With new industry, a new era for cities

Kista Science City, just north of Stockholm, is Sweden’s version of Silicon Valley. Anchored by a few big firms and a university, it has become northern Europe’s main high-tech center, with housing mixed in so that people live and work in the same general area. Around the globe, a similar pattern is visible in many […]

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Solving the challenges of robotic pizza-making

Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot. For a robot, working with a deformable object like dough is […]

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Enjoy your grubs: How nuclear winter could impact food production

The day after lead author Daniel Winstead approved the final proofs for a study to be published in Ambio, the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Russia put its nuclear forces on high alert. “In no way, shape or form had I thought that our work — ‘Food Resilience in a Dark Catastrophe: A […]

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Oleic acid, a key to activating the brain’s ‘fountain of youth’

Many people dread experiencing the cognitive and mood declines that often accompany reaching an advanced age, including memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and mood conditions like depression. At Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children’s Hospital researchers have been investigating new ways to prevent or treat these […]

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The human fingertip can sense single atom substitutions in a surface

The human fingertip can not only perceive subtle differences as small as single atom substitutions in silane monolayers, but can also detect differences in a polymer’s crystallinity. The research out of the University of Delaware was presented at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) spring conference held virtually and in-person in San Diego, US. These discoveries […]

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Turning off the plastic tap

A historic agreement has been reached on plastic pollution. 175 nations that met in Nairobi, Kenya, in March have agreed to come up with a binding treaty to tackle a problem that no one nation can address on its own. But how big is the problem of plastic pollution? The figures for plastic waste are […]

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Fighting discrimination in mortgage lending

Although the U.S. Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits discrimination in mortgage lending, biases still impact many borrowers. One 2021 Journal of Financial Economics study found that borrowers from minority groups were charged interest rates that were nearly 8 percent higher and were rejected for loans 14 percent more often than those from privileged groups. When […]

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A Cock is a Thing that Ticks

As I have mentioned a few times in the past, I came late to the computer and the Internet. No Sinclairs, Ataris, or Commadores in my life, my first computer was a Bondi Blue iMac G3. All of which is kind of ironic, because by the time I acquired that G3, I was something of […]

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Nature-based carbon removal can help protect us from a warming planet

A new study finds that temporary nature-based carbon removal can lower global peak warming levels but only if complemented by ambitious fossil fuel emission reductions. Nature-based climate solutions aim to preserve and enhance carbon storage in terrestrial or aquatic ecosystems and could be a potential contributor to Canada’s climate change mitigation strategy. “However, the risk is […]

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Dad’s use of metformin before conception linked to birth defects

A large cohort study found that babies born to men who took metformin during the period of sperm development were at increased risk for birth defects, specifically genital defects in boys. These finding suggest that men with diabetes who are taking metformin should talk to their doctors about whether they should switch to another treatment […]

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