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This article focuses on a study related to global warming. Engineer Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh is proposing a fleet of yachts that sprays water droplets into the clouds as the way to damp down global warming. In a paper presented at a climate-change conference in Edinburgh last week, Salter says that chimneys mounted on a fleet of 500 £1 million sprayer yachts would cancel a year's worth of global warming from carbon dioxide emissions over their 20-year lifetime. Instead of sails, the yachts will be propelled by spinning vertical cylinders known as Flettner rotors. The rotors, which were used to successfully cross the Atlantic in the 1920s, will double as chimneys for the water droplets.

The article discusses several aspects of climate change and its attribution to corporate emissions. It mentions Scott Pruitt, President Donald Trump's administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, refused to agree that carbon-dioxide (CO2) is the main driver of climate change. It also mentions author Myles Allen called for one of the many cash-rich environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the U.S. to buy them.

A recent assessment by climate researchers suggests that if it takes longer to reach net zero emissions, there is a greater risk that global warming will continue for decades or even millennia after greenhouse gas emissions have stopped. This means that we may need to emit even less carbon dioxide than previously thought in order to limit warming to 2°C. While some climate models suggest that surface warming will halt within a few years of emissions stopping, more comprehensive models indicate that there is a 33% chance that the planet will continue to warm past 2.3°C. However, these models do not include all feedbacks, such as the melting of ice sheets. The uncertainties surrounding the timescales of warming and cooling are still not fully understood, but reaching net zero emissions is seen as an important milestone in preventing additional warming. [Extracted from the article]

The articles explores the scientific reasons behind hiccups. Hiccups are sudden contractions of the muscles we use to breathe in. Just after the muscles start to move, the glottis shuts off the windpipe, producing the characteristic hic sound. The ultrasound scans reveal that babies in the womb start hiccuping after two months, before any breathing movements appear. This suggests that hiccups in adults are remnants of some primitive reflex which occur when the brain circuit is accidentally triggered. Yet the purpose of hiccups during pregnancy remains unclear. There is one group of animals in which the combination of the contraction of these muscles and the closure of the glottis does serve as primitive air breathers that still possess gills, such as lungfish, gar and many amphibians. These animals push water across their gills by squeezing their mouth cavity while closing the glottis to stop water getting into the lungs. There are many similarities between hiccuping and gill ventilation in animals like tadpoles. The only cure with any scientific basis is breathing into a paper bag, as this raises the level of carbon dioxide in the blood. INSET: A BRIEF GUIDE TO HICCUPS.

The article focuses on a study by Sylvia Michel at the University of Colorado and colleagues which analyzed whether methane gas came from burning fossil fuels and wood or from wetlands and cow guts. As compared to carbon dioxide, methane gas may be short-lived but with warming effects that is 28 times more potent. Since 2007, the atmospheric concentrations of methane gas have been increasing. In the study, the methane analyzed has less carbon-13 and more carbon-12.

Why does a candle make more smoke just after it has been extinguished? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that vigorous plant growth on the flanks of a volcano can indicate where magma is most likely to spurt out. Satellite images reveal that shrubs and trees grow taller and greener along stripes where the volcano eventually ruptures. Nicolas Houlié from the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues studied satellite images of Mount Etna in Sicily and Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When they compared before and after pictures of the volcanoes they found a significant increase in plant reflectivity and greenness along the eruption fissures. Theories for why this pattern of growth occurs include better water supply in the cracks where the plants grow, and more carbon dioxide seeping out of the ground.

This article focuses on the exchange of letters between Colin Tudge, a genetic modifications sceptic, and two advocates, Chris Leaver and Anthony Trewavas. The hype behind genetically modified crops is driven by commercial companies. A recent study estimates that if half the farmers in the European Union started to grow genetically modified varieties of four crops — maize, oilseed rape, sugar beet and cotton — annual pesticide use on those crops could be reduced by 40 per cent, with additional savings of 20 million liters of tractor fuel and a corresponding decrease in carbon dioxide emissions of 73,000 tonnes. INSET: THE WORD VOTIVE PSYCHOLOGY.

This article presents information on superconductors. The article presents the superconductor designed by scientist Warren Pickett from the University of California. He found that his brown powder, magnesium diboride has lost his resistance at 40 K. To alter this he has sketched out a material that superconducts above room temperature. Superconductors are efficient and have the capacity to prevent tonnes of carbon dioxide from being emitted each year.

The article reports that the use of biomass energy such as burning waste wood and felled trees results in higher carbon dioxide emissions than estimated. It states that the European Union is expected to get 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 202 with 60 percent of that from biomass including burning wood. It comments that carbon dioxide from burning biomass is not calculated in carbon dioxide emissions as they are considered carbon neutral and examines why this is not the case.

The article focuses on the climatic changes during 1940s-1970s, which resulted in global cooling. During this period, the planet seemed to be in the grip of a global freezing. Some climatologist predicted a new ice age. However, they miscalculated the link between climate and the accumulation of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. Finally, far from cooling, since the middle of the 1970s the planet has been warming exceptionally rapidly.

Presents several letters to the editor on science. Impact of the global warming, on climatology; Effect of increased carbon dioxide levels on forest growth; Assessment of the potential impacts of deglaciation on the water resources of the Himalayas.

The article focuses on a research scrutinizing the possibility that the fire within the solar system burns up Earth's carbon dioxide. It references a study by Jeong-Eun Lee of Sejong University in Seoul, South Korea, and colleagues cited in arxiv.org. The team claimed that hot oxygen atoms in the dusty disc would have already merged with carbon, burning it to produce carbon dioxide and other gases, and any solid carbon in the inner solar system would have been extinguished in a few years.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article on carbon dioxide is presented.

The article explains how companies like Planktos are trying to combat global warming by fertilizing regions in the Pacific Ocean with iron in order to induce plankton blooms. Plankton draw carbon dioxide out of the air and into the ocean, which some think will reduce the effects of global warming. The author discusses whether this method will be successful and what the consequences might be if it is not.

This article discusses the green movement of the U.S. and China. Energy use in U.S. buildings is predicted to rise by 25% by the year 2020. In China, it is expected to rise by 50%. Researchers have found that 30% of the global total of man-made CO2 emissions could be cut in a decade because the technology to do so already exists.

This article focuses on the role of oxygen and nitrogen in respiration. Organisms need a source of energy to drive the processes of life. Respiration creates that energy. Molecular oxygen is a very powerful oxidizing agent, reacting with substances such as glucose and releasing energy in the process. Molecular nitrogen on the other hand is relatively unreactive at room temperature and is therefore pretty useless for providing that energy. Also, most life has come to rely on another gas that makes up only 0.03 per cent of the atmosphere, namely carbon dioxide. Photosynthesis depends on it. So life evolves not only to fit the inorganic environment, but to take advantage of inalienable chemical processes.

The article reports that sixty years ago an American second world war liberty ship, the USS Richard Montgomery, sank in the Thames estuary a couple of kilometers from the town of Sheerness in Kent with a cargo of 13,700 bombs. Great Britain continues to take a lead internationally and to push for action from others in tackling climate change. In 2000, the government set out its policy on reducing greenhouse gas emission and the action to be taken to achieve this in its publication "Climate Change: The UK Programme." It will consider the action needed to ensure British moves towards its domestic goal of a 20 per cent cut by 2010 and towards a longer-term goal of a 60 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, the minister said.

A team of chemists from China is claiming to have made small diamonds from carbon dioxide, as of July 26, 2003. "We are changing a waste gas into gems," claims Qianwang Chen, head of the team producing the diamonds at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. The team claims its method could be cheaper and more efficient than some existing methods of synthesizing diamonds, which require pressures of up 5 million atmospheres and temperatures that reach 1400 °C. Chen and his colleagues make their diamonds by reacting carbon dioxide with metallic sodium in a pressurized oven at only 440 °C and 800 atmospheres. After 12 hours, grains of diamond can be separated from the sodium carbonate, graphite and unreacted carbon dioxide that remain.

Reports that burning peat bogs in Indonesia are releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Cause of an increase in global emissions from burning fossil fuels; Amount of carbon stored in Indonesia's peat bogs.