After many decades of growth, China’s population could begin to shrink this year, suggest data released yesterday by China’s National Bureau of Statistics. The numbers show that in 2021, China’s birth rate fell for the fifth year in a row, to a record low of 7.52 per 1000 people. Based Read more…
According to NASA researchers, the power of a massive volcanic eruption that took place on Saturday near the island nation of Tonga was equivalent to around 10 megatons of TNT. “That means the explosive force was more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, Read more…
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to unveil its measure of how close human civilisation is to the edge of extinction. On 24 October 1962, an American nuclear chemist, Harrison Brown, started to pen a guest editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just as the Cuban missile crisis reached Read more…
The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said. Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit Read more…
Indonesia has announced that its new capital will be called Nusantara, meaning “archipelago” in Javanese. The country’s parliament approved a bill to relocate the capital from Jakarta, which is rapidly sinking. The idea of building a new capital 1,300km (800 miles) away on the island of Borneo was first proposed Read more…
1.77 million people live in South Australia, speading across 984,321 square kilometres (or 380,048 square miles), according to Wikipedia. Today the Sydney Morning Herald announced that South Australia “sourced an average of just over 100 per cent of the electricity it needed from renewable power for 6 and a half Read more…
2021 was actually cooler than 2020, points out Wired science journalist Matt Simon. So is that good news? No. One reason for cooler temperatures in 2021 was likely La Niña, a band of cold water in the Pacific. It’s the product of strong trade winds that scour the ocean, pushing Read more…