It’s called a sudden stratospheric warming event — and, unlike the name might suggest, the rare phenomenon could spell a burst of bitterly cold weather for Australia and New Zealand over coming weeks.

If so, it could be the southern hemisphere’s own version of the icy “beast from the east” that paralysed Europe in 2018, reported the New Zealand Herald.

A sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) event kicks off when the temperature of the stratosphere — that’s 30km to 50km above ground — over the South Pole climbs by more than 25C. Meteorologists from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) think it’s likely this is about to happen next week.

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A team of researchers from Trinity College Dublin and the Universität Mainz has developed the world’s smallest engine.

In a backyard shed in the snowy town of Nederland in the United States lies the frozen corpse of Bredo Morstoel.

The Norwegian man died 30 years ago. If plans go accordingly, he may one day walk again.

Inside Bredo’s timber mausoleum, a man named Brad Wickham throws bricks of dry ice onto a metal casket.

Yes, bubonic plague—the Black Death that killed millions in the Middle Ages— is still out there. It even infects and kills people in the United States. Without treatment, half the people infected die, but the Food and Drug Administration approved ciprofloxacin in 2015 to treat plague, and it has just successfully been used to stop the infection in five people.

Before ciprofloxacin was approved for use, people infected with Yersinia pestis, the plague-causing bacteria, were treated with streptomycin or doxycycline. Streptomycin kills the bacteria, but has serious side effects, and doxycycline inhibits the bacteria, but doesn’t completely kill it.

Humans usually get plague after being bitten by a rodent flea that is carrying the Y. pestis bacteria. Rock squirrels, wood rats, ground squirrels, prairie dogs, chipmunks, mice, voles, and rabbits also can become infected with plague from a flea bite, and fleas that bite them can, in turn, transmit the infection to humans by biting them.

⏪🕰 2009 – Using a new modeling program, Lab researchers predict the collision between the defunct Russian Cosmos 2251 and privately-owned American Iridium 33 satellite months before it happened.

Learn more 🛰→ https://str.llnl.gov/content/pages/past-issues-pdfs/2009.07.pdf