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With Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party now on its honeymoon thanks to a supermajority in the House of Commons, what are the environmental challenges ahead?
We asked Simon Lewis, professor of global change studies at University College London, about the new government’s priorities for tackling the climate crisis, the transition to renewable energy and the Tories’ environmental record after 14 years in power.
Meanwhile, four test astronauts will spend 378 days in a Mars habitat simulation.
The space agency’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog mission featured four volunteers confined to an environment that looked and felt like the Red Planet, called Mars Dune Alpha.
The habitat was 3D printed at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The team conducted missions including Mars walks and agriculture, while communicating with the outside world only through external ground control.
The test, which ends this weekend, is intended to calculate the nutritional, exercise and health requirements for future Mars missions.
In addition, space scientists at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh are working on a major new project to search for exoplanets in the solar system.
We hear about their development of an “astrocomb” to support the South African Large Telescope project, with Richard McCracken, associate professor and laser expert.
And the rest
The farewell to floppy disks in Japan, the giant fanged swamp creature that was “the largest predator before the dinosaurs” and why song melodies “have become simpler since the 1950s.”
Listen via the player above, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you stream.
Here’s an automated transcript of today’s episode:
Hi, I’m Mark Blunden and this is The Standard’s Tech and Science Daily podcast.
Coming soon: the space laser comb, hunting for rare exoplanets.
But first, with Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party enjoying something of a honeymoon thanks to a collective supermajority, what are the environmental challenges ahead?
We asked Simon Lewis, Professor of Global Change Science at University College London, about the new government’s priorities for tackling the climate crisis.
I think that’s going to be one of the biggest challenges, but not just climate change.
So it’s about tackling carbon emissions while at the same time stimulating the economy and tackling the cost of living crisis.
They try to integrate these three things to give it a real boost.
And in particular the issuing of new oil and gas permits in the North Sea.
And that’s really important from a climate perspective, and when you combine that with major investments in onshore wind, solar and offshore wind through the new Great British Energy Company.
Just received $8 billion in funding.
And we wanted to know more about Labour’s plans to transition from reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.
There is, and it is stated in the Labour Manifesto, a kind of careful transition for the workers involved in the North Sea.
But of course they do have the skills needed for the transition.
And I think it will be a lower bill for ordinary people, because the gas and oil that comes out of the North Sea will be sold on the international market.
What you really need is cheaper energy from renewable sources, which can reduce your bills.
Then there is the crucial issue of holding water companies accountable.
And with those terrible sewage discharges into rivers and coasts, we asked Simon what we know about it.
The Labour Party manifesto is very vague about what they are going to do about this problem. The public has spoken out about the disgrace of dumping raw sewage into our rivers and coastlines.
They say they are imposing special measures on the water companies, but they don’t say what those special measures are.
So it’s unclear what exactly they’re going to do about this problem.
So I think it’s definitely a film to keep an eye on.
Finally, we wanted his verdict on the Tories’ environmental policy, after 14 years and five prime ministers.
I think they are doing particularly badly on the environment.
And I think one thing stands out.
At a national level, Rishi Sunak has broken the consensus on how to tackle climate change in the long term.
So he went back on the policy, using some divisive rhetoric to break the previous unity and turn it into a new branch of the culture war.
And that really did a lot of damage.
And it’s not just damaging to the UK, but also to having a coherent policy to tackle climate change while improving people’s lives.
But it is also a disaster internationally.
I am a climate change scientist.
I have sat on the international stage with Rishi Sunak and his speeches have been received like a bombshell.
And on the international stage we lacked credibility.
After this, a team of four NASA test astronauts will spend more than a year in an immersive simulation of the Martian environment.
The space agency’s analogous mission to study crew health and performance involved volunteers living in an environment that looked and felt like the Red Planet, called Mars June Alpha.
The habitat was 3D printed at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The team carried out the missions, which included walking on Mars and agricultural activities. However, communication with the outside world was only via external control on the ground.
The test, which ends this weekend, is intended to calculate the nutritional, exercise and health requirements for future Mars missions.
To stay in space: scientists from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh have started a major new project to search for exoplanets in the solar system.
Exoplanets are planets that orbit a star other than the sun. The team is using a particularly large telescope that allows them to peer deep into the cosmic void.
The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) is the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere.
The mirror has a diameter of 9.2 meters.
It consists of 91 individual hexagonal segments and is located approximately four hours drive north of Cape Town.
We started working with them in 2016, when we tested a prototype laser frequency comb on their telescope.
Richard McCracken, associate professor and laser expert at Heriot-Watt, explains what they are looking for.
Astronomers want to measure the starlight and the different colors they get from the stars as accurately as possible.
They also want to see if there are changes in the spectrum of a star over time. These changes could indicate that there might be another planet, an exoplanet, orbiting that distant star.
And how it works.
They use a spectrograph.
It is a tool that allows us to visualize the rainbow of colors emanating from the star.
If you zoom in on the colors you will see a really high definition.
And if we want to measure a change in the spectrum over time, we need some kind of local ruler, an absolute standard against which we can compare the starlight.
And this is what we have developed at Heriot-Watt University.
And that’s thanks to a crucial piece of technology developed in Edinburgh.
We built a laser frequency comb.
It is essentially an optical ruler, a ruler of light that is projected onto the spectrograph together with the starlight. This allows us to measure these tiny spectral shifts with extreme precision.
Japan has now finally said goodbye to the humble floppy disk, which, amazingly enough, was still the medium for filing official documents until last month.
3.5-inch drives, which can store less than 1.5 megabytes of data, are now a thing of the past as part of a campaign to digitize bureaucracy.
The Japanese government’s digital agency has now repealed all 1,034 regulations governing the use of these technologies, except for one environmental regulation related to vehicle recycling.
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Stay here for more news from the world of technology and science, plus the largest predator before the dinosaurs.
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Welcome back. Research from the National Science Foundation at the Field Museum in Chicago and the University of Buenos Aires suggests that a giant salamander-like creature was a top predator during the Ice Age, before the dinosaurs arrived.
Gaiasia jennyae, a swamp creature with a head shaped like a toilet seat, had interlocking jaws with which it grabbed its prey as it swam past.
The fossil was found in the Gaius Formation in Namibia. The first part of the name is derived from this and the second part is named after the late British paleontologist Professor Jenny Clack, a specialist in the evolution of early tetrapods.
They are four-legged vertebrates that evolved from lobed, thinner fish.
Gaiasia jennyae is known to have had a skull over two feet long and lived in swampy waters for 40 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged.
And finally, computer scientists at Queen Mary University of London have discovered how the melodies of popular songs have become significantly simpler since the 1950s.
They analyzed hundreds of hit songs from the past 70 years and found a significant decrease in the complexity of rhythm and pitch in song melodies.
They said the biggest changes, or what they describe as bursts of change, occurred in the years 1975 to 2000, when music genres like new wave, disco and stadium rock became more popular in the mid-1970s and hip-hop became more prominent in the early 2000s.
The team also found moderate evidence for what has been described as a melodic revolution in 1966, around the time that major music studios began using new technologies such as software applications to record, edit and produce music.
You’re in the know. Come back at 4pm for the latest general election news, interviews and analysis from The Standard’s Westminster team. We’ll be back at 1pm on Monday. See you then.