Homo sapiens has been revealed to be 100,000 years older than previously assumed.
Having lost to Park Geun-hye in South Korea’s 2012 presidential election, Moon Jae-in has become the chief beneficiary of the abuse-of-power scandal that engulfed his erstwhile opponent. Moon’s victory in the race to the presidential Blue House in Seoul could herald an era of rapprochement with North Korea, and an unlikely meeting of minds with Donald Trump over Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.
In March, the House of Lords told us what has long been obvious: that we need to pay far more attention to the internet by coordinating our efforts towards improving children’s “digital literacy”. A report, published by the Lords Communications Committee, states that students’ lives – “from health to education, from socialising to entertainment” – are now “mediated through technology”.
Only 12,000 years late, on an experimental farm outside Fairbanks in central Alaska, Greg Finstad is proposing an agricultural revolution. For the indigenous communities of the north, he is advocating a move from hunting to farming, in particular to farming reindeer.
Despite the temptation for parents to say yes to their children’s wishes, research shows there’s an insidious side to chasing after the newest thing others have. It fosters a sense of deficiency that can never be fully satisfied. First they want the doll, then all of the accessories — and of course the four-story Barbie mansion.
In real life, most parents are proud of their kids’ talents and often secretly convinced of their precocity. But how can you tell if your tot’s early aptitude for languages or maths is, in fact, anything out of the ordinary? Professor Joan Freeman is a chartered psychologist and expert on childhood intelligence. Having worked for many years with gifted children and their families, Joan talks us through how best to recognise, and then support, the brightest of our bright young sparks.
Most smartphones are designed to work even on hot days. Apple, for example, states that the iPhone is designed to work in ambient temperatures of between 0 and 35 degrees Celsius, meaning it should in theory get through this week’s heat wave. However, certain conditions or processes can make this worse. The most common ones are direct sunlight and running programs that are either processor or screen intensive - these include playing games, watching video and using sat-nav systems.
CAPE GRIM, Tasmania — On the best days, the wind howling across this rugged promontory has not touched land for thousands of miles, and the arriving air seems as if it should be the cleanest in the world. But on a cliff above the sea, inside a low-slung government building, a bank of sophisticated machines sniffs that air day and night, revealing telltale indicators of the way human activity is altering the planet on a major scale.
There are more than 200 countries in the world, and we’re sure you’ve heard of each of them at least once. But there are states and territories on our planet we never knew existed. They occupy a super small area, and some of them are inhabited by just a couple of families.
The Swedish government published new estimates for the economy on Wednesday that project much larger budget surpluses than it had forecast only a few weeks ago.