Experts estimate about 30,000 people per year are dying alone in Japan and many have bodies discovered weeks later. Yoshinori Ishimi, who runs the Anshin Net service that cleans up afterwards, believes the true figure is “twice or three times that” (60,000 to 90,000) A combination of uniquely Japanese cultural, social and demographic factors have …
For decades, pollution and its harmful effects on people’s health, the environment, and the planet have been neglected both by Governments and the international development agenda. Yet, pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and death in the world today, responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths. The Lancet Commission on pollution and …
There was an analysis on Quora of the number of deaths associated with the Cold War. The USA did contain communism and then communism failed economically. The USSR and China have now converted to some form of capitalism. Although Russia is more of a Kleptocracy. How many died in the Cold War? A loose definition …
Our World in Data has recently looked at the safety of different energy sources and reached the same conclusion that Nextbigfuture has had for many years (since 2008). Nuclear energy is far safer than other major energy sources and is about as safe as wind and solar on a deaths per terawatt hour basis. When …
Martin Landau played a master of disguise on the Mission: Impossible TV series, Commander John Koenig and as a broken-down Bela Lugosi in his Oscar-winning performance in Ed Wood, has died. He was 89. He attended the Actors Studio, becoming good friends with James Dean, and was later in the same class as Steve McQueen. …
Adam West, the iconic star of the campy 1960s “Batman” TV series, died Friday at the age of 88 in Los Angeles after a short battle with leukemia. Although he was already immortalized as the Caped Crusader, a younger generation had embraced West for his role voicing the corrupt, crackpot Mayor Adam West in the …
Coal is undergoing a renaissance in emerging and developed countries in Asia, buoyed by technical breakthroughs and looming questions about squaring development with energy security. Japan, India and China will try to blunt the air pollution effects from the use of coal which cause millions of premature deaths in India and China and tens of …
A team of engineers led by 94-year-old John Goodenough, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery, has developed the first all-solid-state battery cells that could lead to safer, faster-charging, longer-lasting rechargeable batteries for handheld mobile devices, electric cars and stationary energy storage. …
For the past several years, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been developing a class of walking “bio-bots” powered by muscle cells and controlled with electrical and optical pulses. Now, Bioengineering Professor Rashid Bashir’s research group is sharing the recipe for the current generation of bio-bots. Their how-to paper is the cover …
Smartphones will continue to grow through Gartner’s forecast period, but their share of the semiconductor pie will peak in 2017 at 25.4% and their overall amount of chip revenue will max out at $97.7 billion in 2018 as growth shifts to mid- and low-end models. PCs and ultramobiles (below) will be flat this year. Growth …
China is planning to develop a prototype of an exascale computer, considered the next frontier of supercomputers, by the end of 2017, according to a developer Tuesday. EArly in 2016, China had announced plans to build three different pre-exascale systems with three very different architectures, according to some Tweets put out by James Lin, vice …