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Global temperatures "smashed" heat records last year, as heatwaves stalked oceans and glaciers suffered record ice loss, the United Nations said Tuesday – warning 2024 was likely to be even hotter. The annual State of the Climate report by the UN weather and climate agency confirmed preliminary data showing 2023 was by far the hottest year ever recorded. And last year capped off "the warmest 10-year period on record", the World Meteorological Organization said, with even hotter temperatures expected. "There is a high…

As It Happens6:50Frozen sperm could help bring these giant sea stars back from the brink of extinctionMelissa Torres spent her Valentine's Day helping to usher new life into the world — in the form of millions of fertilized sea star eggs.Torres is part of a team that, on Feb. 14, successfully spawned and cross-fertilized sperm and eggs from male and female sunflower sea stars at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. It's a major step in a massive effort by scientists, governments and…

A new study indicates that human evolutionary traits, especially cultural adaptation, could hinder solving global environmental problems, such as climate change. It highlights the need for innovative global governance strategies and further research into overcoming the evolutionary challenges to environmental sustainability. Credit: SciTechDaily.comA new study led by the University of Maine suggests that inherent aspects of human evolution could hinder our ability to tackle global environmental issues such as climate…

ProcurePro co-founder Alastair Blenkin.In the two years since, ProcurePro has powered more than $30 billion in construction value across 1000-plus projects for contractors including Roberts Co, Hutchinson Builders, Hansen Yuncken, Richard Crookes Constructions, Kane Construction and McNab.The start-up has raised a $6.15 million funding round led by AirTree Ventures and Aconex co-founder Leigh Jasper’s Saniel Ventures to fuel an expansion into the UK. Local angel investors also poured into the round.The local start-up…

Credit: Monstera Production from Pexels Going into 2022, Zehra Parlak received a warning from her accountant: A looming change to the federal tax code threatened to torpedo the future of Qatch Technologies, the biomedical company she had founded six years earlier based on her postdoctoral research at Duke University. There was little she could do to…

In August 1791, a group of enslaved Haitians met in the woods of Bois Caïman, on the north coast of Haiti, and conducted a secret Vodou ceremony that planted the seeds for the Haitian Revolution. This collective ritual, which would go on to inspire a mass uprising, now forms the energetic inspiration for Haitian saxophonist Jowee Omicil’s latest album, Spiritual Healing: Bwa Kayiman Freedom Suite. Over an hour, Omicil transposes the imagined energy of the ceremony into a free jazz interpretation, switching between several…

It's now almost inevitable that 2023 will be the warmest year ever recorded by humans, probably the warmest for at least 125,000 years.Multiple temperature records were smashed with global average temperatures for some periods well above 1.5°C. Antarctic sea ice loss is accelerating at frightening rates along with many other indicators of rapid climate change. Does this mean 2023 is the year parts of the climate tip into a much more dangerous state?Most people expect that if a system, like someone's body, an ecosystem,…

June 9, 2023 8:58 am ETMichelle Curb’s 7-year-old daughter has a new type of toy she cherishes. Unfortunately for Curb, the toys are tiny, squishy, sticky and tend to multiply exponentially. Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8 June 9, 2023 8:58 am ETMichelle Curb’s 7-year-old daughter has a new type of toy she cherishes. Unfortunately for Curb, the toys are tiny, squishy, sticky and tend to multiply exponentially. Copyright ©2023Dow Jones & Company,…

The finding that Lokis have actin tentacles adds plausibility to a eukaryogenesis scenario called the inside-out model, Spang and Schleper said. In 2014, the cell biologist Buzz Baum at University College London and his cousin, the evolutionary biologist David Baum of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, proposed an idea they had kicked around at family events: that the first eukaryotes were born after a simple ancestral cell extended protrusions past its cell walls. First these arms reached toward a symbiotic bacterium.…

Lebanese artist and film-maker Ali Cherri, artist-in-residence at London’s National Gallery in 2021, makes his feature film debut with a visually striking, ruminative and mysterious piece of work, a kind of magic social realist vision. The script was developed with two French cinema heavyweights, producer and screenwriter Geoffroy Grison and director Bertrand Bonello and it premiered at Cannes in 2022 in the Directors’ Fortnight section.It is a drama teetering on the verge of a heatstroke hallucination, with flourishes of…