90% of kids breathe polluted air. A new World Health Organization (WHO) report finds that air pollution afflicts 90% of children around the world and contributes to 600,000 child deaths annually. Unsurprisingly, the numbers are far more dire in developing nations, where 98% of children under the age of 5 are exposed to more pollutants than…
A natural gas fracking well near Shreveport, Louisiana. The US Energy Information Agency (EIA) recently published two interesting sets of maps to show how the US energy mix has changed state by state between 2007 and 2017. That decade saw the rise of cheap natural gas that lead many utilities to switch away from coal,…
A researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory holds a vial of fuel produced from industrial waste gas. A Virgin 747 will burn a blend of fuel made from waste gas and jet fuel in a flight today. The Chinese steel mill where LanzaTech opened its first waste-gas-to-ethanol facility this summer. LanzaTech A little after 7pm…
Enlarge / EnChroma glasses have always had both skeptics and true believers. Who's right? It's complicated. The much-touted EnChroma glasses don't help colorblind users see new colors; they merely let the colorblind see the same colors in a different way, according to a new study published in Optics Express by scientists at Spain's University of Granada.…
Enlarge / An automobile chassis sits on display inside a Tesla Motors Inc. store in Munich, Germany, on Monday, March 30, 2015. In a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg, the head of Panasonic's Automotive Division said that the company was on track to complete an additional three battery-cell production lines at Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory before the end…
Enlarge / A general view of Laguna Colorada located near the border with Chile, in the Uyuni salt flats, Bolivia. The Uyuni salt flats are estimated to contain 100 million tons of lithium, making it one of the largest global reserves of this mineral, according to state officials at the Bolivian Mining Corporation. MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty…
THE aerial party tricks of the F-35, a stealth fighter made by Lockheed Martin, an American defence giant, wows audiences at air shows across the world. But without the sensors and electronics made by firms such as L3 Technologies and Harris, two medium-sized firms, the plane would not get off the ground. The F-35 would…
Enlarge / The position of Barnard's star relative to the Earth and its other neighbors. IEEC/Science-Wave/Guillem RamisaFrom the phenomenal success of the Kepler mission and a proliferation of ground-based telescopes, we now know that planets are common in our galaxy. But the methods we've used to detect most of them are biased toward finding large…
Enlarge / Finding a distraction is key for young children trying to resist the marshmallow. The psychologist who famously demonstrated the importance of being able to delay gratification to achieving later success in life died on September 12 in New York City. Walter Mischel, emeritus professor of psychology at Columbia University and self-proclaimed "Marshmallow Man,"…
Enlarge / Parking assist in action in a BMW 640i GT. Eric BangemanYou know all that safety stuff on new cars? Lane-keep assist? Adaptive cruise control? It has a downside... if you get in an accident. Cars with advanced driver-assistance technology are more expensive to repair than their less-autonomous counterparts, according to a study by…
