An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Space station commander Jeff Williams set a new U.S. space endurance record Wednesday, his 521st day in orbit over four missions, eclipsing the 520-day record set earlier this year by astronaut Scott Kelly at the end of his nearly one-year stay aboard the lab complex. Williams now moves up to 17th on the list of the world’s most experienced astronauts and cosmonauts. The overall record is held by cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, who logged 878 days in orbit over five missions. Williams, Soyuz TMA-20M commander Alexey Ovchinin and flight engineer Oleg Skripochka were launched to the space station March 18. They plan to return to Earth Sept. 6 (U.S. time), landing in Kazakhstan to close out a 172-day mission. At landing, Williams will have logged 534 days aloft, moving him up to 14th on the space endurance list. Williams first flew in space in 2000 aboard the shuttle Atlantis, the third shuttle flight devoted to station assembly. He served as a flight engineer aboard the station in 2006 and completed a second long-duration stay in 2010, serving as a flight engineer and then commander of Expedition 22. “I wanted to congratulate you on passing me up here in total number of days in space,” Kelly radioed Williams Wednesday. “It’s great to see another record broken. […] But I do have one question for you. And my question is, do you have another 190 days in you?” Kelly was referring to the time Williams’ current mission would have to be extended to equal Kelly’s U.S. single-flight record. Williams laughed, saying “190 days. That question’s not for me, that’s for my wife!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – NASA Astronaut Jeff Williams Sets New US Space Endurance Record With 521 Days

New research led by scientists at the Australian National University’s Research School of Earth suggests that humans first started to significantly change the climate in the 1830s, near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The findings have been published in the journal Nature, and “were based on natural records of climate variation in the world’s oceans and continents, including those found in corals, ice cores, tree rings and the changing chemistry of stalagmites in caves.” Sydney Morning Herald reports: “Nerilie Abram, another of the lead authors and an associate professor at the Australian National University’s Research School of Earth Sciences, said greenhouse gas levels rose from about 280 parts per million in the 1830s to about 295 ppm by the end of that century. They now exceed 400 ppm. Understanding how humans were already altering the composition of the atmosphere through the 19th century means the warming is closer to the 1.5 to 2 degrees target agreed at last year’s Paris climate summit than most people realize.” “It was one of those moments where science really surprised us,” says Abram. “But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Global Warming Started 180 Years Ago Near Beginning of Industrial Revolution, Says Study