New exoplanet is smallest to be precisely measured

A rendering of the orbits of the two planets around their star, named K2-146. Credit: Daniel Fabrycky

Earthlings have long daydreamed about faraway planets, but only recently have scientists been able to identify thousands of new exoplanets—and to learn more and more about what they look like.

The latest: a new exoplanet discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft in the constellation of Cancer. Thanks to good timing and the planet's odd orbital pattern, scientists with the University of Chicago were able to calculate its mass more precisely than any other planet this small to date.

"It was totally unexpected—at first we thought there was something wrong with the data, but when we looked at it closely, it was super clear," said graduate student Aaron Hamann, the first author on the paper. "There are two planets going around this star, and they are acting very strongly on each other, which allows us to calculate their masses with record-breaking precision."

Launched in March 2009, the Kepler mission was designed to look specifically for exoplanets—planets orbiting stars in distant systems, some of which may harbor life. Scientists comb through its data, looking for anomalies around distant stars that might indicate planets. This was the mission for a group of University of Chicago scientists working with Assoc. Prof. Daniel Fabrycky, a hunter of strange exoplanets—among others, he's weighed planets in complex systems containing five to seven planets, and teased out the orbital interactions of four planets locked in orbit more tightly together than any other system.

Faraway planets are too tiny to see with telescopes, so a primary way that such exoplanet hunters search for them is by noticing a very small dimming of a star's light as a planet passes in front of it. When Kepler first looked at the cool star called K2-146, which is located about 258 light-years away, scientists saw one planet making an irregular dimming pattern. But poring over the data from Kepler's second and third passes years later, the team confirmed the irregularity was caused by a second planet.

An artist's rendering of NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which took data that scientists used to discover a new tiny exoplanet in a strange configuration. Credit: NASA

This second, smaller exoplanet was circling and pulling on the first planet's orbit. As the two exoplanets pass each other, they speed up a little: "A mini slingshot effect," Hamann said. (There's a parallel in our own solar system. Neptune was discovered the same way, Fabrycky said: Scientists noticed Uranus orbiting strangely and inferred a new planet was responsible—leading to Neptune's direct discovery.)

But K2-146's planets are extreme among the known exoplanets, the scientists said. Both planets zip around the sun in a matter of days: 3.99 days for the larger, 2.66 for the smaller, on average. "Because they have short orbital periods and the gravitational effects are strong, the orbit changes dramatically as we watch it," Fabrycky explained.

"To give you a sense of it, our year always has 365 days, but these planets will have years that are significantly shorter or longer," Hamann said. "It would be as though your birthday would sometimes come almost a month earlier or later than you'd normally expect."

They hadn't seen the second planet clearly in the first pass since it wasn't in front of the star at the right time, but in the second and third passes, the two planets' dance had made them shift so that both were clearly visible.

Asst. Prof. Leslie Rogers, who specializes in decoding the composition of exoplanets, helped them guess that the planets may have a rock core with a substantial gas atmosphere thick enough to block sunlight. Normally planets this close to their suns would have had the atmosphere stripped away by photons. (Neither planet is habitable, the scientists said: Temperatures probably run close to 600 degrees Fahrenheit.)

Further compounding scientists' good luck, Kepler happened to be looking at the system at key points during the transits. "We caught it at just the perfect time, so that we could measure it to a precision of 3%, even though we looked at it for a relatively short period of time," Hamann said.

"You need a planet's mass to understand its gravity, so having such an accurate mass helps us interpret what the atmosphere must look like," said UChicago NASA Sagan Fellow and co-author Benjamin Montet.

The scientists said the discovery has implications for how to direct searches for future exoplanets, such as NASA's new exoplanet mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is in orbit now.

"This is a good reminder, especially as TESS continues, that if you check back on a system two years later, you might learn quite a lot," Fabrycky said. "There are plenty of other planets in hiding like this."

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New space discovery sheds light on how planets form

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K2-146: Discovery of Planet c, Precise Masses from Transit Timing, and Observed Precession arxiv.org/abs/1907.10620

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This One 'Anomaly' Is Driving Physicists To Search For Light Dark Matter

The XENON1T detector, with its low-background cryostat, is installed in the centre of a large water shield to protect the instrument against cosmic ray backgrounds. This setup enables the scientists working on the XENON1T experiment to greatly reduce their background noise, and more confidently discover the signals from processes they're attempting to study. XENON is not only searching for heavy, WIMP-like dark matter, but other forms of potential dark matter, including light candidates like dark photons and axion-like particles.

XENON1T collaboration

Sometimes, the solution to a puzzle you've been stymied by lies in a place you've already looked. Only, until you develop better-precision tools than you've used to conduct your previous searches, you won't be able to find it. This has played out many times in the sciences, from the discovery of new particles to uncovering phenomena like radioactivity, gravitational waves, or dark matter and dark energy.

We've been looking for new particles not predicted by the Standard Model with an enormous variety of experiments for decades, from accelerators to underground laboratories to rare, exotic decays of everyday particles. Despite decades of searching, no beyond-the-Standard-Model particles have ever turned up. But recently, searches have begun to consider light dark matter, despite having already looked in that expected range. We have to look better, and one unexplained experimental result is the reason why.

When you collide any two particles together, you probe the internal structure of the particles colliding. If one of them isn't fundamental, but is rather a composite particle, these experiments can reveal its internal structure. Here, an experiment is designed to measure the dark matter/nucleon scattering signal. However, there are many mundane, background contributions that could give a similar result. This particular hypothetical scenario will create an observable signature in Germanium, liquid XENON and liquid ARGON detectors.

Dark Matter Overview: Collider, Direct and Indirect Detection Searches - Queiroz, Farinaldo S. arXiv:1605.08788

Identifying a scientific puzzle — a phenomenon or observation that cannot be conventionally explained — is often the starting point that leads to a scientific revolution. If heavy elements are made from the synthesis of lighter ones, for example, then you have to have a viable pathway for the natural construction of the heavy elements we see today. If your best theory cannot explain why carbon exists, but we observe carbon to exist, that's a good puzzle for science to investigate.

Often, the puzzle itself offers possible clues to a solution. The fact that there are no stationary, oscillating in-phase electric and magnetic fields led to Special Relativity. If not for a mysterious observation of missing energy in radioactive beta decays, we wouldn't have predicted the neutrino. And patterns seen in the heavy composite particles produced in accelerators led to the quark model and the prediction of the Ω^- baryon.

Different ways of putting together up, down, strange and bottom quarks with a spin of +3/2 results in the following 'baryon spectrum', or collection of 20 composite particles. The Ω- particle, on the lowest rung of the pyramid, was first predicted by applying Murray Gell-Mann's quark theory to the structure of the previously-known particles and inferring the existence of the missing pieces.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

In the case of the mystery of carbon's existence, the situation has only gotten more interesting with time. Back in the 1950s, scientist Fred Hoyle, along with Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, were trying to understand how the heavier elements of the periodic table were formed if all you began with were the lightest ones of all.

Postulating that the Sun was powered by the energy released from the nuclear fusion of light elements into heavy ones, Hoyle could account for the synthesis of deuterium, tritium, helium-3 and helium-4 from raw hydrogen nuclei (protons), but couldn't find a way to get to carbon. You couldn't add a proton or neutron to helium-4, since both helium-5 and lithium-5 were unstable: they'd decay after ~10^-22 seconds. You couldn't add two helium-4 nuclei together, because beryllium-8 was too unstable, decaying after ~10^-16 seconds.

The triple-alpha process, which occurs in stars, is how we produce elements carbon and heavier in the Universe, but it requires a third He-4 nucleus to interact with Be-8 before the latter decays. Otherwise, Be-8 goes back to two He-4 nuclei.

E. Siegel / Beyond The Galaxy

But Hoyle had a brilliant possible solution up his sleeve. If a dense enough environment could create beryllium-8 on fast enough timescales, it could be possible for a third nucleus — another helium-4 — to get in there before the beryllium decayed away. Mathematically, that would enable you to create carbon-12: permitting the existence of carbon under the right conditions.

Unfortunately, we knew the mass of a carbon-12 nucleus, and it didn't match the mass of helium-4 plus the mass of beryllium-8. Unless our understanding of nuclear physics was wrong, this reaction couldn't account for the carbon we see today. But Hoyle's workaround was brilliant: he hypothesized the existence of another, hitherto undiscovered possibility: a resonant state of carbon-12 could exist that did have the right mass.

Willie Fowler in the W.K. Kellogg Radiation Laboratory at Caltech, which confirmed the existence of the Hoyle State and the triple-alpha process.

Caltech Archives

Then, it could decay to the carbon-12 we see today. This nuclear process, the triple-alpha process, is now known to occur inside red giant stars, with the resonant state of carbon-12 now known as the Hoyle state, as it was confirmed by nuclear physicist Willie Fowler later in the 1950s. The existence of carbon, and the puzzle of how to create it using known physics and pre-existing ingredients, led to this remarkable discovery.

Perhaps, then, a similar line of reasoning could lead to a solution to the biggest puzzles facing physicists today?

It's undoubtedly worth a try. We all know that these big puzzles include dark matter, dark energy, the origin of the matter/antimatter asymmetry in our Universe, the origin of neutrino mass and the incredible difference between the Planck scale and the actual masses of the known particles.

The masses of the quarks and leptons of the Standard Model. The heaviest standard model particle is the top quark; the lightest non-neutrino is the electron, which is measured to have a mass of 511 kev/c^2. The neutrinos themselves are at least 4 million times lighter than the electron: a bigger difference than exists between all the other particles. All the way at the other end of the scale, the Planck scale hovers at a foreboding 10^19 GeV. We do not know of any particles heavier than the top quark, nor why the particles have the mass values that they do.

Hitoshi Murayama of http://hitoshi.berkeley.edu/

On the other hand, we have clues from measurements and observations that our current story of the Universe may not be all that there is. Most of these have not yet reached the definitive 5-sigma threshold we require to claim that something new is out there, but they are suggestive.

• The muon's measured magnetic moment doesn't match theoretical predictions with a 3.6-sigma tension.


• The AMS experiment has seen an excess of positrons, with an energy cutoff seen with 4.0-sigma confidence.


• And the tension between different methods of measuring the Hubble expansion rate has risen to a 4.4-sigma discrepancy.

But one experiment blew past that threshold years ago: an experiment designed to measure the decay of that short-lived state so essential to creating carbon in the Universe: beryllium-8. It disagrees with our conventional predictions by an impressive 6.8-sigma, and is known in the community as the Atomki anomaly.

The accelerator model, used to bombard Lithium and create the Be-8 used in the experiment that first showed an unexpected discrepancy in particle decays, located at the entrance of the Institute of Nuclear Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Yoav Dothan

When you create a particle like beryllium-8, you fully expect it to decay back into two helium-4 nuclei with no preferred direction with respect to its center of mass. In a laboratory setting, fusing two helium-4 nuclei is impractical, but fusing lithium-7 with a proton will do just as good a job at creating beryllium-8 with one additional exception: it will create the beryllium-8 nucleus in an excited state.

Just as the Hoyle state of carbon was an excited state, it needed to emit a high-energy (gamma ray) photon before dropping down to the ground state. Well, the excited beryllium-8 has to emit a high-energy photon before it can decay to two helium-4 nuclei, and that photon will be energetic enough that there's a chance it can spontaneously produce an electron/positron pair. The relative angle between the electron and the positron, assuming you make a detector to trace out those tracks, will tell you what the energy of the emitted photon was.

The decay tracks of unstable particles in a cloud chamber, which allow us to reconstruct the original reactants. The opening angle between the sideways "V" shaped track will tell you the energy of the particle that decayed into them.

Wikimedia Commons user Cloudylabs

You'd fully expect that there would be a predictable energy distribution for the photon, and hence a smooth distribution in the opening angles between the electron and positron. You'd fully anticipate a maximum number of events with a particular angle, and then the event rate would decrease the greater you departed from that angle.

Except, starting in 2015, a Hungarian team led by Attila Krasznahorkay found a surprise: as the angle between the electrons and positrons gets larger, the number of events decreases, until you get to about a 140º angular separation, where they observed a surprising increase in the number of events. Maybe it was an experimental error; maybe there was an analysis error; or maybe, just maybe, the result is robust, and this is a clue that might help us solve a deep mystery in physics.

The excess of signal in the raw data here, outlined by E. Siegel in red, shows the potential new discovery now known as the Atomki anomaly. Although it looks like a small difference, it's an incredibly statistically significant result, and has led to a series of new searches for particles of approximately 17 MeV/c^2.

A.J. Krasznahorkay et al., 2016, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 042501

If the result is robust, one potential explanation is the existence of a new particle with a specific mass: about 0.017 GeV/c². This particle would be heavier than the electron and all of the neutrinos, but lighter than every other massive, fundamental particle ever discovered. Many different theoretical scenarios have been proposed to account for this measurement, and various ways to look for an experimental signature have also been devised.

When you hear about experiments looking for a dark photon, a light vector boson, a protophobic particle, or the force-carrying particle for a new, fifth force, they're all looking for variants that could explain this Atomki anomaly. Not only that, but many of them also seek to solve one of the big puzzles with this particle: the dark matter puzzle. There's no harm in shooting for the Moon, but every measurement has met with the same disappointment: null results.

The spin-dependent and spin-independent results from the XENON collaboration indicate no evidence for a new particle of any mass, including the light dark matter scenario that would fit with the Atomki anomaly.

E. Aprile et al., 'Light Dark Matter Search with Ionization Signals in XENON1T,' arXiv:1907.11485

If it weren't for the puzzling nature of the Atomki anomaly, there would be no motivation to be interested in dark matter at these energies. Results from electron-positron colliders should have seen something at these energies long ago, but no evidence for a new particle exists. It's only through contrived scenarios, which were explicitly contrived to both explain the Atomki anomaly and evade the existing constraints, that we concocted these light dark matter scenarios.

Still, that's where the clues are, so that's one of the places we're looking. There's a big warning here: in science, we have a tendancy to find the particles we're seeking in the places where we're actively looking, whether they actually exist or not. Fokke de Boer, who led the Atomki experiments before Krasznahorkay did, had a rich history of discovering similar evidence for new particles, only to have those results fail verification and replication.

The jury is still out on whether this anomaly is as good as it's hyped to be, but until we have a robust explanation, we have to both keep an open mind and look everywhere the data tells us new physics might reasonably be. Despite the null results, the search continues.

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Finally, we have some good nature news: tiger numbers in India are rebounding

Indian tiger numbers are up, according to one of the most detailed wildlife surveys ever conducted. Tiger populations have risen by 6 percent, to roughly 3,000 animals.

The massive survey may set a new world standard in counting large carnivores. The encouraging results validate India's impressive investments in tiger conservation.

A mammoth effort

Large, solitary predators hate being seen. They owe their entire existence to being able to avoid detection by prey and sneak close before attacking.

Hence, when we want to count tigers, the tigers don't help. But accurate population numbers are fundamental to good conservation. Every four years since 2006, the Indian government conducts a national census of tigers and other wildlife.

The efforts the project team undertakes to derive the tiger population estimate are nothing short of phenomenal: 44,000 field staff conducted almost 318,000 habitat surveys across 20 tiger-occupied states of India.

Some 381,400 km² (147,000 square miles) was checked for tigers and their prey.

(There is an application in with the Guinness Book of World Records to see if this is the largest wildlife survey ever conducted anywhere in the world.)

The team placed paired camera traps at 26,760 locations across 139 study sites and these collected almost 35 million photos (including 76,523 tiger and 51,337 leopard photos). These camera traps covered 86 percent of the entire tiger distribution in India.

Where it was too dangerous to work in the field (14 percent of the tigers' distribution) because of political conflict, robust models estimated population numbers.

Count the tigers

Collecting this volume of data would be an utter waste of time if it were poorly analysed. The teams took advice from some of the world's foremost experts to sort the photos: pattern matching experts who could identify whether a photo of a tiger taken in the monsoon matched that of a tiger taken in the dry season while walking at a different angle, machine learning experts to speed up species identification, and spatial analysis experts to estimate the populations of tigers and their prey.

The research team took this advice and coupled it with their own knowledge of tiger ecology to develop a census that is unique among large carnivore studies.

We were fortunate enough to be among the non-Indian scientists invited to review this process. Peer review is a crucial part of any scientific endeavour, and especially important as early Indian tiger surveys were notoriously unreliable.

Actual numbers

So how did they do? A total of 2,461 individual tigers older than one year of age were photo-captured. The overall tiger population in India was estimated at 2,967 individuals (with an error range of roughly 12 percent).

Out of this, 83.4 percent were estimated from camera-trap photos, and the rest estimated from robust modelling. Tiger numbers have increased by 6 percent per year, continuing the rate of increase from the 2014 census. This is a wonderful success for Indian conservation efforts.

However not all is rosy. There has been a 20 percent decline in areas occupied by tigers in 2014 to today, although tigers have moved into some new areas (some 8 percent of their Indian range is new).

The coordinators of the tiger survey – Yadvendradev Jhala and Qamar Qureshi – conclude that while established and secure tiger populations in some parts of India have increased, small, isolated populations and those along corridors between established populations have gone extinct.

This highlights the need for conservation efforts to focus on improving connectivity between isolated populations, while incentivising the relocation of people out of core tiger areas, reducing poaching and improving habitat to increase prey resources.

This will be no easy task with India's burgeoning population, but investment from private sector tourist corporations in land acquisition along corridors and the creation of community conservancies could supplement government funding for expanding protected corridors.

The success of India's census has led the governments of Nepal and Bangladesh to employ the same project team to help estimate their own tiger populations.

These methods can – and should – be employed for other iconic, charismatic species that can be individually identified, such as jaguars in South and Central America; leopards, cheetahs, and hyenas in Africa, and possibly even quolls in Australia.

This article was co-authored by Chris Carbone, Senior Research Fellow at the Zoological Society of London.

Matt Hayward, Associate professor, University of Newcastle and Joseph K. Bump, Associate Professor, Gordon W. Gullion Endowed Chair in Forest Wildlife Research and Education, University of Minnesota.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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NASA Selects Dozen U.S. Companies For Moon To Mars Partnerships

Artist's concept of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule prepared for launch.

Credit: NASA

Today, NASA announced it has selected 12 U.S. commercial companies for 19 partnerships in its crewed Moon to Mars efforts, which kicks off with a planned 2024 Artemis program crewed return to the lunar surface.

The selections entail six key areas for future development as well as a category for other exploration technologies. They are: advanced communications, navigation and avionics; entry, descent and landing; in-space manufacturing and assembly; advanced materials; power; and propulsion.

“We’ve identified technology areas NASA needs for future missions, and these public-private partnerships will accelerate their development so we can implement them faster,” Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA’s space technology mission directorate, said in a statement.

The selected companies include:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX which NASA says will work with the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to advance technology to vertically land large rockets on the Moon; including advancing models to assess engine plume interaction with lunar regolith. SpaceX will also work with NASA on advancing tech needed to transfer propellant in orbit, which the space agency says is an important step in the development of the company’s Starship space vehicle.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will collaborate with NASA on advanced navigation and guidance systems to enable safe, precise landings on the Moon, says the agency. And NASA says the company will also partner with them on advancing a fuel cell power system for the company’s Blue Moon lander. The system, says NASA, could provide uninterrupted power during the lunar night, which lasts for about two weeks in most locations.

Advanced Space of Boulder, Colo., will partner with NASA on advancing a navigation system between Earth and the Moon that could supplement NASA’s deep space network and support future exploration missions, says the agency.

Spirit Aerosystem, Inc. of Wichita, Kan., will partner with NASA on improving the durability of low-cost reusable rockets manufactured using friction stir welding, says the agency. This welding method which is already being used for NASA’s Space Launch System allows for stronger, more defect-free seals.

Maxar Technologies of Palo Alto, Calif., will work NASA to build a breadboard – a base for prototyping electronics – for a deployable, semi-rigid radio antenna, says NASA. In-orbit assembly of large structures like antennas will enhance the performance of assets in space, says the agency.

And Lockheed Martin will partner with Kennedy Space Center to test technologies and operations for autonomous in-space plant growth systems, says NASA. The idea is that integrating robotics with plant growing systems could help NASA harvest plants on future platforms in deep space.

Illustration of a human landing system and crew on the lunar surface with Earth near the horizon.

Credit: NASA

All of this work is aimed at returning NASA to the moon using robotic and crewed vehicles.

Artemis 1, an uncrewed flight to test the Space Launch System and Orion (crew vehicle) together, is scheduled for 2020, says NASA, while Artemis 2, the first flight with crew, is targeted for launch in 2022.

NASA says it plans to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024 on the Artemis 3 mission and about once a year thereafter. The goal of these missions will be in part to learn how to live and operate on the surface of another celestial body, says the agency. There, only three days from home, it will be easier to prove the technologies needed before sending astronauts on missions to Mars, says NASA, which can take up to three years roundtrip.

The aim is to begin crewed Mars missions by the 2030s.

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Hundreds of fossils of strange primordial predator unearthed in Canada

A complete fossil unearthed in Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies of the marine creature Cambroraster falcatus, which lived 506 million years ago, showing the eyes and the body with paired swimming flaps below the large head carapace is seen in this image released by the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 30, 2019. Jean-Bernard Caron/Royal Ontario Museum/Handout via REUTERS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hundreds of fossils of a primordial sea creature with rake-like claws and a head resembling a famous fictional spaceship have been unearthed in Canada, providing a wealth of information about an important predator from a key time in the evolution of life on Earth.

Scientists on Tuesday said the creature, called Cambroraster falcatus, was a distant relative of today’s arthropods - the diverse group of animals including insects, spiders and crabs - and lived during the Cambrian Period 506 million years ago, when all animal life lived in the oceans.

“Most animals in the Cambrian Period were small, typically a few centimeters long at most. By comparison, Cambroraster was a giant, at up to a foot long (30 cm),” said paleontologist Joe Moysiuk of the Royal Ontario Museum and University of Toronto, lead author of the research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Cambroraster was excavated in Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies from a rock formation known as the Burgess Shale that has yielded fossils of a wondrous array of Cambrian animals. The Cambrian was a time of evolutionary experimentation when nearly all major animal groups first appeared and numerous oddballs came and went.

“With its huge head, small body and upward facing eyes, Cambroraster superficially resembles a horseshoe crab, although in detail they are quite different animals,” Moysiuk said. “Just like horseshoe crabs, we think Cambroraster spent its time hanging around near the sea floor, feeding on organisms buried in the mud.”

Its large head was covered by a shield-like carapace whose shape reminded the scientists of the Millennium Falcon spaceship of “Star Wars” fame. At the front of its body were two large claws with a succession of parallel outgrowths like a series of rakes, letting it sift through seafloor mud and strain out any prey. Tooth-like plates surrounded its circular mouth. It may have dined upon worms, small fish and larvae.

It belonged to the same group - radiodonts - as the apex predator of the time, called Anomalocaris, a dangerous hunter reaching three feet (one meter) long that may even have targeted Cambroraster.

Radiodonts, among the earliest offshoots of the arthropod lineage, are usually known from fragmentary remains. But the scientists found such a large number of beautifully preserved and complete Cambroraster fossils that they achieved a breakthrough in the understanding of this significant extinct group.

Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Tesla just announced a giant new battery system to store renewable energy

Tesla on Monday announced its largest battery product. Called Megapack, it's designed to simplify the installation process for large energy-storage projects.

Each Megapack can store up to 3 megawatt hours of energy and convert up to 1.5 megawatts of energy from a direct current (DC) to an alternating current (AC) so homes can use it.

Tesla had previously used its industrial-size Powerpack batteries for large-scale projects, but says the Megapack has 60 percent more energy density.

A system of Megapacks is more cost-effective and can be installed faster than a fossil-fuel power plant, Tesla says, and the Megapacks can store energy generated by wind turbines or solar panels.

The electric-car and energy company will use Megapacks in a California installation operated by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company and designed for use when demand for energy from local grids is greater than their supply.

"Battery storage is transforming the global electric grid and is an increasingly important element of the world's transition to sustainable energy," Tesla said in a blog post on its website.

In 2017, Tesla used Powerpacks to install in Australia what it says is the world's largest lithium-ion battery to support local energy grids. The project reduced costs by almost US$40 million during its first year, Tesla says.

Storage has come to account for an increasingly large percentage of Tesla's energy business, which also includes solar panels. While solar installations have declined in recent years, installed storage-capacity has increased.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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Ethiopia Plants 350 Million Trees in 12 Hours—a New Record

Yesterday, thousands of people in Ethiopia got their hands dirty as the nation planted an estimated 350 million trees across the countryside over the course of only 12 hours, reports the BBC.

The effort is touted as a new world record for the number of trees planted in a single day; it was part of the nation’s “green legacy” initiative. In the early part of the 20th century, the landlocked nation in the Horn of Africa was 35 percent forested. By the beginning of this century, however, that figure dropped to less than four percent.

That’s one reason the government is sponsoring an initiative to plant 4 billion mostly indigenous trees, or about 40 trees per citizen. The Associated Press reports that thus far, over 2.6 billion trees have been planted across Ethiopia as part of the program in the hopes of stopping erosion, preventing desertification and restoring lost habitat.

Staff from the United Nations, African Union and several foreign embassies took part in the planting effort—and some government offices even closed to allow employees to help plant the trees. Special software was used to help keep track of the number trees placed in the ground. The new record, which would blow away India’s 2016 record of planting 50 million trees in a single day, has yet to be confirmed by Guinness World Records.

353,633,660 Tree Seedlings Planted in 12 Hours. This is in #Ethiopians

Regional Shares of Trees Planted today.#PMOEthiopia #GreenLegacyEthiopia pic.twitter.com/2BkTDtYedC

— Dr.-Ing. Getahun Mekuria (@DrGetahun) July 29, 2019

Dan Ridley-Ellis, who studies wood at Edinburgh Napier University, tells Ann Ploszaski at The Guardian that reforestation of any scale can have immense benefits to nations like Ethiopia.

“Trees not only help mitigate climate change by absorbing the carbon dioxide in the air, but they also have huge benefits in combating desertification and land degradation, particularly in arid countries. They also provide food, shelter, fuel, fodder, medicine, materials and protection of the water supply,” he says. “This truly impressive feat is not just the simple planting of trees, but part of a huge and complicated challenge to take account of the short- and long-term needs of both the trees and the people.”

My parents started a forestry program in #Mojo, 30 years ago during Derg, but today we planted on their land together with the whole nation, and it was one of my parent's proudest moments...and mine.
God bless #Ethiopia #GreenLegacyEthiopia pic.twitter.com/dTUR9DODcy

— Edna Alemayehu (@ednaalemayehu) July 29, 2019

Reforestation has been in the news a lot lately, mainly because a paper published in Science earlier this month mapped out the millions of square miles on Earth that could be reforested. If all that land was filled with trees, the researchers estimated, it could drop carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by 25 percent. Other scientists pushed back, saying the estimates were overly generous, and that the climate benefits of reforestation are little studied, highly variable and restoring so much land would be politically and technically difficult.

Restoring degraded land has many benefits, including preserving habitats for endangered species, protecting watersheds and nourishing soil. Those are all reasons for the Bonn Challenge, a global project to reforest 1.35 million square miles of degraded land by 2030. Ethiopia has committed to restoring about 58,000 square miles of forest by 2020.

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