MILTON KEYNES, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 2023--

Regulators have asked a judge to block the proposed deal, arguing it could harm competition levels.

By Blake Brittain (Reuters) -Alphabet Inc's Google must pay $32.5 million in damages for infringing one of smart-speaker maker Sonos

On a sunny street in Hiroshima, a tourist looks around, but instead of seeing a bustling riverside, they face a scene of horror, with...

LOUISVILLE, Ky.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 5, 2023--

Pricing the streaming options is a headache.

Cambodia's ex-leader Hun Sen returned to Facebook on Sunday, claiming the social media giant had "rendered justice" to him by refusing to suspend his account after he...

A UK startup is close to full-scale commercial production of solar trees that serve as clean energy charging stations for electric cars, according to the company’s chief executive. SolarBotanic Trees, which was founded last year, is developing two different sized versions of the tree, one 5.5 metres tall tree and another 3.5 metres tall, with the first installations planned for early next year in Oxford. “The idea is to put solar panels on a domed surface like the canopy of a tree, and then place a battery storage system into the trunk,” Chris Shelley, CEO of SolarBotanic, told The Independent. “Putting solar cells and batteries into the same structure is very practical, as it allows them to store excess energy without having to solely rely on its backup grid supply.” The number of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in the UK has risen by more than a third over the last year in an effort to keep up with growing demand. There are now more than 25,000 locations as of May 2023, according to EV mapping service Zapmap, though this is still well short of the 325,000 charging points that the UK’s Climate Change Committee claims will be necessary by 2032. SolarBotanic already has deals in place with EV infrastructure suppliers to build trees for several sites in the UK, Mr Shelley said, including an order of 200 trees from the Raw Charging Group. The initial idea was to create a structure capable of harvesting both solar and wind energy, using photovoltaic leaves that flutter in the wind to generate additional power. Preliminary research found that wind harvesting via this method is not sufficiently advanced at present to be commercially viable in the near term, however it remains a prospect fot the future. For now, SolarBotanic’s focus is on entering production later this year in order to deliver the solar trees to UK customers at the start of 2024. From there, the company plans to enter other markets, including Europe and the US, as well as develop customisable structures to suit other applications. These include large trees with integrated seating underneath to be used in town squares or pub gardens, with people able to charge their phones or even warm themselves up from inbuilt infrared heating fixtures. “There are quite alot of variations on the core theme,” Mr Shelley said. “Offgrid versions that don’t need to meet the electricity demands of an electric vehicle could serve as work or social areas in town squares with telephone and laptop charging, seating and shelter. “Beyond commercial and municipal uses, the trees could go in people’s gardens to supplement rooftop solar panel setups, or several of them could even meet the annual electrical requirement of a medium-sized house.” Read More Scientists figure out how to turn rocks into batteries Japan aims to beam solar power from space by 2025 Scientists break world record for solar power window material Electric cars could save more than 100,000 lives, study claims Scientists smash world record for solar power window material Instagram has stopped working properly

JERUSALEM Israel aims to parlay its technological prowess to become an artificial intelligence "superpower", the Defence Ministry director-general

There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Despite what people often claim, the Gros Michel isn't to blame.

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 14, 2023--