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Canadian geologist claims to have discovered the oldest animal fossils. The earliest life forms we know of evolved around 3.7 billion years ago. The world’s oldest known animal, Dickinsonia, dates to about 540 million years ago. A discovery in a remote region of north-west Canada is about to change what we understood until now. According…
Consciousness is arguably the most important scientific topic there is. Without consciousness, there would after all be no science. But while we all know what it is like to be conscious—meaning that we have personal awareness and respond to the world around us—it has turned out to be near impossible to explain exactly how it…
We spend most of our lives in buildings but they are responsible for 40 per cent of the EU’s energy consumption and 36 per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions. A LIFE Award-winning project has the keys to change this trend. Improving the energy efficiency of buildings is critical to achieving the EU’s 2050 climate…
An EU-backed computer tech company has demonstrated quantum communications over optical fibres over 600 km long, bringing us a big step closer to a quantum internet. Toshiba Europe’s Cambridge Research Laboratory has achieved a milestone in long-distance quantum communication, demonstrated for the first time on optical fibres exceeding 600 km in length. Achieved with support…
As communism imploded in 1989, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama asked if liberal democracy was “the end of history”, being the form all societies were destined to take. The past decades have suggested not. Illiberal democracies and hybrid democratic-authoritarian regimes continue to emerge. Fukuyama foresaw this possibility. He felt that citizens dissatisfied with liberty…
We may have walked on the Moon and sent probes across the solar system, but we know very little about what’s going on inside other planets. Now, for the first time, we have been able to view the interior of one, thanks to Nasa’s Mars InSight probe. The probe, which landed in 2018, is equipped…
More than 5,000 kilometres beneath us, Earth’s solid metal inner core wasn’t discovered until 1936. Almost a century later, we’re still struggling to answer basic questions about when and how it first formed. These aren’t easy puzzles to solve. We can’t directly sample the inner core, so the key to unravelling its mysteries lies in…
The Endangered Landscapes Programme is working to demonstrate and deliver a vision for the future in which landscapes and seascapes: Support viable populations of native species with the capacity for landscape-scale movement Provide space for the natural functioning of ecological processes Provide sustainable cultural, social and economic benefits to people Are resilient to climate change…
An EU-funded project makes it plain: batteries need to live longer than the Internet of things (IoT) devices they power. A position paper published by the project outlines the key actions to power IoT devices reliably and sustainably. About 78 million batteries powering IoT devices will be dumped globally every day by 2025 if nothing…
For the first time since the creation of the Innovation Fund, the European Union is investing €118 million into 32 small innovative projects located in 14 EU Member States, Iceland and Norway. The grants will support projects aiming to bring low-carbon technologies to the market in energy intensive industries, hydrogen, energy storage and renewable energy. In…
Floods have caused unprecedented damage in Europe recently, while in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, the equivalent of a year’s worth of average rainfall fell in just three days. In stark contrast, extreme heat and droughts have spawned wildfires and caused hundreds of deaths in northwest America. This kind of extremely wet or dry weather…
The AutoNorms project (Transforming Norms Research through Practices: Weaponised Artificial Intelligence, Norms, and Order) have confirmed future research presentations set to take place in September. Science Peace Security 21 conference 8–10 September 2021 Ingvild Bode, Anna Nadibaidze, and Guangyu Qiao-Franco will present their research at the interdisciplinary Science Peace Security 21 conference. Dr Guangyu Qiao-Franco will…
Dig a teaspoon into your nearest clump of soil, and what you’ll emerge with will contain more microorganisms than there are people on Earth. We know this from lab studies that analyse samples of earth scooped from the microbial wild to determine which forms of microscopic life exist in the world beneath our feet. The…
A project to redesign photosynthesis from scratch hopes to fix carbon faster and more efficiently than nature, offering benefits to agriculture and the climate. The 1972 synthesis of vitamin B12 was a Herculean effort, requiring the work of more than 100 researchers over 12 years. The solution was entirely impractical—it required 72 chemical steps and…
Summer 2021 will mark a turning point in how heat is seen by the public and communicated by experts. For the first time in its 167-year history, the UK’s Met Office has issued an amber warning for extreme heat for much of Wales and parts of southern, central and western England, where temperatures are expected…