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Earth’s air temperature may have passed the agreed 1.5°C warming limit around 2010. Plus: nuclear fusion reaction releases almost twice the energy put in.

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Warming world

The world is already 1.8°C warmer than it was in pre-industrial times, having passed the 1.5°C limit in 2010 or 2011, claim researchers who used sea sponges to work out how ocean and air temperatures have changed in the Caribbean over the past 300 years. “The increase in global mean surface temperature has been half a degree greater than the current accepted estimates,” says Malcolm McCulloch at the University of Western Australia. “What our work says is that we are a decade more, or further, advanced in the global warming scenario.” However, other climate scientists say data from a single region isn’t a reliable way of working out past global temperatures. Read more

Nuclear fusion

Scientists have confirmed that a fusion reaction in 2022 reached a historic milestone by unleashing more energy than was put into it – and subsequent trials have produced even better results, they say. The findings, now published in a series of papers, give encouragement that fusion reactors will one day create clean, plentiful energy. Today’s nuclear power plants rely on fission reactions, where atoms are smashed apart to release energy and smaller particles. Fusion works in reverse, squeezing smaller particles together into larger atoms; the same process powers our sun. Read more

Get access to our expert coverage of the latest breakthroughs in science, including the search for a clean wonder-fuel that could speed our path to net zero. 

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Dayarathne MC et al. (2020)

Neither plant nor animal, fungi are their own weird and wonderful kingdom of life: and they just got stranger. Until recently, biologists thought of them as almost completely landlubbing but a closer look at the oceans completely overturns this idea. Fungi have been found in every marine environment examined, from hydrothermal vents and deep-sea sediments to the open ocean. What exactly they are doing there is still something of a mystery. Nevertheless, these extraordinarily adaptive species offer new hope in our battle against two of the 21st century’s biggest scourges: antibiotic resistance and plastic pollution. Read more

Wednesday 21 February 2024 | 7pm EST

Learn all about the cosmic cocktail, including evidence for the existence of dark matter in galaxies. 

Helen Minnis, author of an Academy of Medical Sciences report, on how the health of children younger than five years old is declining in the UK, reported by the BBC.

Thanks for reading!

Alexandra Thompson

Assistant news editor, New Scientist
Email me at newsletter@newscientist.com

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