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The Year 2015–16
ENVIRONMENT AND SCIENCE AUGUST 2015 3. The World Glacier Monitoring Service, based in Zurich, Switzerland, reported in the Journal of Glaciology that the current rate of global glacier melt was without precedent. 5. Astronomers at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, USA, observed the most distant galaxy ever found, lying approximately 13.2 billion light-years from Earth; the galaxy, known as EGSY8p7, shows astronomers the mass of stars that existed just 600 million years after the Big Bang. 20. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that July 2015 was the hottest month on Earth since records began in 1880; temperatures averaged 16.6˚C (61.9˚F), which was 0.08 degrees higher than the previous record of July 1988, a significant margin in weather data. SEPTEMBER 2015 3. A Yale University study, which combined a mass of ground survey data with satellite pictures, estimated that there were over three trillion trees on Earth; reported in the journal Nature, the total represented over 420 trees for every human. 11. The British Psychological Society presented the results of a study that found the need to constantly use social media could cause depression, anxiety and a reduction in sleep quality for teenagers. 16. The World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London reported that populations of marine mammals, birds, fish and reptiles had declined by 49 per cent since 1970, with fish such as tuna and mackerel having dropped in population by 74 per cent; the report claimed overfishing, pollution, climate change and loss of habitat had contributed to the decline. 24. A 26-year-old American paraplegic man was able to walk after scientists rerouted signals from his brain to electrodes on his knees; doctors stated that he was the first person with paraplegia from a spinal injury to walk without relying on manually controlled robotic limbs. 27. The world observed a lunar eclipse that coincided with a ‘supermoon’, which made the Moon appear red; the phenomenon had not occurred since 1982 and will not take place again until 2033. 28. NASA reported evidence supporting the presence of liquid water, in the form of brine, flowing on Mars; as reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, the discovery of water could mean that life has the potential to exist on the planet. OCTOBER 2015 1. The warmest UK October day was recorded in Trawsgoed, Ceredigion, when the temperature hit 22.4˚C (72.3˚F). 26. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that processed meats such as bacon, sausages and ham can cause cancer; the WHO said that 50g of processed meat per day increased the chances of developing colorectal cancer by 18 per cent. NOVEMBER 2015 10. The Met Office officially named the first storm of their ‘Name Our Storms’ project as Storm Abigail; Abigail was set to bring winds of up to 90mph to areas of Scotland between 12 and 13 November. 23. The New Shepard spaceship successfully landed following an unmanned test flight in Texas, USA; the ship, a reusable capsule and propulsion unit owned by Amazon.com entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, was intended to carry people just above Earth’s atmosphere. DECEMBER 2015 13. At the COP21 climate change summit in Paris, almost 200 countries came to a global climate agreement on the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions; the key elements of the deal were to keep global temperatures below 2.0˚C (3.6˚F) above pre-
industrial times and to limit the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by human activity to levels that trees, soil and oceans can naturally absorb, beginning between 2050 and 2100. 17. A study by the Stony Brook Cancer Center in New York, reported in the journal Nature, found that only 10–30 per cent of cancers occur due to the way the body functions, the remainder overwhelmingly resulting from environmental factors such as smoking and UV radiation. 30. Four new elements were added to the periodic table, completing the table’s seventh row; scientists in Japan, Russia and the USA discovered elements 113, 115, 117 and 118, the first to be added to the table since 2011.
JANUARY 2016 5. Met Office figures showed that December 2015 was the wettest month in the UK in over a century while 2015 was the sixth wettest year. 15. UK astronaut Tim Peake’s first spacewalk ended early after his US colleague Tim Kopra reported a small amount of water was in his helmet; the astronauts were outside the International Space Station for four hours and 43 minutes and had completed their objective of replacing a failed electrical box. 17. The UK government designated 23 new Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs), which extended the area of environmental protection to 8,000 square miles and meant 20 per cent of English waters were protected; the new MCZs included The Needles, Land’s End and Fulmar. FEBRUARY 2016 1. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority approved plans for UK scientists to genetically modify human embryos, marking the first time a country had approved the DNA-altering technique in embryos; the research was planned to take place at the Francis Crick Institute of London with the experiments occurring in the first seven days following fertilisation. 11. Physicists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory announced the discovery of gravitational waves, which Albert Einstein first predicted with his general theory of relativity a century before; using the world’s most sophisticated detector, scientists detected the collision of two black holes, one 35 times the mass of the Sun and the other slightly smaller, as they circled each other up to 250 times a second before their collision at a distance of 1.3 billion light-years from Earth, beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud. 15. Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina, USA, developed a technique to produce 3Dprinted custom-made living body parts, including bone, muscle and cartilage, which all functioned regularly when implanted into animals; the research, published in Nature Biotechnology, was considered a significant advance for regenerative medicine. MARCH 2016 9. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced that, for a sixth year in a row, the slaughter of rhinos for their horns in Africa had increased; at least 1,338 rhinos were killed in 2015, which was the highest single-year loss since 2008, the IUCN blamed demand from South East Asia, where rhino horns are considered to have medical properties, for the rise in poaching. 14. Data released by NASA revealed that global temperatures in February had soared above previous monthly records by an unparalleled amount; global surface temperatures in February 2016 across land and ocean were 1.35˚C warmer than the average temperature for February from the period 1951–1980. In a joint mission, the European Space Agency and Russia launched the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), a satellite intended to investigate whether methane in the world’s atmosphere is originating from a geological source or being produced by microbes; Russia, which since 1960 had launched 19 failed missions to Mars,