Cosmetics companies like L’Oreal worry a lot about skin. Products need to be tested to make sure they work safely, and ensuring that a new chemical blend won’t be irritating or harmful is a tough challenge.
Growing interest in alternative energy sources has made the three-pronged white metal wind turbines dotted across open landscapes a familiar sight.
A Polish architect by the name of Krysztof Kotala has released designs for an audacious project with his design firm, 8+8 Concept Studio: a tennis facility located entirely underwater just off the coast of Dubai, where spectators could choose to watch the games below them, or the sea life above them through a massive glass dome.
The past decade has been economically tumultuous for most of the US. But some areas of the country have managed to thrive. Take the oil patch, for instance. Shale-rich North Dakota, Kentucky, and Texas enjoyed a surplus of jobs (at least until oil prices dropped sharply last year). In Silicon Valley, and in smaller tech scenes such as Seattle and Boston, booming startup communities have supercharged salaries, rents, and company valuations.
This post has been corrected.
Back in February of this year, users of the travel website Flyertalk stumbled on a deal that seemed too good to be true: a United Airlines flight from Heathrow to Tel Aviv for 502 Danish kroner ($76.28).
At some point 150 million years or so ago, a certain set of dinosaurs started to look more and more like what we now know as modern birds. One of the most pronounced changes occurred in the front of the face: the nascent birds lost their teeth and the small bones that once sat at the tip of the snout fused and elongated into the modern beak.
By most accounts, The Netherlands is one of the best places in the world to live. People are relatively wealthy, there are ample government social benefits, and it consistently ranks as one of the happiest countries on earth.
The Chinese conglomerate Tiens Group treated 6,400 of the company’s employees to a four-day trip to France last week in a move that appears to be part benevolence, part publicity stunt.
Each year, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program awards funding to a set of research projects on the bleeding edge of technology. These aren’t your everyday “disruptive” apps and social networks; we’re talking interstellar exploration, nanotube comet sensors, and robot squids.
The devastation wrought by the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal April 25 has been severe. The quake killed nearly 8,000, injured more than 17,000, and destroyed some several million homes.
Thanks to the mass migration to urban areas in recent years, there has been a corresponding boom in the number of so-called megacities—population centers with over 10 million people. In 1970 there were eight such cities. As of 2010 there were 27 of them, and there are expected to be 37 by 2020.
As the moon orbits Earth, it keeps the same face oriented toward our planet—almost. From our view, this slight variance—known as libration—looks like a wobble that slowly changes our view of the Moon.
Facebook is opening the gates of its non-profit Internet.org to developers, allowing anyone to develop services for the platform, it announced May 4.
NASA researchers have made progress on a new way to power a spaceship that could eventually enable fast travel to the outer reaches of our solar system. The research findings fly in the face of our understanding up until now of physics. Indeed, the results, which have now been seen similarly in several studies, appear to contradict Newton’s third law of physics.
China now has more land dedicated to vineyards than any country except Spain after narrowly surpassing France this year, according to the International Organization of Vine and Wine’s annual report, released April 27.
Audi has begun production of a synthetic diesel fuel made from water, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen. Unlike fossil fuels, which release additional carbon into the atmosphere, Audi’s “e-diesel,” which is being produced at a plant in Dresden in conjunction with the German alternative energy company Sunfire, has a net-zero carbon footprint because it is made with carbon dioxide taken from the air.
Traditionally, a nation’s economic health is measured by its wealth. But increasingly, some leaders and policymakers are turning their focus to a more human notion of well-being: happiness.
Gathering information is easier than it’s been at any other time in human history, thanks to the internet. And much has been written in the past several years about how the panoply of facts now at our fingertips effects how we think. It’s making us smarter, or maybe dumber, or perhaps some of both.
A Japanese bullet train broke the world speed record for trains in an April 21 test run, clocking in at a blazing 603 km per hour (374 miles per hour) at a track near Mount Fuji. It previously seized the world record when it hit 590 km/h per hour (367 mph) in a test run last week.
In a CNN documentary aired for the first time Sunday night, on the eve of the informal April 20 holiday celebrating cannabis subculture, US president Barack Obama reiterated his support for medicinal use of marijuana and moving towards decriminalization of the drug.
Dog owners already know in their bones that they and their pets love one another. Now, a new study has confirmed it, finding that love is chemically apparent after dogs and their owners gaze into one another’s eyes.
In the long list of grievances travelers have against airlines, scrambling to claim overhead luggage space during boarding arguably rivals the misery of cramped seating and crying babies during the flight.
From the second half of the 20th century through the early 2000s, American migration followed a distinctive pattern: people moved from urban centers to the suburbs, and from the northern US to Sun Belt states like California, Texas and Florida. During the pre-crisis years of the 2000s, the outer-suburban areas known as “exurbs” grew particularly quickly.
