In March 2017, at a small summit in Washington, DC, two Harvard professors, David Keith and Frank Keutsch, laid out plans to conduct what would have been the primary photo voltaic geoengineering experiment within the stratosphere.

The fundamental idea behind photo voltaic geoengineering is that by spraying sure particles excessive above the planet, people might replicate some quantity of daylight again into area as a way of counteracting local weather change. However critics have argued that an intervention that would tweak the whole planet’s local weather system is just too harmful to check in the true world.

The single, small balloon experiment got here to symbolize all of those fears—and, in the long run, it was greater than the researchers had been ready to tackle. Final month, a decade after the mission was first proposed, Harvard formally introduced the mission’s termination. So what went flawed? And what does that failure say concerning the latitude that researchers should discover such a controversial topic? Learn the complete story.

—James Temple

Why the lifetime of nuclear crops is getting longer

The common age of reactors in nuclear energy crops around the globe is creeping up. Within the US, which has extra working reactors than some other nation, the typical reactor is 42 years outdated. Practically 90% of reactors in Europe have been round for 30 years or extra. 

Older reactors, particularly smaller ones, have been shut down in droves attributable to financial pressures, significantly in areas with different cheap sources of electrical energy, like low cost pure gasoline. However there might nonetheless be loads of life left in older nuclear reactors.