Search Result for 'top 100'

President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, released in March 2021, includes US$85 billion for city transit agencies to improve their systems by purchasing new buses and train cars and maintaining subway stations and tracks.

As Japan suffers a fourth wave of COVID-19, domestic opposition to the summer Olympic and Paralympic games is mounting. Two new opinion polls, showing that between 60% and 80% want the games either cancelled or postponed, have triggered a frenzy of articles all asking the same question: will the Olympics ...

Beneath the many complexities of the marathon that is the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a simple hypothesis: if the coronavirus is introduced into a susceptible population, and those people are able to mix, then there will be significant community transmission. Across 2020 and 2021, we have seen this happen around ...

Three-fifths of the measures required to get to “net zero” emissions will require at least some degree of behavioural and social change, according to the UK government’s climate advisers, the Committee on Climate Change. But this only factors in changes in consumer behaviour, such as switching from petrol to electric ...

For the last 12 years, a farm in Yorkshire has had refugees from Iran and Sudan volunteer during lambing season. These sessions, set up by the Darwen Asylum Seeker and Refugee Enterprise and the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust, help counter the negative mental-health effect of being isolated and in limbo ...

The latest IMF and World Bank reports show a global economic boom gathering steam. This is thanks to US$16 trillion in fiscal stimulus packages spent mostly across the world’s rich nations since the pandemic began.

While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken draws attention to climate change in the Arctic at meetings with other national officials this week in Iceland, an even greater threat looms on the other side of the planet.

If a company has a drug patent, for example, the profit from selling that drug will be taxed at a rate of 17%, instead of the usual company tax rate (now 25% for companies with an annual turnover less than A$50 million and 30% for those with more).

Bitcoin is created via high-powered computers solving complex mathematical equations. These computers use a lot of electricity, which is often generated by fossil fuels. Tesla’s about-face is a blow to Bitcoin, the value of which jumped when Tesla got on board.

The fragility of democracy in Samoa has been on full display in the past month. On April 9, voters used the national election to deliver a powerful rebuke to the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP), which has ruled their Pacific nation for four decades as a virtual one-party state.

What’s next in the latest Middle East convulsion? Will a ceasefire between the Hamas militant group in Gaza and Israel be brokered by Arab mediators in coordination with western powers, or will the situation continue to deteriorate?

his week’s budget assumes Australians will be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of the year, despite Prime Minister Scott Morrison saying the government has no vaccination targets, modelling or forecasts.

The twin stress factors of ocean warming and acidification increasingly threaten coral reefs worldwide, but relatively little is known about how various climate scenarios will affect coral reef growth rates.

The technology to capture climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions from smokestacks, and even from the air around us, already exists; so too does the technology to use this carbon dioxide to make products like plastics, concrete, carbonated drinks and even fuel for aircraft and automobiles.

Microfluidic systems are any device that process minuscule amounts of liquids. The fluids travel through channels thinner than a hair, and tiny valves can turn the flow on and off. These channels are made of materials such as glass, polymers, paper or gels.

Herd immunity occurs when there are enough immune people in a population that new infections stop. It means that enough people have achieved immunity to disrupt person-to-person transmission in the community, thereby protecting nonimmune people.

Data breaches have become common, and billions of records are stolen worldwide every year. Most of the media coverage of data breaches tends to focus on how the breach happened, how many records were stolen and the financial and legal impact of the incident for organizations and individuals affected by ...

What started in 2018 as a stop-gap until broader tax cuts were introduced, was extended because of COVID after the tax cuts were introduced in the 2020 budget and has now been extended again in 2021 to assist with the COVID recovery.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech last night highlighted Australia’s huge unnmet need for social and affordable housing. It’s once again shaping up as a major election issue. Labor is proposing a A$10 billion program to build 30,000 social and affordable homes over five years.

More than a year into the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) and US Centers for Disease Control finally changed their guidance to acknowledge SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can be transmitted through the air we breathe.

Telecoms giant gets second-largest fine ever imposed after it signed up more than 100 Indigenous consumers to contracts they couldn’t afford.

In this global context, the climate policies announced in Tuesday’s federal budget are a long-odds bet on a radically different approach. In place of the approaches adopted elsewhere, the Morrison government is betting heavily on alternatives that have failed previous tests, such as carbon capture and storage.

The ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline on May 7, 2021, exemplifies the huge challenges the U.S. faces in shoring up its cyber defenses. The private company, which controls a significant component of the U.S. energy infrastructure and supplies nearly half of the East Coast’s liquid fuels, was vulnerable to an ...

We and our colleagues have developed a way to store data using pegs and pegboards made out of DNA and retrieving the data with a microscope – a molecular version of the Lite-Brite toy

As the drought outlook for the Western U.S. becomes increasingly bleak, attention is turning once again to groundwater – literally, water stored in the ground. It is Earth’s most widespread and reliable source of fresh water, but it’s not limitless.

A large piece of space debris, possibly weighing several tonnes, is currently on an uncontrolled reentry phase (that’s space speak for “out of control”), and parts of it are expected to crash down to Earth over the next few weeks.

India’s COVID-19 crisis has revived a longstanding debate about whether foreign governments should come to the aid of countries facing major economic or humanitarian challenges and, if so, what kind of help they should provide.

There is a lot of interest in the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. So the public and health-care workers are “highly tuned in” to reporting suspected side-effects.

It comes after the Victorian government this week committed to reducing greenhouse emissions by 45-50% by 2030, and to reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

To help Australia adapt to climate change and manage the disasters that come with it, the federal government this week pledged A$600 million towards establishing the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, and $210 million for the Australian Climate Service initiative.

Local-food supporters like the colleague quoted above often claim that consuming food within a short radius (distance varies across countries) will enhance human wellbeing while also radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There is evidence to suggest that local food production and consumption has positive impacts on employment, health, community development, ...

The Oversight Board was set up to give users an independent third party to whom they can appeal Facebook moderation decisions, as well as to help set the policies that govern these decisions.

Australia’s diaspora is estimated to include around one million people, but this would be significantly higher if former residents, such as international students, were included.

Nations establish their borders through treaties. Rivers are sometimes relied on to set boundaries, but even here tensions rise when there are disputes about interpretation.

NFTs open up a huge new market to sell limited-edition images, videos and artwork. They also enable the original licensees – be it sports organisations or individual athletes – to share in resale profits.

Semiconductor memories are the preferred choice for portable electronics, optical storage is mostly used for movies, software and gaming, while magnetic data storage remains the dominant technology for high-capacity information storage, including personal computers and data servers.

A large piece of space debris, possibly weighing several tonnes, is currently on an uncontrolled reentry phase (that’s space speak for “out of control”), and parts of it are expected to crash down to Earth over the next few weeks.

The budget has become a statement of the government’s values in part because it puts numbers on those values — how much it is prepared to spend on health compared to defence, how much it plans to spend on superannuation tax concessions for high earners compared to pensions for low ...

There are a few different definitions of herd immunity. Nevertheless, they all deal with the “reproductive number” of a disease, known as the R number. This is the average number of people an infected person will pass a disease on to, at a certain point in time.

When it comes to dancing, pulling a sled, climbing stairs or doing tricks, “Spot” is definitely a good dog. It can navigate the built environment and perform a range of tasks, clearly demonstrating its flexibility as a software and hardware platform for commercial use.

There is a growing public and political outcry over the federal government’s sudden decision to ban Australians from coming home from India.

A study of medical campaigns in the US suggests crowdfunding has become a “gap-filler” or an entrepreneurial safety net for people without health insurance.

People might once have considered oxygen a human right. But the pandemic has revealed that access to oxygen – in a pure form, for medical use – is a luxury in most low and middle-income countries.

Limiting global warming to 1.5℃ this century is a central goal of the Paris Agreement. In recent months, climate experts and others, including in Australia, have suggested the target is now impossible.

In case you missed it, a major A$1 billion energy deal between the Morrison and the South Australian government was revealed recently.

Overcoming the odds is second nature to the Gippsland community. The people in this region have seen it all — fires, floods, droughts and extreme weather. And every time, these capable, resourceful and independent communities bounce back.

Amazon and Google – the leading purveyors of smart speakers outside China – appear to be doing little voice analysis on those devices beyond recognizing and responding to individual owners.

From ancient times until the late 1700s, the term “speculation” was used mainly by philosophers, scientists and authors to describe conjectures about the future. When speaking of traders who manipulated the prices of an asset to make an outsize profit, financial writers instead used terms like “engrossing” or “cornering” the ...

Biden promoted familiar values of American optimism, success and exceptionalism. He assessed a long list of issues facing Americans, from the pandemic to jobs, the environment and to foreign policy.

App tracking transparency is a continuation of Apple’s push to be recognised as the platform of privacy. The new feature allows apps to display a pop-up notification that explains what data the app wants to collect, and what it proposes to do with it.