Month: June 2017
Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
The long read: It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell. In 2011, Claudio Aspesi, a senior investment analyst at Bernstein Research in London, made a bet that the dominant firm in one of the most lucrative […]
Great Barrier Reef valued at $56bn as report warns it’s ‘too big to fail’
Deloitte Access Economics report says reef underpins 64,000 jobs and contributes $6.4bn to economy each year. A new report has valued the Great Barrier Reef at $56bn and warns of vast economic consequences for Australia unless more is done to protect it. The Deloitte Access Economics report says the world heritage-listed reef underpins 64,000 direct […]
Study suggests e-cigs are just as harmful as tobacco but there’s a catch
In April researchers at the University of Connecticut released a study that claimed e-cigarettes could be potentially as harmful as tobacco cigarettes when it comes to causing DNA damage. “From the results of our study, we can conclude that e-cigarettes have as much potential to cause DNA damage as unfiltered regular cigarettes,” Karteek Kadimisetty, a […]
New algorithm lets you make anything in origami
They say if you fold 1,000 origami cranes out of individual sheets of paper your deepest wishes will be granted. I tried it once: I was a lonely college kid and I ended up with pink eye. However, a new paper out of MIT describes a way to possibly make 1,000 origami cranes out of […]
Boom has orders for 76 of its future supersonic passenger jets
Boom has a new design for its XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator jet, the working prototype aircraft it’s creating to prove out its tech before beginning work on building real, commercial supersonic passenger aircraft. The new design was revealed Tuesday at the Paris Air Show, along with new business milestones: Boom has orders for 76 aircraft thus […]