Local govts support state-owned enterprises expanding hiring of graduates, expected to help alleviate unemployment pressure

Many localities have issued policies to encourage state-owned enterprises to play an exemplary role in stabilizing employment and expand recruitment of college graduates, with some provinces and cities requiring no less than half of the hiring quota at state-owned enterprises be dedicated to college graduates. The office of the Guangdong Provincial People's Government recently published ... Read more

Hubble telescope snaps stunning pic for its 26th birthday

Time to add another gorgeous space photo to the Hubble Space Telescope’s list of greatest hits. For the orbiting observatory’s 26th anniversary in space, astronomers snapped a picture of the Bubble Nebula, a seven-light-year-wide pocket of gas being blown away by a blazing massive star about 7,100 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. The star ... Read more

Limestone world gobbled by planet-eating white dwarf

SAN DIEGO — A remote planet — the first with hints of a limestone shell — has been shredded by its dead sun, a new study suggests. A generous heaping of carbon is raining down on a white dwarf, the exposed core of a dead star, astrophysicist Carl Melis of the University of California, San ... Read more

Courts’ use of statistics should be put on trial

The Rev. Thomas Bayes was, as the honorific the Rev. suggests, a clergyman. Too bad he wasn’t a lawyer. Maybe if he had been, lawyers today wouldn’t be so reluctant to enlist his mathematical insights in the pursuit of justice. In many sorts of court cases, from whether talcum powder causes ovarian cancer to The ... Read more

Single-atom magnets store bits of data

NEW ORLEANS — ­The tiniest electronic gadgets have nothing on a new data-storage device. Each bit is encoded using the magnetic field of a single atom — making for extremely compact data storage, although researchers have stored only two bits of data so far. “If you can make your bit smaller, you can store more ... Read more

Pollution regulations help Chesapeake Bay seagrass rebound

Underwater grasses are growing back in the Chesapeake Bay. The plants now carpet three times as much real estate as in 1984, thanks to more than 30 years of efforts to reduce nitrogen pollution. This environmental success story shows that regulations put in place to protect the bay’s health have made a difference, researchers report ... Read more

Hospital admissions show the opioid crisis affects kids, too

As I’ve been reporting a story about the opioid epidemic, I’ve sorted through a lot of tragic numbers that make the astronomical spike in deaths and injuries related to the drugs feel more real. The rise in the abuse of opioids — powerfully addictive painkillers — is driven by adults. But kids are also swept ... Read more