Tag: SB001

Australia is going through another supply chain crisis. Stocks of AdBlue, an exhaust fluid used in newer diesel cars and trucks to reduce pollution, is getting dangerously low.

If at some stage during the COVID pandemic you’ve had a face mask mysteriously disappear from your pocket, you’re not alone. From March 2020 countless discarded blue and white masks started appearing around the world.

Almost a third of Australia’s estimated ten million households now have solar on the roof.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been touted, again and again, as one of the critical technologies that could help Australia reach its climate targets, and features heavily in the federal government’s plan for net-zero emissions by 2050.

Tropical forests are among the world’s best tools for fighting climate change and the loss of wild species. They store huge quantities of carbon, shelter thousands of plants and animals and are home to Indigenous peoples who sustain them.

As New Zealand gets ready for the festive season under the new traffic light system, the emergence of the Omicron variant is a reminder this pandemic is far from over.

The People’s Bank of China is encouraging Chinese banks to lend more to businesses and consumers by cutting the proportion of deposits that they have to hold as reserves by 0.5 percentage points to an average of 8.4% from December 15.

Former President Donald Trump has lost his latest legal battle over documents relating to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, in a case that tests the power of a former president to withhold his records from Congressional scrutiny.

The goal is to see how well antibodies from real people who have had COVID-19 or have been vaccinated against it can hold off omicron in petri dishes in the lab.

On the frosty morning of Dec. 9, 1921, in Dayton, Ohio, researchers at a General Motors lab poured a new fuel blend into one of their test engines. Immediately, the engine began running more quietly and putting out more power.

The new xenobots are a bit like Pac-Man – as they swim around they can gobble up other frog stem cells and assemble new xenobots just like themselves. They can sustain this process for several generations.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics in Beijing in February. This means that while athletes will still compete in the games, no officials will represent Australia at the event.

Eucalypt forests are well known for bouncing back after fire, and the green shoots that emerge from eucalypts stems as they begin their first steps to recovery provide some of the most iconic images of the Australian bush.

During last month’s COP26 summit, climate change was a ubiquitous story. News hooks abounded, from unpacking the flurry of non-binding pledges to reporting on the failure of rich nations to honour demands of countries at the frontline, criticising the summit as the “most exclusionary COP ever”.

Shell has scrapped plans to invest in Cambo, a proposed oilfield off the Shetland Islands. The fossil fuel supermajor has been shedding UK assets for a while. It sold a large refinery complex in Cheshire in 2011 and US$3.8 billion (£2.64 billion) of North Sea assets in 2017.

The Soviet anthem hailed the socialist union that it celebrated as “indestructible”. Yet 30 years ago this week, the then Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, together with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus, signed the agreement that created the Commonwealth of Independent States. It was the end for the Union of ...

The recent Glasgow climate pact committed 197 countries to “phas down unabated coal”. Unabated coal refers to when power stations or factories burn coal without capturing and storing the carbon dioxide (CO₂) generated.

Australia’s domestic spy agency ASIO anticipates espionage – spying – will supplant terrorism as Australia’s principal security threat over the next five years. They do not explicitly say why, but note this is “based on current trends” and that “espionage attempts by multiple countries remain unacceptably high”.

After a deadly second wave of COVID-19 overwhelmed hospitals in India earlier this year, the country is battling yet another viral outbreak. Hospitals are struggling to treat dengue, a viral disease that spreads through the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

The sense of urgency mounting around this issue does not sweep aside the need for reasoned and rational policymaking. In Australia, we have seen the damage caused by hurried and ill-conceived asylum policies. It is deeply disturbing to see the UK barrel down the same path.

Western Australia’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Bill 2021 is set to become law, replacing the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972. The Bill will be read tonight for the third and final time in Western Australia’s state parliament upper house.

The eruption of Mount Semeru in Indonesia on Saturday tragically claimed the lives of 22 people, with another 22 still missing and 56 injured. More than 5,000 people have been affected by the eruption, and more than 2,000 people have taken refuge at 19 evacuation points.

Australia’s Fair Work Commission has made its first ruling against an employer mandating COVID-19 vaccination as condition of work. But this isn’t the decision those opposed to vaccine mandates have been hoping for.

When Minister of Finance Grant Robertson announced in this year’s budget that his government was developing a social unemployment insurance scheme, people could have been forgiven for seeing this as largely positive.

The Coalition and Labor took very different higher education policies to the 2019 federal election. The contest was between tightly capped total spending under the Coalition and a restored demand-driven system under Labor, letting universities enrol unlimited numbers of students for bachelor degrees.

Teaching graduates want “more time spent in schools”. This research finding is noted in the discussion paper of the teacher education review announced by the federal education minister in March this year.

Underinsurance is more common than many realise. And if you live in an area where most people don’t have enough home and/or contents insurance, the financial and social catastrophe that follows a disaster can be community-wide.

New figures show global diabetes prevalence has increased by 16% in the past two years, with 537 million adults (aged 20-79) now estimated to be living with the chronic condition.

A new era of space stations is about to kick off. NASA has announced three commercial space station proposals for development, joining an earlier proposal by Axiom Space.

Internationally, and especially within the US, there has been a lot of talk about the so-called “great resignation” – the trend seeing large numbers of workers leaving their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, having reevaluated their priorities or simply because there are more opportunities than ever before.

Basically, it’s a question of whether a virus has changed enough so that antibodies created by the original vaccine are no longer able to recognize and fend off the new mutated variant.

Canadians dramatically reoriented their auto economy to gain a share of this boom via the 1965 Canada-U.S. auto pact. The deal sealed Canada’s American economic fate, but hard bargaining also resulted in smart interventionist Canadian measures that required U.S. assemblers to continue producing in Canada in exchange for cross-border, tariff-free ...

New Zealand has a reputation for being transparent and free from corruption – but how true is this really? Recent events suggest there could be cause for concern, especially at a time when government agencies are engaged in urgent and large-scale procurement processes to combat COVID-19.

The World Health Organization has advised countries to take precautions to limit its impact, such as upping the wearing of masks, sanitising of hands and surfaces, social distancing and ventilation of shared spaces.

Science, at its heart, is a collaborative effort. The eureka moments are headline-grabbing and enormously important, but they don’t come out of the blue.

Reports about the latest COVID variant of concern, Omicron, have exploded all over the news. No sooner had we learned its name, it had arrived in Australia.

Plastic waste of all shapes and sizes permeates the world’s oceans. It shows up on beaches, in fish and even in Arctic sea ice. And a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine makes clear that the U.S. is a big part of the problem.

Researchers around the world are trying to work out whether existing COVID vaccines protect us from the latest variant, Omicron.

f the omicron variant of the coronavirus is different enough from the original variant, it’s possible that existing vaccines won’t be as effective as they have been. If so, it’s likely that companies will need to update their vaccines to better fight omicron.

After nearly two years of COVID, how is the pharmaceutical industry faring? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we explore where drug companies were before the arrival of COVID and how they performed financially during the pandemic.

Olaf Scholz is soon to be sworn in as the new chancellor of Germany after nearly two months of intense negotiations between the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens, and liberal Free Democrats (FDP).

The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, recently announced plans to fine people aged 60 and over who refuse the COVID vaccine. A monthly fine of €100 (£85) will be imposed from January 16.

The word diet originates from the Greek dieta meaning to live normally. However, nowadays it mostly refers to restricting food to help weight loss rather than a way to enjoy food and health.

If you’ve pumped gas at a U.S. service station over the past decade, you’ve put biofuel in your tank. Thanks to the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, almost all gasoline sold nationwide is required to contain 10% ethanol – a fuel made from plant sources, mainly corn.

Before the end of this century, most of the Arctic will for the first time receive more rain than snow across a whole year. That’s one of the key findings of a new study on precipitation in the Arctic which has major implications – not just for the polar region, ...

Vaccines markedly reduce severe disease and death. Our health-care systems are more able to cope because fewer new cases are requiring admission to hospital and ICU.

After years of punishing drought in some areas, many farmers in Australia’s east were hoping the newly declared La Niña event would bring them good rains.

When Jack Dorsey made the sudden public announcement that he had quit as CEO of Twitter, it was only ever going to have happened in one place – Twitter itself.

Research in mathematics is a deeply imaginative and intuitive process. This might come as a surprise for those who are still recovering from high-school algebra.

Some countries, such as the US and Israel, are now offering COVID vaccines to all children aged five and over. It’s a sign of how well vaccine rollout has gone in these places, but also that the pandemic is still raging on. Governments are going further and further to try ...