Humor4u

  A recent study has proved that the intensity of exercise matters to reduce the risk of dementia and mortality caused by cancer or heart disease, according to CNBC reports . The article is suitable for B2 students, but there are links to JAMA Neurology and JAMA Internal Medicine leading to the scientific paper, Ahmadi et al, European Heart Journal, 2022 , which is more suitable for C2 students and Medicine professionals. In the CNBC article you can find some interesting words like: a step, to go about [walking], to keep up with a pace , to lower, to be committed to [a daily walk], burst , early death, to peak at [10,000 steps each day], to drop [risk of dementia], purposeful, to review the data, [to walk] briskly , [it] proved to be beneficial, a condition , a device, to monitor [phisical activity]. Time magazine also reports  on a second study by  Dempsey et al, European Heart Journal 2022 , which also studied the intensity of the effort and the time spent. Tara Law e...

[ Sam Carana: "There is no carbon budget!" ] In the above image, the atmosphere is presented as a "bucket" filling with greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuel use from 1870 to 2020. The image depicts the idea that there is some carbon budget left, before 1.5°C above pre-industrial will be reached. The Global Carbon Project has just issued an update of what it refers to as the Global Carbon Budget .  [ adapted from Global Carbon Budget 2022 ] The Global Carbon Project insists that there still is some carbon budget left, even as global fossil fuel C₂O emissions in 2021 were higher than 2020, and are projected to be higher again in 2022 than 2021, as illustrated by the image on the right. Arctic-news has long said that the suggestion of a carbon budget is part of a narrative that polluters seek to spread, i.e. that there was some budget left to be divided among polluters, as if polluters could safely continue to pollute for years to come before thresholds ...

The Mid-term elections are the real test to gauge political trends across the USA every four years. In Washington, the focus is on the control of Congress, that is, the House of Representatives and the Senate, the legistative branch of the constitution. In 2022, the key political issues were democracy and abortion rights for the Democrats, and the economy and crime for the Republicans, but what was really at stake was the political fight to control key local offices across the country, like state attorneys and governors of swing states like Georgia, Pensilvania, Arizona or Nevada, which will oversee the fairness of the next presidential election in 2024,  The New York Times editorializes  in this opinion article. The results of the Mid-term elections show a country that is split into two halves, with minimum gains for the Republicans in the House of Representatives (please, google "Midterm Elections 2022 Results" for the latest update). The Democrats keep control of urban are...

The upcoming El Niño The above image shows a forecast for August 2023 of the sea surface temperature anomaly in degrees Celsius, from tropicaltidbits.com . The forecast shows temperatures that are higher than average (based on 1984-2009 model climatology) for the tropical Pacific region indicative of an  El Niño  event.  By contrast, the above forecast for November 2022 shows temperatures in the tropical Pacific region that are much lower than average, indicating that we're still in the depths of a persistent La Niña.  By comparison, the above nullschool.net image shows the sea surface temperature anomaly for August 15, 2022, i.e. less than three months ago, when sea surface temperature anomalies in the tropical Pacific region were similar to what they are now, while anomalies in the Arctic were much higher than they are now. Moving from the bottom of the current La Niña to the peak of a strong El Niño could make a difference of more than half a degree Celsius, as i...