Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's Christmas wish they know will never happen

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to spend Christmas in Montecito with their two children and Meghan Markle's mum.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle reportedly have one Christmas wish (Image: Stephen Pond/Getty Images) Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are likely to have begun finalising their Christmas plans, which will most likely see the couple and their two children stay in California for the festive season. While they have not spoken outright about how they will spend the big day next month, it is believed the duke, 40, and duchess, 43, will be at their Montecito home with Meghan’s mum Doria, alongside their children Prince Archie, five, and Princess Lilibet, three. n a recent chat with a fashion magazine, Meghan revealed how she loved the holidays, especially as the children were now old enough to understand what was going on. However, while the family are set to have a fun day, there is one Christmas wish the couple - who quit life as senior royals in 2020 - reportedly share that they know can never happen now. A source exclusively told OK! Magazine: “They both really wish that they could have all their families together and have a huge Christmas but they know that will never happen. So they have to make new memories and traditions with their children and those close to them.” This year marks the sixth year Prince Harry has not been with his own side of the family for the big day, with the prince having previously spent the special occasion at Sandringham along with the rest of the Royal Family. However, this has not happened since 2018, the same year he married Meghan Markle in a star-studded Windsor ceremony.

High temperatures due to global warming will be dramatic even for tardigrades

Tardigrade (stock image).

Global warming, a major aspect of climate change, is already causing a wide range of negative impacts on many habitats of our planet. It is thus of the utmost importance to understand how rising temperatures may affect animal health and welfare.

A research group from Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen has just shown that tardigrades are very vulnerable to long-term high temperature exposures. The tiny animals, in their desiccated state, are best known for their extraordinary tolerance to extreme environments.

In a study published recently in Scientific Reports, Ricardo Neves and Nadja Møbjerg and colleagues at Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen present results on the tolerance to high temperatures of a tardigrade species.

Tardigrades, commonly known as water bears or moss piglets, are microscopic invertebrates distributed worldwide in marine, freshwater and terrestrial microhabitats.

Ricardo Neves, Nadja Møbjerg and colleagues investigated the tolerance to high temperatures of Ramazzottius varieornatus, a tardigrade frequently found in transient freshwater habitats.

"The specimens used in this study were obtained from roof gutters of a house located in Nivå, Denmark. We evaluated the effect of exposures to high temperature in active and desiccated tardigrades, and we also investigated the effect of a brief acclimation period on active animals," explains postdoc Ricardo Neves.

Rather surprisingly the researchers estimated that for non-acclimated active tardigrades the median lethal temperature is 37.1°C, though a short acclimation periods leads to a small but significant increase of the median lethal temperature to 37.6°C. Interestingly, this temperature is not far from the currently measured maximum temperature in Denmark, i.e. 36.4°C. As for the desiccated specimens, the authors observed that the estimated 50% mortality temperature is 82.7°C following 1 hour exposures, though a significant decrease to 63.1°C following 24 hour exposures was registered.

The research group used logistic models to estimate the median lethal temperature (at which 50% mortality is achieved) both for active and desiccated tardigrades.

Approximately 1300 tardigrade species have been described so far. The body of these minute animals is barrel-shaped (or dorsoventrally compressed) and divided into a head and a trunk with four pairs of legs. Their body length varies between 50 micrometers and 1.2 millimeters. Apart from their impressive ability to tolerate extreme environments, tardigrades are also very interesting because of their close evolutionary relationship with arthropods (e.g., insects, crustaceans, spiders).

As aquatic animals, tardigrades need to be surrounded in a film of water to be in their active state (i.e., feeding and reproducing). However, these critters are able to endure periods of desiccation (anhydrobiosis) by entering cryptobiosis, i.e., a reversible ametabolic state common especially among limno-terrestrial species. Succinctly, tardigrades enter the so-called "tun" state by contracting their anterior-posterior body axis, retracting their legs and rearranging the internal organs. This provides them with the capacity to tolerate severe environmental conditions including oxygen depletion (anoxybiosis), high toxicant concentrations (chemobiosis), high solute concentration (osmobiosis) and extremely low temperatures (cryobiosis).

The extraordinary tolerance of tardigrades to extreme environments includes also high temperature endurance. Some tardigrade species were reported to tolerate temperatures as high as 151°C. However, the exposure time was only of 30 minutes. Other studies on thermotolerance of desiccated (anhydrobiotic) tardigrades revealed that exposures higher than 80°C for 1 hour resulted in high mortality, with almost all specimens dying at temperatures above 103°C. It remained, yet, unknown how anhydrobiotic tardigrades handle exposures to high temperatures for long periods, i.e., exceeding 1 hour.

"From this study, we can conclude that active tardigrades are vulnerable to high temperatures, though it seems that these critters would be able to acclimatize to increasing temperatures in their natural habitat. Desiccated tardigrades are much more resilient and can endure temperatures much higher than those endured by active tardigrades. However, exposure-time is clearly a limiting factor that constrains their tolerance to high temperatures," says Ricardo Neves.

Indeed, although tardigrades are able to tolerate a diverse set of severe environmental conditions, their endurance to high temperatures is noticeably limited and this might actually be the Achilles heel of these otherwise super-resistant animals.

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Materials provided by Faculty of Science - University of Copenhagen. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

NASA's Mars 2020 will hunt for microscopic fossils

Lighter colors represent higher elevation in this image of Jezero Crater on Mars, the landing site for NASA's Mars 2020 mission. The oval indicates the landing ellipse, where the rover will be touching down on Mars.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL/ESA

Scientists with NASA's Mars 2020 rover have discovered what may be one of the best places to look for signs of ancient life in Jezero Crater, where the rover will land on Feb. 18, 2021.

A paper published in the journal Icarus identifies distinct deposits of minerals called carbonates along the inner rim of Jezero, the site of a lake more than 3.5 billion years ago. On Earth, carbonates help form structures that are hardy enough to survive in fossil form for billions of years, including seashells, coral and some stromatolites -- rocks formed on this planet by ancient microbial life along ancient shorelines, where sunlight and water were plentiful.

The possibility of stromatolite-like structures existing on Mars is why the concentration of carbonates tracing Jezero's shoreline like a bathtub ring makes the area a prime scientific hunting ground.

Mars 2020 is NASA's next-generation mission with a focus on astrobiology, or the study of life throughout the universe. Equipped with a new suite of scientific instruments, it aims to build on the discoveries of NASA's Curiosity, which found that parts of Mars could have supported microbial life billions of years ago. Mars 2020 will search for actual signs of past microbial life, taking rock core samples that will be deposited in metal tubes on the Martian surface. Future missions could return these samples to Earth for deeper study.

In addition to preserving signs of ancient life, carbonates can teach us more about how Mars transitioned from having liquid water and a thicker atmosphere to being the freezing desert it is today. Carbonate minerals formed from interactions between carbon dioxide and water, recording subtle changes in these interactions over time. In that sense, they act as time capsules that scientists can study to learn when -- and how -- the Red Planet began drying out.

Measuring 28 miles (45 kilometers) wide, Jezero Crater was also once home to an ancient river delta. The "arms" of this delta can be seen reaching across the crater floor in images taken from space by satellite missions like NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars instrument, or CRISM, helped produce colorful mineral maps of the "bathtub ring" detailed in the new paper.

Scientists from NASA's Mars 2020 mission and the European Space Agency-Roscosmos ExoMars mission are in the Australian Outback to hone research techniques before their missions launch to the Red Planet in summer 2020. They are hoping to better understand how to search for signs of ancient life on Mars. The Pilbara region of North West Australia is home to "stromatolites," the oldest confirmed fossilized lifeforms on Earth.

"CRISM spotted carbonates here years ago, but we only recently noticed how concentrated they are right where a lakeshore would be," said the paper's lead author, Briony Horgan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. "We're going to encounter carbonate deposits in many locations throughout the mission, but the bathtub ring will be one of the most exciting places to visit."

It isn't guaranteed that the shoreline carbonates were formed in the lake; they could have been deposited before the lake was present. But their identification makes the site's western rim, called "the marginal carbonate-bearing region," one of the richest troves of these minerals anywhere in the crater.

The Mars 2020 team expects to explore both the crater floor and delta during the rover's two-year prime mission. Horgan said the team hopes to reach the crater's rim and its carbonates near the end of that period.

"The possibility that the 'marginal carbonates' formed in the lake environment was one of the most exciting features that led us to our Jezero landing site. Carbonate chemistry on an ancient lakeshore is a fantastic recipe for preserving records of ancient life and climate," said Mars 2020 Deputy Project Scientist Ken Williford of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the 2020 mission. "We're eager to get to the surface and discover how these carbonates formed."

Jezero's former lake shoreline isn't the only place scientists are excited to visit. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters points to a rich deposit of hydrated silica on the edge of the ancient river delta. Like carbonates, this mineral excels at preserving signs of ancient life. If this location proves to be the bottom layer of the delta, it will be an especially good place to look for buried microbial fossils.

The Mars 2020 rover will launch in July or August 2020 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Mars 2020 Project at JPL manages rover development for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. NASA's Launch Services Program, based at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for launch management.

Mars 2020 is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA's Artemis lunar exploration plans.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, leads MRO's CRISM investigation.

For more information about Mars 2020, go to:

• https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
• https://www.nasa.gov/mars2020

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Materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Stalled weather patterns will get bigger due to climate change

Street flooding

Climate change will increase the size of stalled high-pressure weather systems called "blocking events" that have already produced some of the 21st century's deadliest heat waves, according to a Rice University study.

Atmospheric blocking events are middle-latitude, high-pressure systems that stay in place for days or even weeks. Depending upon when and where they develop, blocking events can cause droughts or downpours and heat waves or cold spells. Blocking events caused deadly heat waves in France in 2003 and in Russia in 2010.

Using data from two sets of comprehensive climate model simulations, Rice fluid dynamicists Ebrahim Nabizadeh and Pedram Hassanzadeh, and colleagues found that the area of blocking events in the northern hemisphere will increase by as much as 17% due to anthropogenic climate change. The study, which is available online from Geophysical Research Letters, was co-authored by Da Yang of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis, and Elizabeth Barnes of Colorado State University.

Hassanzadeh, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, uses computational, mathematical and statistical models to study atmospheric flows related to a broad range of problems from extreme weather events to wind energy. He said researchers have increasingly been interested in learning how climate change might affect blocking events, but most studies have focused on whether blocking events will become more frequent as the atmosphere warms because of greenhouse gas emissions.

"Studies in the past have looked at whether you get more or less blocking events with climate change," he said. "The question nobody had asked is whether the size of these events will change or not. And the size is very important because the blocking events are more impactful when they are larger. For example, if the high-pressure system becomes bigger, you are going to get bigger heat waves that affect more people, and you are likely going to get stronger heat waves."

Nabizadeh, a mechanical engineering graduate student in Rice's Brown School of Engineering, set out to answer the question two years ago. Using a hierarchical modeling approach, he began with experiments on a model of atmospheric turbulence that's far simpler than the real atmosphere.

The simple model, which captures the fundamental dynamics of blocking events, allowed Nabizadeh to do a great deal of exploration. Making slight changes in one parameter or another, he ran thousands of simulations. Then the data was analyzed using a powerful dimensional analysis technique called the Buckingham-Pi theorem, which is often used in designing large and complex engineering systems that involve fluid flows.

The goal was finding a scaling law, a mathematical formula that described the size of a blocking event using variables that climate scientists already study and understand. Nabizadeh started with scaling laws that have been developed to predict the size of day-to-day weather patterns, but he found that none of the variables were predictive for blocking events.

His persistence eventually paid off with a simple formula that relates the area of blocking events to the width, latitude and strength of the jet stream, all of which are well-studied and measured.

"I gave a talk about this recently, and one of the people came up after and said, 'This is magical, that these powers add up and suddenly you get the right answer.' But it took a lot of work by Ebrahim to get this elegantly simple result," he said.

At a one point, Nabizadeh had analyzed the data from many simulations and produced a comparison that included page upon page of figures, and Hassanzadeh said the scaling law discovery was encouraged by an unlikely agency: the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

"Ebrahim went to the DMV one weekend, and I went to the DMV the week after, and at the DMV you have to sit and you don't have anything to do," he said. "So after staring at these numbers for hours, we realized this is the right scaling."

They also compared the simple-model results with the output of increasingly complex models of the Earth's weather and climate. Nabizadeh said the scaling law predicted changes in the size of future winter blocking events in comprehensive climate model simulations with remarkable accuracy.

"It performs better for winter events than summer events for reasons we don't yet understand," Nabizadeh said. "Our results suggest future studies should focus on better understanding summer blocks and also how larger blocking events might affect the size, magnitude and persistence of extreme-weather events like heat waves."

The research was supported by NASA (80NSSC17K0266), the National Academies' Gulf Research Program, the Department of Energy (DE-AC02-05CH11231) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) (AGS-1545675). Computing resources were provided by the NSF-supported XSEDE project (ATM170020) and Rice's Center for Research Computing in partnership with Rice's Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Rice University. Original written by Jade Boyd. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Stalled weather patterns will get bigger due to climate change

Street flooding

Climate change will increase the size of stalled high-pressure weather systems called "blocking events" that have already produced some of the 21st century's deadliest heat waves, according to a Rice University study.

Atmospheric blocking events are middle-latitude, high-pressure systems that stay in place for days or even weeks. Depending upon when and where they develop, blocking events can cause droughts or downpours and heat waves or cold spells. Blocking events caused deadly heat waves in France in 2003 and in Russia in 2010.

Using data from two sets of comprehensive climate model simulations, Rice fluid dynamicists Ebrahim Nabizadeh and Pedram Hassanzadeh, and colleagues found that the area of blocking events in the northern hemisphere will increase by as much as 17% due to anthropogenic climate change. The study, which is available online from Geophysical Research Letters, was co-authored by Da Yang of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis, and Elizabeth Barnes of Colorado State University.

Hassanzadeh, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, uses computational, mathematical and statistical models to study atmospheric flows related to a broad range of problems from extreme weather events to wind energy. He said researchers have increasingly been interested in learning how climate change might affect blocking events, but most studies have focused on whether blocking events will become more frequent as the atmosphere warms because of greenhouse gas emissions.

"Studies in the past have looked at whether you get more or less blocking events with climate change," he said. "The question nobody had asked is whether the size of these events will change or not. And the size is very important because the blocking events are more impactful when they are larger. For example, if the high-pressure system becomes bigger, you are going to get bigger heat waves that affect more people, and you are likely going to get stronger heat waves."

Nabizadeh, a mechanical engineering graduate student in Rice's Brown School of Engineering, set out to answer the question two years ago. Using a hierarchical modeling approach, he began with experiments on a model of atmospheric turbulence that's far simpler than the real atmosphere.

The simple model, which captures the fundamental dynamics of blocking events, allowed Nabizadeh to do a great deal of exploration. Making slight changes in one parameter or another, he ran thousands of simulations. Then the data was analyzed using a powerful dimensional analysis technique called the Buckingham-Pi theorem, which is often used in designing large and complex engineering systems that involve fluid flows.

The goal was finding a scaling law, a mathematical formula that described the size of a blocking event using variables that climate scientists already study and understand. Nabizadeh started with scaling laws that have been developed to predict the size of day-to-day weather patterns, but he found that none of the variables were predictive for blocking events.

His persistence eventually paid off with a simple formula that relates the area of blocking events to the width, latitude and strength of the jet stream, all of which are well-studied and measured.

"I gave a talk about this recently, and one of the people came up after and said, 'This is magical, that these powers add up and suddenly you get the right answer.' But it took a lot of work by Ebrahim to get this elegantly simple result," he said.

At a one point, Nabizadeh had analyzed the data from many simulations and produced a comparison that included page upon page of figures, and Hassanzadeh said the scaling law discovery was encouraged by an unlikely agency: the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

"Ebrahim went to the DMV one weekend, and I went to the DMV the week after, and at the DMV you have to sit and you don't have anything to do," he said. "So after staring at these numbers for hours, we realized this is the right scaling."

They also compared the simple-model results with the output of increasingly complex models of the Earth's weather and climate. Nabizadeh said the scaling law predicted changes in the size of future winter blocking events in comprehensive climate model simulations with remarkable accuracy.

"It performs better for winter events than summer events for reasons we don't yet understand," Nabizadeh said. "Our results suggest future studies should focus on better understanding summer blocks and also how larger blocking events might affect the size, magnitude and persistence of extreme-weather events like heat waves."

The research was supported by NASA (80NSSC17K0266), the National Academies' Gulf Research Program, the Department of Energy (DE-AC02-05CH11231) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) (AGS-1545675). Computing resources were provided by the NSF-supported XSEDE project (ATM170020) and Rice's Center for Research Computing in partnership with Rice's Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology.

Karma pays everything

In life it's Karma that
goes from one to another.
Karma is what you sow,
so you reap.

So when you do bad to
other person, the same
will return to you at some
time.

Many hurdles