Three-quarters of S&P 500 companies now tie a portion of their CEO's pay to environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. They typically include carbon emissions, workforce diversity and worker safety, among others.
A hailstorm can undo a season's work in minutes. It can strike quickly and unevenly, shredding wheat, bruising fruit, flattening crops—while also leaving neighboring paddocks untouched. In a new Nature Climate Change study, scientists from UNSW Sydney say the geography and seasonality of that risk is changing.
Picture a pile of trash the size of Manhattan and taller than one and a half Empire State Buildings. That's how much plastic waste the world is predicted to be generating every year by 2050 if nothing is done to change course.
Whisky-inspired chemicals could help power a new generation of microscopic machines, according to researchers who have discovered a way to make tiny particles "swim" through liquid using compounds linked to the production of Scotland's national drink.
Ultrafast lasers emit pulses lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second). These flashes of light power applications from precision micromachining to eye surgery to optical frequency combs, the Nobel Prize-winning technology behind today's most precise optical atomic clocks. Yet despite more than two decades of effort, ultrafast lasers have largely remained bulky, expensive systems confined to optical tables.
From chewing to chomping to grinding, teeth suffer from a lifetime of repeated mechanical stress. It makes sense, then, that enamel is one of the hardest natural materials.
When cells experience sudden physical stress, like stretching or pressure, they can activate a fast, protective mechanism that shields their nuclei from destruction, according to a new study published in the Biophysical Journal. This mechanism could help scientists develop therapies to prevent DNA damage, a major driver of aging and cell death.
With help from a novel cross-linking molecule, MIT chemists have shown they can substantially improve the ballistic impact resistance of common polymers, including polystyrene and a type of rubber used to make shoe soles.
Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial invertebrates that thrive in the world's oceans today, yet for decades their origins presented a puzzling gap in the fossil record. While nearly every other major animal group made its first appearance during the Cambrian explosion roughly 530 million years ago, the bryozoan fossil record remained stubbornly silent until the Ordovician period, some 50 million years later.
Food waste is a nagging problem that weighs heavily on global food production, distribution and sales industries—but an emerging generation of AI sensors is providing a raft of fresh solutions. The embrace of AI in food industries has been swift, which is why Flinders University researchers have worked with an international research team to build the first comprehensive overview of AI technologies involved in the food industry.
