Life

NET25 Kids to hold EBC Webinar Series on how to manage and educate children amid pandemic

  (Eagle News) – Want to learn more about educating and managing your children in these interesting times? Then check out the series of educational and informative webinars by NET25 Kids for teachers and parents which will be livestreamed via NET 25 Kids Youtube Page. The EBC Webinars 2020 will feature several guest speakers with years of experience to share information that would be valuable and helpful for teachers and parents as they educate and […]

Cathay Pacific to cut workforce by nearly a quarter

  by Jerome TAYLOR / Su XINQI Agence France Presse Cathay Pacific announced plans Wednesday to cut its workforce by nearly a quarter and close one of its short-haul airlines in an effort to survive the “devastating” impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. Across the globe, airlines have been hammered as the pandemic has slashed international travel, and they face a long, hard winter after a much-hoped-for rebound failed to materialise. Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong’s flag […]

NASA probe Osiris-Rex ‘boops’ asteroid Bennu in historic mission

by Ivan Couronne WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — After a four-year journey, NASA’s robotic spacecraft Osiris-Rex briefly touched down on asteroid Bennu’s boulder-strewn surface on Tuesday to collect rock and dust samples in a precision operation 200 million miles (330 million kilometers) from Earth. The so-called “Touch-And-Go” or TAG maneuver was managed by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, Colorado, where at 6:12 pm (2212 GMT) an announcer said: “Touchdown declared. Sampling is in progress,” and […]

Bottle-fed babies ingest ‘millions’ of microplastics: study

by Amélie BOTTOLLIER-DEPOIS PARIS, France (AFP) — Bottle-fed babies may ingest more than a million pieces of microplastics each day, new research showed Monday highlighting the abundance of plastics in our food products. There is growing evidence that humans consume huge numbers of the tiny particles, formed when larger pieces of plastic break down, but very little is known about the knock-on health consequences. Researchers in Ireland looked at the rate of microplastic release in […]

Sweden bans China’s Huawei, ZTE from 5G network

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AFP) — Sweden has banned Chinese telecoms groups Huawei and ZTE from its 5G network for security reasons, the Swedish telecoms regulator said on Tuesday. The ban is in line with new legislation that entered into force in January 2020, following an examination by the Swedish armed forces and security service “to ensure that the use of radio equipment in these bands does not cause harm to Sweden’s security,” the Swedish Post and […]

UK researchers aim to infect volunteers to study Covid exposure

  LONDON, United Kingdom (AFP) — British researchers on Tuesday said they hope to expose healthy volunteers to the virus that causes Covid-19 in a groundbreaking study to discover the amount needed for people to become infected. The Human Challenge Programme — a partnership that includes Imperial College London — hopes the work will ultimately help to “reduce the spread of the coronavirus, mitigate its impact and reduce deaths”. In what researchers called a world […]

Nokia and NASA to install 4G on the Moon

HELSINKI, Finland (AFP) —  With competition among Earth’s telecoms providers as fierce as ever, equipment maker Nokia announced its expansion into a new market on Monday, winning a deal to install the first cellular network on the Moon. The Finnish equipment manufacturer said it was selected by NASA to deploy an “ultra-compact, low-power, space-hardened” wireless 4G network on the lunar surface, as part of the US space agency’s plan to establish a long-term human presence […]

Coronavirus survives on skin five times longer than flu: study

TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — The coronavirus remains active on human skin for nine hours, Japanese researchers have found, in a discovery they said showed the need for frequent hand washing to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. The pathogen that causes the flu survives on human skin for about 1.8 hours by comparison, said the study published this month in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal. “The nine-hour survival of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus strain that causes Covid-19) on […]

Pfizer plans to seek authorization for Covid-19 vaccine in November: company

  WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer expects to file for emergency use authorization for its Covid-19 vaccine in late November, around two weeks after the November 3 US presidential election, it said Friday. The company said it hopes to move ahead with the vaccine after safety data is available in the third week of November, immediately lifting the company’s shares two percent in the US. “So let me be clear, assuming […]

Hong Kong pink dolphins enjoy comeback as pandemic slows marine traffic

by Ayaka MCGILL Agence France Presse Rare pink dolphins are returning to the waters between Hong Kong and Macau after the coronavirus pandemic halted ferries, but scientists remain deeply concerned about their long-term survival in one of the world’s busiest sea lanes. The tell-tale flash of pink leaping from the waters alerts Naomi Brennan to the presence of a local Chinese white dolphin and she jots the animal’s location into a GPS device. Conservationists like […]

Twitter service restored following global platform outage

  SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) — Twitter service appeared to be restored Thursday evening after a technical problem caused a global outage of nearly two hours on the social media platform used by hundreds of millions worldwide. The outage marked a new setback for the network, which is fending off accusations of bias over its decision to block a news report critical of Democratic White House candidate Joe Biden. “Twitter has been down for […]

New crew reaches ISS in record time

by Christopher RICKLETON ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AFP) — A three-person crew successfully reached the International Space Station on Wednesday aboard a Russian rocket after the fastest ever journey from Earth of just over three hours. The mission of the Soyuz space craft carrying two Russian cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut was of immense importance to Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, coming as the SpaceX programme relaunches manned spaceflight from the United States and ignites fresh talk of […]