With the arrival of the new water recovery system (WRS) in November 2008, the International Space Station (ISS) moved closer towards its planned increase in crew and mankind took another small step towards the exploration of deep space.

Reducing the need to be resupplied from Earth, the system will decrease the quantity of water and consumables required to be launched by about 6.8t a year and help make it possible for twice as many people to be accommodated on board. Read more

Artist’s impression of the planetary system around the red dwarf Gliese 581. (Courtesy: ESO)

It’s a major discovery: a planet orbiting a red dwarf star some 20.5 light years away with Earth-like qualities, including a radius only 50 per cent larger and a mass about five more than our own planet.

But the potential of the planet to hold liquid water on its surface is what makes the discovery, unveiled Tuesday by the European Southern Observatory in Germany, so intriguing.

Though the planet is 14 times closer to its star than Earth is to our own sun, the star it orbits — the red dwarf Gliese 581 — is smaller and colder than our sun, meaning the planet lies in a potentially ideal temperature zone.

“We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,” explained Stephane Udry, the lead author of the paper reporting the result, in a statement.

“Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth’s radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky, like our Earth, or covered with oceans,” said Udry, from the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland. Read more

The people of the Andes mountains have long benefited from melting glacial ice. But as those ice sheets start to disappear, conflicts over the diminishing resource could intensify.

The majestic Illimani mountain just south of La Paz provides a dramatic backdrop to the bustling Bolivian city. But for residents who have long lived in La Paz, the changes on Illimani are striking – the 6,439-meter high peak is covered with much less snow than just one or two decades earlier.

And the transformation on neighboring mountain Chacaltaya is even more dramatic. Not long ago, it was home to the highest ski region in the world at 5,300 meters. But skiers no longer head to the slopes of Chacaltaya because the mountain’s glacier literally disappeared in 2009. Read more

A new NASA study has revealed why Antarctic sea grows as Arctic sea ice melts. According to a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) report, NASA and British Antarctic Survey researchers have announced the first direct evidence that obvious changes to Antarctic sea ice drift caused by changing winds are responsible for observed increases in Antarctic sea ice cover in the past twenty years.

The evidence helps researchers understand how Antarctic sea ice cover has augmented due to climate change, while Arctic sea ice cover has significantly decreased.

Researchers looked at maps generated by the JPL from more than five million individual daily ice-motion measurements. The data reveals long-term changes in sea ice drift around Antarctica. Read more

This raises the question of whether or not this recent period of fairly static temperatures represents a termination of the temperature increase that has been occurring for some time and widely considered within the scientific community as resulting from increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Or is it simply a pause that can be explained in other ways or alternatively the natural variation in the secular trend in temperature increases.

It appears to be the more recent years from the following time series prepared jointly by the Climate Research Unit of East Anglica University, UK and the British Met Office Hadley Centre. Read more