Tag: SB001

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.

Responding to pressure from public sector unions and workers, the government has suggested routine step-based pay increases could be applied more widely, the policy could be reviewed a year earlier and cost-of-living increases accounted for.

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 ...

Markets, economists and policymakers have been fretting about inflation for months, worried that the trillions of dollars being spent in recent and future government stimulus programs could overheat the economy and send prices soaring.

The latest violence between Israeli and Palestinian forces should come as no surprise. The issue of Palestinian statehood has been off the international agenda since US President Barack Obama effectively washed his hands of the issue. The Trump administration then focused on Israel’s relations with other Arab states at the ...

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.

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.

In June last year, Ed Miliband was asked on The Andrew Marr Show whether Keir Starmer was going to be a better leader of the Labour Party than he had been.

On Sunday May 2, only one person in the UK died from COVID-19. It’s a remarkable achievement after a terrifying winter spike in the disease which saw the UK rack up one of the highest per-capita death tolls in the world.

Overnight, Boston-based pharmaceutical company Moderna announced a new supply agreement with Australia for 25 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine.

Capturing audiences worldwide with its no-holds-barred indictment of the fishing industry, Netflix’s Seaspiracy is the latest documentary to draw attention to the plight of our oceans.

The United States’ offshore wind industry is tiny, with just seven wind turbines operating off Rhode Island and Virginia. The few attempts to build large-scale wind farms like Europe’s have run into long delays, but that may be about to change.

President Joe Biden calls climate change “the existential crisis of our time” and has taken steps to curb it that match those words. They include returning the U.S. to the Paris Agreement; creating a new climate Cabinet position; introducing a plan to slash fossil fuel subsidies; and announcing ambitious goals ...

The federal budget for 2021-22 promises A$1.2 billion over the next six years to support the Digital Economy Strategy, a plan to make Australia “a leading digital economy and society by 2030”.

Weeks of tensions between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces in East Jerusalem have boiled over in recent days, unleashing some of the worst violence between Israel and the Palestinians in years.

Yesterday the news dropped that Christine Holgate, the Australia Post chief executive pushed so roughly from her job by the Morrison government, has a new job with a rival delivery company.

Chinese technology provider Huawei was recently accused of being able to monitor all calls made using Dutch mobile operator KPN. The revelations are from a secret 2010 report made by consultancy firm Capgemini, which KPN commissioned to evaluate the risks of working with Huawei infrastructure.

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 ...

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 ...

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on the weekend Australia’s borders will remain closed for the foreseeable future, only reopening “when it is safe to do so”.

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.

Since COVID-19 vaccines began rolling out across the world, many scientists have been hesitant to say they can reduce transmission of the virus.

Research shared just before the pandemic’s onset uncovered that millennials are reluctant to trust government, business leaders, corporations, social and mass media or even traditional social institutions.

International travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted many travel enthusiasts to explore local and regional tourist destinations.

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.

On the morning of Thursday 6 May, French fishers threatened to blockade Jersey’s main port of St Helier, following a threat by French maritime minister Annick Girardin to cut off the island’s electricity supply.

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 space company Blue Origin announced that it would start selling tickets for suborbital flights to the edge of space. The first flight is scheduled for July 20, and Jeff Bezos’ company is auctioning off one single ticket to the highest bidder.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released updated “climate normals” – datasets that the agency produces every 10 years to give forecasters and the public baseline measurements of average temperature, rainfall and other conditions across the U.S.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, but it’s also a precursor of surface ozone, which is a toxic air pollutant. So, reducing methane improves the quality of the air we breathe at the same time that it reduces climate change, and the results are almost immediate.

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.

After Australia’s foreign minister Marise Payne cancelled the Victorian state government’s memorandum of understanding to participate in China’s “Belt and Road” global infrastructure initiative a fortnight ago, she said she didn’t expect retaliation from Beijing.

The Biden administration has now agreed to back a proposal to suspend intellectual property protection for COVID vaccines. This is a break from US government’s long-held position on strong intellectual property protection, which has also been supported by many research-intensive countries in western Europe as well and the pharmaceutical industry.

When wildfires damage water distribution pipes, wells and the plumbing in homes and other buildings, they can create immediate health risks.

Cities throughout the world, across a range of scales and locales, exemplify this. Brasilia (Brasil), Detroit (USA), Milton Keynes (England), Norilsk (Russia) – the list goes on – were designed as modernist visions of a single, finite solution. However, this vision quickly unravelled. Overpopulation, climate change, diminishing resources, rampant commercialisation ...

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.

The UK and India have announced a new enhanced deal on trade at a virtual summit. The deal aims to double trade between the two countries by 2030 and declares their joint commitment to start working towards a comprehensive free-trade agreement, for which discussions are due to commence in the ...

Scotland’s four tribes correspond to the four constitutional boxes that voters can be placed into according to their attitudes on Scottish independence and EU membership.

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.

It has been a big year for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is worth six times what it was 12 months ago, and the joke currency Dogecoin has seen a hundredfold increase in price.

China does not want war, at least not yet. It’s playing the long game and its evident intentions have become more unnerving.