Swedish carmaker Volvo announced this week that it will cease manufacturing cars with internal combustion engines in less than a decade, by 2030. This map shows current plans by various national and subnational governments to phase out sales of internal combustion cars. sailthru-media.s3.amazonaws.com/composer/images/sailthru-prod-53o/Global-ICE-phaseout-map-nov2020.png
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Fun science projects from National Geographic! (Note: although no subscription is required, you will need to provide your email address to read the entire article.)
www.nationalgeographic.com/family/article/science-experiments-to-chill-out-your-kids Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Commerce finalized its study of unfair trading practices on flat-rolled sheet aluminum imported from 18 countries (shown in aluminum-gray on this map :-)). New tariffs range from to 2.7% on Greek flat-rolled sheet aluminum to 243% on German sheet aluminum. (These come on top of the 10% aluminum tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, citing national security.) www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-aluminum/u-s-commerce-sets-anti-dumping-duties-on-aluminum-sheet-from-18-countries-idUSKCN2AU2S4?il=0
At this point, the science suggests COVID-19 is likely to be with the human race forever. But what about the next pandemic? Biologists, epidemiologists, and public health officials believe this coronavirus was not the nearly as bad as it could have been -- in terms of fatalities, especially -- and the Big One (possibly an influenza combination? or something lurking in a bat?) is still out there and is likely to arrive on our doorstep within the next couple of decades. This article from The Wall Street Journal by a former director of the Centers for Disease Control considers what the the U.S. and the world need to be doing to prepare for the next pandemic: www.wsj.com/articles/will-we-be-ready-for-the-next-pandemic-11613145677
A new report finds that the planet is losing 1.2 trillion tons of ice each year, up from 760 billion tons in the 1990s, and the pace of ice loss is accelerating. Scientists used satellite data to study land and sea ice and found the areas experiencing the greatest loss of ice are Greenland and Antarctica, where warming water is eating away at glaciers and ice sheets where they meet the sea. Moreover, the report finds that previous estimates fail "to fully account for the role of ocean undercutting" and sea-level rise from melting ice "may be underestimated by 'at least a factor of 2.'” ... “'It’s like cutting the feet off the glacier rather than melting the whole body,' said Eric Rignot, a study co-author and a glacier researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine. 'You melt the feet and the body falls down, as opposed to melting the whole body.'” www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/01/25/ice-melt-quickens-greenland-glaciers
A recent study finds that how Americans view older people varies with the state. States in the South and Northeast, for example, have more negative attitudes toward old people than states in the Pacific Northwest and Rockies. New Jersey was found to have the highest levels of bias against older people. (Map from www.wsj.com/articles/worried-about-ageism-where-you-live-matters-11612198542.)
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