The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Saudi Aramco have agreed to establish a research center to develop technologies to capture, store and utilize carbon dioxide. Korea’s leading research institution and the world’s top oil developer signed a memorandum of understanding in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on Monday. They will build a new facility with a total floor space of 16,500 square meters in the school’s campus in Daejeon.KAIST said the center will be financed equally by the t

Global sea levels may rise more than 3 feet by 2100 due to melting glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland, according to glaciologists. Such a rise in sea levels could displace millions of people in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, swamp atolls in the Pacific Ocean, cause dikes in Holland to fail and cost coastal mega cities from New York to Tokyo billions of dollars for construction of sea walls and other infrastructure. Glaciologist Jonathan Bamber and his colleague Willy Aspinall used a s

Scientists and broadcasters said Monday they have captured footage of an elusive giant squid up to eight meters long that roams the depths of the Pacific Ocean.Japan‘s National Science Museum succeeded in filming the deep-sea creature in its natural habitat for the first time, working with Japanese public broadcaster NHK and the U.S. Discovery Channel.They spotted the squid at a depth of 630 meters using a submersible in July, some 15 kilometers east of Chichi island in the north Pacific Ocean.T

U.S. astronomers say a study suggests planets are in fact the cosmic norm and estimate the Milky Way galaxy contains at least 100 billion planets.A team of astronomers at the California Institute of Technology made the estimate while analyzing planets orbiting a star called Kepler-32, worlds they say are representative of the vast majority in the galaxy and are a perfect case study for understanding how most planets form.Kepler-32's planets were detected by the Kepler space telescope, and the re

ANCHORAGE (AP) ― The grounding of a petroleum drilling ship on a remote Alaska island has refueled the debate over oil exploration in the U.S. Arctic Ocean, where critics for years have said the conditions are too harsh and the stakes too high to allow dangerous industrial development.The drilling sites are 1,600 kilometers from Coast Guard resources, and environmentalists argue offshore drilling in the Arctic’s fragile ecosystem is too risky. So when a Royal Dutch Shell PLC ship went aground on

PARIS (AFP) ― Astronomers using the most advanced land telescope in the world said on Wednesday they had unlocked knowledge about how formidable “gas giant” planets such Jupiter and Saturn come into being.These vast but uninhabitable worlds are created by gobbling up gas and dust that envelope young stars in a murky disc, they believe.The evidence comes from observations of a youthful star called HD 142527 which is located more than 450 light years from Earth.Stars are born from a cloud of cosmi

President-elect prioritizes science, tech convergence and creativity to create more jobs

Moderately overweight people are less likely to die than people of normal weight, a U.S. government study published Wednesday indicates.Being substantially obese, with a body mass index of 35 and higher, does raise the death risk 29 percent, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention‘s National Center for Health Statistics said in the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.But overweight people with a BMI of 25 to 30 -- who make up more than 30 per

Babies start learning language in the womb and at birth can differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, U.S. scientists say.Researchers at the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma report unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they‘ve heard.That’s because sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing have developed by 30 weeks of gestation, they said.“The

The use of antidepressants during pregnancy is not linked to a higher overall risk of stillbirth and death in newborns, a study said Tuesday, confounding a long-held opposing view of such drugs.The Swedish study of more than 1.6 million births in five Nordic countries included nearly 30,000 women who had filled in a prescription for an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) during pregnancy.The researchers found that the 1.79 percent of mothers exposed to an SSRI had higher rates of still

An ancient "Megapiranha" weighing around 20 pounds delivered a bite with a force more fierce than even the toothy Tyrannosaurus rex, a U.S. researcher says.Based on bite strength versus body size as found in modern piranhas, the Megapiranha of 10 million years ago could have had a bite force from 280 to 1,070 pounds -- 30 times its body weight -- and possibly more, University of Washington biology doctoral student Stephanie Crofts said."If our calculations are correct, Megapiranha was probably a