Quamrul Haider

On December 21, the first day of winter this year, the two gaseous giants in the solar system—Jupiter and Saturn—will put up a spectacular display in the evening sky.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the Paris Accord hammered out by more than 190 countries at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21).

Science is a remarkable tool available to humans for understanding what is true about the world. It expanded the boundaries of our knowledge and challenged our preconceived notions of what reality is.

Three scientists have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. They are the British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, and American astronomer Andrea Ghez.

On the morning of September 9, 2020, the colour of the sky in the San Francisco Bay Area was burnt orange. By noon, the sky grew darker instead of lighter. The morning sky resembled the red planet Mars, while the afternoon sky gave the impression that there is a solar eclipse, but a longer one.

The 6th and 9th of this month marked the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, that killed an estimated 120,000 people instantly.

We should not be fooled into believing that global warming will cease to be a problem in the coming years if we reduce emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Just when we thought we had chronicled all the beasts of the cosmos, including black holes, a new one—the “Fast Radio Burst”—is howling at us.

A patient on ventilatory support was removed from the ICU of a private hospital in Dhaka when it was found that he was Covid-19 positive.

Though much of the world is focused on transitioning away from fossil fuels as a way to fight climate change, there are other often overlooked contributors to the conundrum resulting from climate change.

In an opinion piece published in this newspaper on April 22, 2020, I discussed the future of our planet within the context of frontier ethics.

No one witnessed the birth of Earth. The Earth does not have a birth certificate to authenticate its age.

In a book on influenza published last year, Robert G. Webster, a virologist at Otago University in New Zealand, had a terrifyingly prescient chapter about pandemics.

If you live in Dhaka, a city that is perennially drowned in a sea of polluted air, you may think that a scarlet sunrise or sunset blazing across the horizon is a sight to behold.

For millions of years, we have remained in equilibrium with our environment. In fact, a defining characteristic of the last 11,500 years, a period in Earth’s history called the Holocene Epoch, has been global climate stability, with average surface temperature fluctuating plus or minus one degree Celsius.

After his death in 1896, the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, established the Nobel Prize in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace.

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. Original members of the Board were a group of scientists who worked under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, the secret scheme responsible for developing the first nuclear weapons.

Ever since global warming became a hot button issue, our leaders have told us umpteen times that “climate change is the greatest environmental threat and the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.” Yet, they are not “bold enough to do enough” to pull us out of the climate change conundrum soon enough.

This year, all the precursor conditions—chilly nights and sunny, warm days—were in place for a fabulous fall foliage season.

In America’s Northeast, including New York, the dramatic explosion of colour during fall season starts typically in late September. It peaks in mid-October when leaves on the trees are emblazoned in gorgeous shades of red, orange, yellow and gold.