An enzyme variant created by engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin can break down environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days. This discovery, published today in Nature, could help solve one of the world’s most pressing environmental Read more…
Space rocks that fell to Earth within the last century contain the five bases that store information in DNA and RNA, scientists report April 26 in Nature Communications. These “nucleobases” — adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil — combine with sugars and phosphates to make up the genetic code of Read more…
A record-breaking heat wave in India exposing hundreds of millions to dangerous temperatures is damaging the country’s wheat harvest, which experts say could hit countries seeking to make up imports of the food staple from conflict-riven Ukraine. With some states in India’s breadbasket northern and central regions seeing forecasts with Read more…
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…
On Monday, the Internet got a much better look at military facilities across Russia. Google Maps stopped obscuring the sensitive locations due to Russia’s ongoing invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces announced the end of Google’s censorship of Russia’s bases on Twitter. Thanks to former US President Read more…