By Heidi Harley

science / science - 6 years ago

Future uncertain for Australia's unique platypus: researchers

Australia's unique platypus population is shrinking under pressure from agriculture and pollution, putting the egg-laying mammals' future in doubt, researchers said in a report published Thursday. "We have great concerns about the future survival of this unique species," said Richard Kingsford, dir...

science / science - 6 years ago

Peru 'catastrophe' feared after 8,000-barrel Amazon oil spill

A Peruvian oil executive warned Wednesday of "catastrophe" after indigenous residents cut a major pipeline in a region of the Amazon, triggering the spill of 8,000 barrels of oil. "We could face an environmental catastrophe," Beatriz Alva, a manager with state oil firm Petroperu, told channel N tel...

science / science - 6 years ago

Google’s Parent Has a Plan to Eliminate Mosquitoes Worldwide

“You hear that little beating sound?” says Kathleen Parkes, a spokesperson for Verily Life Sciences, a unit of Alphabet. When those 80,000 lab-bred Wolbachia-infected, male mosquitoes mate with their counterpart females in the wild, the result is stealth annihilation: the offspring never hatch.Bett...

science / science - 6 years ago

Amazon's latest gadget: a self-driving toy car for coders

Amazon.com Inc's cloud unit on Wednesday announced a $399 autonomous toy car, aimed at helping web developers try out some of their own self-driving technology. Customers can train and tweak machine learning models in an online simulator and then test drive them on vehicles one-eighteenth the size...