413 search results

The Peace Dividend: why Good Friday Agreement matters to us and Earth
Society, Politics & Law

The Peace Dividend: why Good Friday Agreement matters to us and Earth

...carbon emissions (the driver of the greenhouse effect, and therefore global heating), but about all the ways in which our economy interacts with the earth, it extracts and transforms energy and matter to produce the things we need (and, more unsustainably, want). The earth can only sustainably reproduce about 7 tonnes of material per person per year – the Northern...
The ice-covered ocean worlds of the outer Solar System
Science, Maths & Technology

The ice-covered ocean worlds of the outer Solar System

...carbon dioxide into sugars and other biologically useful molecules, a role normally fulfilled by photosynthesis in plants on the Earth’s surface. Studies using data from the Cassini mission have shown that some of the microorganisms that live in hydrothermal vents deep in Earth’s oceans could survive in Enceladus’s ocean, using hydrogen as their main source of...
Supporting sustainable and responsible space exploration
Science, Maths & Technology

Supporting sustainable and responsible space exploration

...carbon fibre, adhesives, lubricants, greases and more – each with its own function and its own history of cleanliness. A huge amount of industry’s investment in planetary protection goes towards identifying the ways contamination of spacecraft happens and how it can be contained. For example, a common approach is to isolate critical areas of the spacecraft where...
Introduction to Planetary Protection
Science, Maths & Technology

Introduction to Planetary Protection

...carbon-based, but it is a complex system. So, AI could satisfy some of the criteria for life, especially as it becomes more sophisticated. You may have different levels of understanding of each of the examples and so have quite different notes to those here, but this will have made you realise that defining life is very complex and may even change as we come to understand...
How are scientists testing for the growth of antibiotic resistance?
Health, Sports & Psychology

How are scientists testing for the growth of antibiotic resistance?

...carbon and nitrogen; in this case inactivation (resistance) is really just digestion. Perhaps bacteriocins, if not antibiotics, exist not to help bacteria but rather to ensure their own survival. In an experiment published in 2013, Inglis and colleagues showed that bacteriocins can act primarily as selfish genetic elements promoting their own transmission in the...
The Silver Bridge Disaster: Stresses and strains
Science, Maths & Technology

The Silver Bridge Disaster: Stresses and strains

...carbon, heat-treated steel which, presumably, he thought meant that you could build a less substantial structure. Undoubtedly he expected lower ‘live’ loading than in Pittsburgh. But each bridge was a much longer span and so the loads at the tops of the chains in the towers would have been greater than in the bridges in Pittsburgh. The towers themselves were less...
EU Referendum - Economy
Society, Politics & Law

EU Referendum - Economy

...carbon emissions restrictions and safer banking regulations in a way that the UK on its own might not. The union also prevents the effectiveness of member states’ policies being blocked by the actions or inactions of other European countries, through coordination in the many areas where decisions by one country (or the big businesses based in it) have cross-border...
Life in the Palaeozoic
Nature & Environment

Life in the Palaeozoic

...carbonate about 0.2 mm across, found in late Precambrian strata about 550 Ma old. The unknown organisms that produced them were living at the same time as the Ediacaran fauna. SAQ 1 What, in general, was different about the size of fossils with hard shelly parts in the earliest Cambrian, compared with late Precambrian life such as the Ediacaran organisms? Answer The...
Level 1: Introductory 12 hrs