(BBC News) Jacinda Ardern has announced she will quit as New Zealand prime minister next month, saying she no longer has "enough in the tank" to lead.
Ardern choked up as she detailed how six "challenging" years in the job had taken a toll.
She will step down as Labour Party leader no later than Feb. 7. There will be a vote in the coming days to determine her replacement.
New Zealand will hold a general election...
(Idaho National Laboratory) Nuclear and hydrogen could be the ideal fuel for recharging electric trucks, opening potential markets for developers of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).
That's according to a University of Michigan study.
This analysis addresses a critical aspect of low-emission energy transitions, said Steve Aumeier, senior adviser of Idaho National Laboratory's strategic programs. "It answers the question, how do we practically transition heavy transport paradigms, and what technologies might provide the best value long-term?...
(BBC News) Climate campaigner Greta Thunberg has been detained by police at a protest outside a western German village.
She had been protesting with activists seeking to stop the abandoned village of Lützerath from being demolished for the expansion of a coal mine.
Police told the BBC Thunberg was not arrested and would be released after they checked her ID.
The Swedish activist was detained after a group "rushed towards the ledge" of the Garzweiler 2 mine,...
(AFP) The hottest startup in Silicon Valley is OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed developer of ChatGPT, a much-hyped chatbot that can write a poem, college essay, or even a line of software code.
Tesla tycoon Elon Musk was an early investor in OpenAI, and Microsoft is reported to be in talks to up an initial investment of $1 billion to $10 billion in a goal to challenge Google's world-dominating search engine.
If agreed, the cash injection by the Windows-maker...
(BBC News) Nepalis are observing a day of mourning for victims of the country's worst air disaster in decades.
At least 68 people died when a flight from Kathmandu to the tourist town of Pokhara crashed and caught fire on Sunday morning.
Mobile phone footage showed the Yeti Airlines flight rolling sharply as it approached the airport.
It is unclear what caused the crash, but Nepal has a history of fatal airline accidents.
A search and rescue operation...
(Sarah Hayford and Karen Benjamin Guzzo, The Conversation) Birth rates are falling in the U.S. After the highs of the Baby Boom in the mid-20th century and the lows of the Baby Bust in the 1970s, birth rates were relatively stable for nearly 50 years. But during the Great Recession, from 2007–2009, birth rates declined sharply – and they have kept falling.
In 2007, average birth rates were around 2 children per woman. By 2021, levels had...
(Astronomy & Astrophysics) In the eROSITA all-sky survey, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) have found an interesting repeating event. In an otherwise quiescent galaxy, an X-ray flare repeats every 220 days, indicating that a star orbiting the central black hole "feeds" the gravity monster on subsequent orbits. Such events could be effective tools to explore the accretion process and the gravity field around supermassive black holes in other galaxies.
The findings...
(Carnegie Institution for Science) The Martian meteorite Tissint contains a huge diversity of organic compounds, found an international team of researchers led by Technical University of Munich and Helmholtz Munich's Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin and including Carnegie's Andrew Steele. Their work is published in Science Advances.
Tissint, which crash landed in Morocco more than 11 years ago, is one of only five Martian meteorites that have been observed as they fell to Earth. Pieces of it were found...
(BBC News) Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has called for Congress to investigate U.S. President Joe Biden following the discovery of two batches of classified documents – one of which was found at Biden's home.
McCarthy accused Biden of hypocrisy, pointing to the Justice Department's probe of former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified files.
McCarthy also accused Democrats of trying to "have different standards for their own beliefs," citing the fact that the first...
(California Institute of Technology) Astronomers have used an intense burst of radio waves originating from a nearby galaxy to inspect the halo of gas cocooning our Milky Way galaxy. The scientists studied the way that the light of the so-called fast radio burst, or FRB, was dispersed as it travelled from deep space into our galaxy as a means to estimate how much matter resides in the galaxy's halo. This is a bit like...
