Tag: SB001

Wasps have a reputation for being jerks because of their perceived aggressiveness and ability to sting repeatedly. They’re often negatively compared with the honey production and agricultural pollination of bees.

The transport sector accounts for 47% of New Zealand’s carbon dioxide emissions. It will be a focus for decarbonisation to meet the country’s new climate pledge to cut emissions by half by 2030.

Leaders of the world’s wealthiest countries, including Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, failed to reach a commitment to phase out fossil fuels. And the meeting’s final communique did not include a commitment to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Macron’s comments come off the back of Australia’s abrupt strategic breakup with France as part of the AUKUS partnership. In September, Australia announced this new alliance, which meant it would end a multibillion-dollar submarine deal with France.

The UK has around 1,500 individual river systems, totalling over 200,000km in length. It’s common for sewers here to accept both untreated human waste and rain water in a combined system.

The 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, for which I was a senior economist, was the first time a G7 government had used economic analysis to spell out the case for urgently reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A decade and a half on, its conclusions and recommendations are ...

The CSIRO’s 64-metre Parkes Radio Telescope was commissioned on October 31 1961. At the time it was the most advanced radio telescope in the world, incorporating many innovative features that have since become standard in all large-dish antennas.

Metaverse is a portmanteau of meta, meaning transcendent, and verse, from universe. Sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash” to describe the virtual world in which the protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, socializes, shops and vanquishes real-world enemies through his avatar.

Australian children aged five to 11 could begin receiving the Pfizer vaccine by the end of November, with the nation’s regulator currently reviewing the health and safety data.

As the world’s attention turns to the climate summit in Glasgow, where governments are negotiating the future of international action on climate change, many will be feeling the acute stress and dread that comes with living in a world where it seems environmental catastrophe is around every corner.

The rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria has already led to a significant increase in human disease and death. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that approximately 2.8 million people worldwide are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, accounting for 35,000 deaths each year in the U.S. and 700,000 deaths around ...

In mid October, the New South Wales government’s top bureaucrats urged new Premier Dominic Perrottet to push for “an aggressive resumption of immigration levels” to spur post-pandemic economic recovery.

The dystopian South Korean horror series Squid Game has become Netflix’s most watched TV series, but it is quickly becoming as controversial as it is popular.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, it’s still common to see politicians, media commentators or social media users cast doubt on the role of humans in driving climate change.

Cult 1970s BBC TV show The Good Life examined Tom and Barbara Good’s experience of attempting to opt out of the rat race by becoming self-sufficient. They grew vegetables in their back garden, milked a goat, tried to knit their own clothes and collected their animal’s waste to create methane ...

Omar al-Bashir’s regime in Sudan was toppled in 2019, a demise hailed with cries of “just fall!” from protesters massing in the streets of the capital Khartoum. But the transition rested on a power-sharing deal between the protesters and Sudan’s powerful military, whose leaders had withdrawn their support for Bashir ...

The UK government has set out its plans for reaching net zero emissions. This target, which Prime Minister Boris Johnson says will be met by 2050, is a crucial test of whether countries can move to a carbon-free economy.

Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change – and in particular, when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has announced the company will change its name to Meta, saying the move reflects the fact the company is now much broader than just the social media platform (which will still be called Facebook).

Rishi Sunak mentioned the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the UK and world economy — over and over again. He did not reference Brexit in explaining the challenging months ahead, instead blaming global supply chains struggling to keep up with demand, and the wholesale prices of oil, gas, ...

COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths have been rising in the UK, pressurising a health service that’s already working hard to treat the backlog of non-COVID patients that have accumulated since March 2020.

Fall foliage season is a calendar highlight in states from Maine south to Georgia and west to the Rocky Mountains. It’s especially important in the Northeast, where fall colors attract an estimated US$8 billion in tourism revenues to New England every year.

Corporate Australia has of late become a strong voice for more action on climate change. Earlier this month the Business Council of Australia, which represents the nation’s 100 biggest companies, declared its support for the federal government committing to halving its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and net zero emissions ...

All Australians have a stake in our nation’s good governance. The past week has provided plenty of reasons to be concerned about the Morrison government’s disregard of core tenets of Australian democracy in its quest for electoral advantage.

With brands increasingly engaging in social change campaigns and leveraging their influence to be “purpose-led”, the time has come to ask a couple of big questions: is this a viable strategy, and how sceptical should we be of so-called “brand activism”?

The New Zealand government’s announcement yesterday of expanded mandatory vaccination requirements raises important questions about legality and compliance.

Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), today provisionally approved the Pfizer COVID vaccine to be used as a booster for anyone over the age of 18.

This week the federal government announced proposed legislation to develop an online privacy code (or “OP Code”) setting tougher privacy standards for Facebook, Google, Amazon and many other online platforms.

If nations make good on their latest promises to reduce emissions by 2030, the planet will warm by at least 2.7℃ this century, a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has found. This overshoots the crucial internationally agreed temperature rise of 1.5℃.

During marine heatwaves, ocean temperatures can become so high that many species become stressed, or die. Critical coastal habitats, such as seagrass meadows, corals and kelp forests, can die out, limiting their natural capacity to store carbon dioxide and disrupting fisheries and tourism.

In December last year, the media reported an intriguing signal we at the Breakthrough Listen project found in our radio telescope data. Dubbed BLC1, the signal didn’t appear to be the result of any recognisable astrophysical activity or any familiar Earth-based interference.

After the 1989 fall of communism in the Soviet bloc, five self-declared communist states remain today: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. Belarus and Venezuela can also be added to the mix as they fulfil the criteria of a communist state – even though they do not officially invoke ...

Scientists have long known that ultraviolet light can kill pathogens on surfaces and in air and water. UV robots are used to disinfect empty hospital rooms, buses and trains; UV bulbs in HVAC systems eliminate pathogens in building air; and UV lamps kill bugs in drinking water.

The federal government has been asking the public for feedback on proposed legislation to create a “trusted digital identity” system. The aim is for Australians to use it to prove their identity when accessing public services.

No sooner than you thought all the talk of new COVID variants was over, there’s news of yet another one: AY.4.2. But what is it, where did it come from, and should we be concerned?

The Musk v Bezos rivalry makes for good press and is stoked occasionally in tweets by both parties, but is it real? Probably not, according to our research, published in the book The New Patriarchs of Digital Patriarchy: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power, which analyses 95 popular books ...

France intervened in Mali in 2013, “following the request” from the transitional government of President Dioncounda Traore to help combat terrorism. At the time, the then French President François Hollande declared that the objective of intervention was to “fight against terrorism”.

Fresh emissions targets from Saudi Arabia and Australia – two of the world’s largest fossil-fuel producers – are due to arrive just in time for global climate talks in Glasgow.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, billionaire co-founder of software developer Atlassian and his partner Annie Cannon-Brooke who this month pledged A$1.5 billion to invest in climate projects by 2030.

Supply chains have not been coping with this surge in orders. Ports have been struggling to load and unload container ships quickly enough, with nearly 600 container ships stuck outside docking areas around the world – nearly double the number at the start of the year.

Many Americans now have the green light to get a COVID-19 vaccine booster – and the flexibility to receive a different brand than the original vaccine they received.

A powerful storm system known as an atmospheric river is heading for northern California and Oregon, a region in the midst of an historic drought.

The National Party on Sunday agreed to a plan to cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050, clearing the way for Prime Minister Scott Morrison to announce the target ahead of the Glasgow climate summit.

The Australian government’s recent warning to Facebook over misinformation is just the latest salvo in the seemingly constant battle to hold the social media giant to account for the content posted on its platform.

People were washing their hands so much early in the pandemic that sensitive skin and soap shortages were common problems in 2020.

On October 23, 2001, Apple released the iPod — a portable media player that promised to overshadow the clunky design and low storage capacity of MP3 players introduced in the mid-1990s.

The climate talks in Glasgow are just days away, and may be the last chance to coordinate global efforts to stop the planet warming beyond 1.5℃ this century.

In inland Australia, rabbits have taken a severe toll on native wildlife since they were introduced in 1859.

This morning, Melburnians are waking up to the end of the city’s sixth lockdown.

According to the recent House of Commons report on the UK’s pandemic response, one of the government’s key failings was to assume that the success of countries like South Korea in controlling the virus couldn’t be replicated in Britain.