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Category: climatology – Page 80

Musk’s focus on asking and answering the right questions has played a major role in the Tesla CEO’s success, as recently reported by Inc.com. With the billionaire’s net worth floating around $200 billion, even critics have to admit that a few different factors put Musk in that position, and his business savvy is definitely one of them.

Beyond being a founder of both Tesla and SpaceX, Musk’s brands have increased mainstream awareness of both EVs, a necessary step forward for the climate, and for space exploration, a huge and growing industry, for lack of a better description.

But asking the right questions is central to Musk’s ethos as a CEO, and he’s revealed this time and time again. Musk’s leadership style has discouraged the chain of command mentality in favor of the free flow of information, and he has used this to encourage anyone to search for the right questions at the right times — a strategy crucial to Musk’s approach.

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As physicists dig deeper into the quantum realm, they are discovering an infinitesimally small world composed of a strange and surprising array of links, knots, and winding. Some quantum materials exhibit magnetic whirls called skyrmions — unique configurations sometimes described as “subatomic hurricanes.” Others host a form of superconductivity that twists into vortices.

Now, in an article published in the journal Nature, a Princeton-led team of scientists has discovered that electrons in quantum matter can link one another in strange new ways. The work brings together ideas in three areas of science – condensed matter physics, topology, and knot theory – in a new way, raising unexpected questions about the quantum properties of electronic systems.

Topology is the branch of theoretical mathematics that studies geometric properties that can be deformed but not intrinsically changed. Topological quantum states first came to the public’s attention in 2016 when three scientists, including Duncan Haldane, who is Princeton’s Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics and Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics, were awarded the Nobel Prize for their theoretical prediction of topology in electronic materials.

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While volcanic eruptions and earthquakes serve as immediate reminders that Earth’s interior is anything but peaceful, there are also other, more elusive, dynamic processes taking place deep down below our feet. Using information from ESA’s Swarm satellite mission, scientists have discovered a completely new type of magnetic wave that sweeps across the outermost part of Earth’s outer core every seven years. This fascinating finding, presented today at ESA’s Living Planet Symposium, opens a new window into a world we can never see.

Earth’s magnetic field is like a huge bubble protecting us from the onslaught of cosmic radiation and charged particles carried by powerful winds that escape the Sun’s gravitational pull and stream across the Solar System. Without our magnetic field, life as we know it could not exist.

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Volcanic eruptions remind us that the inside of our planet isn’t exactly tranquil, but there’s plenty of completely unknown stuff happening beneath our feet.

ESA’s Swarm satellite mission has detected a completely new type of magnetic wave that sweeps across the outermost part of Earth’s outer core every seven years.

The finding could help us to understand more about Earth’s magnetic field, without which life as we know it could not exist.

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The unexpected discovery of “ghost” fossils belonging to tiny, ancient organisms could provide insights about how life reacts to climate change in Earth’s oceans.

Looking through a powerful microscope, researchers were stunned to see the impressions left by single-celled plankton, or fossilized nannoplankton, that lived millions of years ago – especially since they were analyzing something else.

A study detailing the findings published Thursday in the journal Science.

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A team of NASA scientists has spotted strange flashes of light known as “transient luminous events” (TLEs) in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter.

Events like these have never been observed on another world until now — though here on Earth, scientists have observed similar flashes of light that occur far above lightning storms here on Earth, triggered by discharges of electricity in the upper atmosphere.

For a while, astronomers have theorized their existence in Jupiter’s massive, turbulent atmosphere. Thanks to new data collected by the ultraviolet spectrograph instrument (UVS) attached to NASA’s Juno spacecraft, a small space probe that’s been orbiting the gas giant since 2016, the team was finally able to confirm their presence, as detailed in a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

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A new study is revealing that a reversal in the Earth’s magnetic poles 42,000 to 41,000 years ago may have led to environmental crises that resulted in mass extinctions. The period is called the Laschamps excursion and the research used precise carbon dating obtained from ancient tree fossils to study its effects.

The team details how they created a precise radiocarbon record around the time of the “Laschamps geomagnetic reversal about 41,000 years ago from the rings of New Zealand swamp kauri trees.”

“This record reveals a substantial increase in the carbon-14 content of the atmosphere culminating during the period of weakening magnetic field strength preceding the polarity switch.” The team concluded that the “geomagnetic field minimum caused substantial changes in atmospheric ozone concentration that drove synchronous global climate and environmental” with their model investigating the consequences of this event.

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Costa Rica has declared a state of emergency after ransomware hackers crippled computer networks across multiple government agencies, including the Finance Ministry.

The official declaration, published on a government website Wednesday, said that the attack was “unprecedented in the country” and that it interrupted the country’s tax collection and exposed citizens’ personal information.

The hackers initially broke into the Finance Ministry on April 12, it said. They were able to spread to other agencies, including the Ministry of Science, Technology and Telecommunications and the National Meteorological Institute.

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I’ve noticed a tremendous change in how companies invest in their ESG initiatives. No longer is it just their peers or employees holding them accountable; it’s also national and international governing bodies. In 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission created an ESG disclosure framework for consistent and comparable reporting metrics, and just recently the organization amended that framework to deepen the level of reporting required from organizations. And in March of this year, the U.K. Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures mandated U.K.-registered companies and financial institutions to disclose climate-related financial information.

It’s this very shift that has convinced organizational leaders that just having ESG initiatives isn’t enough anymore. It’s the ability to accurately and consistently report ESG metrics that may ultimately make the difference for a company to thrive in the next era of sound business practices.

When you look at this new challenge for ESG reporting, there’s simply no denying it: The single most important factor in successfully adhering to ESG standards is data.

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