Because Carson’s company is called Covid, and as of Tuesday, so is the disease caused by that new coronavirus.And per the Coronavirus Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (in a preprint, so not peer reviewed, but likely to be cleared), the microbe itself is now called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2.Not much better?

In Auckland city, just 5mm of rain was recorded at the Motat weather station—the lowest since 1948 and just 7% of normal.The extremely dry conditions have prompted NIWA and Fire Emergency New Zealand to issue a video today highlighting the areas at greatest risk and alerting people to the fire danger.

In fact, the entire Red Sea region has dealt with slow to nonexistent connectivity since the severing of a single submarine cable on Thursday.The Falcon cable has not yet been fixed, though, and countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, along with Yemen, are still dealing with lingering impacts of the cut.

Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Penn State/DSSThis infrared view from NASA’s Spitzer telescope reveals even more texture and activity in this busy region.Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of WisconsinIn this image from the Hubble Space Telescope, the center of the Swan Nebula appears shrouded in a cloud of hydrogen gas.

It can't be docked for playing on a TV, and it has a smaller battery than the full-size Switch (about six hours of gameplay depending on the game).

It was a different much more pleasant occasion in the South Island where Cromwell hit 32.8°C on Christmas Day, the warmest temperature recorded across all of New Zealand in December 2018.Daytime temperatures near average (generally in the upper teens.)

The powerful Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around Earth takes an astoundingly detailed look at the same planet: You can see its telltale bands, the iconic Great Red Spot, and smaller individual storms.

Everything from traffic safety to chickens and ballet shoes has had a scientific eye cast over it ahead of this year’s NIWA Wellington Science and Technology Fair.

The fiery, anti-environment populist has encouraged settlements in the Amazon region, sacked the head of the government agency that monitors deforestation from space, and just this week blamed NGOs for setting the fires to make him look bad.On Tuesday, a satellite took this image of forest fires burning across three Brazilian states.

NIC manager Sadie Mills says staff on research vessels and fisheries observers use identification guides to help them to identify common species and over the past few years have become much more proficient at what they do.

Get to Know Maxwell's Equations—You're Using Them Right Now. The behavior of magnets can be explained with Maxwell's equations, which also describe the behavior of light and everyday objects like electric motors.

Photo © Nikolaj Lasbo / TNC These “passport stamps” are data points that help us understand that kestrel’s movements and migrations throughout its life — and HawkWatch staff and volunteers have now banded about 2,000 kestrels since 2013.

An experiment with a paperclip reveals both its elastic and plastic properties, a distinction that's key to how any material compresses or deforms. plastic properties of a paperclip with a graph that looks something like this.

Led by the World Bank’s South Asia unit, with support from Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) , the pilot aims to create a set of recommendations summarizing possible entry points – project-specific social inclusion ideas – that are practically replicable to similar projects in other countries and localities based on the DRM activity.

Portland is taking seriously the idea of a publicly overseen dark-fiber network over which private providers could compete to offer cheap, ubiquitous internet access.

For years, one of the great mysteries of Nintendo has been the fate of their so-called "quality-of-life" technology, which was said to use their expertise (and their affinity, in the pre-Switch days, for weird peripherals) to create a series of personal health devices that would do things like monitor your sleep and provide useful information on it.

But the hunter photographer Makar Tereshin followed there in January—his fifth trip to the region while shooting his stunning series Fields of Fall — was after bigger, more exotic prey: a 65-foot-long Soyuz rocket booster.

So here’s even worse news: The Arctic contains much of the world’s permafrost, which holds what the report calls a “sleeping giant” made of greenhouse gases.

This region on Mars, called Mawrth Vallis, is of extreme interest to scientists who want to study the rich clays and minerals that exist on the Martian surface.

The wettest soils for this time of the year are located in parts of Gisborne, eastern Bay of Plenty and southern coastal Hawke’s Bay. Areas deemed hotspots have expanded over the past week.

Disasters due to natural hazards are just the tip of the iceberg in MENA cities Resilience is increasingly recognized as a key attribute of an effective urban system. Without efforts to boost resilience in MENA, this rapid growth is exposing cities to significant risks to natural hazards and other shock and stress factors.

The driest soils across the North Island compared to normal for this time of the year are found in central Taranaki District and parts of western Waikato where the soil moisture levels continue to be well below average for this time of year.

They could design disaster-resilience strategies with support from international financial institutions (IFIs), multilateral development banks, donors, and climate funds, increase efforts to restore fiscal sustainability to create room for resilience-building, while incorporating upfront costs and long-term benefits of resilience investments in macro-fiscal frameworks.

NIWA has crunched the data on this week’s heatwave and come up with the following record breakers: Highest temperature: Hanmer Forest 38.4˚C Warmest temperature in Aotearoa so far this summer was recorded at Hanmer Forest on 31st January.

Pinball in space: NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory found jets of particles and energy streaming from a black hole, only to run into a wall of gas and then bounce back toward the region they came from.

A city-by-city diagnostic that compared life cycle costs and GHG emissions of technologies ranging from clean diesel (Euro VI equivalent) and compressed natural gas (CNG) to battery-electric (BEB) and hydrogen buses was completed.

Rob Bell, Paula Blackett and Scott Stephens were among five lead authors who worked on the Ministry for the Environment’s updated coastal hazards and climate change guidance for local government.

The region is buried in sand and dust each summer, making life almost unbearable.Reeds catch fire in the intense sunlight of the Hamoun wetlands.Hossein, 13, lives in Beris, Chaabahar, which lacks clean drinking water.Women draw water from a Houtag—a rainwater collection pit that animals also drink from—in Choutani village, Dashtyari.Nabi Sarani, 63, farms and owns livestock.

Under 12-year agreements with Denmark’s Orsted A/S, Exxon will buy 500 megawatts of wind and solar power in the Permian Basin, the fastest growing U.S. oil field.

Photographer Leah Kennedy documented the region's resulting salt lakes in her series Salis.Related StoriesLaura MalloneeGet Lost in Australia's Vast Salt Lake With These Dreamy PhotosDoug BierendPhotos of Lakes Turn Psychedelic After Soaking in Their WatersAarian MarshallHow to Derail a Runaway Train (and Save Australia)The salt lakes predate human settlement, but over the past hundred years so-called "secondary salinization" has made the lakes’ natural chemistry even more extreme.