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Each year weather records are being broken around the globe; this boreal summer has seen heat records fall across Europe, America and Central Asia. These discernible effects of climate change cannot be ignored, as combined with global issues they endanger society and well-being.
The news headlines in the weeks of July 2022 have been dominated by reports of heatwave events in the UK, across Europe and the USA. The UK experienced record temperatures, with some locations exceeding 40 °C for the first time, while equally high temperatures were seen across the continent. Fires broke out in the extreme heat — extensive wildfires threatening lives and property, as has been seen all too often in recent years around the globe. In the USA, from the south to the north, temperatures exceeded 100 °F (37.8 °C) spanning the nation.
Credit: René Schmidt / Alamy Stock PhotoIn Spain, the recent heatwave was the first to be named, Zoe, as part of a trial in Seville1. It is standard practice for tropical cyclones to be named, allowing easy identification of different systems and providing early warning to those at risk, and this pilot of naming severe heatwaves aims to imitate that strategy and increase public awareness of impending heat risk. The system includes three tiers, and only time will tell how many top-tier, and therefore named, heatwaves will be seen this summer, and in the coming years.Outside the headlines seen here in the UK, there were extreme temperatures in Central Asia and China, and much of the globe saw heat anomalies pushing temperatures beyond the ‘norm’. These are not isolated events, normal is no longer that, as climate change and warming continue. Acknowledging the effect of climate change on average temperatures, earlier this year the UK Met Office updated their heatwave threshold classification — shifting from using the 1981–2010 average daily maximum mid-summer temperature to now using 1991–2020 as the base period (https://go.nature.com/3Q1Vhv2). Heatwaves occur when the temperature equals or exceeds this average for three consecutive days.Extended periods of hot weather put stress on societies and increases mortality risk. An attribution study showed that climate change increased heat-related mortality risk during the 2003 European heatwave — with the highest increase of approximately 70% occurring in central Paris2. Alongside the risks associated with heatwaves themselves, a recent study showed that higher ambient temperatures in Latin America increased the risk of premature death by 5.7% per 1 °C increase3. Another study considering data covering 43 countries and the period 1991–2018 showed that 37% of heat-related deaths in the warm seasons could be attributed to climate change4. This is further explored in a Feature, in our July issue, debating whether climate-related data should be included on death certificates for better understanding of climate change impacts on human mortality5.The immediate impact on human health from heat abates as weather systems pass, but these events as well as higher ambient temperatures have far-reaching consequences. Higher temperatures, in the short and long term, are raising concerns for water and food security, with food security currently of high concern as it is further exacerbated by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. In Africa, there is ongoing wide-scale drought in the Horn of Africa, extending throughout East Africa, as well as drought in West Africa and the Sahel. Agriculture in these regions relies on rainfall and with four failed seasons in East Africa, and a drought touted as the worst in 40 years, there is insufficient water for crops to produce. Estimates place hundreds of millions of people at risk from this food crisis, with the situation in West Africa being exacerbated by conflict in the region.The risks of climate change continue to emerge, with those covered here just a small sample of those that have occurred, or are ongoing, in recent months. We have said it many times before but time is running out, there needs to be action and committed focus on addressing climate change as the new normal keeps shifting and we cannot adapt to keep pace. More

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The Danuri probe will use multiple scientific instruments to probe properties of the Moon.Credit: NASA

By this time next week, South Korea’s first lunar probe will be on its way to the Moon. The probe, Danuri, which means ‘enjoy the Moon’, should arrive at its destination by mid-December and orbit for a year.Researchers are eager for Danuri, which took more than six years to build and cost 237 billion won (US$180 million), to begin revealing insights about aspects of the Moon ranging from its ancient magnetism to ‘fairy castles’ of dust sprinkled across its surface. Researchers also hope that the craft, officially called the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, will find hidden sources of water and ice in areas including the permanently cold, dark regions near the poles.Scientists in South Korea say the mission will pave the way for the country’s more ambitious plans to land on the Moon by 2030. Success for Danuri will secure future planetary exploration, says Kyeong-ja Kim, a planetary geoscientist at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources in Daejeon, and principal investigator for one of Danuri’s instruments, a γ-ray spectrometer. “Everybody is so happy and excited,” says Kim, describing the lines of people who waved goodbye to the orbiter — safely packed in a container — on its way to the airport on 5 July.Danuri was flown from South Korea to the United States, and is now in Cape Canaveral, Florida, preparing to be placed on a Falcon 9 rocket that will take it beyond Earth’s orbit on 2 August.“The spacecraft is ready to launch,” says Eunhyeuk Kim, project scientist for the mission at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) in Daejeon, but he still sometimes worries about whether the team is truly ready. “Until the time of the launch, we will be checking all the systems over and over and over.”Within an hour of launching, the 678-kilogram spacecraft will detach from the rocket and KARI will take control of it, extending the craft’s solar panels and deploying its parabolic antenna.“It’s just so cool to see more and more countries sending up their own orbiters and adding to the global understanding of what’s going on on the Moon,” says Rachel Klima, a planetary geologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, who is part of the science team.Fairy castlesDanuri will carry five scientific instruments. Among the most exciting is PolCam, which will be the first camera in lunar orbit to map the texture of the Moon’s surface using polarized light. Polarizers are popular for observations of Earth, such as those studying vegetation, but have not been sent to study the Moon, says Klima. By capturing how light reflects off the lunar surface, PolCam will be able to reveal characteristics such as the size and density of grains of dust and rock. This could help researchers to study unusual objects such as the tiny, porous towers of dust called fairy castle structures, says Klima. These structures can’t be reproduced on Earth because of its stronger gravity compared to the Moon, which makes them difficult to study.“It’s a ground-breaking instrument,” says William Farrand, a planetary geologist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who will be working on PolCam data. Farrand hopes to use the data to study deposits of volcanic ash and improve understanding of the history of explosive eruptions on the Moon.Another widely anticipated instrument is ShadowCam, a highly sensitive camera provided by NASA that will take images of the permanently shadowed regions of the Moon, devoid of sunlight. The camera will need to rely on scattered light such as that from far-off stars to capture images of the surface topography.Since shortly after the Moon formed, volatile materials such as water from comets have been bouncing off its surface and becoming trapped in these very cold regions, says Klima. “We’ve got billions of years of Solar System history locked in the layers of these cold traps.” By giving researchers a view of the terrain in these regions, and identifying brighter regions that might be ice deposits, ShadowCam will be able to inform future landing missions to study that history, she says.MagnetismResearchers hope that data collected by Danuri’s magnetometer (KMAG) will help solve a mystery. The Moon’s surface displays highly magnetic regions; these suggest that for hundreds of millions of years in the Moon’s past, its core generated a magnetic field almost as powerful as Earth’s, through a process known as a dynamo, says Ian Garrick-Bethell, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who hopes to interpret KMAG data. But scientists are puzzled by how the Moon’s core, which is much smaller and proportionally farther from the surface than Earth’s, could have powered such an intense dynamo, and for so long. KMAG will take precise measurements of the Moon’s magnetic field to help them understand this.Garrick-Bethell hopes that towards the end of its life, the spacecraft will fly closer to the Moon to get even better measurements of the magnetic field. “The most exciting science would come if we flew closer to 20 kilometres.”The KARI team has not yet decided whether it will shrink Danuri’s orbit after the one-year mission is complete and eventually crash-land the craft on the Moon, says Eunhyeuk Kim. Alternatively, he says, the team could send the capsule into a higher orbit that could see it glide on for many more years. More

Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory, The Charles E. Via Jr Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech, Manassas, VA, USAShantanu V. Bhide, Stanley B. Grant, Emily A. Parker, Megan A. Rippy & Adil N. GodrejCenter for Coastal Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USAStanley B. Grant, Megan A. Rippy & Todd SchenkDepartment of Geology and Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USASujay KaushalFairfax Water, Fairfax, VA, USAGreg Prelewicz & Niffy SajiStormwater Planning Division, Public Works and Environmental Services, Fairfax, VA, USAShannon CurtisThe Charles E. Via Jr Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USAPeter Vikesland, Ayella Maile-Moskowitz, Marc Edwards & Kathryn G. LopezSchool of Public and International Affairs, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USAThomas A. BirklandUrban Affairs and Planning, School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USATodd Schenk More

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Sociodemographic of respondentsA total of 140 households completed surveys with a response rate of 45.0%. The respondents were comprised of 48.6% males (n = 68) and 51.4% females (n = 72) in the general population aged 18 to 64 years, which were differentiated into five age groups: ≤19 (1.4%); 20–29 (22.1%); 30–50 (67.1%); 51–59 (5.0%); ≥60 (4.3%). There was a variation in terms of education levels and employment status; the majority of respondents were Bachelor-degree holders (at least 45%) and working as government servants (60.0%), as tabulated in Table 1. The accounted median monthly household income of Putrajaya is RM 7512 (~USD 1803, mean monthly household income of RM 10401, ~USD 2496), exceeding the national level (RM 4585, ~USD 1100)26. The survey covered household groups: bottom 40% (B40), middle 40% (M40), and top 20% (T20), classified into income groups ≤RM 2999, RM 3000–4999, RM 5000–6999, RM 7000–8999, RM 9000–10999, RM 11000–12999, and ≥RM 13000, where RM 1 approximately equivalent to USD 0.24 in average. On an average, respondents had lived in Putrajaya for seven years.Table 1 Descriptive statistics about risk perception of drinking water supply security with potential EDC contamination.Full size tableHuman morphology and drinking water consumption patternsThe present study involved 140 households with 257 total respondents (n = 257), consisting of infants (n = 4, aged less than 1 year; birth–5; 6–11 months), children (n = 77, aged 1 to 9 years; 1–3; 4–6; 7–9 years), adolescents (n = 37, aged 10 to 19 years; 10–14; 15–19 years), adults (n = 133, aged 20 to 59 years; 20–29; 30–50; 51–59 years) and elderly (n = 6, aged more than 60 years) (Table 2). Age groups were categorized based on previous studies27,28,29,30.Table 2 Age groups and respective mean body weight, body height, body mass index, daily water intake, and daily water intake per body weight.Full size tableThere were no significant differences between males (n = 125) and females (n = 132) in terms of body weight (t(235) = 1.671, p = 0.096), body height (t(225) = 0.804, p = 0.422), body mass index (t(246) = 1.116, p = 0.266), and daily water intake (t(255) = 0.483, p = 0.629). Surprisingly, males consumed more water than females in the United States and Australia19,31. Body weight showed a significant positive correlation to height based on Pearson product-moment correlation test (r = 0.861, p  More