Tag: SB001

Global oil consumption declined by roughly 9% in 2020 as the pandemic reduced business and pleasure travel, factory production and transportation of goods. This abrupt drop accelerated an ongoing shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Australia will shut its residential embassy in Afghanistan before its troops leave the country, amid concerns of an expected worsening security situation.

The world is now 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic and we’ve yet to find a single drug that can stop the virus.

Alarm bells rang internationally last week when Taiwan announced it was moving to its second highest COVID alert level after a recent surge of cases.

Drought over the last two decades has dealt a heavy blow to the wheatbelt of Western Australia, the country’s most productive grain-growing region.

Buried in last week’s budget was money for rehabilitating the Rum Jungle uranium mine near Darwin. The exact sum was not disclosed.

Installing solar panels is an easy way to lower your carbon footprint and cut electricity bills. But our recent research found there are many incentives to remove them prematurely, adding to Australia’s massive waste problem.

Adolescents in North America are beginning to roll up their sleeves for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine after it was approved for 12-15-year-olds this month.

The opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics is about nine weeks away. And yet many of the world’s athletes are not satisfied with the COVID-19 precautions organisers have planned.

There’s a weedkiller used in Australia that’s so toxic, one sip could kill you. It’s called paraquat and debate is brewing over whether it should be banned.

Even if every country meets its current climate targets, Earth’s temperature will still rise by a dangerous 2.1℃ this century, according to sobering findings from a new International Energy Agency report.

The Black Summer bushfires burned far more temperate forest than any other fire season recorded in Australia. The disaster was clearly a climate change event; however, other human activities also had consequences.

Established in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, the International Energy Agency (IEA) was created to maintain the stability of the international oil supply. As an independent adviser to many governments on energy policy, the IEA has the authority to make member states release reserve oil stocks to stabilise ...

It is now established as fact that Bashir commissioned fake bank statements and showed them to Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, in order to secure his trust and gain access to his sister.

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.

More than 2.4 million older adults are supported each year by Meals on Wheels, a program through which seniors and people with disabilities receive healthy and tasty meals for free from a network of volunteers.

On May 11, 2021, the World Food Prize Foundation announced that its 2021 laureate is Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, a nutrition scientist who in my view has done more than anyone to draw attention to the essential but often overlooked role of aquatic foods in sustainable healthy diets.

Imagine driving a car at speeds approaching 112 mph for around two hours, while at the same time having to negotiate twisting circuits and finding ways to overtake opponents. This is what a Formula 1 (F1) driver will experience when they race around the streets of Monaco.

When Australia and the UK began discussing a free trade agreement in 2020, they issued a joint statement with remarkably similar objectives. It now seems that a meeting of minds is imminent.

In an effort to reverse the flood of abuse on the platform, Twitter is rolling out a new feature which will show a self-moderation prompt to users who compose replies that the platform’s algorithms recognise to be abusive. The prompt effectively asks users to think twice before posting an abusive ...

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 ...

More than six months after the astonishing polling embarrassment in the 2020 U.S. elections, survey experts examining what went wrong are uncertain about what led to the sharpest discrepancy between the polls and popular vote outcome since Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a near-landslide in 1980.

Instead of impact assessments that provide us with reassurance that risks have been responsibly mitigated, the vaccine passport has been released with a privacy notice that appears to contradict the caution and care the UK government has so far professed to be applying to this controversial technology.

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 ...

Peat has been a staple ingredient of composts sold in British garden centres since the 1960s, even though it’s not actually that nutritious for plants. The reason why this spongy turf is coveted by gardeners is that it can hold onto both water and air and it’s generally free of ...

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 ...

As summer in the Northern Hemisphere approaches, forecasters begin watching every bout of rainy weather between the Gulf of Mexico and Africa. Each counterclockwise swirl of wind or burst of puffy clouds there has the potential to organize into a life-threatening tropical storm.

This liberal vision of global health – one which held that the rich had responsibilities to the rest of the world, and progress was possible through cooperation – was already in trouble prior to COVID.

To protect cyclists on the roads, state governments in Australia have introduced laws that set a minimum space drivers must give cyclists when overtaking them. These laws are now in place nationwide, with Victoria the final state to join the ranks last month.

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.

The ruling by Australia’s Fair Work Commission that online food delivery platform Deliveroo unfairly dismissed driver Diego Franco marks a major shift in the Australian “gig” economy.

Taking place decades after Sweden’s nineteenth-century mechanisation, this electrification was the country’s second industrial revolution. It brought with it powerful forces of change that swept through civilian life, stoking tensions between employers and workers as evidenced by a huge increase in strike action at the time.

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.

Vaccines have unquestionably been society’s most potent weapon against viral diseases of medical importance. When the new disease AIDS burst onto the scene in the early 1980s and the virus that caused it was discovered in 1983-84, it was only natural to think that the research community would be able ...

The Australian government’s latest budget has committed A$210 million for a new climate information service, $600 million for a new agency to promote natural disaster recovery and resilience, and $10 billion for a reinsurance fund to reduce insurance premiums in northern Australia.

Australia’s parliament is considering legislation to give new powers to the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) and the Australian Federal Police.

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).

For many Australians, there is nothing bad at all with having national borders closed indefinitely. We shouldn’t rush to re-engage with the world, not when there’s a deadly virus in circulation.

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?

China’s space program is making impressive progress. The country only launched its first crewed flight in 2003, more than 40 years after the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. China’s first Mars mission was in 2020, half a century after the US Mariner 9 probe flew ...

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.

ver the past few years, controversy has surrounded the World Athletics ruling that female hyperandrogenic athletes — female athletes with naturally high levels of testosterone — are banned from competing in certain track events.

The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the air we breathe, the water we drink – it’s all underpinned by healthy and productive soils.

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.

It’s only May, and states are already considering water use restrictions to make the supply last longer. California’s governor declared a drought emergency in 41 of 58 counties.

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.