There are objects that enter our lives with the promise of making our lives easier, but disappear just as quickly. Disposable e-cigarettes are one of the clearest examples of this contemporary paradox: a few days of use, a perfectly working lithium battery, followed by a noiseless journey to the trash can.
Sewage doesn't lie. At the Nosedo wastewater treatment plant, on the southeastern outskirts of Milan, a faithful portrait of citizens' consumption habits (including food, tobacco and drugs) is drawn every year.
EFSA has published the conclusions of its re-evaluation of sucralose, the sweetener E 955 used in many light and sugar-free products.
Two hundred million people worldwide live above two thousand meters. Science has barely cared about this for decades - the focus was mainly on the extreme altitudes of four- and five-thousand meters - leaving this huge group of people in a blind spot of medical research. This is precisely why Eurac Research, the private research center headquartered in Bolzano, wants to fill that gap - and to do so it needs people willing to spend a month in a mountain hut.
PFAS in water has been increasingly discussed for several years, and not only in technical or scientific circles. The subject pops up in local news, in daily concerns, in political choices. And each time the same problem recurs: these substances persist, accumulate, move. Disappearing is an entirely different story.
Frequent waking, the Moro reflex (startle reflex) and difficulty falling asleep make nights fragmented and often grueling.
The discovery fascinates archaeologists, but also raises troubling questions about the acceleration of climate change.
Those who think of space quickly think of it as an infinite and unchanging realm, governed by natural laws that humanity watches only from a distance with increasingly sophisticated telescopes. In recent years, however, that view has begun to tilt. Scientific research has reached a point where man has managed to communicate with the cosmic environment with a precision which, up until recently, belonged mostly to fiction.
There's an island in the middle of the Pacific that almost nobody has ever heard of. It's called Minamitorishima, a triangle of rock and coral the size of a suburban neighborhood.
A Greenland shark has been filmed for the first time at near-freezing depths off the South Shetland Islands in the Southern Ocean.