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Daily briefing: Thousand years of coral show El Niños are getting stronger
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Robots compete during a combat event at the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. Credit: Lintao Zhang/Getty
At the second annual World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, a human-sized robot sprinted faster than any human has before, among other physical feats. But when it comes to tasks most of us would actually want a robot to do, sprinting is low on the list. “If I ask you which is harder — folding laundry or doing a backflip — most people will say folding laundry is way easier,” says computer scientist Karen Liu. “But for humanoids, doing a task that we do in our daily lives is actually way harder than a backflip.”
A reconstruction of sea surface temperatures based on the geochemistry of Galápagos coral skeletons suggests that more strong El Niño events have been happening over the past 100 years as fossil-fuel emissions heat the world, compared to the millennium before the industrial revolution. However, the interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere that drive El Niño events are complex, so there is still uncertainty about how cycles of Pacific temperature will change this century. “Corals give us a time machine to look into the past,” says palaeoclimatologist Julia Cole. “They don’t give us a time machine to look into the future.”
On 30 August, NASA’s long-awaited Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is planned to make its ascent into Earth’s orbit. With its crisp infrared vision and expansive field of view, Roman is a powerhouse: one month of Roman’s Milky Way observations would take about a century for the Hubble Space Telescope. It should give scientists insights into the early Universe and the mysterious force called dark energy, and give a huge boost to the number of planets we can detect outside the Solar System.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope undergoes vibration testing before its launch, scheduled for 30 August. Credit: Sydney Rohde/NASA/Roman Space Telescope (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
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