On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the House Financial Services Committee on Capitol Hill. The subject was Facebook’s finance sector, and specifically their plan for a new global cryptocurrency, known as Libra, that would be run entirely through Facebook. Lawmakers from both parties came together over their skepticism of the system, which would see Facebook and partner corporations in charge of their own currency beyond the control of any government. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, designed at their core to have no central regulating authority and thus to be independent…
On Tuesday, the EU’s top court ruled that Google isn’t required to apply the bloc’s “right to be forgotten” rules on a worldwide level. These rules require that an individual be able to ask a company to remove personal information from the internet, or in Google’s case, their search engine. In 2015, France’s privacy regulator CNIL demanded that the removal of information apply to Google’s global database, to prevent even those outside the EU from obtaining information on EU citizens. Google faced fines up to $100,000 for failing to comply…
A Chinese research team may have finally cracked the problem of repairing tooth enamel. Scientists at Zhejiang University have discovered a method by which its complex structure can be reproduced and the enamel essentially “grown” back. The team behind the research say the materials are cheap and can be prepared on a large scale. “After intensive discussion with dentists, we believe that this new method can be widely used in future,” said Dr Zhaoming Liu, co-author of the research. Currently, substitute materials such as resin, metal alloys, amalgams and ceramics…
In January, Tesla CEO Elon Musk accused the government of Singapore of being ‘unsupportive’ of a shift to electric vehicles. Now, the Singaporean minister for the environment fired back in a statement that accuses Musk and Tesla of wanting to promote a lifestyle over actual solutions to climate problems. “What Elon Musk wants to produce is a lifestyle,” minister Masagos Zulkifli said on Wednesday. “We are not interested in a lifestyle. We are interested in proper solutions that will address climate problems.” Masagos stated that while it would be possible…
A test case for the solar road technology which attracted attention in 2016 has now been declared a failure by the Global Construction Review and France’s Le Monde. A one kilometre solar panel road that was opened in Normandy, near the town of Tourouvre, in 2016, has failed to live up to promised standards of durability or energy production. According to Le Monde reporting from July, the solar panels have degraded to the point that 100 metres of the road had to be removed entirely. Power production only reached half of what was…
A climate change scientist who previously ran health programs at the Centers for Disease Control is now planning to file a whistleblower complaint against the agency, alleging he was removed from his office in retaliation for calling out an illegal misuse of funds set aside for climate work. George Luber ran the climate and health program at the CDC, until his office of 18 people was rolled into a bigger asthma program, which initially was set to include the word climate in its title, but was ultimately named asthma and…
Blogging platform Tumblr was valued at over one billion dollars when Yahoo acquired it in 2013. Now, six years later and with Yahoo’s former assets snapped up by Verizon Media Group, Tumblr has been sold off to WordPress for a miniscule three million. The collapse of the platform’s value is tied to a long history of mismanagement by companies never quite sure how to capitalize on an internet blogging service populated heavily by the millennial audience. Tumblr as a service is comparable to Instagram, leaning heavily on image posting to…
The Japanese government has given the go-ahead to the University of Tokyo to conduct experiments on human-animal hybirds, which may now be carried to term. Currently, on the international stage, hybrid embryos are not allowed to develop for more than 14 days. In March, Japan was the first country to remove such restrictions. The first experiment of its kind to be approved will involve human cells grown in mouse and rat embryos. According to the experiment lead, geneticist Hiromitsu Nakauchi, there will be no attempts to bring embryos to term…