More than five billion of the estimated 16 billion mobile phones possessed worldwide will likely be discarded or stashed away in 2022, experts said Thursday, calling for more recycling of the often hazardous materials they contain. . Many of the five billion phones withdrawn from circulation will be hoarded rather than dumped in the trash, according to a survey in six European countries from June to September 2022.
Europe faces a higher-than-usual chance of a cold blast of weather before the end of the year, but the winter overall is likely to be warmer than average, the continent's long-range weather forecaster said Thursday.. "We see the winter as being warmer than usual," said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service that produces seasonal forecasts for the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
Wild populations of monitored animal species have plummeted nearly 70 percent in the last 50 years, according to a landmark assessment released Thursday that highlights "devastating" losses to nature due to human activity.. Globally, the report found that monitored animal populations had fallen 69 percent since 1970.
Dennis Tito, an American entrepreneur who in 2001 became the first person to pay for their own space voyage, said Wednesday he plans to fly with his wife Akiko on a future SpaceX mission around the Moon.. In 2001, Tito paid $20 million to fly on a Russian rocket to the International Space Station, heralding the era of space tourism.
Andean villagers in Peru told an inter-American rights court on Wednesday about how their health has suffered for decades due to environmental damage caused by a mining company extracting heavy metals in their midst.. "The State was like a father who ignored us," 74-year-old villager Rosa Amaro told the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the first day of a hearing against the Peruvian government.
About 500 people have died in Nigeria's worst floods in a decade and 1.4 million others been displaced from their homes since the start of the rainy season, the government said.. Nigeria's Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs said Tuesday that "over 1.4 million persons were displaced, about 500 persons have been reported dead... and 1,546 persons were injured".
Scientists have successfully implanted and integrated human brain cells into newborn rats, creating a new way to study complex psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism, and perhaps eventually test treatments.. The rats' age was important: human neurons have been implanted into adult rats before, but an animal's brain stops developing at a certain age, limiting how well implanted cells can integrate.
Brain cells living in a dish can learn to play the classic video game Pong, thus demonstrating "intelligent and sentient behavior," Australian neuroscientists argue in a new paper.. To perform their experiment, Kagan and colleagues took mice cells from embryonic brains, and derived human neurons from adult stem cells.
Britain's approach to changing public travel, heating and food habits is "inadequate" to meet its net zero and environment targets, a parliamentary committee warned Wednesday.. "People power is critical to reach our environmental goals, but unless we are encouraged and enabled to change behaviours in how we travel, what we eat and buy and how we heat our homes, we won't meet those targets," she added.
Australia's world-beating mining firms are flush with cash and desperate for staff but green-minded workers are shunning the high-paying sector, causing serious staff shortages, the government warned Wednesday.. But this year the Australian Resources and Energy Employer Association warned the sector needed an extra 24,000 new workers over the next five years.
