World military spending continued to grow in 2021, reaching an all-time high of $2.1 trillion. This was the seventh consecutive year that spending increased. “Even amid the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, world military spending hit record levels,” said Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, Senior Researcher with SIPRI’s Military Read more…
A new breed of startups wants to formalise cattle trading. Livestock fairs, where most animals are still bought and sold, can be expensive and chaotic. Farmers shell out entry fees to register their beasts. They must pay for labourers to load and unload the animals, as well as for transport Read more…
Thousands of potentially harmful chemicals could soon be prohibited in Europe under new restrictions, which campaigners have hailed as the strongest yet. Earlier this year, scientists said chemical pollution had crossed a “planetary boundary” beyond which lies the breakdown of global ecosystems. The synthetic blight is thought to be pushing Read more…
Bill Gates shares a statistic about the COVID-19 pandemic. “If we’d been able to stop it within 100 days, we would’ve saved over 98% of the lives.” “Viruses spread exponentially, and so if you get in there when the infection rate is fairly small, you can actually stop the spread.” Read more…
CNBC explores the dream of “a future where nobody has to constantly update and change online passwords to stay ahead of hackers and keep data secure.” Here’s the good news: Some of the biggest names in tech are already saying that the dream of a password-less internet is close to Read more…
Twitter is in the final stretch of negotiations about a sale to Elon Musk, a person with knowledge of knowledge of the matter said, Bloomberg News reports. The social media company is working to hammer out terms of a transaction and could reach an agreement as soon as Monday if Read more…
On April 15th Americans filed their taxes with the Internal Revenue Service (or IRS). But on the same day ProPublica was reporting a difference between “the rich and the rest of us” — that their wealth just isn’t easily defined: For one, wages make up only a small part of Read more…