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Total number of posts: 23687
Full cycle: Turning plastic bottles and bags into fuel again
Most plastic is made from fossil fuels. Worldwide about 100 million tons is produced each year, and it ends up in landfills that pollute the environment or in oceans where it kills fish. Now scientists have come up with a new way to turn plastic waste into liquid fuel. It uses less energy than Read More...
Online learning offers refugees a first opportunity to enter their new world
Refugees face enormous challenges entering their new home countries. They need to learn a new language, and they have to make sure their skills fit legal and regulatory requirements. The US State Department is posing a solution through a partnership with online education platform Coursera that Read More...
Toyota to build artificial intelligence-based driving systems in five years
Toyota Motor Corp is targeting developing in the next five years driver assistance systems that integrate artificial intelligence (AI) to improve vehicle safety, the head of its advanced research division said. Gill Pratt, CEO of recently set up Toyota Research Institute (TRI), the Japanese Read More...
Breathless in Paris as clean-air battle mounts in French capital
Paris will no longer take your breath away. Its monuments, avenues and restaurants might, of course, but Mayor Anne Hidalgo is pledging its pollution won’t. The city, host to the COP21 United Nations climate conference last year, will ensure the French capital’s air is cleaner and that Read More...
Can the $16 cup of Blue Bottle coffee help rebuild a country?
Blue Bottle Coffee has taken the Bay Area and Silicon Valley by storm, and affection for its brews spread from its flagship store at the Ferry Building in San Francisco to the East Coast and even as far as Tokyo. Visit any of its locations, and chances are the lines will be long. And of course the Read More...
Saiga antelope numbers rise after mass die-off
Last year, catastrophe hit saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan. About 200,000 of these critically endangered antelopes died in Betpak-Dala in May, deeply worrying conservationists. The deaths, scientists eventually found, were most likely caused by bacterial infection. But there may be hope for these Read More...
Solar-powered air-con uses heat to cool shopping center
Solar-concentrating thermal technology is being used to power the air-conditioning system of an entire shopping center in Australia solely from the rays of the sun. With around 60 percent of all energy used in shopping centers being consumed by heating and cooling needs, the new system could lead Read More...
Record-breaking solar impulse starts Atlantic crossing tonight
Tonight’s the night for the zero-fuel Solar Impulse 2 aircraft and pilot/inventor Bertrand Piccard. They take off at 2:00 am EDT Tuesday (6:00 am UTC, 8:00 am CET) from JFK International Airport in New York to make history on the first transatlantic solar/electric flight — zero fuel and Read More...
Mars' 100% renewables pledge: a cause for celebrations?
On a beautiful barren stretch of the Scottish Highlands, just south of Inverness, spin 20 brand new 3,300-kilowatt wind turbines. The second these industrial-scale turbines came on stream last month, all Mars UK’s factories and offices became immediately zero carbon. The US confectionary Read More...
The Inventors of the Internet Are Trying to Build a Truly Permanent Web
If you wanted to write a history of the Internet, one of the first things you would do is dig into the email archives of Vint Cerf. In 1973, he co-created the protocols that Internet servers use to communicate with each other without the need for any kind of centralized authority or control. He has Read More...