100 seconds to midnight: Doomsday Clocks ticks closer to disaster
Every year members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists meet to decide the time on the Doomsday Clock – a notional device created by physicists after the Second World War to surmise how close the world is to destruction. With the clock set in January 2020 at 100 seconds to midnight – the furthest forward it’s ever been – Rachel Brazil lifts the lid on how and why the time gets picked. Elsewhere in the issue, Sam Vennin shows how scientific modelling is critical to many aspects of medicine, including the spread of viruses, while Kate Ravilious finds out how COVID-19 lockdown and travel restrictions changed the climate, and Sean Ryan and Veronica Benson look at how to close the skills gap in physics.
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