The head of the Russian astronaut team and TASS correspondent, Oleg Kononenko, took a night photograph of Mecca from aboard the International Space Station.
Head of the Russian cosmonaut team, "second in the world" in terms of the total time of his space flights
Kononenko said in a statement to the Russian "TASS" agency: "I captured a view of Mecca on the night of January 23, 2024."
It is noteworthy that Oleg Kononenko, who represents the Russian TASS agency on board the International Space Station, had previously taken night photographs of Russian cities, namely Moscow, Orenburg, Saratov, and Grozny. Yesterday, the Russian astronaut photographed Mecca from space at night.
Announcing the "Doomsday Clock" for the year 2024!
Scientists set a symbolic 'doomsday clock' at 90 seconds to midnight on Tuesday, reflecting the existential threats to humanity posed by conflict and the effects of the climate crisis.
The clock time, set by leading scientists and security experts, remains the same as it was last year and is the closest to midnight in its history spanning more than 75 years.
“Trends continue to point ominously toward global catastrophe,” said Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Rather than abandoning nuclear weapons, countries that possess them are modernizing their arsenals, while massive floods, fires and other climate disasters have threatened the lives and livelihoods of billions of people in a year of record-breaking temperatures due to humanity's reluctance to transition away from fossil fuels.
“Biological research aimed at preventing future pandemics has proven its benefits, but it also carries risks of causing them,” Bronson said, while recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) raise questions about how to control technology that “could improve or threaten.” civilization in the world.
There is a “mixed story on climate,” said Ambuj Sagar, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, praising the $1.7 trillion investment in clean energy at the Dubai climate conference as a sign of movement in the right direction, albeit not as quickly or as deeply as required.
The clock was originally set to seven minutes to midnight in 1947.
The publication was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first nuclear weapons. The idea of the clock, which symbolizes global vulnerability to disasters, appeared two years later.