Blogs
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New material inspired by spider silk could help solve our plastic problem
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
Plastics are very useful materials. They’ve contributed significant benefits to modern society. But the unprecedented amount of plastics produced over the past few decades has caused serious environmental pollution.
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This portable solar distiller could provide drinking water everywhere
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
A portable solar distiller which aims to provide anyone in the world with clean drinking water has won this year’s Lexus Design Award. The project has been designed by Henry Glogau, who explains that the design can be prefabricated or locally sourced and manufactured or a mix of the two.
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Could all your digital photos be stored as DNA?
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
On Earth right now, there are about 10 trillion gigabytes of digital data, and every day, humans produce emails, photos, tweets, and other digital files that add up to another 2.5 million gigabytes of data. Much of this data is stored in enormous facilities known as exabyte data centers (an exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes), which can be the size of several football fields and cost around $1 billion to build and maintain.
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Yes, the weather can affect your internet connection. This is how
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
When your Netflix stream drops out in the middle of a rainstorm, can you blame the wild weather?
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The ‘second quantum revolution’ is coming. Let’s make sure it benefits the many, not the few
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
Over the past six years, quantum science has noticeably shifted, from the domain of physicists concerned with learning about the universe on extremely small scales, to a source of new technologies we all might use for practical purposes. These technologies make use of quantum properties of single atoms or particles of light. They include sensors, communication networks, and computers.
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Emoji count: can you guess how many there will be by 2022?
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
2022 will likely see the release of 107 new emojis including beans, the pregnant man and finger hearts, a hand gesture popularized by K-pop stars. The update would grow the number of the popular pictograms to 3,460 next year. The Unicode consortium has recommended the emojis for release, but a final decision is still outstanding.
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COVID-19 has devastated India’s self-employed women. Here’s how to support them.
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
Lasuben Shivlal Raval is a 70-year-old grandmother from Ahmedabad in India. She has worked as a ‘headloader’ – a goods carrier – in one of the city’s biggest wholesale cloth markets for decades. Her work was always tough, but life became immeasurably harder for Lasuben and her fellow workers when Covid-19 struck and business slumped. Yet she has not given up, and in her position as the leader of the local headloaders she has helped coordinate assistance for her sister workers.
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COVID-19: What you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic on 16 June
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have passed 176.6 million globally, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of confirmed deaths stands at more than 3.82 million. More than 2.42 billion vaccination doses have been administered globally, according to Our World in Data.
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Chatbots are on the rise. This approach accounts for their risks.
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expanding at breakneck pace into products and services that we use daily. There are well-known ethical concerns about the use of it, though. Perhaps the most widely discussed is facial recognition in public places and its impact on privacy.
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Addressing climate change through carbon taxes
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
In 2020, we witnessed several extreme weather events around the globe. There were hot and dry weather conditions that led to record-setting wildfires in vast areas of California, Brazil and Australia. And that year’s hurricane season featured 30 destructive named storms in the North Atlantic and 12 land-falling storms in the US.
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What the pandemic has taught us about science communication
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
Public behaviour since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of good communication from experts and scientists. Too often, ineffective communication has led to a poor take-up of measures that could have saved lives.
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Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin summit in Geneva: Here’s why Switzerland is the ideal host for diplomacy
Wednesday 16th of June 2021
US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet in Geneva, Switzerland, this week in what will be their first face-to-face meeting since Biden’s election and Putin’s first trip abroad since the start of the pandemic.
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How the creative manufacturing and handmade sector can craft a post-COVID-19 future
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a mixed effect on consumption. Some categories and distribution channels for “essential goods and services” – from food and mass retail to e-commerce and online services – saw record growth; while “non-essential” products, like fashion retail or the creative manufacturing and handmade (CMH) sector, saw much of their business come to a standstill. The artisans that make up much of the CMH workforce are among the world’s poorest and most vulnerable workers. Many of their businesses are now challenged with inventory backlogs, cancelled orders and supply chain disruption. Heritage skills have already been erased by offshoring in recent decades and more could be under threat.
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Small local innovators are highly effective at tackling big global threats. Here’s why
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
World leaders had their work cut out for them at last week’s G7 summit where vaccine diplomacy, trade, climate and rebuilding infrastructure in the developing world were among the thorny topics on the agenda.
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3 ways to unlock the world-changing power of start-ups
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
• The World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer community aims help start-ups unlock their potential.
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Global solutions: Four things that came out of the G7 summit
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
The Group of Seven (G7) advanced economies met in Cornwall, UK last week.
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Here are some of the most exciting green Technology Pioneers of 2021
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
The 2021 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers list has been announced, featuring a diverse and inclusive line-up.
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By 2025 the IT industry could use 20% of all electricity produced. How can we make it sustainable?
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
Around 4.6 billion people use the internet every day. In fact, 350,000 tweets have been sent in the past minute. We tend to think of the internet as something ephemeral – partly thanks to terms like “web” and “cloud” – but the servers that host all that data produce huge amounts of emissions, leaving giant carbon footprints behind.
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This is how much mental health costs in relation to GDP across Europe
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
As well as leading to greater awareness about mental health conditions, the global Covid-19 pandemic has also led to a spike in the number of people seeking support. Unfortunately, some countries are better placed to provide that support than others. Data published by the OECD shows that mental health care has been neglected and under funded within its member states for years.
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LinkedIn CEO shares his best advice to new grads looking for jobs and what he wishes he’d known at the start of his career
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
Congratulations to the Class of 2021! As you look back on your college years, I hope you take some time to appreciate all the hard work and support that led to this moment.
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How cities can make urban forests accessible
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
Many people have developed stronger relationships with urban nature during the pandemic. Some have enjoyed views of nearby trees and gardens during periods of isolation, taken walks after Zoom-filled days or socialized at a distance with friends in local parks. As housing has become increasingly unaffordable, some people have taken refuge in parks as places to live.
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Volcanic rock could cut concrete carbon emissions by two thirds – here’s how
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
Replacing just one of concrete’s main ingredients with volcanic rock could slash carbon emissions from manufacturing the material by nearly two-thirds, according to a new study.
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Why Southern Africa is the perfect place to become the world’s solar hotspot
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
Southern Africa is popularly associated with sunshine. Does that make the region exceptionally suited to solar energy generation?
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Mental health: why green spaces are vital for reducing loneliness
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
One in four Australians feel lonely on three or more days a week. Our longitudinal study, just published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, finds adults in neighbourhoods where at least 30% of nearby land was parks, reserves and woodlands had 26% lower odds of becoming lonely compared to their peers in areas with less than 10% green space. For people living on their own, the associations were even greater – in areas with 30% or more green space the odds of becoming lonely halved.
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IMF: Post-pandemic growth relies on these two things
Tuesday 15th of June 2021
Producing and consuming more goods and services for the same amount of work sounds too good to be true. In fact, it’s entirely possible. Higher productivity is one of the key ingredients to higher economic growth and incomes. It’s all about how workers become more productive.
