Germany is fully committed to hydrogen to help make the industry more sustainable. The government in Berlin has therefore adopted a 38-measure plan to boost the production and use of hydrogen and increase spending on infrastructure, research and innovation. By 2030, Germany wants to have the capacity to generate 5 Gigawatts of hydrogen. That should have doubled five years later. …

Lettuce on gutters is in itself an absolute rarity in Switzerland. Of the three cultivation companies that are engaged in so-called hydro cultivation, the family company Wyssa in Galmiz (Kanton Freiburg) is the only one that grows the lettuce in the open air, not under glass. Despite the risk of bad weather and insects that is always lurking, the lettuce …

British medical staff will begin a trial on Thursday to determine whether two anti-malarial drugs can also be used in the fight against the coronavirus. These include hydroxychloroquine, which it says US President Donald Trump takes preventively to prevent him from getting sick. There are anecdotal evidence and some possible explanation on why hydroxychloroquine may prevent infection. However it wasn’t …

The coronavirus was known in France earlier than it was believed. On December 27 last year, a patient in a hospital was positive. That has only been established by testing a sample of the man that was taken at the time for the lung virus, French media report. The patient had pneumonia and was admitted to a hospital in the …

Leiden-based biotechnology company Pharming reports encouraging results with his drug Ruconest against Covid-19, which is caused by the new coronavirus. Results from tests in five patients prompted a more extensive study into the effect of the drug against the lung virus. Pharming initially developed Ruconest as a medicine against hereditary forms of angioedema, or acute swelling in the body. The …

The 2019-nCoV corona virus has claimed a first victim in Europe. In France, an eighty-year-old Chinese tourist succumbed to the effects of the COVID-19 disease on Friday, French health minister Agnès Buzyn reported Saturday. The tourist is said to be from the Chinese province of Hubei, the epicenter of the virus outbreak, and arrived in the French capital Paris in …

Sun bursts can disrupt radio signals, make navigation instruments more unreliable, or even shut down entire power plants. To better understand that space weather, a probe from the European space agency ESA has been heading for the sun since last night: Solar Orbiter. The probe was launched early this morning from Florida. It doesn’t happen often that a solar storm …

The new corona virus is significantly reducing economic growth in China. Credit rating agency S&P Global expects the rate of growth of the second largest economy in the world to fall to 5 percent in 2020. Last year the Chinese economy improved by 6.1 percent. That was already the weakest growth in the country in almost three decades. S&P Global, …

Google launches OpenSK. That code should make it easier for other parties to create hardware security keys. With OpenSK, Google is introducing an open-source tool for creating FIDO2-compatible security keys. Such keys enable two-factor authentication. The combination of safe hardware and software in things makes them unique, so that you can only unlock accounts when you have the key. OpenSK …

A telescope in Hawaii made the most detailed solar photo to date. Cells of cooler and hotter plasma are visible. We have never seen the sun so detailed. Wednesday evening the first images were presented that were made with the new Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on the Hawaiian island of Maui. They give a spectacular impression of the …