Tag Archives: maximum

What’s the Maximum Amount of Meat for a Sustainable Diet?

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You can enjoy a healthy and sustainable diet without completely eliminating meat. Recent research.

Scientists at the Denmark Institute of Technology have analyzed 2,500 foods and concluded that consuming less than 255g of pork or chicken weekly is beneficial for both the environment and your health.

“We understand that the planet faces significant environmental challenges, while millions are dealing with hunger and malnutrition,” stated Dr. Caroline Helev Guevara from the University of Technology, Denmark, who led the research. BBC Science Focus.

“While there’s a strong emphasis on increasing plant-based food consumption, it’s still uncertain how much of it is necessary and whether these changes can truly have a positive impact.”

Agriculture utilizes 70% of the world’s freshwater – Credit: Getty Images/Pete Starman

The team led by Guevara examined 11 different diets, including options with red or white meat, pescetarian, vegetarian, vegan, and various flexible diets, to determine if they were “sufficient.”

They formulated thousands of food combinations within these dietary patterns, evaluating both their nutritional value and environmental impact.

Environmental effects were assessed in five key areas: carbon dioxide emissions, land use, water consumption, biodiversity loss, and fertilizer-contaminated water.

The findings revealed that it is possible to nourish the global population healthily without excessively harming the planet, with a variety of dietary choices available.

“We possess enough resources to provide healthy, nutritious foods to the global populace without surpassing environmental limits,” said Guevara. “This is promising news.”

The research identified around 100,000 healthy and sustainable food combinations. While vegan and vegetarian diets showed the greatest benefits, those including less than 255g of pork and chicken were also feasible—equivalent to two chicken breasts or one large pork chop.

The only option that was entirely off the table was lean meat, as it was deemed less viable due to its higher environmental impact relative to the nutrition it delivers.

“Producing lean meat generates more greenhouse gas emissions (mainly methane) than poultry and pork, mainly due to how ruminants digest their food.”

However, although such diets are feasible, their practical implementation may pose challenges.

“A significant shift in our food consumption habits is essential right now,” Guevara noted. “Our research focuses on what can physically be done, not what is socially or economically accessible. Structural changes are necessary to turn these sustainable diets into reality.”

About our experts

Caroline Helev Guevara is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Environmental Resources Engineering, University of Technology, Denmark. She investigates the impact of human activities and industries on the environment.

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Source: www.sciencefocus.com

Physicists at Catlin determine the maximum weight of neutrinos

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Physicists of the Karlsrue Tritium Neutrino (Catlin) experiment have reported so far the most accurate measurement of the upper mass limit of neutrinos, establishing it as 0.45 electron volts (EV), less than a millionth of the electron mass.

Interior view of the main spectrometer of catrin. Image credit: M. Zacher/Katrin Collaboration.

Neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe and exist as three different types or flavors: Electron Neutrino, Muon Neutrino, and Tau Neutrino.

These flavors vibrate. In other words, a single neutron can be converted to each type when it moves, providing compelling evidence that neutrinos have masses that contradict the original assumptions of massless neutrinos in the standard model.

But their exact mass remains one of the great mysteries of particle physics.

in New paper In the journal Sciencethe physicists from the Catlin collaboration present the results of the first five measurement campaigns of the Catlin experiment.

“The catrin experiment determines the mass of neutrinos by analyzing the beta decay of tritium,” they explained.

“During this decay, the neutrons are converted into protons, releasing both electron and electron antioxidant, the latter being neutrino antiparticles.”

“We can infer the mass of neutrinos by analyzing the distribution of total disintegration energy between the emitted electrons and the electron antioxidants.”

For 259 days between 2019 and 2021, Catlin physicists measured approximately 36 million electrons of energy. This is a dataset of 6 times the previous run.

The findings establish the strictest laboratory base upper limit for effective electron neutrino masses and place them below 0.45 eV at a 90% confidence level.

This result shows a third improvement in the mass limit of neutrinos, and doubles the previous limit.

“For this result, we analyzed five measurement campaigns. The total data collection from 2019 to 2021 is about a quarter of the total data expected from Catlin,” said Dr. Catlin Valerius, one of the two co-spokemens for the Catlin experiment and a physicist at the Karl-Thru Institute.

“In each campaign, we gained new insights and further optimized the experimental conditions,” said Dr. Suzanne Mertens, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics and the Institute of Technology Munich.

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Max Aker et al. (Catlin collaboration). 2025. Direct neutrino mass measurements based on 259 days of catrin data. Science 388 (6743): 180-185; doi: 10.1126/science.adq9592

Source: www.sci.news

Solar maximum increases chances of auroras.

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overview

  • A recent flurry of solar storms suggests the Sun is at its peak as part of an 11-year cycle.
  • The active period is likely to continue into next year, and more auroras may appear.
  • Next month, NASA will take an up-close look at solar activity as the Parker Solar Probe makes its closest approach to the sun ever.

The sun is awake.

Earth’s star has become more active in recent months, with giant flares erupting from the surface and streams of plasma and charged particles spewing into space. Several solar storms have been directed towards our planet, causing intense magnetic storms and the dazzling glow of the aurora borealis.

Experts say a storm of solar explosions after years of relative calm and calm is a sure sign that the star has entered a busy phase of its natural cycle, or solar maximum.

The active period is likely to continue into next year, with the potential for more solar storms and spectacular aurora borealis.

“This is definitely the season for major solar storms,” ​​said Kelly Kolek, a program scientist in NASA’s Heliophysics Division. “I think we’ll see the sky lit up again by the northern lights.”

Aurora photographed over Kiruna, Sweden on March 7th.
Leon Neal/Getty Images File

Later this month, NASA will get a close-up look at intense solar activity when the agency’s Parker Solar Probe makes its closest approach ever to the sun on December 24th.

The spacecraft is on an orbit that swoops to within 3.86 million miles of the Sun’s surface. This is closer than any other artifact in history. It is predicted that it could fly through the sun’s plasma plumes and fly into the star’s active regions.

“If you think of an American football field, if the Earth is on one side and the sun is on the other side, this is like going to the sun’s 4-yard line,” Kolek said.

Parker Solar Probe after heat shield installation in a clean room in Titusville, Florida, 2018.
Johns Hopkins APL / Ed Whitman / NASA

The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 with a mission to study the sun’s atmosphere, an extremely hot region known as the corona. Last month, the car-sized spacecraft flew nearby in a maneuver that helped slingshot Venus closer to the sun.

Kolek said the spacecraft’s close encounters could provide valuable insights, especially if there are active sunspot regions (temporary features that appear as dark scratches on the sun’s surface) along its path. He said there is. Such observations could help researchers better understand how the sun’s activity rises and falls.

Solar cycles typically last about 11 years, as the Sun’s magnetic activity moves from periods of low to high magnetic activity. When a star emerges from its calm phase, or solar minimum, and reaches the peak of its solar cycle, its magnetic poles reverse and it enters solar maximum, increasing activity and erupting more frequently and violently.

The main way scientists know when the Sun has reached its maximum is by monitoring the formation of sunspots. As the sun spins, its magnetic field undulates, becoming distorted and tighter in some areas, Kolek said. This creates sunspots, which appear as dark specks in telescope images.

A huge, bright coronal loop traces magnetic field lines over the Sun’s active region in 2018.
Solar Dynamics Observatory / NASA

“The sun is a magnetic sphere, but it’s not a solid solid body, so as it rotates, its magnetic field gets twisted,” Kolek said.

the number of sunspots It increases steadily as the star moves towards its solar maximum. Once a significant decline is observed, researchers can define the beginning and end of a period of activity.

In some sunspot regions, the magnetic field can be about 2,500 times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field. According to NASA. Over time, sunspots can release vast amounts of stored magnetic energy in the form of solar storms.

This year, two major solar storms (one in May and one in early October) painted the night sky in bright pinks, greens, and purples as far south as Texas and Alabama. It surprised sky watchers. NASA said the May event was the strongest geomagnetic storm to hit Earth in the past 20 years.

On May 10th, a solar storm hit the Scottish National Monument in Edinburgh.
Jacob Anderson/AFP – Getty Images File
On October 10, the Northern Lights illuminate the desert sky of the Tonto National Forest northeast of Phoenix.
Michael Chou / USA Today Network

Auroras occur when clouds of charged particles ejected from the Sun during solar storms collide with Earth’s magnetic field and interact with atoms and molecules in Earth’s upper atmosphere. The colorful display is a beautiful byproduct of that process and is usually only seen at high latitudes. But during periods of high solar activity, the light can wander farther south than usual.

However, there may also be negative consequences. Strong magnetic storms can cause problems for astronauts in space and for GPS systems and satellites in orbit.

Source: www.nbcnews.com

What is the maximum number of satellites and moons that could fit in Earth’s orbit?

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Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes some crazy ideas for how to tinker with the universe and tests their effects against the laws of physics, from snapping the moon in half to causing doomsday events with gravitational waves. apple, Spotify or our Podcast Page.

One moon isn’t enough. While Earth only has one moon, other planets have many. Jupiter has 95 moons, putting its shining cosmic partner to shame with only one. In this episode of Dead Planets Society, we try to light up the night sky with as many moons as possible.

But it’s not as simple as just throwing a bunch of rocks into orbit. So in this episode, hosts Leah Crain and Chelsea White Shawn Raymond We asked a researcher from the University of Bordeaux in France for help with the details, who suggests we could build a ring of 10 moons, each of which would orbit Earth in different phases, causing strange little eclipses as they orbited the planet.

And it’s not just the moon. In 2018, Raymond and Juna Kollmeyer Researchers at the Carnegie Observatories in California have found that it’s theoretically possible for Earth’s moon to have its own orbital satellite, known as a lunar lunar. Such a satellite might not be stable due to the presence of a gravitational anomaly on the moon, so our host has been adding a giant hand blender to his space tool belt to try and smooth things over. If things get sorted, we could have a lunar lunar, or even a lunar lunar, lighting up the night sky.

The moon is bright because it reflects sunlight, and these new moons could be the perfect place to line up giant solar panels, unobstructed by the atmosphere and clouds that plague Earth’s surface. And because the moon is so bright, it would probably be impossible to see the stars from Earth’s surface, but in relatively small detail.

An even bigger problem is that the more complex and crowded the orbit, the greater the risk of these moons colliding with each other, which could give Earth beautiful rings like Saturn, but could also destroy life on Earth.

Dead Planets Society is a fun and subversive podcast about space. New ScientistIn each episode, hosts Leah Crain and Chelsea White explore what would happen if we were given cosmic powers to rearrange the universe. They speak to astronomers, cosmologists and geologists to find out what would happen if we ripped a hole in a planet, unified the asteroid belt or destroyed the sun. Dead Planets Society Season 2 continues with apple, Spotifyor our Podcast Page.

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Source: www.newscientist.com