The current climate crisis is not only leaving us with a historically warm winter and a decade of record temperatures, but is overlapping with an almost unprecedented energy crisis. Securing energy supplies in a sustainable way is now a challenge where the war in Ukraine adds to the complexity.
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.
Nearly three and a half million Ukrainians have fled their country; half of them are children. Ensuring their physical well-being is a priority, but we cannot forget the effect that war can have on children's mental health.
"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.
A journalistic article follows an inverted pyramid structure in which the most important things are at the beginning. A paper does not present its results and conclusions until the end. This is a suggested reading order, depending on the level of depth we want to reach.
Scientific studies are regularly published in various scientific journals. Science journalists who have contacted the journal and registered have prior access to them under an embargo that they undertake to respect. This is an advantageous system, but it is not without its critics.