Tag: SB001

Last year, the return of blue passports was touted as a symbol of Britain taking back control following Brexit. Some in government would now like to see Britain’s imperial measurements make a comeback.

Each union has its own leadership and there are different positions being adopted. But the construction union’s approach has been broadly the same as the Australian Council of Trade Unions, which has supported vaccination but also consistently opposed individual companies having the power to mandate vaccines.

Thousands of demonstrators rallied across the Serbian capital Belgrade this month, protesting the US$2.4 billion (A$3.3 billion) Jadar lithium mine proposed by global mining giant Rio Tinto.

A magnitude 5.8 earthquake has struck about 115 kilometres east of Melbourne in Victoria, causing damage to buildings and forcing residents to evacuate across the city.

The country or company cuts most of its emissions through efficiency and clean energy, then offsets the rest by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or eliminating emissions elsewhere.

In the right setting, CO₂ is an extremely useful gas. When added to beverages it gives them their fizz. Trap it in high pressure bubbles in sweets and you get popping candy. Compress it in a cylinder and you have a fire extinguisher.

The driving force behind many reforms has been a narrative of panic and failure, often centred on the steady decline of Australian students on the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

The 2021 Canadian election results were almost a mirror of the results of the 2019 vote. After calling an election in the middle of a fourth COVID-19 wave, Justin Trudeau’s gamble for a majority government failed.

Digital technologies are now at the heart of our everyday lives, as anyone who has swapped their office for a videoconferencing screen, or downloaded a contact-tracing app, knows only too well.

The UK government has been in emergency talks with leaders from the energy industry as gas prices (and with them, electricity prices) have soared to more than four times the level they were at the same time in 2020.

The UK has become the latest country to offer COVID-19 vaccines to all children aged 12 to 15, following many others including France, Germany, the US, Canada and Japan.

China is shaping the future of economic development through its Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious multi-billion-dollar international push to better connect itself to the rest of the world through trade and infrastructure.

An internal Facebook report found that the social media platform’s algorithms – the rules its computers follow in deciding the content that you see – enabled disinformation campaigns based in Eastern Europe to reach nearly half of all Americans in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, according to a ...

For Pacific Island countries, undersea internet cables can be crucial. The number of Pacific Island countries with such connections has increased substantially in recent years. Even so, many countries still rely on a single cable and others have no cable at all.

Despite working with people in the most vulnerable situations, support workers spoke of being turned away or facing public backlash when trying to use essential worker queues at supermarkets.

The relationship between America and China had already deteriorated under the presidency of Donald Trump and has not improved under Joe Biden. New satellite evidence suggests China might be building between 100 and 200 silos for a new generation of nuclear intercontinental missiles.

Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor of the UK’s first mass-market home computer, has died at the age of 81. Pioneer of tiny portable devices, truly affordable computers and novel, electric forms of transportation, he leaves behind what some see as a checkered history of hit-and-miss inventions.

Shipping emissions can be calculated using four principal factors: the weight of products transported, the distance they’re sent, the amount of fuel it takes to move one tonne of products one kilometre, and the amount of carbon released by making and using that fuel – known as the fuel’s carbon-intensity.

The key scientific advisory council of the Food and Drug Administration has voted to deny use of a “booster” shot of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine to the general public – a move that will likely disappoint some public health experts pushing for a third dose to help slow the spread of ...

What is my IP? It’s an odd question in most people’s minds, yet it’s one of the top ten most-searched questions on Google.

On Friday, US President Joe Biden announced a sweeping new vaccine mandate for employers covering around 100 million adults.

The current wave of COVID cases is leading to more hospital and intensive care (ICU) admissions. Frontline health workers and experts use the term “intubation” for the extra breathing support some patients need in an emergency.

Carnivorous animals come in all shapes and sizes, from the 500-gram quoll to the 500-kilogram polar bear. This disparate group of mammals shares a common feature: canine teeth at the front of their jaws.

What do koalas, barking owls, greater gliders, southern rainbow skinks, native bees, and regent honeyeaters all have in common? Like many native species, they can all be found in vegetation along fences and roadsides outside formal conservation areas.

Having pulled back from the precipice of a full-blown disaster over vaccine rollout a year ago, Von der Leyen could justifiably boast about 70% of EU adults are now fully vaccinated.

With six weeks to go until COP26, the delayed 2020 UN climate change conference in Glasgow, many people are considering how their personal and professional behaviour can help tackle the climate crisis.

To recoup the around £34bn a year currently collected through fuel and vehicle excise duty, one report has recommended that the most equitable way would be a national road pricing system.

The fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda, isn’t a worm. It’s a striped caterpillar, the larvae of an ordinary and benign brown moth. It’s native to the Americas and is extremely adaptable, thriving everywhere from lush forests to arid regions and in pristine, disturbed and urban landscapes.

Can the United Kingdom survive Brexit? This remains one of the great unanswered questions of our time. Politically, two major narratives have dominated. The first is that the UK is on a break-up trajectory. Brexit has revived the Scottish independence movement and destabilised Northern Irish politics.

Teacher turnover often negatively affects students’ academic success. Teacher shortages could also disrupt subjects or geographic areas that already have staffing challenges.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom emerged from a recall election on Sept. 14, 2021, as the big winner, having secured a heavy majority of the vote. But while most eyes were on the result itself, another important shift was playing out: California’s growing role in national Democratic politics.

Sending a crew of amateur astronauts into orbit is a significant step in the development of space tourism. However, despite the more inclusive feel of the mission, there are still serious barriers to overcome before average people can go to space.

The firing off of two long-range missiles by North Korea shows that rather than being unpredictable, the isolationist state is quite the opposite.

In 2019 and 2020, bushfires razed more than 18 million hectares of land in Australia. For weeks, smoke choked major cities, leading to almost 450 deaths, and even circumnavigated the southern hemisphere.

Scotland is to become the latest nation to trial a four-day working week, after the SNP government announced it was setting up a £10 million fund to enable some office businesses to cut workers’ hours without reducing their pay.

More than 60 years later, in 2016, a pair of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers were training an AI to play video games. The goal of one game – Coastrunner – was to complete a racetrack. But the AI player was rewarded for picking up collectable items along the track. When ...

Across the globe there are billions of computing devices that connect to the internet. To communicate, each device needs an address, just like our homes.

Multiple doctors’ organisations, led by the Australian Medical Association, and a major farm lobby have called on the federal government to boost Australia’s climate change ambition, as pressure mounts on Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce to finalise a deal ahead of the Glasgow conference.

With COVID-19 causing extraordinarily intrusive and expensive lockdowns, vaccine “passports” or certificates are increasingly seen as key to getting out of them.

When fossil fuels are burnt, their carbon reacts with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. The energy originally provided by the Sun, stored in chemical bonds for millions of years, is released and the carbon returns to the air.

COVID-19 has seen the world embrace sanitisers and formal hand washing procedures in our private lives like never before. But even as we’ve thought more and more about surfaces and the hands that touch them as vectors for disease, mobile phones have largely escaped scrutiny.

The soaring cost of natural gas and a warm, dry and windless start to autumn 2021 have conspired to create one almighty headache for energy consumers in the UK and the rest of Europe.

Germany is shortly to hold its first ever federal election in which the sitting chancellor is not running. The departure of Angela Merkel means that, for the first time since 1949, change is inevitable.

Producing enough food for a growing world population is an urgent global challenge. And it’s complicated by the fact that climate change is warming the Earth and making farming harder in many places.

In partnership with eyewear brand Ray-Ban, Facebook has released its first pair of smart glasses, offering wearers the ability to capture photos and videos without even needing to pull out their phone.

States like New South Wales and Victoria will require ongoing low level restrictions, such as masks and capacity limits — even with vaccination rates of 70%–80% of over 16s.

The federal government’s promise to deliver more student places through its Job-ready Graduates Package was hollow rhetoric, as research released today demonstrates.

Caught out by its strategy to bet on COVID-19 vaccines that could be made in Australia, the federal government is now scrambling to manufacture mRNA vaccines locally.

The concept and technology behind Whim is known as Mobility as a Service — or MaaS. The aim is to promote more sustainable modes of travel and make individual car ownership unnecessary for urban mobility.

Right now, there’s just one virus on everyone’s minds: SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But humanity is plagued by many respiratory viruses, such as influenza A (IAV) and respiratory syncytial viruses (RSV), which cause hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. Most of these viruses – apart from influenza ...