In 2025 how and when to see July's full Moon and the Delta Aquariid meteor shower
Will you or won't you see the full Moon?
The full Buck Moon rises on 10 July at around 22:00 BST but whether or not you get to see it depends on where you are - and the weather conditions of course. As with the other full Moons across the year, they are named after events in nature happening around the same time. This month's full Moon was named to represent the time of year when male deer, known as bucks, begin to grow their new antlers. For many it marked the start of the game hunting season.According to the Sky at Night magazine this month's full Moon will be a low hanging one, external, meaning that in some parts of the northern hemisphere, including the UK, it might be too close to the horizon to really see it well.
More meteors for July
Starting on 12 July, the Delta Aquariid meteor shower begins its annual display, peaking on the nights of 28 and 29 July.Stargazers can expect between 15 and 20 meteors an hour especially in dark-sky locations, but you'll need to be up after midnight to see them. While they're best viewed from the southern hemisphere, observers in the northern hemisphere should still catch a decent show.They are believed to originate from Comet 96P/Machholz, a short-period comet that orbits the Sun every five years. The meteors tend to be faint, so darker skies will enhance visibility, especially around the new Moon on 24 July when it could also be possible to see parts of the Milky Way.
The Moon and Mars are a double delight
Just to keep you on tenterhooks you have to wait until July ends to see a striking conjunction of the Moon and Mars on 29 JulyIf you look to the eastern sky before dawn you should be able to see the waning crescent Moon closely aligned with the red planet.If skies are clear, you may be lucky enough to observe Mars and its striking reddish tint.Don't forget that the weather and cloud cover in your location will have an impact on what you can see, but you can check that and the sunrise/sunset times where you are on the BBC Weather app or online.
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The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Helm by Sarah Hall review – a mighty epic of climate change in slow motion
Even if Sarah Hall did not begin her acknowledgments by saying that it's taken her 20 years to write Helm it would be evident. Not from a cursory glance at her bibliography, perhaps: in that time Hall has published six other novels and three volumes of extraordinary short stories. But in every other way, and the moment you begin reading. There's the subject, for starters. Ever since the first paragraph of her first novel, Haweswater, in which an early 20th-century man drives his horse and cart through the waters of a Cumbrian valley recently drowned by a dam, Hall has been concerned with landscape, with weather, with nature in all its forms, with the ways in which we affect each other. In The Carhullan Army, climate change has already happened. Cumbria is semi-tropical, temperate England a folk memory; a dystopian vision that feels, this baked summer, uncomfortably close to reality. The Wolf Border, published in 2015, was, among many other things, about the ethics and unpredictabilities of rewilding an apex predator, while Hall's last novel, Burntcoat, written in the first lockdown, was set in and after a pandemic. Her story Later, His Ghost is set in a perpetual windstorm of total climate breakdown; in One in Four, a virologist writes to his wife, apologising for getting things wrong. In this new novel, weather and climate are not just potent settings but the main event. The central character in Helm is the Helm, Britain's only named wind. This wind, which is local to Cumbria, occurs when air sweeping down Cross Fell, above the Eden valley, creates both a crest and a low bar of cloud. 'Tricky to explain/visualise', admits Helm. 'For now, imagine a skater launching off a quarter pipe two thousand feet high, then somersaulting. Again. And again and again.' As the book begins, Helm witnesses its own arrival. An ice age, sun flares, ash cloud; and, relatively insignificant in the context of such deep time, the evolution of humanity. Because there are many people in the novel, too, which is structured by braiding their stories with Helm's, but also with lists: the forces of Helm, for instance, which range from '0. Zero Helm (complete calm). Mean wind speed < 1mph. Weathervanes and trees unmoving, grass still, water as mirror, smoke rising vertically from roundhouses/cottages/plague pyres' to '12. Hurricane Helm (Hand of God). Wind speed 73-83mph, phenomenal damage and widescale loss of life, Eden reconfigured biblically, Carlisle-Settle train lifted off the tracks, history made, FIN.' Other lists include names for Helm and the damage Helm can wreak; or the trinkets Helm collects, often after that damage (Howdah pistol, iron skullcap, Apple iPhone 11 64GB, Tornado F3 series, eject pin). The pictures humans make, trying to understand, locate, corral Helm. Helm finds people amusing, and watches as they succeed each other; Hall's ambition may be bounded by one valley, but it reaches through thousands of years. Her subjects range from a neolithic tribe to a medieval exorcist; from an isolated 18th-century wife to a quixotic Victorian meteorologist; from a wind-touched, lonely mid-20th-century child to a present-day academic counting plastic particles in the air. From stone tools to the Industrial Revolution to the advent of AI, each era has its own existential encounters with Helm: as deity or devil, as a psychological or a scientific mystery. Both sides are made complacent by Helm's longevity, size and power, by human smallness and briefness, neither realising, until perhaps too late, that these little beings threaten Helm's own existence. A project of this scope, which requires a range of research and imagination that could have produced several historical novels, not to mention an entire other volume of meteorological expertise, holds so much in suspension around its whirling, windy core that it could easily blow apart. But, despite the occasional threat or lull, Helm doesn't. Partly, I would argue, this is because of Hall's development as a consummate short story writer. Her novels are never less than hugely accomplished, but the narrative demands of the longer form, especially in more conventional earlier work, can sometimes dissipate the blaze of which she is capable. Hall is freed by the constraints of the short story – like the female sculptor in her last novel, Burntcoat, she burns away everything extraneous – and her work only gains in concentrated, suggestive power. Each strand of Helm has this concentration; the characters and voices could stand alone, but they flow together into something deep and rich, held together by the Eden valley, and its Helm. And by the writing. Hall's work on place, and especially this corner of England, has always been virtuosic, a tough and supple poetry anchored in decades of attention to Cumbrian land and plants and skies. In her first novels it sometimes threatened to submerge everything else, but in Helm is so embedded on the page that it's easy to take for granted, until you pause and back up to really look at the 'dirty, clay-slipped sky', or a gaggle of Victorian children, born into the shantytown that grows up around the railway, collecting on a hillside to eat magic mushrooms and stare at the 'silly jinking stars'. Every era in Helm has its own seeing; the same land, the same wind filtered through time-specific fears and hopes and work, time-specific knowings, from a neolithic world interpreted through animal behaviour to the bathos of 21st-century cycling waterproofs, pub menus, emails. Hall has a thrilling command of vocabulary, with the concurrent deployment of etymologies and the hinterlands they bring; words often work not as single notes, but as chords, big ideas slipping in on the wakes of concrete specificities. So NaNay, a neolithic girl, watches as the wind approaches: 'In the centre it was blue-grey, like bull-hide, with the dull pearl-shine of scales at its edges. It was faceless and its body was its only government.' The 'spectral gap' is a technical term of modern mathematics and quantum mechanics as well as meteorology. But what heft and metaphorical possibility such a gap has, when a retired policeman in a glider is required to fly into it. Above all it is the wind itself that holds this vastly ambitious, serious – but also often playful and ironic – book together. Some might find Helm's voice initially a little arch, a little unplaced relative to the human voices, but it grows on you. Antic, needy, angry, curious, millennia-old Helm, who gives and takes, fascinates and awes, is feared and loved, and loves in return; who absorbs violences, propitiations, yearnings, and who is now beginning to feel 'a bit wrong'. There has been so much change, over so many millennia, but this is different. 'It's complicated. Hard to put Helm's fingers on it.' It isn't that Helm is old, more that 'Whatever is wrong … feels insidious, sneaky, infectious. The surprise disease on the routine tests. Some kind of weird intimate growth you find accidentally and go, Jesus, how long has that been there? A toxic waft when you're asleep. Lights out.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The neolithic tribe listens to Helm in its prime, 'splintering and shredding the valley, its voice mourning its own violence'. In the mid-20th century Helm searches for a young girl, his friend, who has been locked in an asylum, and, trying to look beyond the valley, 'rises, higher, until being is difficult'. At the 21st-century meteorological observation post, 2,000ft up, Helm whips and churns and 'calls to awful prayer'. A prayer for itself, perhaps, because whatever Hall's intentions – an urgent rallying, a tribute, a warning – this novel reads like nothing so much as an elegy. Helm by Sarah Hall is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Reuters
44 minutes ago
- Reuters
AI will replace most humans, but then what?
LONDON, August 19 (Reuters) - Is technology more job augmenting or job replacing? This has been a long-standing debate. But recent academic work suggests that technology has been a net destroyer of jobs for decades. Artificial intelligence and robotics could rapidly accelerate this trend, with significant implications for inflation, the size of government and U.S.-China relations. Over the long arc of history, technological advances have enabled industries to emerge, as workers, released from "older" jobs by machines, have been able to transition into newer ones. Indeed, 60% of workers today are employed in occupations that did not exist in 1940, or 74 percent if we consider just the professional category, which added the most workers during the past eight decades. However, recent academic research, opens new tab suggests we may have reached an inflection point in the U.S., whereby technology is now destroying more jobs than it is creating. David Autor, an economist at MIT and winner of the 2005 John Clark Bates Medal, argues that since 1980, the jobs replaced by automation have not been fully offset by new jobs created. This reflects the pace of technological change and the fact that advancements are now increasingly focused on 'professional, technical, and managerial occupations,' Autor notes, rather than lower-skilled work. He finds that machines that are more powerful than an average human (e.g., a tractor) are typically labour-augmenting and productivity-enhancing, while machines that are also smarter than the average human tend to be labour-substituting. And AI is on pace to be a lot smarter than most humans. While forms of AI have been around since the 1940s, the immense computing power resulting from advances in semiconductor technologies has now allowed machines to attain multidimensional intelligence. It is therefore reasonable to assume that many workers are going to be replaced by automation in the coming decades, even if the best AI is never as creative or imaginative as the smartest humans. In fact, a 2019 OECE report and a 2018 paper by PriceWaterhouseCoopers argue that some 15-30% of all jobs in developed markets are at risk of being automated. If AI does turn out to be a net job destroyer, what are some of the biggest implications? First, it's likely to be deflationary. High and rising unemployment resulting from ever cheaper and more capable machines should, in theory, lead to structural deflation, as technologies that can rapidly augment the supply of goods and services should reduce demand if they cause massive job losses. Next, the U.S government will probably get even bigger. In a mass unemployment scenario, the government would likely be compelled to step in to facilitate income and wealth transfers from the owners of robots and tech businesses to the unemployed workers. And which countries will come out on top? The economic winners and losers in the years ahead will likely be determined by who can best create and utilize technology. The U.S. and China, both dominant in cerebral technologies, therefore appear well positioned to thrive in this environment. These economic and technology superpowers have adopted muscular industrial policies, while Europe – the other big regional power – has not yet done so. What this also suggests is that, even if the trade war between the U.S. and China is short, the tech war between these two countries could be protracted – and ultimately much more consequential. The tech war, unlike the trade war, is dynamic, meaning it's not about challenging the static comparative advantages of nations, but rather continually evolving and advancing. Investors would be wise to keep this distinction in mind, as the dynamic aspect of the tech war is apt to become much more important than, say, whether Vietnam is allowed to sell cheap running shoes in the U.S. My views here are admittedly speculative. But the arguments for why AI and robotics could ultimately be labour-creating are as well. Furthermore, these arguments are often obscured by sloppy references to labour productivity, which is a simple ratio between output and labour input. When calculating this, there is often little explanation of what part of the output should be attributed to the labour input. For example, should subway train drivers account for the value of the entire subway system? Projections based on such questionable assumptions should be viewed cautiously. Finally, it's also true that populations in many developed markets are aging, so the heavy use of automation could simply offset the shrinkage in the labour force, something we're already seeing in Japan and South Korea. But aging, like natural evolution in general, is gradual, while computational and technological evolution accelerates at an exponential pace. Because of the convexity in technological advances, it's hard not to bet on technology rather than workers. (The views expressed here are those of Stephen Jen, the CEO and co-CIO of Eurizon SLJ asset management). Enjoying this column? Check out Reuters Open Interest (ROI),, opens new tab your essential new source for global financial commentary. ROI delivers thought-provoking, data-driven analysis of everything from swap rates to soybeans. Markets are moving faster than ever. ROI,, opens new tab can help you keep up. Follow ROI on LinkedIn,, opens new tab and X., opens new tab
BBC News
2 hours ago
- BBC News
First baby dormice born in Bradgate Park conservation milestone
The first baby dormice have been born at a park in Leicestershire as part of a project to boost the population of the tiny than 20 hazel dormice were released at Bradgate Park, near Newtown Linford, over the have been living in open cages in a secret location in the staff said 11 baby dormice were found on Monday during inspections of the cages, along with 19 nests. "It's really good news," said Holly Woodward, the Bradgate Park Trust's learning and engagement officer."There may be more [baby dormice] out there that we haven't seen yet, but it's great to know that they are actually breeding." Hazel dormice are a native rodent to the UK and are the only one with a distinctive furry tail, and while they can live in many habitats, they favour woodlands and the dormouse population has declined by 70% nationally since 2000, and the species is now extinct in 20 English counties, according to a 2023 a statement on social media, the trust said: "This milestone is not just a win for conservation but a real testament to the dedication and hard work of everyone involved in their release and ongoing monitoring.
