Journalists

A study of more than 630 billion words (mostly in English) used on 3 billion web pages concludes that the term 'people' is not gender-neutral: its meaning is biased towards the concept 'men'. The authors write in Science Advances that they see this as "a fundamental bias in the collective view of our species", relevant because the concept 'people' is "in almost all societal decisions and policies".

The latest IPCC report shows that we are not close to limiting the rise in temperatures to 1.5ºC. Fortunately, he points out that climate action in the form of policy and law has increased, and that there is hope to cut emissions by at least half by 2030. In this sense, the retrofitting of existing buildings and the adequate design of new ones will play a fundamental role.

Two studies published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases confirm that covid-19 vaccines offer additional protection for those already infected with SARS-CoV-2, especially against severe disease.

The effort to decipher the human genome led 21 years ago to the publication of a first sequence that has already revolutionised medicine. The full version published today by Science represents a technical feat that will provide new information about disease, disease susceptibility and the evolution of our species.

Storm surges, one-off events associated with storms that can cause flooding, are rare and highly destructive phenomena. A paper published this week in Nature finds that they have increased since 1960, comparable to the increase in average sea level rise over the same period.

The authors, led by Spaniard Francisco Calafat of the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool, UK, statistically analyse observations of extreme tides from 79 tide gauges on European coasts over the period 1960-2018, and compare them with climate models.

Their results point to an increase in extreme sea levels in the future, something the authors say has implications for coastal planning. So far, the most widely accepted hypothesis is that the frequency of such extreme storm surges would not increase.

The current climate crisis is not only leaving us with a historically warm winter and a decade of record temperatures, but is overlapping with an almost unprecedented energy crisis. Securing energy supplies in a sustainable way is now a challenge where the war in Ukraine adds to the complexity.

The weekend saw record temperatures in both the Arctic and Antarctica, up to 40°C above normal for this time of year.