Touching The Sun.

21 solar slingshots.

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1. On Christmas Eve, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will come closer than ever before to "touching the sun," getting more than eight times closer than Mercury does to our home star. It will also smash its own speed record, becoming the fastest human-made object when it zooms past our home star. While the probe will make a few more final flybys in the next 12 months, it is unlikely to get much closer than it will on Tuesday. Parker was launched in 2018 with the goal of learning more about the sun's atmosphere, or corona, by flying through it, which the probe achieved for the first time in 2021. To do this, the spacecraft has repeatedly slingshotted around our home star, as well as occasionally around Venus, to build up enough speed and momentum to get progressively closer with every approach. To date, it has completed 21 solar slingshots. (Source: livescience.com)

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2. The New York Times:

As countries around the world continue to pump planet-warming pollution into the skies, driving global temperatures to record levels, the financial world is racing to fund the emerging field of carbon dioxide removal, seeking both an environmental miracle and a financial windfall.

The technology, which did not exist until a few years ago, is still unproven at scale. Yet, it has a uniquely alluring appeal. Stripping away some of the carbon dioxide that is heating up the world makes intuitive sense. And with a small but growing number of companies willing to pay for it, investors are jockeying to be first movers in what they believe will inevitably be a big industry that is necessary to help fight global warming.

Companies working on ways to pull carbon dioxide from the air have raised more than $5 billion since 2018, according to the investment bank Jefferies. Before that, there were almost no such investments.

“It’s the single greatest opportunity I’ve seen in 20 years of doing venture capital,” said Damien Steel, the chief executive of Canada-based Deep Sky, which has raised more than $50 million to develop carbon dioxide removal projects. “The tailwinds behind the industry are greater than most industries I’ve ever looked at.” (Source: nytimes.com)

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3. Robin Wright:

The international story of this year may be the collapse of Iran’s alliances.