On January 12th Oxfordshire County Council, in England, gave the go-ahead for a new building near the village of Culham.
22/03/2023
Making steel is a dirty business. For every tonne of it some 1.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) are emitted into the atmosphere. As a result, steelmaking accounts for 7-9% of the world’s anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions. Cleaner ways of…
15/02/2023
“Good job you!” shouts Pauline Bika, as a group of schoolchildren completes the hokey-cokey. “Good job me!” choruses her class. Ms Bika runs a small government primary school in Edo state, in southern Nigeria. It is reached by a mud track that…
26/01/2023
Mosquito repellents have come a long way. For decades, the market leader was DEET, which fends the pests off successfully, but only for an hour or two. Recently, Icaridin has become available. This lasts up to eight hours and is just as effective.
25/01/2023
Few insects strike greater fear into the hearts of orchard-owners than rosy apple aphids. These tiny bugs feed on the leaves of apple trees, draining them of nutrients.
11/01/2023
Concrete is one of the world’s most important materials. But making the cement that binds it generates about 8% of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions. This is not just because of the heat involved. That could, in principle, be supplied in…
23/11/2022
Introduced species have a bad rap. From American grey squirrels displacing European red ones, to Japanese knotweed displacing just about everything everywhere, their purported negative effects on nature are there for all to see.
02/11/2022
Though dark satanic mills are long gone from industry, the start of the lithium-ion-battery production line in a factory in Vasteras, west of Stockholm, is particularly squeaky clean.
26/10/2022
Most diseases that used to kill children in large numbers have succumbed to vaccines. Malaria is an exception. In 2020 it killed 640,000 people, mostly African children under five years old. Scientists have not ignored the scourge: the first…
08/09/2022
It is not often that a bit of mind-bending mathematics can avert disaster. But researchers at America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist) have done their bit: last week, after years of analysis, they gave their stamp of approval…
13/07/2022
Why Go To all the trouble of designing and building a drone if nature has already done most of the job for you? That is the attitude taken by the small but determined band of researchers who are trying to robotise insects.
23/03/2022
Around 60% of the world’s lithium, a metal in high demand for making batteries, comes from evaporation ponds, like that pictured overleaf, located in deserts in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.
25/02/2022
