Tag: SB001

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.

Climate change and water scarcity are front and center in the western U.S. The region’s climate is warming, a severe multi-year drought is underway and groundwater supplies are being overpumped in many locations.

The UK government recently announced an £800 million, taxpayer-funded Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria). The brainchild of the British prime minister’s former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings and modelled on the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Darpa, the organisation will focus partly on genomic research.

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

Australian governments are busy designing the nation’s transition to a clean energy future. Unfortunately, in a misguided effort to ensure electricity supplies remain affordable and reliable, governments are considering a move that would effectively pay Australia’s old, polluting coal-fired power stations to stay open longer.

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.

By helping identify perpetrators and the remains of victims, forensic DNA analysis holds enormous power to solve crimes. It also has enormous implications for privacy and fairness. But with science and society changing at such a pace, the law can struggle to keep up.

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.

t’s unusual for researchers who study our catastrophically changing climate to use the words “optimism” and “climate change” in the same sentence.

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.

New waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in countries, such as Kenya and India, have exposed the poor management of oxygen supplies.

The go-ahead for Australian Olympians to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before others the same age has led to allegations of “queue-jumping”.

India finds itself in the throes of a humanitarian disaster. Until March 2021, case numbers were low in most parts of the country, leading many to think that the worst was over.

Water is a vital tool for all nuclear power stations: it’s used to cool their heat-generating radioactive cores. During the cooling process, the water becomes contaminated with radionuclides – unstable atoms with excess energy – and must be filtered to remove as many radionuclides as possible.

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.

Part of the problem, as seen with Baltimore, is that federal intervention does not appear to guarantee lasting change. Research shows that Department of Justice regulations aimed at reform only slightly reduce police misconduct.

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 ...

Johnson insists that he has paid for the renovations with his own money but continues to evade questions about whether Lord David Brownlow paid for them in the first instance before being repaid. If the money was donated (or loaned) by Lord Brownlow either to Johnson or his party and ...

The second wave of the pandemic has struck India with a devastating impact. With over 300,000 new cases and 3,000 deaths across the country each day at present, the total number of deaths has just passed the 200,000 mark – that’s about one in 16 of all COVID deaths across ...

Phytoplankton are microscopic algae living throughout the ocean’s surface waters. They can’t swim and are at the mercy of the currents and tides. Despite their small size, phytoplankton enable life in the oceans – and throughout the planet – to exist.

The convictions of 39 Post Office workers were quashed on April 23 after the UK’s court of appeal heard that the crimes for which they’d been accused were in fact caused by the organisation’s Horizon IT system.

NASA has long been hesitant to play host to space tourists, so Russia – looking for sources of money post-Cold War in the 1990s and 2000s – has been the only option available for those looking for this kind of extreme adventure.

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.

For the first few months of 2021, the Martian atmosphere was buzzing with new visitors from Earth. First, it was the UAE Space Agency’s Hope probe, followed by the Chinese Tianwen-1 entering orbit.

Ambulance services have taken some measures to address this rising demand, such as the recruitment of extra paramedics, and programs that divert patients with less urgent conditions to primary care services such as GPs.

In the past week, at least six Australians returned home uninfected only to acquire the coronavirus while undergoing quarantine in hotels in Sydney and Perth.

Microplastics are plastic particles less than five millimetres across. They come from a range of household and everyday items such as the clothes we wear, home furnishings, and food and beverage packaging.

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.

Given the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is no longer recommended for under-50s following news of very rare blood clots, Australia is looking to other vaccines to plug the gap.

Many people might wonder how it can possibly be that none of the UK officials (former or past) currently facing questions about their role in lobbying appear to have broken any rules.

Perhaps because there are no chimney stacks belching smoke, the contribution of the world’s farms to climate change seems somehow remote. But agriculture accounts for a staggering 26% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Tractors running on diesel release carbon dioxide (CO₂) from their exhausts.

The COVID-19 virus hit China first and hard, stalling its rapid economic growth for the first time since the Great Recession. But China’s economy grew by a blistering 18.3% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to 2020, keeping it solidly in place as the world’s second-largest economy.

Arrivals from India are set to be cut further or flights suspended altogether by the federal cabinet’s national security committee when it meets on Tuesday.

MaaS is part of a broader evolution as novel technologies have driven the rapid transformation of products and offerings into collections of services. Smartphone applications rely on digital distribution platforms such as Google Play Store, Apple Store, Microsoft Store and Amazon Cloud.

Tasmanian Liberal Premier Peter Gutwein is gambling on an early election to cash in on his government’s popularity due to its management of the COVID pandemic. It is a reasonable strategy, given how voters in Queensland and Western Australia have rewarded their governments in recent months.

Most vaccines have side-effects and COVID vaccines are no different. The public are being reassured that if they experience a sore arm where the needle went in, or tiredness, a headache, fever or nausea, these are merely signs that the immune system is working as it should.

Department stores have not fared well under COVID-19. Thanks to changing government restrictions, stores have veered from near-normal trading to click-and-collect to complete closure apart from online offerings.

If humanity ever wants to travel easily between stars, people will need to go faster than light. But so far, faster-than-light travel is possible only in science fiction.

To stem migration from Central America, the Biden administration has a US$4 billion plan to “build security and prosperity” in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – home to more than 85% of all Central American migrants who arrived in the U.S. over the last three years.

At least 82 people are dead after a horrific fire swept through the COVID intensive care unit of one of Iraq’s main hospitals over the weekend. The Iraqi prime minster has suspended the nation’s health minister over the incident.

It’s no surprise Nomadland won Best Picture — it’s good, compelling stuff, and manages (like most Oscar contenders) to be formulaic to its core without appearing as such. In classic Hollywood fashion, beautiful images accompanied by derivative but affecting music reinscribe social and political history in the mode of melodramatic ...

Defence is always one of the Australian government’s busiest — and most powerful — portfolios. Now, as Peter Dutton takes the helm, this is no exception, and he will have much work to do.

The availability of vaccines has brought hope for the end of the pandemic. Yet COVID deaths and cases are still surging around the world. As we try to immunise the world, the most likely scenario for the next few years is that COVID-19 will be like other infectious diseases, such ...

An expensive IVF technique, routinely offered in fertility clinics around the world, offers no extra benefits to standard IVF in the vast majority of cases, our new research shows.

Plants absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere, transforming it into leaves, wood and roots. This everyday miracle has spurred hopes that plants – particularly fast growing tropical trees – can act as a natural brake on climate change, capturing much of the CO₂ emitted by fossil fuel burning.