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by Ivan Couronne Agence France Presse WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — A new, much-ballyhooed study showing that the most avid consumers of organic food had fewer cancers than those who never eat such products illustrates the difficulty of establishing cause and effect when evaluating diet and health. It is effectively impossible to prove beyond a doubt in a laboratory that any given food reduces the risk of developing an illness as complex as cancer. “Diet […]
by Kerry SHERIDAN Agence France Presse TAMPA, United States (AFP) — Humpback whales are famous for their eerie, underwater songs. But researchers in Japan said Wednesday these massive marine creatures stop singing, at least temporarily, when human-driven ships are nearby. Researchers focused on the remote Ogasawara Islands in Japan, some 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) south of Tokyo, where a single passenger-cargo liner passed through the area once per day. Male humpback whales sing as a […]
by Marlowe HOOD Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Bits of plastic have been detected in the faeces of people in Europe, Russia and Japan, according to research claiming to show for the first time the widespread presence of plastics in the human food chain. All eight volunteers in a small pilot study were found to have passed several types of plastic, with an average of 20 micro-particles per 10 grams of stool, researchers […]
SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) — Facebook on Tuesday announced an overhaul of its Messenger smartphone app in an effort to simplify the service for its 1.3 billion monthly global users. The social network began rolling out a redesigned version featuring three tabs instead of nine, saying it was “going back to its roots” seven years after the standalone app’s launch. “We build one feature after another; they’re piling up,” Messenger chief Stan Chudnovsky said […]
LONDON, United Kingdom (AFP) — An ancient Greek trading ship dating back more than 2,400 years has been found virtually intact at the bottom of the Black Sea, researchers said on Tuesday. The vessel is one of more than 60 shipwrecks identified by the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project including Roman ships and a 17th-century Cossack raiding fleet. During the three-year project, researchers used specialist remote deep-water camera systems previously used in offshore oil and […]
PARIS, France (AFP) — Global use of raw materials is expected to double by 2060, “placing twice the pressure on the environment” than at present, according to an OECD study released on Monday. The study “sees global materials use rising to 167 gigatonnes in 2060 from 90 gigatonnes today,” the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of advanced economies, said. It gave increases in population, economic activity and living standards around the world […]
by Marlowe HOOD Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported Monday. In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal such as a sponge, they reported in the journal Nature Geosciences. “We discovered that brines” — water […]
TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — The Japanese government on Monday ordered Facebook to improve protection of users’ personal information following data breaches affecting tens of millions of people worldwide. Facebook said early this month that hackers accessed the personal data of 29 million users in a breach at the world’s leading social network first disclosed late September. The company had originally said up to 50 million accounts were affected in a cyber-attack that exploited a trio […]
by Laurence COUSTAL Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Is Mercury’s core liquid or solid, and why — on the smallest planet in our solar system — is it so big? What can the planet closest to the Sun tell us about how our solar system came into being? An unmanned European-Japanese space mission, dubbed BepiColombo, blasted off early Saturday morning from French Guiana, to probe these and other mysteries. “BepiColombo is coming like […]
by Karyn NISHIMURA-POUPEE Agence France Presse TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — Forget the flashy humanoids with their gymnastics skills: at the World Robot Summit in Tokyo, the focus was on down-to-earth robots that can deliver post, do the shopping and build a house. Introducing CarriRo, a delivery robot shaped a bit like a toy London bus with bright, friendly “eyes” on its front that can zip around the streets delivering packages at 6km/h (4 miles per […]
THESSALONIKI, Greece (AFP) — Lake Vistonida in northern Greece has become an arachnophobe’s worst nightmare after it was cloaked recently by massive webs spun by hundreds of thousands of small spiders. Biologists say the recent phenomenon, though rare, is not unheard of and is caused by unseasonally warm weather prompting an increase in the local population of mosquitoes and gnats. “It’s caused by an overpopulation of spiders…there is an abundance of food available,” local […]
by Julie CHARPENTRAT Agence France-Presse MENLO PARK, United States (AFP) — In Facebook’s “War Room,” a nondescript space adorned with American and Brazilian flags, a team of 20 people monitors computer screens for signs of suspicious activity. The freshly launched unit at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in California is the nerve center for the fight against misinformation and manipulation of the largest social network by foreign actors trying to influence elections in the United States […]
