In early March, a series of explosions in the Equatorial Guinea city of Bata rocked the harbor and demolished buildings. Over 100 people died in the explosion or of the resulting injuries, and the country’s long-running president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo blamed the military’s mishandling of a stockpile of dynamite
There has been much ink spilled over the topic of artificial intelligence. Movies and books often warn of the cold, calculating learning machine that decides it no longer needs its human makers. Just as common are the treatises from AI experts who comfort us by reminding us that AI can
When you think about how visual information relayed through a headset could change the world, you might be thinking of virtual reality. After all, there are constant ads for VR headsets and immersive videogames that take the user to a virtual landscape. However, VR has limitations that make it far
Assuming that humanity does nothing to prevent the runaway escalation of global warming into a full-blown climate catastrophe, the future looks bleak and miserable. While world governments make the most glacial progress on grinding to some kind of climate action, the planet continues to get hotter, and natural disasters become
Global climate change is warming the planet up at an alarming rate. This comes with a whole slew of challenges to life as we know it: everything from rising sea levels to more intense weather disasters follows in the wake of rising global temperatures. However, there’s yet another aspect of
Two major vaccines got emergency authorization for use in the US early on: one from Pfizer, and another from Moderna. These two vaccines share a lot of characteristics in common, including their efficacy and the ways they have to be stored and administered. Those two vaccines, while highly effective at
As the US looks ahead to a summer that is likely to be pretty “normal,” Brazil is still struggling to contain the pandemic. Just Tuesday, Brazil recorded some 1,700 deaths from COVID, their highest single-day death toll. The Brazilian healthcare system is on the brink, even as many in the
Everyone is still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, even a year after it sank its teeth into the US. Many people lost loved ones and friends to the disease, and many more lost a year of their lives to lengthy lockdown efforts. However, while we’ve not even dispensed with this
New York, Charleston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Miami. These coastal cities are cultural hubs of their respective parts of the country, iconic metropolitan centers and jewels of American civilization. They’ll likely be underwater in 50 years if we don’t do something about rampant global climate change, too. The science is clear:
Alexey Navalny, the outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin who survived a poisoning attempt on his life earlier in 2020, has been moved to a penal colony in Russia. Navalny, the leader of an opposition party in Russia that seeks to ouster the totalitarian dictator Putin, was arrested upon returning from
