The country’s best and brightest teachers celebrate what they’re able to achieve under less-than-ideal conditions. Here, the government is the enemy.
Category: Future
Global warming is a big problem in Latin America, but the private sector is busy developing alternative energy sources. Has the rush to innovate arrived in time?
LOS ANGELES TIMES, REUTERS Worldcrunch SAN FRANCISCO – California billionaire Elon Musk has unveiled the design of his Hyperloop, a $6 billion would-be high-speed transport system powered by solar energy. The network of crash-proof capsules could become “a fifth mode of transport after planes, trains, cars and boats,” Musk declared in a blog post. Hyperloop […]
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Five Incredible Uses For Drones Worldwide
Drones. They’re not just for the military anymore. The “unmanned aerial aircrafts,” as they are more formally known, were until recently used exclusively for special operations. Now they’re being deployed in ways The Jetsons might have imagined… Take a look at our picks from around the world! Photo: Naval Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Air Demo
CHANGSHA – Is it a stroke of genius or a gigantic bluff? The Chinese conglomerate Broad Group announced on July 20 that it had started preliminary work on the construction of the “Sky City” tower near the central Chinese city of Changsha. This is a project with exceptional dimensions: with its 838 meters (2,750 ft.) […]
Despite the rise of the China’s economy in recent years, many people still doubt that Chinese enterprises will be able to develop innovative products or new manufacturing methods or business models. The Financial Times recently published an article in which it referred to two Chinese corporations, Haier and Huawei, which have learned and rapidly adapted […]
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The Astonishing Sex Lives Of Slugs
BERLIN – Chances are, you don’t know anyone with professional interests quite like biologist Heike Reise. She and her colleagues at Germany’s Senckenberg Museum of Natural History in Görlitz are studying the sex life of slugs, also known as “naked snails” for their lack of shells. Every year the scientists catch and observe primarily field […]
After top tech companies were shown to be dodging taxes in several European countries, similar questions have now emerged in Israel. An exclusive from top Israeli business daily Calcalist.
GENEVA – For a long time, the brain was considered a kind of black box, whose internal workings were largely a mystery. But recently, this special organ has started yielding its secrets, thanks in part to the progress made in the field of genetics. Neuroscientists from the University of Geneva have achieved a breakthrough that […]
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Is Apple Still A Luxury Brand?
PARIS – So Yves Saint Laurent“s CEO has been named vice president at Apple. We don’t know much yet about what Paul Deneve’s role will be beyond the company’s mention of “special projects” and his reporting to Apple chief Tim Cook, but let’s try to analyze the move from the perspective of luxury strategy. We […]
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Chile’s Reforestation Efforts Paying Off
SANTIAGO – Between reforestation and afforestation, 100,000 hectares are planted in Chile on average every year – 160 million new trees. Reforestation is the restocking of forests that have been depleted, while afforestation is the establishment of new forests. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Chile and Uruguay are the only South […]
Exactly 100 years ago, the renowned Italian educator first landed in America with a method that pushes independent thinking. Today, the results are everywhere — notably at Google HQ.
BERLIN – Anyone who owns a Trabant — or “Trabi” as the East German cars are called these days, often with a mixture of affection and amused derision — really wants to own one. But probably not as a financial investment, because even a beautifully maintained Trabant P601 fetches no more than 3,000 euros. Instead, […]
BEIJING – These are good days for China. Not so much for the United States — or Sino-American relations. After Edward Snowden left Hong Kong unhindered last week, the angered Americans at first threatened this would have “negative consequences” on relations between the two superpowers. Snowden’s departure had delivered a blow to “mutual confidence,” the […]
BEIJING – An article last month in the Beijing Evening News declared that: “one-third of news going viral on microblogs are rumors.” Referring to a survey called China New Media Development Report, 2013, the article cited the “chaos” of China’s microblogging platforms. Since then, this form of media has received a wave of mainstream attention […]
Google+, the social network of the American web giant is, in fact, a lot more than a social network. Larry Page, the web giant’s CEO, describes it as “the social backbone” of a company whose ambition is simple, if not the least bit modest: to control the Internet. “If Google+ was just a social network, […]
NEW DELHI – In 2012, out of the millions of people displaced by natural disasters around the world, over a quarter were from northeast India. Almost nine million inhabitants were forced to flee the region’s devastating monsoon. These forced displacements are a common occurrence. Floods have become so routine in Assam, a state located at […]
GRENOBLE – Since 2009, a team of 30 researchers from the Clinatec biomedical platform of the French Alternative Energies And Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has been tackling a huge challenge: allowing quadriplegics to walk and open a door thanks to a brain-controlled implant system. For this to happen, the CEA is relying on different technologies […]
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Searching For Gold In China’s Poison Land
Decades of unbridled industrialization has left much of China’s soil badly contaminated. Some are set to make millions cleaning it up.
Founded in Latvia, Ask.fm is exploding around the world. Its users communicate with questions and answers. Here’s one: How cruel can young people be with each other?
GENEVA – He quotes Mahatma Gandhi and wears the traditional Indian dress, but Arun Krishnamurthy is not living in the past. On the contrary, it is his desire to build a better future that led him to give up a promising career at Google and create an organization to help fight environmental degradation in his […]
GENEVA – Chances are that at least once in your life you’ve found yourself at a restaurant, sitting next to someone who claims to know everything about wine. They usually hold their glass up toward the light to see the color of the wine, talk about tannins, grape variety, soil quality… Of course, the most […]
Racotumomab, set to be available in several countries, can work with other therapies by activating the immune system to help reverse one of the deadliest forms of cancer.
MOSCOW – The Volga River, the longest in Europe and one of Russia’s natural jewels, has not so much flowed for decades. When it’s not covered with ice, it fills with fish-killing microorganisms, and emits a putrid stench. Environmental organizations describe the situation in the Volga region in alarming terms, noting that the region is […]
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Why A Saudi Virus Is Spreading Alarm
Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, closed the annual World Health Assembly this week May 27 sounding alarm about a new SARS-like virus circulating primarily in Saudi Arabia. “My greatest concern right now is the novel coronavirus,” Chan warned the representatives of two hundred nations gathered in Geneva. “We do not know […]
Though it may look pristine, a new study finds that the lake’s water contains significant amounts of “microplastic contamination,” that is causing real harm.
How can the Internet run more efficiently? A growing number of experts say so-called “band-aid” fixes are insufficient — and the entire system of communication needs to be rebooted.
A program in Uganda helps chimpanzees deal with their emotions through sign language and art. Mariangela Ferrero can compare their woes to those of her human patients near Turin.
DIE WELT (Germany) Worldcrunch BERLIN – Google Maps is now calculating routes for German cyclists, meant to enable people to get where they’re going “more simply and more safely” on their bicycles, says product manager Kai Hansen. Sounds like a nice new App indeed. Just don’t forget your helmet — or compass! Google’s map-makers got […]
When there are fewer humans to fill certain jobs, businesses turn to different *creatures.*
PARIS – Retake control of your personal data and get paid for it. This is the straightforward concept behind the recently launched French startup Yes Profile. On its platform, Yes Profile allows the user to create a profile with a certain amount of information – from email to age to interests and preferences such as […]
On the 30th anniversary of her landmark discovery, French Nobel Laureate Françoise Barré-Sinoussi calls for a new approach for definitively defeating AIDS.
And why I won’t be coming back…
CANADIAN PRESS, CNET NEWS, THE STAR (Canada) Worldcrunch BAIKONUR – Canadian star astronaut Chris Hadfield landed safely back on earth early on Tuesday morning after a six-month expedition on the International Space Station (ISS) that brought the space age into the Internet era with unmatched aplomb. He arrived at the Kazakh space base in a […]
WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, THE GUARDIAN (UK), ATLANTICO (France) Worldcrunch Over the past two weeks, a growing number of cases have been reported of a new strain of coronavirus, a contagious and potentially fatal virus that resembles SARS, which caused a global health scare a decade ago. Here’s what you need to know: What is the […]
DIE WELT (Germany), NATURE COMMUNICATIONS (UK) Worldcrunch BONN – The equivalent of pressing a button that activates your body’s fat-burning mechanism…and watch the pounds disappear. It sounds like advertising hype, but researchers at the University of Bonn and their colleagues at Germany’s Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices believe it may be revolutionize the […]
Talk about Tiny, Tiny Toons… Granted, the 90-second-long cartoon doesn’t look like much. If anything, it reminds you of early arcade games like Pong. But once you realize that each pixel is actually an individual atom, things get way more interesting… Watch IBM’s A Boy and His Atom, officially the smallest movie ever made: Here […]
PARIS – Will the young women of 2033 laugh when they learn that their mothers chose their foundation and makeup by themselves? Without a microscope or a telephone? This is what Givenchy is betting on. The French luxury cosmetics company just launched its first Spectrocolorimeter in three of its Paris stores. Developed by X-Rite, the […]
MOSCOW – In December, the Kazakh space agency announced that it was going to be reevaluating the terms under which Russia leases the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world’s largest facility for space launches — and the only cosmodrome that Russia uses to launch manned space flights. The announcement sent a wave of panic through the Russian […]