The UK's electricity grid is increasingly vulnerable to weird weather events as its reliance on low-carbon wind and solar power grows, scientists have warned.

During the first quarter of the year the UK experienced its longest spell of low wind output in a decade, causing the output from wind turbines to shrink dramatically for 11 days straight.

On 3 March the UK produced just 0.6GW of wind power, compared to the 18.1GW of output delivered later that month, according to experts at Imperial College London.

Gas power stepped in to plug the gap in supply, the researchers found, pushing up carbon emissions.

A stretch of dark, still days is known in Germany as Dunkelflaute or 'dark wind lull'. Experts are worried that as the UK grid relies more and more on wind and solar power, it could become more vulnerable to such events.

NASA satellites have spotted a sunspot on the Sun which is ploughing ultraviolet radiation into the solar system. A few waves of the radiation have glanced Earth, leaving some parts of the globe without radio frequencies below 20MHz.

Solar flares can be detrimental to radio waves as when they hit the atmosphere, ionisation occurs which saps energy from radio waves.

The sunspot in question has been dubbed AR2824 which was first found last week.

However, it went quiet for a few days before waking up and blasting solar flares into the cosmos.

Dr Tony Philips of astronomy site Space Weather wrote on his blog: "After nearly a week of somnolent quiet, sunspot AR2824 is flaring again.

"An impulsive C4.8-class flare during the late hours of May 21st (1928 UT) was followed by an even stronger C6.1-flare on May 22nd (0256 UT).

"AR2824 is now strobing Earth with pulses of ultraviolet radiation.

A new study by a Belgian team using data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) has shown that iron and nickel exist in the atmospheres of comets throughout our Solar System, even those far from the Sun. A separate study by a Polish team, who also used ESO data, reported that nickel vapour is also present in the icy interstellar comet 2I/Borisov. This is the first time heavy metals, usually associated with hot environments, have been found in the cold atmospheres of distant comets.

"It was a big surprise to detect iron and nickel atoms in the atmosphere of all the comets we have observed in the last two decades, about 20 of them, and even in ones far from the Sun in the cold space environment," says Jean Manfroid from the University of Liège, Belgium, who lead the new study on Solar System comets published today in Nature.

The wonderful mess of molecules that make up living things is so complex, biologists have overlooked an entire class of them - until now. This missed bit of biochemistry is neither rare nor hard to find; it's just no one had thought to look for it before.

"This is a stunning discovery of an entirely new class of biomolecules," said Stanford biochemist Carolyn Bertozzi.

"It's really a bombshell because the discovery suggests that there are biomolecular pathways in the cell that are completely unknown to us."

Biologists have a fairly good grasp of our main molecular building blocks. You've got carbohydrates (like starch), lipids (fats), nucleic acids (DNA), and proteins (muscle).

Last May, a spot suddenly appeared in Jupiter's southern hemisphere. But as new images from the Juno spacecraft show, the once circular feature has morphed into an enigmatic splotch.

The feature was first detected by Clyde Foster, director of the Shallow Sky section of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa, on May 31, 2020. Foster spotted the spot using his own 14-inch telescope, and, quite fortuitously, NASA's Juno probe made a close approach two days later, allowing for a close-up view of the new feature.

Clyde's Spot, as it's informally known, is a convective outbreak — a plume of cloud that's reaching out beyond the regular cloud tops — and is located to the southeast of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Such outbreaks are not uncommon within the gas giant's South Temperate Belt.

On April 15, 2021, Juno performed its 33rd perijove (close flyby) of Jupiter, during which time it captured a new view of Clyde's Spot — or, at least what used to be Clyde's Spot. The new image was taken when the spacecraft was 16,800 miles (27,000 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops. Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill processed the image from raw JunoCam data, according to NASA.

Carbon exists in various forms. In addition to diamond and graphite, there are recently discovered forms with astonishing properties. For example graphene, with a thickness of just one atomic layer, is the thinnest known material, and its unusual properties make it an extremely exciting candidate for applications like future electronics and high-tech engineering. In graphene, each carbon atom is linked to three neighbors, forming hexagons arranged in a honeycomb network. Theoretical studies have shown that carbon atoms can also arrange in other flat network patterns, while still binding to three neighbors, but none of these predicted networks had been realized until now.

Researchers at the University of Marburg in Germany and Aalto University in Finland have now discovered a new carbon network, which is atomically thin like graphene, but is made up of squares, hexagons, and octagons forming an ordered lattice. They confirmed the unique structure of the network using high-resolution scanning probe microscopy and interestingly found that its electronic properties are very different from those of graphene.

Most able-bodied people take their ability to perform simple daily tasks for granted — when they reach for a warm mug of coffee, they can feel its weight and temperature and adjust their grip accordingly so that no liquid is spilled. People with full sensory and motor control of their arms and hands can feel that they've made contact with an object the instant they touch or grasp it, allowing them to start moving or lifting it with confidence.

But those tasks become much more difficult when a person operates a prosthetic arm, let alone a mind-controlled one.

In a paper published today in Science, a team of bioengineers from the University of Pittsburgh Rehab Neural Engineering Labs describe how adding brain stimulation that evokes tactile sensations makes it easier for the operator to manipulate a brain-controlled robotic arm. In the experiment, supplementing vision with artificial tactile perception cut the time spent grasping and transferring objects in half, from a median time of 20.9 to 10.2 seconds.

Not graphene: researchers in Germany and Finland discover new type of atomically thin carbon material.
Carbon exists in various forms. In addition to diamond and graphite, there are recently discovered forms with astonishing properties. For example graphene, with a thickness of just one atomic layer, is the thinnest known material, and its unusual properties make it an extremely exciting candidate for applications like future electronics and high-tech engineering. In graphene, each carbon atom is linked to three neighbours, forming hexagons arranged in a honeycomb network. Theoretical studies have shown that carbon atoms can also arrange in other flat network patterns, while still binding to three neighbours, but none of these predicted networks had been realized until now.

Researchers at the University of Marburg in Germany and Aalto University in Finland have now discovered a new carbon network, which is atomically thin like graphene, but is made up of squares, hexagons, and octagons forming an ordered lattice. They confirmed the unique structure of the network using high-resolution scanning probe microscopy and interestingly found that its electronic properties are very different from those of graphene.

In contrast to graphene and other forms of carbon, the new Biphenylene network — as the new material is named — has metallic properties. Narrow stripes of the network, only 21 atoms wide, already behave like a metal, while graphene is a semiconductor at this size. "These stripes could be used as conducting wires in future carbon-based electronic devices." said professor Michael Gottfried, at University of Marburg, who leads the team that developed the idea. The lead author of the study, Qitang Fan from Marburg continues, "This novel carbon network may also serve as a superior anode material in lithium-ion batteries, with a larger lithium storage capacity compared to that of the current graphene-based materials."

Comets that circle the Sun in very elongated orbits spread their debris so thin along their orbit or eject it out of the solar system altogether that their meteor showers are hard to detect. From a new meteor shower survey published in the journal Icarus, researchers now report that they can detect showers from the debris in the path of comets that pass close to Earth orbit and are known to return as infrequent as once every 4,000 years.

"This creates a situational awareness for potentially hazardous comets that were last near-Earth orbit as far back as 2,000 BC," said meteor astronomer and lead author Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute.

Jenniskens is the lead of the Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) project, which observes and triangulates the visible meteors in the night sky using low- light video security cameras to measure their trajectory and orbit. There are CAMS networks now in nine countries, led by co-authors on the paper.

In recent years, new networks in Australia, Chile and Namibia significantly increased the number of triangulated meteors. The addition of these networks resulted in a better and more complete picture of the meteor showers in the night sky.

"Until recently, we only knew five long-period comets to be parent bodies to one of our meteor showers," said Jenniskens, "but now we identified nine more, and perhaps as many as 15."

Last June, the Solar Orbiter spacecraft rocketing around the Sun discovered something new about our hot-headed star: its surface is covered in miniature solar flares, or otherwise known as "campfires" to the scientists behind the spacecraft. Having continued its exploration efforts, NASA and European Space Agency's spacecraft has now captured the first solar eruption on the Sun's surface.

If these eruptions on the Sun's surface are big enough, they can cause billions of tons of plasma and electrically charged particles to dash towards Earth. These eruptions, also known as coronal mass ejections (CME), were observed by the Solar Orbiter on February 12, NASA said in a statement.