Our world is facing a huge challenge: we need to create enough high-quality, diverse and nutritious food to feed a growing population – and do so within the boundaries of our planet. This means significantly reducing the environmental impact of the global food system. There are more than 7,000 edible plant species which could
Month: March 2022
Australia’s spectacular Great Barrier Reef is suffering “mass bleaching” as corals lose their color under the stress of warmer seas, authorities said Friday, in a blow widely blamed on climate change. The world’s largest coral reef system, stretching for more than 2,300 kilometers (1,400 miles) along the northeast coast of Australia, is showing the
In the past 24 hours, people uploaded more than 720,000 hours’ worth of footage onto YouTube. According to calculations made a few years ago by University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson, this literal mass of visual imagery – along with half a billion tweets, countless texts, billions of WhatsApp messages, and every other bit and
The cutting-edge number-crunching capabilities of artificial intelligence mean that AI systems are able to spot diseases early, manage chemical reactions, and explain some of the mysteries of the Universe. But there’s a downside to this incredible and virtually limitless artificial brainpower. New research emphasizes how easily AI models can be trained for malicious purposes
Rare-earth elements are crucial components in all kinds of electronics, from smartphones and broadband cables to wind turbines and electric cars. But coming up with useful compounds that can expand our practical use of rare-earths is notoriously difficult, with unpredictable results. Now, scientists have come up with a clever way to help the search of
A new crystalline form of water ice has been discovered in fleeting transitions between phases at high pressures. It’s called Ice-VIIt, and it takes place as the substance slides between two already known, cubic arrangements of molecules. Although it’s unlikely Ice-VIIt would naturally appear on Earth’s surface, it could reveal more about how water behaves on
At the heart of every black hole sits a problem. As they sizzle away into nothingness over the eons, they take with them a small piece of the Universe. Which, quite frankly, just isn’t in the rule book. It’s a paradox the late Stephen Hawking left us with as a part of his revolutionary
Have you ever felt a creeping sensation that someone’s watching you? Then you turn around and you don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Depending on where you were, though, you might not have been completely imagining it. There are billions of things sensing you every day. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight –
The catastrophic disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 was caused by an explosion at the Reactor 4 Unit. This expelled a sizeable quantity of radioactive material into the surroundings, alongside a partial meltdown of the reactor core. The last few decades have seen substantial international efforts to safely contain and decontaminate the
Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant and all the facilities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone have been completely disconnected and are now without electricity, Ukraine’s state energy company has announced. Russian forces attacked the defunct nuclear facility on the very first day of the invasion (Feb. 24), seizing it after heavy fighting and taking its roughly 210 staff hostage, Live Science
Since its launch in 2020, a pioneering energy company called Quaise has attracted some serious attention for its audacious goal of diving further into Earth’s crust than anybody has dug before. Following the closure of first round venture capital funding, the MIT spin-off has now raised a total of US$63 million: a respectable start
There was a time, not so long ago, when computers were so large, they occupied entire rooms. Today, some processing units can come as small as a few specks of dust. Even next to a grain of rice, these stacks of micrometer-sized chips look infinitesimal. Shrinking computer batteries to fit that size, however, has proved