Ten years after the publication of their first plan for powering the world with wind, water, and solar, researchers offer an updated vision of the steps that 143 countries around the world can take to attain 100% clean, renewable energy by the year 2050. The new roadmaps, published December 20 in the journal One Earth,...
Increasing access to clean and affordable energy and improving gender equality are two major sustainable development goals (SDGs) that are believed to be strongly linked. With electricity access, less time and effort in the developing world is needed for tasks related to cooking, water collection, and other housework, which are typically undertaken by women. “The...
Described as “living rocks”, giant land tortoises are lumbering beasts with a reputation for being sluggish in both speed and brainpower. But new research carried out by scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) suggests we have greatly underestimated the intelligence of these creatures, who can not only be trained but also...
Growing up in the wild makes plants tough. Wild plants evolve to survive the whims of nature and thrive in difficult conditions, including extreme climate conditions, poor soils, and pests and disease. Their better-known descendants – the domesticated plants that are critical to a healthy diet – are often not nearly as hardy. The genes...
Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative, has prevented 2.2 million children from experiencing malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found. The researchers, led by Tess Ryckman, a Stanford Health Policy graduate student, compared children’s health in 33 low- and middle-income countries in...
If you want to know how climate change and hypoxia — the related loss of oxygen in the world’s oceans — affect fish species such as the economically important Baltic cod, all you have to do is ask the fish. Those cod, at least, will tell you that hypoxia is making them smaller, scrawnier and...
It’s time to write about Indigenous Australian place relationships in a new way – in a language that speaks in Indigenous terms first, to convey a rich meaning of Country and best identify its deep ecological and social relevance to Aboriginal people. Flinders University anthropologist and Matthew Flinders Fellow, Professor Amanda Kearney, explains the need...
Drones with cameras might be a nuisance to privacy in the suburbs, but in Southern Africa they are helping a UNSW Sydney research team to save a threatened species: the humble hippo. Wild numbers of the vulnerable Hippopotamus amphibius are declining because of habitat loss and hunting for meat and ivory, so monitoring their population is crucial...
How the languages of the world emerged is largely a mystery. Considering that it might have taken millennia, it is intriguing to see how deaf people can create novel sign languages spontaneously. Observations have shown that when deaf strangers are brought together in a community, they come up with their own sign language in a...
Inaccessible valleys and ravines lead from the North East Indian Meghalaya plateau to the wide plains of Bangladesh. In the monsoon months the mountain streams in the forests swell into torrential rivers. In order to cross these rivers, the indigenous Khasi and Jaintia peoples have long built their bridges out of the living aerial roots...
