The world’s digital economy depends heavily on a vast network of undersea cables stretching across the ocean floor, quietly carrying nearly all international internet traffic and enabling trillions of dollars in financial transactions every day. Despite their central role in modern connectivity, these cables remain largely invisible to the public, even as governments and technology […]
Ahead of donning a beige WFP vest and boots to face hurricanes, wars and refugee camps, the Portuguese scientist worked with satellite imagery and cartography, creating maps to support humanitarian missions, until he realised he didn’t want to stay behind a computer screen. On the occasion of World Humanitarian Day, marked annually on 19 August, […]
At a major UN conference underway this week in Awaza, Turkmenistan, calls are growing to tackle the high trade costs, investment gaps and growing digital divide that continue to hold these countries back. Despite progress in some areas, landlocked developing nations – from Bolivia to Bhutan and Burkina Faso – account for just 1.2 per […]
Now, governments have committed to close that gap by 2030. At the conclusion of the Third Ministerial Conference on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics in Asia and the Pacific, leaders adopted a renewed declaration to strengthen national civil registration systems – the foundational mechanisms that register births, deaths and other vital events. The move extends […]
Astronomers have detected much of the Universe’s ordinary matter, which had long been missing from accounts of its total mass. Not ‘dark matter’ — the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up the majority of the Universe’s contents. This is normal matter, but it’s spread so sparsely across intergalactic space that more than three-quarters of it […]