There is a massive, mineral-rich region in the Pacific Ocean—about twice the size of India—called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), which has already been divided up and assigned to companies for future deep-sea mining. To better understand what may be at risk once companies start mining, a team of biologists has built the first “CCZ checklist”...
While the integration of business processes and digitization always were fundamental aspects of Industry 4.0, the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the digital conversion of activities. However, while the benefits of digitization are apparent, it also poses new challenges to businesses. New digital tools and systems appear every day, and there is a constant need to integrate...
Scientists are often trained to seek out the absolute best solution to a given problem. On a chalk board, this might look something like drawing a graph to find a function’s minimum or maximum point. When designing a turbojet engine, it might mean tweaking the rotor blades’ angles a tiny degree to achieve a tenth...
A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, led by researchers from Newcastle University, suggests that supermassive black holes that are hidden by dust are more likely to grow and emit huge amounts of energy when they are located inside galaxies that are on course to collide with another galaxy. Supermassive...
Hollywood screenwriters have gone on strike. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) seeks higher pay, upfront fees from streaming services, better working conditions and reassurance that studios won’t use artificial intelligence programs to generate scripts. The last WGA strike, 15 years ago, led to permanent changes in the entertainment landscape, such as the rise of...
It turns out that pop stars Drake and The Weeknd didn’t suddenly drop a new track that went viral on TikTok and YouTube in April 2023. The photograph that won an international photography competition that same month wasn’t a real photograph. And the image of Pope Francis sporting a Balenciaga jacket that appeared in March...
Sex in space is a real possibility with the expected growth in space tourism over the next decade, says Cranfield University-led paper Researchers say the expected motivations and behaviours of space tourists will differ from that of professional astronauts Green paper published today highlights the biological and commercial risk of human conception in space and...
Deadlines are part and parcel of modern knowledge work. Journalists must serve their weekly columns, managers must turn in their monthly reports, and researchers must submit their papers and proposals on time. Despite their ubiquity, deadlines conjure up negative feelings and are perceived as challenging events. Accordingly, there has been a trend to do away...
Smartphone spyware apps that allow people to spy on each other are not only hard to notice and detect, they also will easily leak the sensitive personal information they collect, says a team of computer scientists from New York and San Diego. While publicly marketed as tools to monitor underage children and employees using their...
Researchers at Tufts University have successfully bulk-produced fat tissue in the lab that has a similar texture and make-up to fat tissue naturally occurring in animals. The results, described in a study published in eLife, could be applied to the production of cultured meat grown entirely from cells, giving it a more realistic texture and...
