Results for Science and Technology

This year’s worldwide mountain of waste electronic and electrical equipment will total an estimated 57.4 million tonnes – greater than the weight of the Great Wall of China, the world’s heaviest artificial object, said the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment Forum (WEEE), on International E-Waste Day, yesterday. By weight discarded big appliances such as stoves and refrigerators constitute the largest component or e-waste. These large appliances contain steel, copper and aluminium.

New York Times reporting: In his new book, the astrophysicist Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard, argues that the absence of evidence regarding life elsewhere is not evidence of its absence. In October 2017, a telescope in Maui, Hawaii, captured an exotic speck speeding across the sky. It was interstellar — recognized as the first object we’ve ever seen that originated outside our solar system. In the past few years there has been a flurry of new interest in the search for aliens. Tech billionaires are funding novel efforts to scan the heavens for evidence of life, and after decades of giving the field short shrift, NASA recently joined the search. By Farhad Manjoo.