A ‘floating’ plan to stop trash in rivers from entering seas It is the rivers in metropolitan cities that face maximum abuse, owing to the lack of efficient waste management system, besides the apathetic attitude of citizens, industries and civic bodies. What we fail to realise or conveniently overlook is the drastic effect that indiscriminate…
Food transformed: from garbage to gourmet Think of projects that are putting waste food to good use and likely to spring to mind are all-purpose, easily adaptable dishes like veg soups and simple curries. But it’s not just wonky veg that gets wasted. Although the vast majority of the UK’s 200,000 tonnes of retail sector…
Quark fusion produces eight times more energy than nuclear fusion To reduce the emissions fueling climate change and develop more efficient ways of generating energy, while focusing on the bottom line, governments and private institutions all over the world have been turning to renewable energy. And while solar and wind energy advance and become more…
Streptococcus vaccine ‘could prevent over 100,000 baby deaths worldwide’ More than 100,000 stillbirths and baby deaths worldwide could be prevented by the development of a vaccine against an infection commonly carried by pregnant women, according to a groundbreaking report. The impact of disease caused by group B streptococcus (GBS) has not been properly chronicled before…
A new organic material that generates electricity when stressed We all get stressed out. But typically, when we stress, we don’t produce electricity. The same can’t be said of a flexible new material developed by researchers from Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology. They’ve created a thin, flexible, rubbery material that generates…
3D-printed human skin models will help end animal testing Carolina Catarino is a young Brazilian scientist who just won a Lush Prize for improving lab-grown skin models. When Carolina Catarino was a teenager, she wanted to be a fashion designer. But her parents, living in the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba, told her she had…
We could power the world with volcanoes Rifting is the geological process that rips tectonic plates apart, roughly at the speed your fingernails grow. In Ethiopia this has enabled magma to force its way to the surface, and there are over 60 known volcanoes. Many have undergone colossal eruptions in the past, leaving behind immense…
EasyJet says it could be flying electric planes within a decade EasyJet could be flying planes powered by batteries rather than petroleum to destinations including Paris and Amsterdam within a decade. The UK carrier has formed a partnership with US firm Wright Electric, which is developing a battery-propelled aircraft for flights under two hours. EasyJet…
Uganda city of Gulu launches massive tree-planting campaign Experts are warning that global climate change is closely linked to agriculture, the World’s major source of nutritive food. They want the world to prevent global temperature rise above two degrees Celsius (35.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial level to prevent reaching a tipping point where food security can…
Cape Town’s new buses will be all-electric come 2025 Cape Town, along with 11 other major world cities, has vowed to shirk purchasing fossil fuel-powered buses in favour of electric models for its inner city transport networks by 2025. The cities, which include Auckland, Barcelona, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Quito, Vancouver, Mexico City, Milan…