2 November 2019 | New Scientist | 25$50 million a year to try to
“control, delay or block” policies
to tackle climate change? You
should stop taking money from
the oil companies that are driving
the current crisis.
From Marcus Swann,
Lymm, Cheshire, UK
BP makes a clear call for decisive
and immediate action. Its group
chief executive says: “The world
needs to take urgent action... it is
critical that everyone plays their
part.” Apart from the assertion
that our growing world really
needs ever more energy, the rest
of the statement would, taken at
face value, be worthy of applause.
But it is a sad indictment that BP
hasn’t taken its own message to
heart. Its dedication to being “part
of the solution” extends as far as
promising to invest $0.5 billion
of its $300 billion turnover
or $17 billion profit before tax
in low-carbon activities.
Far from “changing what it
means to be an energy company”,
it seems to be demonstrating
exactly what being an energy
company has been thus far:
marketing, spin and maximising
exploitation of the oil-based
business that is largely responsible
for our current and future climate
problems. We can only hope that
BP starts putting its money and
considerable talents where its
mouth is, or that its investors take
its advice and choose to invest
more wisely for the future, for
the sake of all our children.
It’s a dog’s life in odour
identification research
12 October, p 42
From John Dobson,
Allendale, Northumberland, UK
Camille Ferdenzi has discovered
that each person’s scent is unique.
My dog tells me that her dog could
have told her that, if she had asked.
A whole new set of
meanings for big hair
28 September, p 15
From David Aldred,
Brough, East Yorkshire, UK
Alice Klein reports on a baseball
cap intended to boost hair growth
by using a wireless patch that
administers an electric current.
This reminded me of Natalie
Salmanowitz describing the
Thync device (16 April 2016,
p 24). Its small electric current is
supposed to boost brain function,
among other things. In the future,
will we spot people with improved
brains by the extravagant
proportions of their coiffures?Galactic brain says resist
rocket-powered hyperbole
5 October, p 5
From Martin Pitt, Leeds, UK
For Elon Musk to give the name
Starship to a rocket intended to
go to Mars might be considered
something of an exaggeration.
It is, though, nothing compared
with the hype of suborbital hops
promised by Virgin Galactic. ❚For the record
❚ Couldn’t see the trillions for
the billions: the estimated number
of trees in boreal conifer forests
is 0.74 trillion (5 October, p 34).
❚ Check, mate: a game of chess
is won when one player’s king
is in check and they have no way
to remove the threat (Feedback,
7 September).
❚ The equinox is the exact moment
when the sun crosses the plane
of Earth’s equator. What varies
with your latitude is when your
day and night are of equal length
(21 September, p 51).
❚ The Hub for Biotechnology in the
Built Environment is a partnership
between Northumbria and Newcastle
universities (19 October, p 24).30 years ago, New Scientist
was worried about the potentially
catastrophic effects of space junk“WITHIN 50 years, enough
satellites and debris could be
orbiting the Earth to lead to a
catastrophic train of collisions,
according to a study for the West
German government. The result
of the collisions would be a belt
of small debris which would
make flight in space impossible
for several centuries.”
That was the stark warning contained in our issue of
21 October 1989. Awareness of the problem stretched
back to 1978, when NASA astrophysicist Donald
Kessler raised the alarm about a possible “ablation
cascade”, in which objects abandoned in low Earth orbit
would repeatedly collide over time, creating an orbital
cloud of deadly, fast-moving shrapnel that no future
spacecraft could hope to safely get through – and
would only be dissipated by gravity over centuries.
That was a very real possibility according to the
German study, Helen Gavaghan reported from a
meeting of the International Astronautical Federation
in Spain. The researchers responsible concluded
“that the critical mass for a chain reaction is between
two and three times the mass of junk that they assume
to be in space now”. (At that time, some 7000 objects,
such as the upper stages of rockets or old satellites,
were known to orbit Earth.) They predicted a
catastrophic collision and chain reaction “taking place
anything between 20 and 50 years from now”.
That hasn’t come to pass as yet, but space debris
remains a huge problem. The smaller the debris,
the more numerous and deadly the cloud becomes.
As of January 2019, more than 128 million bits
of debris smaller than 1 centimetre are estimated
to be in orbit around Earth. In 1983, a paint fleck
0.2 millimetres across chipped the windscreen
of the space shuttle Challenger. In 2006, another
piece of debris took a chip out of a heavily reinforced
window on the International Space Station. Given
they were travelling faster than any bullet, if either
fragment had hit an astronaut during a space walk,
it would have gone straight through them.
Proposed clean-up methods involve giant magnets,
harpoons, nets and an electrically charged “space
whip”. They will have to move fast: the accidental
collision of two satellites in 2009, plus intentional
destruction of orbiting satellites by China in 2007
and India this year have sharply increased the amount
of space junk out there. Simon IngsTo find more from the archives, visit
newscientist.com/old-scientistViews From the archives
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