The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just approved the study on measures to curb the climate crisis on which more than 200 authors from around the world have been working for three years. It is the report of Working Group III and is the final component of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report.
Two studies published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases confirm that covid-19 vaccines offer additional protection for those already infected with SARS-CoV-2, especially against severe disease.
Storm surges, one-off events associated with storms that can cause flooding, are rare and highly destructive phenomena. A paper published this week in Nature finds that they have increased since 1960, comparable to the increase in average sea level rise over the same period.
The authors, led by Spaniard Francisco Calafat of the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool, UK, statistically analyse observations of extreme tides from 79 tide gauges on European coasts over the period 1960-2018, and compare them with climate models.
Their results point to an increase in extreme sea levels in the future, something the authors say has implications for coastal planning. So far, the most widely accepted hypothesis is that the frequency of such extreme storm surges would not increase.
A study assesses the health impacts of the 2020 closures in three European cities that implemented different measures: Barcelona, Stockholm and Vienna. The researchers took data on changes in pollution, noise and physical activity at three different points in time. Their findings suggest that, while the reduction in noise and pollution may have been positive for health, the negative consequences of the lack of physical activity were generally greater.
The weekend saw record temperatures in both the Arctic and Antarctica, up to 40°C above normal for this time of year.
The Public Health Commission has updated the Covid-19 Surveillance and Control Strategy, which will come into force on Monday 28 March. From then on, as long as indicators of healthcare utilisation are at low risk, diagnostic testing will focus on vulnerable individuals and settings and severe cases. Surveillance will focus on these groups.
Japan's IBUKI greenhouse gas observation satellites (GOSAT) have just announced the detection of a sharp annual increase in the average atmospheric methane concentration in 2021, the largest since 2011. European (ESA) and US (NASA) space agencies, as well as ground stations, have also detected spikes.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is meeting between 21 March and 1 April to approve the study on measures to curb the climate crisis, on which more than 200 authors from all over the world have been working for three years. The text will be published on 4 April.
"According to a study" is a phrase that is as used as it is inaccurate: not everything that journals publish is a study, nor have all their articles been peer-reviewed. As in traditional media, there are different genres ranging from Letters to Editorials. Here are some of the most important ones.
The publications in which scientific results are made public, known as papers in the jargon, are sometimes newsworthy, that is, what they report can be narrated to a wider - non-scientific - audience as journalistic news. But in the paper-news transition the message is formatted very differently.