News of the Day: Friday 7 May

There’s 21 tons of Chinese Long March 5b rocket making an uncontrolled re-entry tomorrow, possibly, as nobody is sure yet where it’ll enter the atmosphere.

Cutting methane emissions will help reduce the rate of climate change while boosting health and crop production says a new UN report:

But there are ways to cut methane emissions by 45 per cent this decade, which will avoid nearly 0.3 degrees of warming up to 2045, according to the report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and Climate and Clean Air Coalition.

As methane also contributes to the creation of ground-level ozone, a dangerous air pollutant, nearly halving emissions will also prevent a quarter of a million premature deaths and 775,000 asthma-related hospital visits a year, it concludes.

Ozone pollution also harms plants and natural systems so reducing methane emissions would prevent global crop yield losses of 26 million tonnes a year, the report finds.

Emissions could be cut with cost-effective and readily available measures such as controlling leaks and vented gas from oil, gas and coal operations and stopping organic waste going to landfill where it produces methane.

After sitting in the wardrobe for almost eight years, I finally got around to replacing the broken keyboard membrane on my ZX Spectrum 48k (see photo). I discovered that it’s an issue 2 machine, built between 1982 & 1983. It still works.

And lastly, Vintage Space has a video all about one of the proposed post-moon missions that NASA came up with in the late 60’s, when the galaxy was the limit and before budgets were slashed to fund the Vietnam war. This one was a manned Venus-Mars manned mission which is pretty amazing: