197 articles from TUESDAY 15.11.2022

Why we need to do a better job of measuring AI’s carbon footprint

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Lately I’ve lost a lot of sleep over climate change. It’s just over five weeks until Christmas, and last weekend in London, it was warm enough to have a pint outside without a coat. As world leaders gather in Egypt for the final week of...

Humans could face reproductive crisis as sperm count declines, study finds

Global figures suggest sperm concentration has halved in 40 years – and the rate of decline is acceleratingHumans could face a reproductive crisis if action is not taken to tackle a drop in sperm count, researchers have warned after finding the rate of decline is accelerating.A study published in the journal Human Reproduction Update, based on 153 estimates from men who were probably unaware of...

Scientists find new variations among sperm cells

The behavior of sperm cells is due, in part, to the individual DNA make-up of these cells, rather than only to the genetics of males, finds a team of scientists. Its results, which provide a new understanding of the competition among sperm cells to fertilize the egg, have larger implications for the reproductive process.

Cosmic chocolate pralines? General neutron star structure revealed

So far, little is known about the interior of neutron stars, those extremely compact objects that can form after the death of a star. The mass of our sun or even more is compressed into a sphere with the diameter of a large city. Since their discovery more than 60 years ago, scientists have been trying to decipher their structure.

‘Let’s try something really bold’: inside Oscar-tipped Nasa doc Good Night Oppy

The Amazon Prime movie, aided by Steven Spielberg, tells the story of a Wall-E-esque rover 15-year mission to MarsOpportunity is quite a character. I’m talking about the star of Ryan White’s crowd-pleasing, Oscar-tipped documentary Good Night Oppy: a Nasa-engineered rover sent on a 90-day mission to Mars in 2003 that surprisingly stretched to 15 years.Opportunity, or Oppy as some...

Cop27: has there been any progress in Sharm el-Sheikh?

Cop27 got off to a difficult start last week. Attendees struggled with a lack of food and drink, civil society group events were curtailed, and more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists hit the conference halls – more than the delegations of many of the most vulnerable countries combined.As we head into the second week, Madeleine Finlay hears from biodiversity reporter Patrick Greenfield about what...