When the Milan Expo opens next year, the centerpiece building will be a masterpiece of sustainable engineering. Designed around the idea of an urban forest, the new Palazzo Italia will generate its own electricity, and will be clad in materials specifically designed to clean the surrounding air. The designers, Nemesi & Partners, are using photocatalytic cement – basically, concrete that’s been mixed with titanium oxide. When the building material comes […]

Bariatric surgery, or weight loss surgery, in Canada has jumped four-fold since 2006-07 and a new study says the health-care system has made great strides to meet the demand. Vertical sleeve gastrectomy removes about 80 to 85 per cent of the stomach. (Shutterstock) “One in 5 Canadian adults has obesity — and with those rates continuing to grow, so too will the need to understand the implications for the health-care system,” […]

You’ve heard the saying, “money can’t buy happiness,” but what if a certain amount of money actually does make you happier? And don’t people feel unhappy when they learn a colleague is earning more money for doing the same amount of work? At the very least, money, or lack of it, can bring some level of joy or despair. Several LinkedIn Influencers weighed in this week on why salaries shouldn’t […]

Meet the 19-year-old who inadvertently grabbed the “Prime Minister of India” Twitter handle – the same one India’s top leaders are now tussling over. Qaiser Ali says he still doesn’t understand how it happened. The teenager from Lucknow in India just wanted to give his Twitter handle a better name. “I don’t know how but it came into my mind to check PMO [Prime Minister’s Office] of India, and when […]

Sometimes we feel sh*tty. It happens. Things don’t always go right and bad luck can creep its way in from time to time. The trick isn’t to dwell on how unhappy you are at the moment, but rather to focus your energies on getting out of that mindset and moving back towards happier and more pleasant times. We all have our own way of dealing with ourselves and our emotions […]

Trafficking, forced labour and modern slavery are generating profits estimated at US$150 billion a year, and two-thirds of that comes from sexual exploitation, the U.N. labour agency said Tuesday. In the wake of a new report by the International Labor Organization, the National Post takes a graphic look at the US$99-billion sex-trafficking industry around the world.   Please follow and like us:

Companies are creating learning aids that tap the science of memories, says David Robson. Do they work in the classroom? For most of his 20s, Ed Cooke had been hovering around the top 10 of the World Memory Championships. His achievements included memorising 2,265 binary digits in 30 minutes and the order of 16 packs of playing cards in just an hour. But at the age of 26, he was […]

A new study finds that if temperatures rise and more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow, it will reduce the total amount of water in rivers It is a surprising observation. One might expect the timing of water flow to change but not the overall volume. But this is precisely what scientists discovered when they examined the histories of 420 catchment basins in the US spanning the period 1948-2001. […]

A molecular compound developed by Saint Louis University scientists restored learning, memory and appropriate behavior in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, according to findings in the May issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. The molecule also reduced inflammation in the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory The paper, authored by a team of scientists led by Susan Farr, Ph.D., research professor of geriatrics at Saint […]

Millions of India’s lowest “untouchable” caste celebrated the election of a rat catcher as the state of Bihar’s chief minister Tuesday amid hopes that their days as the country’s most marginalized minority might be coming to an end. Jitan Ram Manjhi, 68, who grew up catching and eating rats to survive, was sworn in as chief minister in a ceremony that marked the most extraordinary rise of any politician in […]