate litigation has witnessed a surge in cases across the world. While scholarly interest has predominantly focused on cases from the Global North, attention to litigation originating in the Global South has been lacking, yet crucial in understanding the broader climate litigation landscape. Credit: Sora Shimazaki via pexels In July, the Sabin Center published Climate Litigation in the Global South: Mapping Report, which serves to shine a spotlight on the current state of climate litigation in the Global South. The report utilizes data from the Sabin Center’s Global Climate Change Litigation databases, which has seen an influx of new cases in recent years, thanks to enhanced data collection efforts and more cases being filed, especially in the past four years. By...

A cyborg bested me. When I played the online game WebGrid, using my finger on a laptop trackpad to click on squares appearing unpredictably on a grid, my speed was 42 squares per minute. When self-described cyborg Noland Arbaugh played it, he used a chip embedded in his brain to send telepathic signals to his computer. His speed? 49. Arbaugh was paralysed from the neck down in 2016. In January, he became the first person to be surgically implanted with a chip made by Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk. Since then, Arbaugh has been operating his phone and computer with his thoughts, surfing the web and playing Civilization and chess. But Neuralink isn’t the only outfit melding human minds with machines using brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Thanks to a series o...

Huge stars collapsing or colliding create gamma ray burstsNASA Goddard Space Flight Center/ A. Simonnet, Sonoma State University The most powerful explosion astronomers have ever seen contains a mysterious signal thought impossible to exist. That signal gives us our first detailed look inside a gamma ray burst and suggests that they involve the annihilation of matter and antimatter. Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful blasts of radiation in the universe, and are generated in cosmic explosions and collisions. Physicists suspect that the highest energy GRBs come from stars collapsing and forming a black hole. The black hole then produces a jet of material, moving at close to the speed of light, that pierces through the failing star and sends out blasts of radia...

Switching from a gas stove to an electric induction stove can reduce indoor nitrogen dioxide air pollution, a known health hazard, by more than 50 percent according to new research led by scientists at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the Columbia Climate School. Photo: Ivan Radic via wikimedia Commons The study was carried out as part of a pilot project titled “Out of Gas, In with Justice” led by Northern Manhattan-based nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice. The pilot is the first to evaluate the feasibility and benefits of transitioning from gas to induction stoves in affordable housing. It is also the first study to evaluate the effects of residential cooking electrification in a public housing setting in the U.S. This research comes as New York Ci...

A robot dog equipped with a flamethrower could be used to stop weeds growing on farms, potentially offering a replacement for harmful herbicides. Even highly targeted herbicides can cause environmental problems, affecting local wildlife, and “superweeds” are quickly evolving resistance to the most common weed-killers like glyphosate. In search of an alternative solution, Dezhen Song at Texas A&M University and his colleagues have developed a weed control system that uses a brief burst of heat from a propane-powered flamethrower controlled by a robotic arm, attached to a Spot robot manufactured by Boston Dynamics. Rather than incinerate the weeds, the robot is designed to identify and heat up the centre of the plant, which can stop it growing for se...