Heard At the DNC: Tim Walz Will Be the First Chinese Vice President

The ever-growing menace of plastic pollution and the plight of polar bears has been starkly captured in this shortlisted image for an upcoming photography competition. The image was recently picked as a finalist for the Ocean Photographer of the Year 2024 award along with a selection of other incredible wildlife shots depicting Godzilla-like iguanas, creepy eels, and much more. Celia Kujala took the troubling photograph of the polar bear with plastic trash in its mouth on Kiepert Island, part of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The photographer described the image as “a stark reminder that even the uninhabited reaches of the Arctic are not exempt from the pervasive grip of plastic pollution.”      It’s no secret that polar bears are becoming increasingly impacted by human behavior. Warming temperatures in the Arctic are causing the sea ice to melt, forcing hungry polar bears to spend more time on land near human settlements. Simultaneously, expanding human activity is increasingly infringing upon the bears' natural habitat.Starved and driven closer to humans, the predicament is leading polar bears to eat an increasing amount of anthropogenic trash – including plastic.A 2023 study looked at the stomach content analysis of 42 polar bears in Alaska and found plastic in the bellies of 12 (28.6 percent) individuals. By no surprise, 14 of the polar bears were found to be suffering from inflammation of the stomach, almost certainly caused by their poor diet.A gannet, entangled in discarded fishing gear, hangs off a cliff. Isle of Noss, Shetland Islands.Image credit: © Rebecca Douglas/Ocean Photographer of the YearPlastic pollution is a big theme in the “Conservation - Impact” category of this year’s Ocean Photographer Of The Year competition. Another selected finalist, Rebecca Douglas, captured a heartbreaking shot of a gannet seabird hanging from plastic netting like a noose, while Francesca Page shared her image of a critically endangered smoothnose wedgefish caught in a fishing net. Between 75 and 199 million tonnes of plastic is currently lost in our oceans. Despite increasing awareness, the use and abuse of plastic continue to grow. Plastic production doubled between 2000 and 2019, from 234 to 460 million tonnes, and it’s set to continue along this trajectory reaching over 1.2 billion tonnes by 2060, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.The winners of Ocean Photographer Of The Year 2024, an annual competition co-presented by Oceanographic and Blancpain, will be announced on September 12, 2024 – so stay tuned!

The European Space Agency's Juice mission is on its way to explore Jupiter’s icy moons, arriving in a few years, but to get there it's stealing some orbital velocity from Earth, Venus, and – for the first time – the Moon. These gravitational assist maneuvers are standard to slingshot missions about the Solar System but what JUICE did last night, and is about to do tonight, is anything but.For the first time, a spacecraft is using two objects for a gravity assist maneuver instead of just one. This is the first-ever lunar-Earth flyby, carried out over two nights. It is such a daring maneuver that it required the launch window for the mission last year to be only 1 second long. Last night Juice successfully flew by the Moon, conducting some tests of the science instruments, including the ones that will study what’s underneath the icy exterior of the Jovian moons, and in the second leg, it will fly by Earth tonight.“This could not be done in the lab. This will be an excellent test to check the performance of the radar in the context of the full spacecraft operating,” Nicolas Altobelli, planetary scientist with ESA, said during a press conference attended by IFLScience 10 days ago.The Moon captured by JUICE at 9:25 pm UTC on August 19, 2024, soon after its closest approach to the Moon.Image credit: ESA/JUICE/JMC, acknowledgments: Simeon Schmauß & Mark McCaughreanWhile most of the focus is on the science, the cameras will also be tested. Several images have already been shared online, with a few that have been lightly processed such as the main image above to show real color differences on the Moon.This image was not actually taken by the proper scientific camera. It comes from the Juice Monitoring Camera, which is used to check the status of the booms and antennae.The spacecraft will fly by Earth in just a few hours and that will put it on the right trajectory to go towards Venus, which it will reach in August 2025. It will then come back to Earth twice in September 2026 for more gravitational assists and then again in January 2029.All the flybys will provide the speed to reach Jupiter in 2031, where Juice will study the system as a whole and Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto for three years, before orbiting Ganymede alone.

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