Beyond Infinity

With bushfires still burning out of control in South Eastern Australia, the nation's capital Canberra was hit by an ice storm, damaging thousands of cars and buildings. Wildlife and trees have also been pounded.

The bushfire emergency has killed over a billion animals and decimated national parks and old growth forests. Now seems a good time to listen again to our in-depth interview on anthropogenic climate change with Professor David Karoly, recorded in 2016. We discuss global warming, its impacts and implications for the planet.

The podcast includes an update on the enormous and tragic losses of native flora and fauna in Australia, plus how to donate and support recovery efforts.

With 1.5% of Australia's land mass burnt in disastrous bushfires - an area bigger than Scotland - and 1.25 billion animals lost, we revisit an in-depth interview we did in 2016 with leading climatologist Professor David Karoly. He spoke about human-induced climate change, its impacts and implications for the planet.

There are mounting fears about foreign-made apps hoovering up sensitive personal data. The proposed National Security and Personal Data Protection Act would try to stop foreign app owners from collecting any more data from American users than is necessary to provide their service.

Fossilised Antarctic seashells show the planet was unstable, warmed by intense volcanism, long before it was smashed by the notorious space rock impact 66 million years ago.

New measurement methods show that pieces of plastic smaller than 5 mm in diameter are scarily common. Microplastics are entering all parts of the marine ecosystem. If we eat any kind of fish, we are likely ingesting toxic microscopic plastic. Things must change.

Metallosphaera sedula is a single-celled organism and hails from some of the earliest life forms on Earth. Now scientists think this metal-eating extremophile could help extract minerals from space rock or even find signs of life on Mars.

Library Genesis and Sci-Huh have evolved into very popular and massive repositories of pirated scientific papers. Now there are moves to formalise and protect the "pirate bays" of science.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk successfully fended off a monster US$190 million defamation lawsuit brought by UK cave diver Vernon Unsworth. In a far-reaching decision, an LA court found that tweets are merely casual conversation and opinions, and should not be taken too seriously.

After serving a lengthy jail term, a German criminal wants Der Spiegel Online to remove his name from archived references on its website.