Planting trees in urban areas can help reduce stress and anxiety for the people living there, according to a new study. An experiment in Germany suggests that simply living within 100 metres of a tree can be enough to reduce the need for antidepressant drugs. Dr Melissa Marselle and a team of scientists wanted to […]
The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km). The fastest ever spacecraft, the now-in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of 450,000 miles (724,000 km) per hour. It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City […]
What’s wrong with cross-border payments today? It’s no secret that the cross-border payments landscape using traditional rails is fraught with fees, hurdles and delay. Individual senders incur outsized fees for the billions of dollars sent in personal remittances every year. Global businesses choose between bearing an FX cost or passing that cost onto their ...
CRISPR is revolutionary. It’s also a total brute. The classic version of the gene editing wunderkind literally slices a gene to bits just to turn it off. It’s effective, yes. But it’s like putting an electrical wire through a paper shredder to turn off a misbehaving light bulb. Once the wires are cut, there’s no […]
The race to build the first practical quantum computers looks like a two-horse contest between machines built from superconducting qubits and those that use trapped ions. But new research suggests a third contender—machines based on optical technology—could sneak up on the inside. The most advanced quantum computers today are the ones built by Google and IBM, ...
So far, I’ve participated in 11 virtual events to discuss my new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, with a few more to come. At each one, I’ve talked about how the world needs to transform its entire physical economy so we can stop emitting greenhouse gases by 2050, and at nearly every event, I’ve […]