New nuclear clock technology breakthroughs

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You can't beat it Terms apply, see optimum. com for details Summer is a gift The gift of days that last a little longer, a brighter state of mind So giveift yourself a new Kia at the KIA Smmer Sticker sales event, Eespecially tacked vehicles including the Sorrento, Sportage, Carnival, as well as the Nio Hybrid. All backed by a ten year one hundred thousand mile limited powertrain warranty. So the gift of summer can keep on giving for summers to come. Kia Movement that insspires. Call eight hundred threety threety four Ka foretails Hosto safree event and seven hundred sixty twenty six to dealer for warranty details Hello, I'm Tom Whipple and a welcome to Inide Science from the BBC World Service Are you sitting comfortably Then we shall Of course, you're not sitting comfortably At least, not if you're listening live in parts of Europe You're clammy, you're hot, you're wondering if you'll sleep tonight. But I'll begin anyway Be this week on inside science As we adjust our sweaty gussets in the heat wave We are going to consider, is it time to do something a bit more extreme on climate? Is it time to block out the sun What will the effects of heat stress be in the near future There's lightness too Lizzy Gibney, reporter at Nature has been looking through everything else in science to bring us what's important What's interesting and even what is tangentially related to football for our World Cup science section Lizzy, what have you got Well, we have something very exciting in clock news for all those metetrology fans. and some Fantastic effect of football that you might not have thought about fabulous Let's begin with the heat. It has been, shall we say, an ironic week to hold London Climate Action Wek onene of the world's largest independent climate gatherings On Wednesday, the organizers scheduled an event looking at climate policies titled Extreme Heat It was cancellled. due to extreme heat due to, in fact, the most extreme heat parts of Europe ever seen in June Are we doing enough then when it comes to climate action Something scientists have been tentatively Increasingly Hesitantly mooting in public is What have we tried Let reflect more of the sun Is it mad Perhaps Is it extreme Certainly But is it possible Just maybe Professor Mark Maslin from UCL sits on the Nutfield Bioethics Wking Group on the thhics of what is called solar radiation management. Mark, it's the middle of the week. It's really hot where I am. I suspect it's really hot where you are. Climate change, we've been trying to deal with this for thirty years We use the idea of reducing CO two and the idea that that's we have to do. but As a short term sticking plaster, I'm increasingly hearing scientists saying that it might be worth considering blocking the sun. Can you explain maybe in a slightly more scientific way, what these ideas are and what they might involve? So there are a group of my colleagues who are incredibly smart around the world who are looking at alternatives because they are not convinced we're going to reduce carbon emissions quick enough world in a habitable temperature. And so what they're looking at is different ways of reflecting sunlight away from the earth to try and keep it cool. So this imagine you're on a hot day like we are today. It's like putting up a power sale and making sure the sun doesn't hit you and therefore you can be a little bit cooler in the shade What they're looking at is trying to shade the Earth. Now there' a number of ways of doing this. One of them is by injecting aerosols. theseese are small particles into the upper atmosphere, whether it happens to be sulfur dioxide, whether it happens to be silica or happens to be aluminium in there to reflect sunlight The other one that's really left field was a suggestion that we could put mirrors in space. and the cost of that is Astronomical, but the idea is you'd have a mirrors reflecting sunlight from there So the idea is that you dim the sun slightly And therefore, the temperature of the earth cools down so therefore buys us time to decarbonize. So this isn't a fix. It is literally my colleague saying how can we buy ass time so the transition away from fossil fuels occurs And we can buy time to deal and suck out those emissions from the atmosphere and so we can try to protect the Earth That sounds like quite a sensible idea to me The problem is that only deals with It doesn't deal with things like ocean acidification, it doesn't deal with sea level rise. it's just a fix for temperature. And it's also really science and its nissance. We really don't know whether we can do it at scale We don't know what the consequences of perhaps chucking all these chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight And we don't know how long we'd have to do it for because The problem with this technology is if you start doing it and you start dimming the sun You have to keep doing it. And if you stop, that dimming goes away. It's like having a power sole up against the sun. If you close the power sole and you stop chucking chemicals into the atmosphere The sun comes back and we get heating. Okay, look, I sense a certain skepticism before you get to telling us why you think we shouldn't be doing this. It's a hot day. I'm putting on sunscreen and I'm using a parasol. I'm not claiming that that's some sort of global solution, but it's a sensible thing to do. So you know what are the sort of things we could do? because you say it's unproven, but that's only in the sense humans haven't done it. This is very proven from things like You know, volcanic eruptions and stuff, we can actually do this, can't we So the key thing is that it's about geo engineering and geo engineering covers this multitude of sins. And there are two things that I think are important. The first is that we can remove carbon dioxide. So we can either remove it from power plants, from coal manufacturing, from steel manufacturing, stopping it going into the atmosphere Or what is more likely and what we need to do in the future is suck CO two out of the atmosphere and put it into deep geological reservoirs to trap it. And we're going to need to do that if we're going to try to keep the world to one point five. We can also reforest vast areas of the world to suck CO two out of the atmosphere. we can rewild And then you heard my skepticism, then there's the whole perhaps we can do the suns shade approach. And yes, you're absolutely right When incredibly large volcanoes go off They do this and put huge amounts of sulfur dioxide and dust into the atmosphere that reflects the sunlight. But they have an effect over a year. So the huge volcanoes exploding has an effect for one year. And what we have to do, if we were going to go down this route do this exploding volcano everywhere at the same time. every single year other problem that we have is this changing of the reflectance We're not sure if we do it in one area, perhaps we do it over Europe What's the effect on the other parts of the world Do we shift weather patterns? So the problem here is there's a real ethical problem, which is you may have dimmed the sunlight for your area and a little bit of effect on the globe, but you've suddenly shifted the monsoons by five hundred miles. So a country doesn't get any rainfall and another country gets too much rainfall. So there's a real ethical dimension to this sort of like manipulation of the planet. Is it fair to say though, that scientists are talking about this sort of thing a bit more now and a bit more openly than they had? So I think it is beholden on scientists of all countries to look into these problems and potential solutions. So of course, we should be doing the model runs, we should be looking at small scale experiments to see if it's even feasible because at the moment, this is all very theoretical. We need to know whether it is even possible, if it's possible, what are the consequences, what are the side effects? and therefore we can then openly discuss Is this necessary Is this something we need to discuss? Is this something we need to agree internationally And what are the ethical considerations? But course, the underlying science has to be there so people can choose. You've made a really, really compelling case for reducing our CO two emissions and controlling climate change, but we haven't done that Oh, so at Tom, I would slightly disagree because a couple of weeks ago scientists retired The RCP eight point five So fifteen years ago, we had stories or scenarios about emissions into the future One of them was, hey, we're going to do everything we can. We'll keep it to one point five Brilliant. And then there was one that said, lookook, China and India and other developing countries are using a lot of coal. This could double or triple into the future. we have that scenario, the RCP eight point five What we did last year was have a workshop where everybody sat down from the experts around the world and went You know what? This is now so unlikely We can retire it. And that meant that the four to six degrees warming that I was talking about and you were talking about, say ten years ago, is off the cards However, we're now still looking at three degrees warming, which is a lot hotter than we have today But international negotiations, the global economy, the huge price drop in renewables is already having effect. The problem is, as you and I know, we need to do all of this. Faster five times faster if we are going to have any hope of keeping to one point five Well, look, thank you very much for ending with a little bit of hope there, Mark, and I hopef you get some ice cream. Oh I'm going to go and stand by the air conditioning now because it is way too hot, Tom. Hey, but at least I can show that during London Climate Action Week, climate change is actually happening. Lizzy, look Mark represents what I think a lot of scientists think about this, which is it's This is extreme and quite mad. but Conversation about solar radiation management has changed. know the Rural Society has a report out on it. How has this changed in your career become so much more mainstream. I remember maybe a decade ago, it was something quite risky for researcher even to propose as a study to look at geoengineering because it was seen as just so radical. I The side effects is just so hard to predict when you are literally altering the atmosphere. But I really think that's changed. We're now seeing all of these ideas being taken really seriously, which probably tells us something about the dire situation We are in there was a survey done by a new scientists last year that found that two thirds of climate scientists thought humans would by the end of the century do some form of large scale geoengineering, even if they don't think it's a good idea. When you sort of look at costs estimates, it's tens of billions a year, it's a degree of cooling Of course the sort of all the moral hazards and the termination shock. If you stop this, suddenly you get a degree of warming, it's will remain quite a contentious I think so. It's got to be the you know the final nuclear option. you know, it shouldn't there are many, many more levers that we have to pull. And I think it's just, as Mark said, it' quite, you know, disappointing that those aren't necessarily being pulled yet Thanks, Lizz And in case we need reminding about why this matters, Over to Roland Pease, who has been investigating the effect of heat stress Yes, a study from the European Center for Medium Range where the forecasting says that across the world, an additional billion people are likely to experience extreme heat stress each year these days compared with the nineteen seventies, and it's not just about population growth. The driving factor, as you'd expect ' global warming. And the study lead Rebecca Emertton explained to me, this isn't about the temperatures as recorded on a thermometer but it is felt by a living person calculated as the Universal Thermmal Climate Index. One way of thinking about it is we often hear discussed kind of the level of humidity that you're experiencing during a heat wave and how that can make things worse That's an example of what the Universal Thermmal Climate Index or the UTCI is trying to do. It's trying to take into account as many different aspects of the environment as possible. and how the human body reacts to the environment to really understand how the heat is affecting the human body. So it accounts for the temperature, humidity, wind speed, solar radiation, lots of different factors. How big a difference would there normally be, would you say, between this climate index and what the thermometers or the met offices might be reporting? So this can vary around the world and it can vary depending on the specific conditions you're looking at, but just to give an example, I took a look at the data for the recent Heat wave that we had in may twenty twenty six across much of Europe And quite often the UTCI or the fields like temperatures were four degrees and in sometimes five degrees higher than the air temperature. And I've looked at previous heat waves, for example, one in August, that impacted Southeastern Europe, where the UTCI reached even up to ten degrees higher than the air temperatures. That's an extraordinary difference. Yeah I think it showcases why it's important to try and take into account these other factors as well as the temperatures obviously important, but there's a lot of other factors at play What you've done in this new study then is to look at trends in this universal temperature index over the past, well, I guess a few decades to see if that is being altered by climate change. Yes, exactly. So we know there's trends in heat waves across the globe becoming more frequent, more intense, lasting longer. and really we really wanted to give this kind of global picture of how heat stress in our climate has changed over recent decades. so we kind of compare The most recent ten years of the data, so twenty fifteen to twenty twenty four, with how things looked in the nineteen seventies. And the changes are notable? Yeah, so there's a few different factors that we look at. One is, for example, the maximum UTCI that you might experience on kind of the warmest days of the year. and this has increased across almost all regions of the globe with some of the strongest warming in Europe Northern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, some of those maximum UTCI values are reaching four or five degrees higher on the hottest days of the year than they did back in the nineteen seventies We're also seeing more days per year with heat stress, more of these so called tropical nights where the temperature doesn't drop below twenty degrees C And we're also seeing that heat stress is becoming more widespread So it's not only affecting the areas that we might traditionally think of as being hot or experiencing heat waves, but it's expanding out into areas that have been previously unaffected by heat stress. And that seems to be quite important because I guess there are parts of the world which are routinely much hotter than other parts. I guess the way this is affecting let's say people in tropical climates or Subtropical climates is going to be different from those in temperate climates and so on. Yeah, that's exactly right. So we know that across a lot of the tropics, there are places that experience kind of chronic heat stress, some level of heat stress almost all year round. And we're seeing that in those places, that heat stress level is becoming more severe. In a lot of places there's an increasing duration more of the year that's being affected by heat stress Whereas in other places it might be that the maximum feels like temperatures increasing or they're starting to see levels of strong heat stress where they haven't experienced it before. So it's quite relative kind of based on the baseline climate they started with in the nineteen seventies, but we're seeing similar trends in terms of more frequent and more severe fs like temperatures on every continent. Is the seasonality of it changing as well? know when the first heat wave sets in or when the last one sort of peeters out at the end of the season. Yeah, that is something that we're seeing particularly across the Northern hemisphere. We're seeing that we call it the heat stress season has increased in duration since the nineteen seventies. So the most dramatic changes, I think' in Europe, Africa and North America where take, for example, Europe, strong heat stress might start now in June rather than in July, moderate heat stress in May rather than June, and that's just an average across the continent. but that is something we're seeing in parts of Europe too. have you unpicked the drivers of the changes in this universal Thermmal Climate index. Obviously, if temperatures are a degree or so high, if the global temperature is a degree or so higher compared to the seventies That's going to be one thing, but Are there changing humidity factors, changing wind factors or any of these things that are also contributing to it? Yeah, so that's definitely part of it. So one aspect is this increase of around one point four degrees for the global average is very much a global average and that can vary substantially when you look at a regional scale in terms of the rate and the amount of warming. And then as you said, there are the other factors. So at the global scale, there's more water vapour in the atmosphere as the climate is warming. There are changes in solar radiation. For example, in Europe, there's quite a strong increasing trend in solar radiation and sunshine duration with a corresponding reduction in cloud cover. So yeah these factors all All accounted for in these trends, yeah Rebecca Emmton of the ECMWF. The study was published this week in Nature Climate Change Thanks, Rand You're listening to Inside Science from the BBC World Service Tell us what science you think we should be investigating email address is inside science at bbc. co. Summer is a gift The gift of days that last a little longer. a brighter state of mind So giveift yourself a new Kia at the Kia Summer Sticker sales event, Epecially tacked vehicles including the Sorrento, Sportage, Carnival, as well as the Nurohybrid All backed by a ten year one hundred thousand mile limited powertrain warranty. So the gift of summer can keep on giving for summers to come. Kia Movement that insspires. Call eight hundred thirty three four K Free Details host us a free event and seven hundred six twenty six S deealer for warranty details. When it comes to looking your best, beachbum Tanning does it better. Beachbum delivers advanced sun and spray tanning, luxury skincare, and an elevated salon experience designed around you. It's why so many guests trust Beachbum for flawless color and real confidence. And now Beachbum is expanding wellness services to many locations. with red light therapy and infrared sauna, with more on the way. Rcharge your body, refresh your skin. Ret your day. Beachbum isn't just tanning. It's full spectrum wellness. Visit beachbum dot com to find a location near you ot Uk. Let's go on to something that's Perhaps a bit cheerier, perhaps a bit less complicated, and certainly involves some sounds of football commentary He's up and running It's been brilliantly he's been absolutely sensational in the second half This hatchging Story Story Fear not, listeners, I know what you're thinking. You thought you were safe You fought here on inside science if nowhere else we would have a World Cup free zone So I'm sorry about that. but listen on because to honour the World Cup we continue our football science segment, but to honour the fact that inside science listeners had a statistically higher chance of being picked last at school sports and having their head flushed down the loop. That's a P value point five It is not about how science serves football, it's about how football serves science and our understanding of the world I am the World Cup manager of our science squad and together we are populating our dream squad of peer reviewed footie papers Lizzy Gibme is my talent scout this week Lizzy, what have you found? So this is a paper on the salad effect. so it's about what football can teach us about reducing prejudice It is published in the American Political Science Review And the researchers here looked at what happened after Mohammed Salah, who's an Egyptian footballer, he joined Liverpool in twenty seventeen. So what happened after that? He's Muslim. He's very up frront about his religion His religion was really a part even of the chance that the supporters would sing. Ly do you have any examples of that So there are some examples in the paper. I'm having to infer what the tun is from the words, but for instance, if he's good enough for you, he's good enough for me, sitting in a mosque, that's where I want to be. about Mlla. So they really took him, you know to heart and embraced his religion as well And so the researchers wanted to see what the effect of this was. They collected data on hate crimes, on tweets and then surveyed a bunch of Lipool fans as well And they found that the effect was pretty big. So after Asala joined Liverpool, hate crimes there dropped by sixteen percent compared to what you'd expect And fans of Liverpool posted about half as many anti Muslim tweets as other fans. That's a huge effect. It's pretty big, isn't it? And then there was a subtle but But significant effect from the surveys as well, when people ask to when the fans were asked to think about Mosalah the fact that he's Muslim, that made them more likely to say that they saw Islam as compatible with British values Um I mean, there are limitations to this is very hard to say much of this effect was, Mos Alla, you know and also hate crimes are not by far not the only way in which racism manifests. So there are limitations to this, but the takeaway, which I think is quite interesting is that having these role models can have an impact. And you might have seen previous studies where they found that when people actually know someone who's from a minority religion, a trans person, any kind of minority that can face prejudice They're much more likely to have positive views towards them, just if they know them, if they have people in their lives from those groups And this shows that that can happen with a celebrity. it can be a parasocial, like one sided effect. You don't actually have to personally know them. They just have to be this kind of positive role model. Yeah, mayaybe's something we can bear in mind when trying to foster more tolerance and I love this paper. It's definitely making it into our World Cup squad. I think I'm going to put it in midfield as this the heart of our team and a reminder of the moral foundations of our team. if indeed, that is what midfielders do. Who knows? whoo cares? It's a lovely paper Fantastic So well, congratulations for getting your paper into the inside science squad. But you've got other papers for us, notothing to do with football at all. What have you spotted in the news So this is a story that I wrote about in nature and it's from two pre prrints from a group in Europe and one in China and it's a completely new kind of clock. So we might need a little clock one on one. So the most precise clocks that we have at the moment, all clocks need some natural way of ticking, you know, like our swing, like a pendulum atomicock, which is the most precise we had today, that tick is a bit abstract. It's It comes from the oscillations of the light wave that would bump an electron up an energy level around an atom So electrons live in these orbits at different energy levels, you've got to tune a laser to be at exactly the right energy to trigger this jump between those levels, and you lock your laser to this natural timekeeper and then use that laser's frequency, its oscillations in order to K keep time just like a pendulum So know you know that if a laser is bouncing up this thing, you've got exactly the right amount of energy and then you know that it must have a very precise frequency. So you define time according to the frequency of light in the laser Exactly. And we use this really precise time for all kinds of things for GPS to work to synchronize mobile phone networks, computing systems It's really, really important, even if we don't always notice it across society. So at the moment we have these optical atomic locks. but now what we have, which was new earlier this month is a completely different way of doing this. So rather getting your tick from the energy levels of electrons, This clot gets them from the energy levels of nuclei. So the nucleus of Thorium two hundred twenty nine So it might surprise I don't even know they had energy levels. Exactly. So Nic I have energy levels