A pioneering new report has devised a seven-point plan to help policymakers devise new, coherent and collaborative strategies to tackle the greatest global environmental threats. | Continue reading
Many companies and organisations appear keen to support a more diverse workforce, where minority group members are made to feel welcome. One strategy involves creating special "spaces" at work, physical or otherwise, where minority employees can connect with each other. | Continue reading
This past year, many people deleted their social media accounts following revelations about privacy violations on social media platforms and other concerns related to hate speech. | Continue reading
On October 19th, 2017, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System-1 (Pan-STARRS-1) in Hawaii announced the first-ever detection of an interstellar object, named 1I/2017 U1 (aka. 'Oumuamua). In the months that followed, multiple follow-up observations were conducted … | Continue reading
Look at a galaxy, what do you see? Probably lots of stars. Nebulae too. And that's probably it. A whole bunch of stars and gas in a variety of colorful assortments; a delight to the eye. And buried among those stars, if you looked carefully enough, you might find planets, black h … | Continue reading
China on Friday hailed its historic mission to the far side of the moon as a "complete success" so far but said new challenges await its rover as it explores rugged terrain. | Continue reading
German car giant Volkswagen said Friday it sold a record number of vehicles in 2018 even as it felt the sting from US-China trade tensions and problems with European emissions tests in the final months of the year. | Continue reading
Ride-hailing giant Uber has lost an appeal in France brought by a former driver who wanted his terms of employment recognised as a fully-fledged work contract. | Continue reading
India will send its first manned mission into space by December 2021, the head of the country's space agency said on Friday. | Continue reading
German travellers face fresh upheaval on Tuesday when security staff at Frankfurt airport, the nation's largest, are set to walk off the job in a battle for better pay that has already caused hundreds of flight cancellations. | Continue reading
In 2017, a group of us decided to tackle the ever-present problem of spider misidentification by creating the Twitter account @RecluseOrNot. Focused mainly around the eponymous recluse spiders – particularly, but not limited to, the brown recluse (Loxosceles reclusa) – our accoun … | Continue reading
A brief and unusual flash spotted in the night sky on June 16, 2018, puzzled astronomers and astrophysicists across the globe. The event—called AT2018cow and nicknamed "the Cow" after the coincidental final letters in its official name—is unlike any celestial outburst ever seen b … | Continue reading
In the moments leading up to assault by a short, peculiar peptide, the bacteria are happily growing, their DNA jiggling around the cell in the semi-random motions characteristic of life. | Continue reading
Researchers at The University of Manchester's National Graphene Institute in the UK have succeeded in making artificial channels just one atom in size for the first time. The new capillaries, which are very much like natural protein channels such as aquaporins, are small enough t … | Continue reading
ESA's high-energy space telescopes Integral and XMM-Newton have helped to find a source of powerful X-rays at the centre of an unprecedentedly bright and rapidly evolving stellar explosion that suddenly appeared in the sky earlier this year. | Continue reading
While most developed countries have reduced the construction of large dams for the production of electricity in recent decades, developing countries, including Brazil, have embarked on even more massive hydropower developments. | Continue reading
Distinguishing between left-handed and right-handed (chiral) molecules is crucial in chemistry and the life sciences, and is commonly achieved using a method called circular dichroism. However, during biochemical reactions, the chiral character of molecules may change. EPFL scien … | Continue reading
Nordic countries such as Sweden rely heavily on biomass-derived fuels to power their homes and businesses. However, in the process of burning biomass like wood or straw, gases are released that can pollute the air, damage the environment, and harm public health. | Continue reading
Modern communications technology means one can find anything, anywhere around the world, on the internet and via mobile phones. But people still live in communities and need information that is relevant to them. | Continue reading
Aviation giants Boeing and Embraer will push on with their proposed merger after Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro confirmed on Thursday he would not oppose the move. | Continue reading
Standing in his garden in Kabul, Baz Mohammad Kochi oversees the drilling of a new well more than 100 metres deep after his first water reservoir dried up. He is not alone. | Continue reading
Holiday shopping reports released Thursday underscored anew the challenges US retailers face in the Amazon era—even if consumers are willing to open their wallets to spend. | Continue reading
Struggling with a sagging stock price and sluggish sales, US car giant Ford took steps to regain its footing this week with the announcement of a massive restructuring effort in Europe—even as it prepared for an imminent strategic partnership with German carmaker Volkswagen. | Continue reading
The Washington Post on Thursday announced plans to publish an Arabic-language page of opinion columns and editorials. | Continue reading
With robots, augmented reality displays and other advanced technologies, traditional retailers are taking a cue from the online world to find new ways to connect and keep customers. | Continue reading
The announcement by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world's wealthiest man, and his wife that they will divorce has captivated the imagination—how will they split his giant fortune, estimated at $136 billion? | Continue reading
Tokyo prosecutors on Friday filed two new charges of financial misconduct against former Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn, meaning the auto tycoon is unlikely to be leaving his jail cell soon. | Continue reading
A consortium led by Britain's Virgin Atlantic on Friday said it will buy ailing no-frills airline Flybe for £2.2 million ($2.8 million, 2.4 million euros). | Continue reading
China has broadcast pictures taken by its rover and lander on the moon's far side. | Continue reading
International finance markets lagged behind punters having a flutter when it came to getting the Brexit result right on EU referendum night, according to research. | Continue reading
AT&T says it will stop selling all location data from mobile phones to brokers following a report that companies are still selling that information to shadowy companies without customer knowledge. | Continue reading
Funding by private foundations is inadvertently changing the international journalism it supports, according to a new study led by the University of East Anglia (UEA). | Continue reading
A chemical reaction pathway central to plant biology have been adapted to form the backbone of a new process that converts water into hydrogen fuel using energy from the sun. | Continue reading
A Northwestern University-led international team is getting closer to understanding the mysteriously bright object that burst in the northern sky this summer. | Continue reading
An unusual supernova studied by multiple telescopes, including the SOAR telescope and other telescopes at the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and NSF's Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), is thought to herald the birth of a ne … | Continue reading
How old are each of the stars in our roughly 13-billion-year-old galaxy? A new technique for understanding the star-forming history of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail makes it possible to determine the ages of stars at least two times more precisely than conventional method … | Continue reading
The board of French automaker Renault on Thursday said an ongoing audit into executive pay had found no sign of fraud in the last two years, ahead of a new court appearance in Japan for CEO Carlos Ghosn. | Continue reading
Every year, the CES gadget show brings more devices promising to make life a little bit easier for harried parents. | Continue reading
Intentionally "squashing" colloidal quantum dots during chemical synthesis creates dots capable of stable, "blink-free" light emission that is fully comparable with the light produced by dots made with more complex processes. The squashed dots emit spectrally narrow light with a … | Continue reading
Many stars explode as luminous supernovae when, swollen with age, they run out of fuel for nuclear fusion. But some stars can go supernova simply because they have a close and pesky companion star that, one day, perturbs its partner so much that it explodes. | Continue reading
Researchers from Mexico and the United States have concluded that a population of fin whales in the rich Gulf of California ecosystem may live there year-round—an unusual circumstance for a whale species known to migrate across ocean basins. | Continue reading
A German court has ordered Amazon to stop taking orders from customers using wireless-enabled buttons because they breach e-commerce rules. | Continue reading
Male birds are often the ones with the most vibrant feathers, or the most elaborate songs, but researchers said Thursday that what female birds could really appreciate is a male who shows his intelligence. | Continue reading
There are only so many fish in the sea. And our appetite for seafood has already stressed many wild fisheries to the breaking point. Meanwhile, the planet's growing population will only further increase the need for animal protein, one of the most resource-intensive types of food … | Continue reading
Your knees and your smartphone battery have some surprisingly similar needs, a University of Michigan professor has discovered, and that new insight has led to a "structural battery" prototype that incorporates a cartilage-like material to make the batteries highly durable and ea … | Continue reading
When German mineralogist Gustav Rose stood on the slopes of Russia's Ural Mountains in 1839 and picked up a piece of a previously undiscovered mineral, he had never heard of transistors or diodes or had any concept of how conventional electronics would become an integral part of … | Continue reading
Although the popularity of rooftop solar panels has skyrocketed because of their benefits to consumers and the environment, the deployment has predominantly occurred in white neighborhoods, even after controlling for household income and home ownership, according to a study by re … | Continue reading
Heat trapped by greenhouse gases is raising ocean temperatures faster than previously thought, concludes an analysis of four recent ocean heating observations. The results provide further evidence that earlier claims of a slowdown or "hiatus" in global warming over the past 15 ye … | Continue reading