Christopher's blog

Community Climate Resilience Lab brings racial justice lens to climate change research

A new University of Toronto lab plans to marry lessons from climate change research and community-based resilience work with a racial justice lens. 

The Community Climate Resilience Lab (CCRL) – which launches this fall – will bring together U of T academics, policy-makers and community actors to build community-led climate resilience from a racialized grassroots standpoint.

NASA will be heading back to Venus for the first time in decades

Earth’s evil twin, here we come. NASA’s next two missions, named DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, are heading to Venus, administrator Bill Nelson announced at a news conference June 2.

“These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface,” Nelson said. “We hope these missions will further our understanding of how Earth evolved and why it’s currently habitable, when others in our solar system are not.”

Dark matter may slow the rotation of the Milky Way’s central bar of stars

Dark matter can be a real drag. The pull of that unidentified, invisible matter in the Milky Way may be slowing down the rotating bar of stars at the galaxy’s heart.

Based on a technique that re-creates the history of the slowdown in a manner akin to analyzing a tree’s rings, the bar’s speed has decreased by at least 24 percent since it formed billions of years ago, researchers report in the August Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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