All posts tagged: sharply

The House | Fit For Service? Royal Navy Fitness Test Pass Rates Fall Sharply Over Last Decade

The House | Fit For Service? Royal Navy Fitness Test Pass Rates Fall Sharply Over Last Decade

Published by Sam Flores

Officers at work on the bridge of HMS Dragon as it sails into Limassol, Cyprus, 27 April 2026 (Photography, LPhot Helayna Birkett. UK MOD © Crown copyright 2026) 6 min read27 min The Iran conflict has drawn attention to gaps in Royal Navy capability but, as Tom Scotson finds, it’s not just its ships that need to get into better shape In the early days of the Iran conflict, as UK allies in the Gulf – and even Cyprus – were being hit by drones and missiles, Keir Starmer pledged to send a warship to help defend them. The only problem was the only available vessel, HMS Dragon, was undergoing a refit in Portsmouth. The effort to get the ship ready was extraordinary but there was no escaping the embarrassment. The Royal Navy has been the object of ridicule from US secretary of war Pete Hegseth and, repeatedly, Donald Trump himself. It is widely acknowledged that the UK has an inadequate number of warships currently available, with new frigates only coming into service …

Ebola Cases Rise Sharply as Medical Workers Scramble for Supplies

Ebola Cases Rise Sharply as Medical Workers Scramble for Supplies

Published by Sam Flores

new video loaded: Ebola Cases Rise Sharply as Medical Workers Scramble for Supplies transcript Back transcript Ebola Cases Rise Sharply as Medical Workers Scramble for Supplies Medical workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo are experiencing a shortage of supplies as the number of suspected Ebola cases has passed 500, according to officials. “This is mostly personal protective equipment which helps us in making sure that this infection does not spread, especially with the frontline health workers.” “There is an American that is symptomatic… That American as well as six other high risk contacts are going to be taken out of that region and taken to Germany. Medical workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo are experiencing a shortage of supplies as the number of suspected Ebola cases has passed 500, according to officials. By Shawn Paik May 19, 2026 Source link

Ebola: DR Congo death toll rises sharply to at least 131, WHO to host emergency meeting

Ebola: DR Congo death toll rises sharply to at least 131, WHO to host emergency meeting

Published by Sam Flores

The toll from the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has risen to an estimated 131 deaths from 513 suspected cases, Health Minister Samuel Roger Kamba said. “We have recorded roughly 131 deaths in total and we have around 513 suspected cases,” Samuel Roger Kamba told Congolese national television overnight. He cautioned however that the toll was an estimate and further research was needed to confirm whether all 131 suspected deaths were indeed linked to Ebola. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) has declared the outbreak a Continental Public Health Emergency, in a statement late Monday. Declaring a continental emergency empowers the Africa CDC, based in Ethiopia, to mobilise extra resources including emergency response teams and surveillance operations.  To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. Accept Manage my choices One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Try again © France 24 “Africa …

South Korea exports seen rising sharply again in April on chip boom: Reuters poll

South Korea exports seen rising sharply again in April on chip boom: Reuters poll

Published by Sam Flores

SEOUL, April 29 : South Korean exports likely rose in April for an 11th straight month, with a surge in chip demand driven by artificial intelligence investment more than offsetting a hit from the Middle East conflict, a Reuters poll showed on Wednesday. Import growth and consumer inflation were seen quickening due to high oil prices as the conflict in the Middle East has upended energy markets. Exports from Asia’s fourth-largest economy, a bellwether for global trade, were projected to have risen 45.3 per cent from a year earlier, according to a median forecast of 20 economists. That would be slightly weaker than the previous month’s increase of 49.2 per cent, which was the strongest year-on-year rise since August 1988, but still the second-fastest in the current gaining streak that started in June 2025. The trade-reliant economy delivered its strongest growth in nearly six years last quarter, smashing forecasts on booming chip exports, though rising risks from the Iran war threaten to cut into the record earnings. Last week, chipmaker SK Hynix announced a record …

WSU scientists convert sewage sludge into 99% pure natural gas sharply boosting energy recovery

WSU scientists convert sewage sludge into 99% pure natural gas sharply boosting energy recovery

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sewage sludge is usually the part nobody wants to think about. It is costly to handle, hard to get rid of, and after treatment, much of it still ends up in landfills. A Washington State University team says it has found a way to squeeze far more value from that waste. In a pilot study, researchers turned treated sewage sludge into renewable natural gas that was 99% methane, while sharply improving how much of the sludge’s carbon ended up in usable fuel instead of leftover waste. The work, published in the Chemical Engineering Journal, points to a different way of thinking about wastewater plants, not just as public utilities that clean water, but as places that might also recover energy from a stubborn waste stream. That matters because wastewater treatment facilities consume between 3% and 4% of total U.S. electricity demand, and they release about 21 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year. “There is a workhorse,” researcher Birgitte Ahring said of the microbial strain used in the system. “It doesn’t need organic additives …

AI identifies people with sharply elevated risk of skin cancer within 5 years

AI identifies people with sharply elevated risk of skin cancer within 5 years

Published by Jenni Sidey

A skin cancer diagnosis can seem to arrive out of nowhere. But buried in years of health records, prescription histories, and demographic data, researchers say there may be clues that help flag people at especially high risk before melanoma appears. That is the idea behind a large Swedish study that tested whether artificial intelligence could sort through routine healthcare registry data and identify adults more likely to develop melanoma within five years. The work drew on records from more than 6 million people, making it one of the broadest efforts yet to use national population data for melanoma risk prediction. During the five-year study window, 38,582 of the 6,036,186 adults in the dataset developed melanoma, including melanoma in situ. That amounts to about 0.64% of the population studied. “Our study shows that data which is already available within healthcare systems can be used to identify individuals at higher risk of melanoma,” said Martin Gillstedt, a doctoral student at the University of Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska Academy and a statistician at Sahlgrenska University Hospital’s Department of Dermatology and …

New brain-inspired device sharply reduces AI hardware energy use

New brain-inspired device sharply reduces AI hardware energy use

Published by Jenni Sidey

A tiny change at the boundary between two oxide layers may point to a less power-hungry future for artificial intelligence. Researchers led by the University of Cambridge have built a nanoelectronic device that behaves a bit like a brain synapse, storing and processing information in the same place instead of shuttling data back and forth as standard computer chips do. That matters because today’s AI hardware burns through vast amounts of electricity, and the demand is still rising. The team’s device is a memristor, a component designed to mimic how neurons and synapses adjust their connections. In this case, the memristor is made from a modified form of hafnium oxide containing strontium and titanium. The work appears in Science Advances. “Energy consumption is one of the key challenges in current AI hardware,” lead author Dr. Babak Bakhit of Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy said in a statement. “To address that, you need devices with extremely low currents, excellent stability, outstanding uniformity across switching cycles and devices, and the ability to switch between many …