Natural disasters including wildfires, hurricanes and tsunamis inflicted $160 billion of damage and claimed 10,400 lives in 2018, German reinsurer Munich Re said Tuesday. | Continue reading
Samsung expects its quarterly operating profit will be nearly 29 percent lower than last year, potentially unsettling a tech sector already skittish about slowing global economic growth. | Continue reading
Unprecedented detail of the aftermath of a collision between two neutron stars depicted in a 3-D computer model created by a University of Alberta astrophysicist provides a better understanding of how some of the universe's fundamental elements form in cosmic collisions. | Continue reading
Temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than any other place on Earth. If these changes continue, it is likely that the unique and diverse Arctic tundra will change into a more uniform vegetation dominated by shrubs. | Continue reading
Donhee Ham, Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, has been awarded $1.7 million from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to develop miniaturized nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) electronics. The devices … | Continue reading
The surface waters of Lake Dillon, a mountain reservoir that supplies water to the the Denver area, have warmed by nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 degrees Celsius) in the last 35 years, which is twice the average warming rate for global lakes. Yet surprisingly, Dillon does not s … | Continue reading
The directors of most Australian companies are well aware of the impact of carbon emissions, not only on the environment but also on their own firms as emissions-intensive industries get lumbered with taxes and regulations designed to change their behaviour. | Continue reading
A team of researchers at Northwestern University has found that people serving as mock jurors tend to view police officer intent differently when viewing events captured using body cams versus dash cams. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, … | Continue reading
Since the 1980s, increasingly frequent and intense heatwaves have contributed to more deaths than any other extreme weather event. The fingerprints of extreme events and climate change are widespread in the natural world, where populations are showing stress responses. | Continue reading
In 1933, Fritz Zwicky, famous American astronomer of Swiss origin, arrived at the astonishing conclusion that even though galaxies are the signposts of galaxy clusters, their contribution to the total cluster mass is minuscule in comparison to a dominant dark matter component. Cu … | Continue reading
Secondary school can be a lonely place for adolescents who don't have a best friend or a group of trusted friends. Young people will be more skilled in the art of making genuine friends (and keeping them) if they know how to be assertive, are optimistic about life, have some basi … | Continue reading
It's a new day not very far in the future. You wake up; your wristwatch has recorded how long you've slept, and monitored your heartbeat and breathing. You drive to work; car sensors track your speed and braking. You pick up some breakfast on your way, paying electronically; the … | Continue reading
No rational person would ever enter the lottery. The chance of picking the right six numbers and hitting the jackpot in the UK's Lotto is approximately one in 14m. | Continue reading
The question of whether or not wind turbines have decreased property values in Ontario has been a point of contention in recent years, and fuelled by the rapid expansion of the wind energy industry following the implementation of the Green Energy Act in 2009. (The current provinc … | Continue reading
For people with hearing loss, it can very difficult to understand and separate voices in noisy environments. This problem may soon be history thanks to a new groundbreaking algorithm that is designed to recognise and separate voices efficiently in unknown sound environments. | Continue reading
Anticipation has long been building about the impending takeover of the tech world by Chinese digital giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and JD. Efforts so far, however, have been largely disappointing. The most popular messaging app in the West is WhatsApp, not WeChat; people … | Continue reading
The evidence of human-induced climate change is clear. At minimum, climate change will cost us dearly due to the economic impacts and lives lost from the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events. At worst, it presents an existential threat. | Continue reading
Cast your mind back to the turn of last century. Experts predicted that by now classrooms would no longer feature human teachers, and holographic virtual entities would deliver lessons instead. | Continue reading
Scientists have moved quantum optic networks a step closer to reality. The ability to precisely control the interactions of light and matter at the nanoscale could help such a network transmit larger amounts of data more quickly and securely than an electrical network. | Continue reading
Korean researchers at DGIST have proven the existence of the upper band gap of atomic rhenium disulfide (ReS2) layers in the conductive atomic structure of ionization energy. The work resulted from a joint study with Professor Jong-hyun Ahn's research team at Yonsei University. | Continue reading
Catalysts are chemical matchmakers: They bring other chemicals close together, increasing the chance that they'll react with each other and produce something people want, like fuel or fertilizer. | Continue reading
A German study shows that magma could rise from the upper mantle into the middle and upper crust beneath the Laacher See Volcano (Rhineland-Palatinate). This is the result of a study conducted by the Seismological Survey of Southwest Germany (Erdbebendienst Südwest), together wit … | Continue reading
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have developed and analyzed a novel catalyst for the oxidation of 5-hydroxymethyl furfural, which is crucial for generating new raw materials that replace the classic non-renewable ones used for making many plastics. | Continue reading
How do you separate carbon dioxide from carbon monoxide? One way, showcased by a new study from Kanazawa University, is to use a bowl of vanadium. More precisely, a hollow, spherical cluster of vanadate molecules can discriminate between CO and CO2, allowing potential uses in CO2 … | Continue reading
The images are ubiquitous: A coastal town decimated by another powerful hurricane, satellite images showing shrinking polar ice caps, a school of dead fish floating on the surface of warming waters, swaths of land burnt by an out-of-control wildfire. These dire portrayals share a … | Continue reading
The Roman poet Lucretius' epic work "De rerum natura," or "On the Nature of Things," is the oldest surviving scientific treatise written in Latin. Composed around 55 B.C.E., the text is a lengthy piece of contrarianism. Lucreutius was in the Epicurean school of philosophy: He wan … | Continue reading
A weird feature of certain exotic materials allows electrons to travel from one surface of the material to another as if there were nothing in between. Now, researchers have shown that they can switch this feature on and off by toggling a material in and out of a stable topologic … | Continue reading
A nearly metre-long skull of a giant fossil marine ichthyosaur found in a farmer's field more than 60 years ago has been studied for the first time. | Continue reading
Austria's national post office found itself under fire Tuesday for collecting and selling information about customers' political allegiances in what privacy campaigners say bears similarities to the Facebook data-sharing scandal. | Continue reading
Using the CRISPR gene editing tool, Nikolay Kandul, Omar Akbari and their colleagues at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley devised a method of altering key genes that control insect sex determination and fertility. | Continue reading
Apple has an iPhone upgrade problem. That much is very clear after Wednesday afternoon's investor note from CEO Tim Cook in which the company lowered its expected revenue to $84 billion from its initial projections of between $89 billion and $93 billion for its most recent quarte … | Continue reading
The Numi toilet from Kohler was impossible to ignore. | Continue reading
Perhaps your New Year's resolution goes like this: Stop sending hundreds of dollars monthly to cable and satellite companies in 2019. Cut the cord and save. | Continue reading
From the ancient citadel overlooking the valley, Ridvan Ayhan looks at the Tigris with a furrowed brow. The river that supported his family's town for generations will soon destroy it. | Continue reading
One of Papua New Guinea's most active volcanoes has erupted, authorities said Tuesday, pummelling villages on a remote island with volcanic rock before subsiding. | Continue reading
SoftBank is scaling back plans for fresh investment in shared-office provider WeWork, reports said Tuesday, slashing a multi-billion-dollar injection in the loss-making company. | Continue reading
Samsung Electronics on Tuesday flagged its first quarterly profit drop in two years and painted a grim outlook owing to mounting competition from Chinese smartphone makers and declining chip prices. | Continue reading
One of China's major cities has reached an environmental milestone: an almost entirely electric-powered taxi fleet. | Continue reading
A diving beetle demonstrating various adaptations to the life underground, including depigmentation and evolutionary loss of eyes, was discovered at the bottom of a clay pound in the cave Soprador do Carvalho, Portugal. The species turned out to be the very first in the whole ord … | Continue reading
Many cat owners worry about their pets wandering the streets, but perceive cats hunting mice and birds to be unavoidable instinct, researchers at the University of Exeter have found. | Continue reading
An international collaboration led by scientists from the National University of Ireland, Galway, The University of St Andrews, Trinity College Dublin and the Zoological Society of London has uncovered why the venom of some snakes makes them so much deadlier than others. | Continue reading
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, has discovered a third small planet outside our solar system, scientists announced this week at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. | Continue reading
Environmental groups in Oregon announced Monday they have withdrawn from talks on how to manage the state's rebounding wolf population because of what they called a "broken" process, and concerns that state wildlife officials want to make it easier to kill wolves that eat livesto … | Continue reading
A new computational model could potentially boost efficiencies and profits in natural gas production by better predicting previously hidden fracture mechanics while accurately accounting for the known amounts of gas released during the process. | Continue reading