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Going green could bring huge benefits for India’s economy

Every day 1,000 trucks jostle along a single-lane road to Khavda, near India’s border with Pakistan, to build the Adani Group’s 730 square kilometre solar and wind farm. When completed, the project, with 30 gigawatts (gw) of capacity, could provide…

22/04/2024

Large language models are getting bigger and better

In AI-land, technologies move from remarkable to old hat at the speed of light. Only 18 months ago the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, launched an AI frenzy. Today its powers have become commonplace.

17/04/2024

What is screen time doing to children?

Two months ago Daisy Greenwell and Clare Fernyhough set up a WhatsApp group to discuss how to stave off their young children’s demands for smartphones. After they posted about their plans on Instagram, other parents wanted in.

17/04/2024

New technology can keep whales safe from speeding ships

On March 3rd a whale calf washed ashore in Georgia, on America’s east coast, bearing slash marks characteristic of a ship’s propeller. Less than a month later another whale, a recent mother, was found floating off the coast of Virginia.

11/04/2024

A variety of new batteries are coming to power EVs

The tall grey buildings covering an industrial complex at Nysa, in south-west Poland, look like a modern car factory has been teleported into the surrounding farmland. The plant, though, does not make cars, but it is a new and vital part of the…

28/02/2024

Carbon-dioxide-removal options are multiplying

In what used to be a fish-processing plant in Akranes, a small port in Iceland, fragments of seaweed rise and fall in glass columns lit by leds. Running Tide, the Maine-based company which runs the facility, is trying to work out how best to get…

20/11/2023

Scientists have published an atlas of the brain

Lord Rutherford, the discoverer of the atomic nucleus, divided science into physics and stamp collecting. (He was, after all, a physicist.) But he had a point.

12/10/2023

A new TB vaccine could save 8.5m lives over the next quarter of a century

Tuberculosis (TB), which kills one person every 20 seconds, is a forgotten pandemic. About a quarter of the world’s population has been infected with the bacterium . Most will never know, as they are asymptomatic. But these latent infections go on…

28/06/2023

Sweden wants to build an entire city from wood

There is a global race to build the tallest wooden skyscraper. The record was held by Mjostarnet, an 85-metre tower on the shore of Lake Mjosa in Norway, which hosts flats, a hotel and a swimming pool—until Ascent, an 87-metre structure, was…

21/06/2023

A Finnish firm thinks it can cut industrial carbon emissions by a third

Just three industries—chemicals, steel and cement—account for around a fifth of all man-made carbon-dioxide emissions (see chart). Not only are those industries big polluters, they are also hard to clean up.

07/06/2023

There is more than one way to make green steel

Steelmakers around the world hope to decarbonise by changing the way they pluck oxygen from iron-oxide ores. This is done using either carbon monoxide (CO) derived indirectly from coke in a blast furnace, or by “direct reduction” with syngas, a…

31/05/2023

Old tyres can become a climate-friendly fuel

Getting rid of old tyres has long been a problem. Every year more than a billion reach the end of the road. Until recently, most were thrown into landfills or piled up in storage yards, which occasionally caught fire. Tougher environmental laws mean…

24/05/2023

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