UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was vital "to save the Pacific to save the world" as he wrapped up his brief South Pacific tour in Vanuatu on Saturday. | Continue reading
The vibe at a gathering this week for blockchain enthusiasts felt decidedly less exuberant than its predecessor a year ago after dizzying swings in bitcoin. | Continue reading
Big cities beset with gridlocked traffic, major regions producing coal, pockets of heavy industry encased by mountains—Europe's air pollution hotspots are clearly visible from space on most sunny weekdays. | Continue reading
Scientists say breathing the heavily polluted air in Mexico City these days is like smoking somewhere between a quarter- and a half-pack of cigarettes a day. | Continue reading
On December 11, 2017, US President Donald Trump signed a directive ordering NASA to prepare to return astronauts to the Moon "followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations." | Continue reading
The European Union on Friday adopted powers to punish those outside the bloc who launch cyberattacks that cripple hospitals and banks, sway elections and steal company secrets or funds. | Continue reading
From the ancient pyramids to modern buildings, various three-dimensional (3-D) structures have been formed by packing shaped objects together. At the macroscale, the shape of objects is fixed and thus dictates how they can be arranged. For example, bricks attached by mortar retai … | Continue reading
Recyclable plastics that contain ring-shaped polymers may be a key to developing sustainable synthetic materials. Despite some promising advances, researchers said, a full understanding of how to processes ring polymers into practical materials remains elusive. In a new study, re … | Continue reading
Gastric cancer, Q fever, Legionnaires' disease, whooping cough—though the infectious bacteria that cause these dangerous diseases are each different, they all utilize the same molecular machinery to infect human cells. Bacteria use this machinery, called a Type IV secretion syste … | Continue reading
Machine learning (ML), a form of artificial intelligence that recognizes faces, understands language and navigates self-driving cars, can help bring to Earth the clean fusion energy that lights the sun and stars. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plas … | Continue reading
The ultimate degree of control for engineering would be the ability to create and manipulate materials at the most basic level, fabricating devices atom by atom with precise control. | Continue reading
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on Friday announced a $1.3 billion deal to buy supercomputer maker Cray, part of a move to expand into data analysis from connected devices . | Continue reading
Even as warnings of climate catastrophe and calls for greener economies grow ever louder, the world is still spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to subsidise the fossil fuels that are causing the planet to overheat. | Continue reading
Technology is often touted as a solution to the world's environmental challenges, but it is also part of the problem: industry executives are facing rising pressure to clean up their energy and resource-intensive business. | Continue reading
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said Friday a breakup of big US technology would not address "underlying issues" facing the sector and suggested that such a move could help rivals in China. | Continue reading
Metals such as zinc, copper and chromium bind to and influence a peptide involved in insulin production, according to new work from chemists at the University of California, Davis. The research is part of a new field of "metalloendocrinology" that takes a detailed look at the rol … | Continue reading
The Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), managed by Universities Space Research Association (USRA), has compiled and made available an atlas of the Moon's south pole. Given NASA's recent direction to implement Space Policy Directive-1 landing astronauts at the south pole by 2024, … | Continue reading
Semiconductors, which are the basic building blocks of transistors, microprocessors, lasers, and LEDs, have driven advances in computing, memory, communications, and lighting technologies since the mid-20th century. Recently discovered two-dimensional materials, which feature man … | Continue reading
New discoveries made at the Klasies River Cave in South Africa's southern Cape, where charred food remains from hearths were found, provide the first archaeological evidence that anatomically modern humans were roasting and eating plant starches, such as those from tubers and rhi … | Continue reading
Working with bacteria, a multidisciplinary team at the University of California San Diego has provided new insight into a longstanding question in science: What are the underlying mechanisms that control the size of cells? | Continue reading
Plasmonics and photonics have been drawing attention in both academia and industry due to their use in an extensive range of applications, one of which includes optical sensing. The development of optical sensing technology not only contributes to the scientific research communit … | Continue reading
When the bones of an ancient heron were unearthed at a North Florida fossil site, the find wasn't made by researchers but by two Florida Museum of Natural History volunteers. | Continue reading
In 2020, NASA and European-Russian missions will look for evidence of past life on Mars. But while volcanic, igneous rock predominates on the Red Planet, virtually the entire Earth fossil record comes from sedimentary rocks. | Continue reading
"By ecology, we understand the whole science of the organism's relationship with the surrounding outside world, which includes in a broader sense all 'existential conditions'. These are partly organic and partly inorganic in nature; both the former and the latter are, as we have … | Continue reading
A recent study from North Carolina State University finds that U.S. government spending on military personnel has a positive impact on the nation's human capital—essentially improving the American workforce. Using a new computer model, the study estimates the economic impact of t … | Continue reading
Scientists with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and WCS Ecuador Program publishing in the journal BioTropica say that subsistence hunting in Neotropical rain forests—the mainstay of local people as a source of protein and a direct connection to these ecosystems—is in jeopa … | Continue reading
The University of Portsmouth is helping its students build a strong personal brand to increase their confidence and enhance their employability. | Continue reading
The United States appears to be in a romantic slump. Marriage rates have plummeted over the last decade. And compared to previous generations, young single people today are perhaps spending more time on social media than actual dating. They are also having less sex. | Continue reading
New findings reported by LMU researchers challenge a generally accepted model of echolocation in bats. They demonstrate that bats require far less spatial information than previously thought to navigate effectively. | Continue reading
Governments are becoming ever more reliant on digital technology, making them more vulnerable to cyber attacks. In 2007, Estonia was attacked by pro-Russian hackers who crippled government servers, causing havoc. Cyber attacks in Ukraine targeted the country's electricity grid, w … | Continue reading
In materials science, achromatic optical components can be designed with high transparency and low dispersion. Materials scientists have shown that although metals are highly opaque, densely packed arrays of metallic nanoparticles with more than 75 percent metal by volume can bec … | Continue reading
The 2009, magnitude-8.1 Samoa earthquake dealt a great deal of damage to the Samoan Islands: Tsunami waves as high as 14 meters (46 feet) wiped out multiple villages, claiming nearly 200 lives and severely damaging water and electrical systems. | Continue reading
Every minute, ESA's Earth observation satellites gather dozens of gigabytes of data about our planet—enough information to fill the pages on a 100-metre long bookshelf. Flying in low-Earth orbits, these spacecraft are continuously taking the pulse of our planet, but it's teams on … | Continue reading
Researchers from ANU have helped develop a new computer program to find out a person's genetic make-up, bringing us a step closer to an era of precision medicine. | Continue reading
"Ethics asks what we owe to one another and how we should treat one another. The internet has changed the landscape in which we, as humans, relate, and ethicists need to keep pace," explains Assistant Professor of Philosophy Moti Gorin. | Continue reading
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and partners have demonstrated an experimental, next-generation atomic clock—ticking at high "optical" frequencies—that is much smaller than usual, made of just three small chips plus supporting electronics a … | Continue reading
Researchers report a microbial method for producing an artificial grape flavor. Methyl anthranilate (MANT) is a common grape flavoring and odorant compound currently produced through a petroleum-based process that uses large volumes of toxic acid catalysts. | Continue reading
Oceanographers studying creatures in the ocean twilight zone are facing an optical dilemma. They need to observe the fish in order to study them, but at ocean depths of 200 meters and beyond, there's very little natural light trickling down from the surface. This means that subme … | Continue reading
Germany on Friday authorised battery-powered scooters on its streets and cycle paths but banned them from pavements to protect pedestrians as the two-wheeled craze continues to spread across Europe. | Continue reading
China has developed an app that allows conservationists to identify individual pandas using facial recognition technology, state-run Xinhua news agency reported Friday. | Continue reading
Six European consumer rights associations said Friday they have asked national authorities to look into illegal practices by firms using the AliExpress site of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. | Continue reading
Thousands of hydroelectric dams are under construction around the world, mainly in developing countries. These enormous structures are one of the world's largest sources of renewable energy, but they also cause environmental problems. | Continue reading
About 60,000 merchant ships sail the world's oceans, including container ships, oil tankers and dry bulk carriers loaded with everything from grain to coal. Most operate on carbon-rich fuels such as heavy diesel, and their emissions have negative environmental impacts, are harmfu … | Continue reading
Since the mid-20th century, the global human population has grown from 2.5 billion to 7.7 billion, according to the most recent United Nations estimate. Much of this growth was due to the unprecedented agricultural expansion made possible by the widespread use of synthetic pestic … | Continue reading
Japan is aiming to host the first Olympic Games powered solely by renewable sources. If successful, this could help the country carve a new niche in the global order as a champion of climate action and environmental protection – and set off a clean energy race in the process. | Continue reading
A region's climate has a greater impact than landscape on how many languages are spoken there, new research from The Australian National University (ANU) shows. | Continue reading
U.S. Navy pilots and sailors won't be considered crazy for reporting unidentified flying objects, under new rules meant to encourage them to keep track of what they see. Yet just a few years ago, the Pentagon reportedly shut down another official program that investigated UFO sig … | Continue reading
Even before the fertilised egg or zygote can start dividing into daughter cells that form the future tissues and organs during the development of a multicellular organism, the symmetrical zygote needs to become asymmetrical or polarised in shape and molecular organisation. The ma … | Continue reading