Understanding the hazards of space weather on crewed and robotic missions is vital to informing plans for NASA's Journey to Mars and other missions into our solar system, and beyond.
ountries worldwide, including Germany, Spain, China, the United States, and others, are rapidly expanding their solar power infrastructure. China has been a particularly prominent player, contributing nearly one-third of new capacity additions.
To explore different ways of using solar energy, students build a model solar water heater and determine how much it can heat water in a given amount of time. Solar water heaters work by solar radiation and convection.
This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:
"As we go about our daily lives, we aren’t generally aware of the forces generated by solar activity or the earth’s magnetic field. While these planetary changes are well documented, precisely how they affect human beings is less clear. To answer this question, researchers have turned to the autonomic nervous system – the subconscious control system that regulates bodily functions such as breathing and digestion. Their findings suggest that our nervous systems are well attuned to the energetic fluctuations that ripple through our solar system. The work builds on observations made by the famed astronomer Alexander Chizhevsky during World War I. He noted that battles intensify during peak solar flare periods and that major human events and behaviors closely follow the cycle of the sun – which led to the hypothesis that some unknown solar forces affect human health and behavior, providing a provocative link between events occurring in our solar system and life on Earth..."
The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.