A company’s sustainability efforts are becoming so desirable for employees that some are now willing to give up part of their salary to work for one, new research shows. More than 15% of employees in the U.S., U.K. and Germany have taken a pay cut to work for a sustainable company, a study by consulting…
Dear Men, Have you noticed that a lot of the time it just seems like, gosh, there are a lot of dudes speaking at this conference? Perhaps you’ve been on a panel and you’ve looked around and seen man after man after man. Maybe you’ve thought, it’s too bad the organizers didn’t think to balance…
In surprising numbers, people posted, viewed and searched for science-related topics last year — sharing news from space and undersea, commenting on new discoveries and uploading photos and video in a full-out embrace of the ability to communicate with thousands of others about global subjects in real time. The trend is, in some ways, self-fulfilling….
This was the year climate change vanished from the political agenda – and then suddenly reappeared, after Hurricane Sandy shook the country. It was just a few years ago that President Barack Obama flew to Copenhagen to rescue faltering climate treaty talks amid bipartisan calls for global warming action. But in 2012, there wasn’t a…
Using 20 tablet computers dropped off in their Ethiopian village in February by a group called One Laptop Per Child, the children of Wenchi now know their ABCs and can spell. The project’s goal was to find out whether children using today’s new technology can teach themselves to read in places where no schools or…
Some economists dislike Christmas. They allege that it “destroys value,” which is, in Econoland, the first and only sin. The economist Joel Waldfogel, author of Scroogenomics, goes so far as to contend that the winter holiday season is “an orgy of value destruction.” Waldfogel’s main concern is that the value of gifts to their recipients…
Winter solstice is the longest night and shortest day of the year. A time of ending and new beginnings as now the days will slowly begin to lengthen again. For Pagans, Solstice is symbolically the night when the Sun Child is reborn out of the womb of Mother Night. For the Mayans, this year marks…
A $45 million pot to fund innovative projects that aim to increase government transparency and accountability using web and mobile technology has been unveiled by the U.K., U.S. and Swedish governments. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the Making All Voices Count (MAVC) initiative in early December to support Internet-based technologies that increase…
The growing evidence linking green spaces to human wellbeing could help strengthen the case for conservation, a conference has been told. Professor Ken Norris from Reading University said green spaces improved wellbeing, so that meant “they can also be linked to our health”. Ecologists need to do better when it comes to convincing people about…
A successful model for making more out of physics for development is ready to roll out to others, writes Dipali Bhatt-Chauhan. In October, delegates gathered for the European Physical Society’s (EPS) first conference on physics for development to swap experiences and theories on how developing nations can make the most of their physics research.