Chilling effect

With global warming continuing to claim lives and destroy crops and property, a company is offering to cool the planet by blocking the sun’s rays.

American-Israeli company Stardust Solutions’ solar geo-engineering technology involves spraying tiny particles of amorphous silica and calcium carbonate into the stratosphere using an aircraft and balloons to reflect the sun’s energy away from the earth and back into space, CNN reports.

Every million tons of sprayed particles would lead to 0.9-degrees Fahrenheit of cooling, Stardust’s CEO Yanai Yedvab claimed, according to CNN.

The still untested solution requires yearly spraying at a cost of $10 billion per million tons of particles, he added.

Some scientists and experts, however, warned that it could adversely alter the weather and could only be motivated by profit.

Meanwhile, the owner of a beef hotpot chain headquartered in Jiaozuo, in central Henan province, China has a unique way of protecting her workers from the extreme cold during winter.

Ma Yanli took pity on her employees who commuted to work on electric bikes and were exposed to freezing temperatures.

Ma saw an employee, Li Jie, arrive at the restaurant with her face flushed bright red from the cold, her ears purple, and her hands stiff from the chill wind, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports.

On 24 September, Ma took Li and another hardworking employee, Liu Yingying, to a BMW showroom to collect the cars she had bought for them.

Two weeks earlier, Ma paid 300,000 yuan for a brand new white BMW for Li, and did the same thing for a grey one for Liu.

Ma said she wants her workers to be warm and experience the convenience like her when going to work. She also wanted to share with them the success of her business.