Science

The federal carbon tax has increased by 23 percent, which means burning fossil fuels will cost most Canadians more money, but they’ll also get more money in rebates. David Akin explains why hundreds of economists support the increase; how politicians on all sides are criticizing the increase; how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is responding; and why poor Liberal communication is contributing to the criticism – April 1, 2024.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is asking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to call an emergency meeting with the country’s premier to discuss the federal carbon price.Poilievre circulated the letter following a $15-per-tonne increase in the consumer price on carbon emissions that began Monday.

The planned increase added about 3.3 cents to the carbon price per liter of gasoline. A 50-liter tank will now be charged an additional carbon fee of $8.80, about $1.65 more than before.

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The Conservatives are targeting rural and northern British Columbia, Ontario.
Conservative leader Pierre Poiliev’s path to power may lie in prosecuting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has been in government for the past eight years, but his path to victory is colored orange by the NDP.

Appealing to working-class voters in rural and northern constituencies – such as those held by the New Democrats in B.C. and the Liberals in northern Ontario – is part of what Poilievre sees as a winning formula.

That offensive was on full display on Vancouver Island recently as he crossed into NDP territory, rallying supporters in Nanaimo and taking photos with workers at a Port Alberni plant. He also stopped at a steel mill and harbor in B.C.’s Lower Mainland to talk to workers whose photos have flooded his social media feeds.
“We see Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party leader, in stores and factories,” said Ellie Blades, a strategist who worked on his 2022 leadership campaign in British Columbia.

Blades, who works at Mash Strategy, said it’s a populist approach that has served Poilievre well so far.

“It’s a transition that I think the Conservatives have done very correctly and strategically,” she said. “We see the floor and the stage.”

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Launched for the third time – on December 14 on a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan Cosmodrome in the Gobi Desert – China’s secret reusable spaceplane has performed manoeuvres in Earth orbit. This became known to SpaceNews.

The publication recalls that initially the spacecraft entered an orbit with a height of 333 by 348 kilometres. Referring to data from the U.S. Space Force, the publication writes that around January 20, the spacecraft performed manoeuvres that allowed him to enter orbit with an apogee of 597 kilometres.

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Astronomers at NASA’s Ames Research Centre have refuted the hypothesis that exoplanet K2-18b is a gykean – a planet with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and almost entirely covered by an ocean. According to the study, published in a paper on the arXiv preprint server, it belongs to minineptunes that have no surface.

K2-18b is located in the habitable zone of the red dwarf at a distance of about 134 light years from Earth. Its radius reaches 2.6 Earth radii and its mass is about 8.6 Earth masses. Because of the planet’s close proximity to its star, its orbital period is only 33 days. But because the star is a dim red dwarf, K2-18b receives about the same amount of energy from its star as Earth does from the Sun.

The planet’s density is between that of Earth and Neptune, meaning it is not composed entirely of rocky rock or gas. It was hypothesised that K2-18b was an oceanic world, which had to be confirmed by studying the composition of the atmosphere.

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Geologists have uncovered a mechanism for the emergence of the modern Earth’s crust and continents from a protocrust that existed billions of years ago. According to an article published in the journal Nature Communications, the discovery debunks popular hypotheses of the geological evolution of the Earth, which provided for both external impact and the emergence of tectonic plates before the continents themselves

It is known that most of the Earth’s crust, which emerged during the Archean eon from 4 to 2.5 billion years ago, was an association of three rock types – tonalite, trondhjemite and granodiorite (TTG). However, scientists have been unable to explain what they arose from because so many geological processes took place between the initial melting and final crystallisation.

The new work analysed data from all samples ever studied from Archean craton fragments found around the world. Cratons are large remnants of the basement of ancient continental crust that have not undergone significant change since the Archaean.

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Scientists have found that DNA vaccination can induce sustained, multi-year immunity against HIV, driven by CD8+ T-cells. The results of the successful trial are published in the journal PLOS ONE.

The biologists developed DNA vaccines boosted with the PD-1 protein, which plays an important role in immune cell differentiation. Previous studies in mice have shown that this strategy enables more efficient delivery of antigen (a virus fragment) to dendritic cells, which present it to T-cell receptors to initiate an immune response.

In 2021, researchers reported the results of a study in rhesus macaques that evaluated the potential of the PD-1-enhanced pRhPD1-p27 DNA vaccine against monkey and human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV). The vaccine provided sustained control of SHIVSF162P3CN levels, which was mediated by a strong CD8+ T-cell response. Viruses were undetectable in the blood of the animals for two years.

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Japanese lunar module Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) on the Moon went into hibernation mode until mid-February. This is reported by Kyodo with reference to the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

In hibernation mode module went to sleep due to lack of electricity, which is obtained from solar panels. Japanese experts will try to wake up the device in mid-February, when the solar panels will receive enough light. Scientists admit that the module may not wake up because it is not designed to work in the extremely cold conditions of the lunar night.

Earlier, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said that SLIM has worked in normal mode.

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