The Herald Online says that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region is moving to strengthen its emergency telecommunications systems as climate-induced disasters continue to threaten lives, infrastructure and livelihoods across Southern Africa.

ICT, Postal and Courier Services Deputy Minister Dingumuzi Phuti said robust and coordinated telecommunications systems were critical in ensuring effective disaster response. He was speaking at the official opening of the International Telecommunication union (ITU)-SADC Emergency Telecommunications and Early Warning for All (EW4All) Regional Capacity Development Workshop in Harare on Wednesday. The workshop is a collaborative initiative between the SADC Secretariat, ITU and the Government of Zimbabwe.

“This collaborative effort marks a significant milestone in our shared commitment to enhancing emergency telecommunications capabilities throughout the SADC region,” said Deputy Minister Phuti.

He said the region remains highly vulnerable to climate-induced disasters such as tropical cyclones, floods and droughts, which often result in loss of life, destruction of property, crop damage and disruption of critical information infrastructure.

“In times of crisis, local telecommunications and ICT systems can be severely disrupted, leaving communities without vital communication channels when they need them most,” Deputy Minister Phuti said.

“Timely, reliable and coordinated telecommunications are the backbone of effective disaster response.

“They enable governments, humanitarian agencies and first responders to act swiftly and decisively to save lives.”

Deputy Minister Phuti said telecommunications play a central role across all four stages of disaster management — mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery — but acknowledged that several SADC member states still face gaps in preparedness.

“Issues such as lack of harmonised standard operating procedures, limited interoperability among systems, delays in supporting emergency telecommunications equipment and weak coordination mechanisms during emergencies continue to hinder our collective efforts,” he said.

Thanks to heraldonline.co.zw for this report.

From Popular Mechanics comes a report that nuclear power has the potential to help cut humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, but scientists are still working on how to deal with its radioactive leftovers.

The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility received more than $8 million this month to develop technologies that can drastically reduce radioactivity and spent fuel, producing usable electricity in the process.

The facility relies on superconducting radiofrequency and a pure niobium cavity to accelerate a proton beam that knocks neutrons loose from a target material, and interacts with nuclear waste that converts into more manageable isotopes.

“These neutrons will interact with unwanted isotopes from nuclear power stations and convert them into more manageable isotopes that you can either try out for some beneficial use or bury underground,” Rongli Geng, the principal investigator from Jefferson Lab, said in a press statement. “Instead of having a lifetime of 100,000 years in storage, for example, you can shorten the storage years down to 300.”

The process also creates an immense amount of heat that the engineers hope can be converted into usable electricity.

Sounds like a win-win situation, doesn’t it!

Two or three years ago, I reported on a spacecraft called DART that was sent up to collide with a little asteroid called Dimorphos, which was orbiting its larger sibling Didymos, to see if a planned collision could change the trajectory of the little rock, and which could have implications for protecting Earth from future asteroid strikes.

Within a month, researchers showed that the impact shortened Dimorphos’ 12-hour orbit by 32 minutes. Most of that change came from the impact itself. Some of it came from flying impact debris, which gave Dimorphos a little kick in the opposite direction of its motion.

Some of the rocks knocked off of Dimorphos fled the vicinity completely, escaping the gravitational influence of the Dimorphos–Didymos pair, says planetary defense researcher Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. Those rocky runaways took some momentum away from the duo and changed their joint motion around the sun.

To figure out how much that motion was affected, astronomers watched the asteroids pass in front of distant stars, dimming some of the stars’ light like a tiny eclipse. These blinks, called stellar occultations, can be visible from anywhere on Earth and are predictable in advance.

“Oftentimes it’s amateur astronomers going out in the middle of nowhere to track Didymos based on predictions,” Makadia says. “There was an observer who drove two days each way into the Australian outback to get these measurements.”

Makadia and colleagues gathered 22 such measurements taken from October 2022 to March 2025. Calculating how far off occultation timings were from predictions revealed that the asteroids’ orbit around the sun was about 150 milliseconds slower than before the DART impact.

The result could be confirmed later this year, when the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft arrives at Didymos and Dimorphos for follow-up observations.

Didymos and Dimorphos are not a threat to Earth, Makadia says, and weren’t even before DART. But knowing how a deliberate impact changes one asteroid’s orbit can help make defense plans against another, “in case we need to do a kinetic impact for real.”

Thank you to Lisa Grossman, writing in Science News, for this report.

With apologies for the gruff voice, this is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.