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Big ideas in the news from around the web
What's the Latest Development? On July 19, Earth's residents will get to see what their home looks like from Saturn: specifically, from the perspective of NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which will take pictures of the neighborhood where it's been living for the last nine years. Cassini's camera will ...
What's the Latest Development? A new paper recently published in Geology notes the discovery of a subduction zone -- an area "where one of the tectonic plates that cover the Earth's surface dives beneath another plate" into the layer just below the planet's crust -- forming off the southwest ...
What's the Latest Development? On Tuesday (June 18), NASA announced the start of the Asteroid Grand Challenge, an initiative that will culminate in the tracking and monitoring of any and every asteroid large enough to do damage to the Earth. That includes not only the really big ones -- 95 ...
What's the Latest Development? This week, the Philippines will become the first ivory-consuming country to purposely destroy its stocks of ivory in response to an October 2012 National Geographic exposé revealing its role in the illegal ivory trade. With the exception of 106 pieces that will be ...
What's the Latest Development? London-based junior doctors Kapil Sugand and Pedro Campos have created a system that displays 3D animated images of body parts on a large scale, giving medical students a whole new way to absorb information during a lecture. The system works through a type of ...
What's the Latest Development? Last weekend, as part of its Project Loon, Google launched 30 balloons, which together helped provide basic broadband-like Internet access to 50 or so testers in the Christchurch area of New Zealand. The balloons hover about 12 miles above the Earth -- well out of ...
What's the Latest Development? Pakistani parents living abroad who want their children to have the benefit of religious instruction -- ideally without any potential radical influences included -- have the option of paying a teacher via one of hundreds of online sites based in their home country ...
What's the Latest Development? Going live this week is what may be the world's first reality show that won't air on TV: @SummerBreak follows a group of Los Angeles-area teens as they enjoy their last summer before attending college in the fall. The eight-week series will consist entirely of a ...
What's the Latest Development? Amid calls in the European Union for more detailed online privacy laws, the Association of French Archivists is pushing back with a petition of their own claiming that allowing individuals to remove personal data from the Internet "could complicate the collection ...
What's the Latest Development? The election of moderate Iranian presidential candidate Hassan Rohani represents an opportunity for the West to engage Iran with fresh negotiations over its nuclear energy program, which is feared to shroud more nefarious intentions. "Rohani has called for an end ...
What's the Latest Development? Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who went public with the NSA's clandestine data mining operation, forms part of an increasing crossover between government and private cybersecurity organizations. "As a result of the leaks, politicians are likely to debate the ...
What's the Latest Development? A massive urban development program, in which the Chinese government aims to relocate 250 million peasant farmers to burgeoning urban centers, is set to begin in earnest this fall. "The government, often by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises ...
What's the Latest Development? The population boom of the modern era--there are about seven billion people today living on the planet, up from two billion in 1920--has resulted in an aging world population. By 2025, the world will have almost 800 million people over the age of 65. About 556 ...
What's the Latest Development? The world faces a difficult task in brining energy to poor and growing populations while mitigating the effects of climate change, which is why creating innovative and renewable energy programs must be a global priority. While market solutions are often thought ...
What's the Latest Development? The prevailing wisdom about toddlers' speech patterns is that it lacks the grammatical architecture used by adults, but new research suggests that children just learning to talk have already begun employing grammatical rules. Scientists at Newcastle University ...