Man set up devices in Singapore blasting 50,000 scam calls in 50 minutes; victims lost S$1.6 million

The syndicated operation involved masterminds believed to be Taiwanese, drawing from a SIM pool purportedly located in Malaysia that housed multiple SIM cards in a single system.

The devices and a CCTV camera in one of the raided bedrooms. (Photo: Court documents)

Lydia Lam
02 Apr 2026

SINGAPORE: A Malaysian electrician was recruited by a syndicate and travelled to Singapore to set up devices in a rented house that would blast thousands of automated scam calls, with call origins masked to appear like they were being made locally.

8ui

Over 800 women in S’pore have frozen their eggs for non-medical reasons since 2023

In Singapore, women aged between 21 and 37 – regardless of their marital status – are allowed to undergo the procedure,
which preserves their fertility.

Summary

• Since Singapore allowed elective egg freezing in June 2023, over 800 women have undergone the procedure by end of December 2025, according to Health Minister Ong Ye Kung.
• 57% of women freezing their eggs are 35 years of age and older, 39% are 30-34, and 4% are under 30. The procedure allows women to preserve fertility as egg quality declines with age.
• Elective egg freezing costs about $10,000 per cycle in public hospitals, is not subsidised, and is available to women aged 21-37.

Feb 04, 2026

After a promising beginning, is Singapore's cultivated meat industry on the way to the slaughterhouse?

What is next for the nascent industry that seemed off to such a good start?

A chef prepares Good Meat's cultivated chicken at the Eat Just office in Alameda, California, on Jun 14, 2023.
(File photo: AP/Jeff Chiu)

Justin Ong Guang-Xi

17 May 2024


SINGAPORE: It was June 2022, and the lab-grown meat industry looked like it had a sizzling future.

The largest cultivated chicken meat facility in Asia broke ground in Singapore, with a 30,000 sq ft complex at Bedok Food City, set to produce "tens of thousands of pounds" of meat a year. 

Singapore appoints UK firm Mott MacDonald to study nuclear energy technologies

The Energy Market Authority said no decision had been made to deploy nuclear energy in Singapore.

A photo of nuclear power plants. (File photo: iStock)

Chelsea Ong

02 Sep 2025 

SINGAPORE: The Energy Market Authority (EMA) has appointed the Singapore office of British firm Mott MacDonald to study advanced nuclear energy technologies, it announced on Tuesday (Sep 2).

Record 122°C subsurface temperature found in Sembawang, suggesting geothermal energy potential

Geothermal energy, a clean and renewable source of energy from the ground, could reduce Singapore’s reliance on fossil fuels.

Granite rock core samples obtained from 1,200m below ground at the Sembawang site. (Photo: NTU)

Erin Liam
03 Jul 2025


SINGAPORE: At a small plot of land just 600m from Sembawang Hot Spring, researchers have found subsurface temperatures of 122 degrees Celsius - the highest recorded in Singapore to date. 

Singapore looks to build first-of-its-kind renewable energy farm in waters around Raffles Lighthouse

Raffles Lighthouse on Pulau Satumu, the southernmost islet in Singapore waters. (Photo: Chew Hui Min)

The energy generated could be used to charge electric harbour craft, in line with upcoming requirements to decarbonise the maritime industry.

Jeraldine Yap
Louisa Tang

09 Aug 2024 



SINGAPORE: A renewable energy farm could be built in the waters around Raffles Lighthouse, with a feasibility study expected to begin in the fourth quarter of this year.

The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) told CNA that it has earmarked 30ha around the island and is looking into installing solar panels above the sea surface and tidal turbines underwater.

Observers said it would be the first facility in Singapore to combine harnessing energy from the sun as well as tides on a large scale.

PUB partnering UCLA and American startup to build world’s largest ocean-based carbon dioxide removal plant in Tuas

A rendering of an ocean-based carbon dioxide removal plant.

PUB, Singapore's national water agency PUB, is teaming up with an American university and startup to build the world's largest plant that will remove carbon dioxide from seawater and the atmosphere
When fully completed, the plant in Tuas — named Equatic-1 — will be equipped to remove 10 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per day from seawater and the atmosphere
This is more than 100 times the amount a trial plant has been able to remove

SHYNN ONG

February 27, 2024


SINGAPORE — Singapore's national water agency PUB is teaming up with the University of California (UCLA) and a UCLA-linked startup to build the world's largest plant that removes carbon dioxide from seawater and the atmosphere.

Full of beans: scientists use processed coffee grounds to make stronger concrete

Australian engineers say they can make concrete nearly 30% stronger by incorporating processed grounds into the material

Donna Lu

Tue 22 Aug 2023


In an idea that fittingly arose over a cup of coffee, researchers have devised a technique to recycle used coffee grounds to make stronger concrete.

Engineers at RMIT University say they have developed a way to make concrete nearly 30% stronger by incorporating processed coffee grounds into the material.

Samples of unroasted coffee beans, roasted coffee beans, spent ground coffee and the team’s coffee biochar.
Photograph: Carelle Mulawa-Richards, RMIT University

Fat, Sugar, Salt … You’ve Been Thinking About Food All Wrong

Scientists are asking tough questions about the health effects of ultra-processed diets. The answers are complicated—and surprising.

IN THE LATE 2000s, Carlos Monteiro noticed something strange about the food that Brazilian people were eating. The nutritionist had been poring over three decades’ worth of data from surveys that asked grocery shoppers to note down every item they bought. In more recent surveys, Monteiro noticed, Brazilians were buying way less oil, sugar, and salt than they had in the past. Despite this, people were piling on the pounds. Between 1975 and 2009 the proportion of Brazilian adults who were overweight or obese more than doubled.

This contradiction troubled Monteiro. If people were buying less fat and sugar, why were they getting bigger? The answer was right there in the data. Brazilians hadn’t really cut down on fat, salt, and sugar—they were just consuming these nutrients in an entirely new form. People were swapping traditional foods—rice, beans, and vegetables—for prepackaged bread, sweets, sausages, and other snacks. The share of biscuits and soft drinks in Brazilians’ shopping baskets had tripled and quintupled, respectively, since the first household survey in 1974. The change was noticeable everywhere. When Monteiro first qualified as a doctor in 1972, he’d worried that Brazilians weren’t getting enough to eat. By the late 2000s, his country was suffering with the exact opposite problem.

Singapore digs deep to unleash geothermal energy potential

17 Aug 2022

But the volumetric extent of hot rock where geothermal can be sourced is unknown.

First published online at Asian Power

Unlike Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan, Singapore has no known shallow heat source. That is why the country exerted more efforts to unearth its geothermal potential to diversify its energy sources. It turned out that its geothermal potential could cover a sizable portion of Singapore’s energy mix, an expert said.

The Energy Market Authority (EMA) in April [2022] issued a request for information to conduct a geophysical investigation project to assess the country’s geothermal energy potential. The EMA said that progress in technologies such as the Advanced Geothermal Systems enabled the extraction of heat from hot dry rock and at greater depths, opening the potential for geothermal applications locally as the country is within a region of high subsurface heat flow.

“If found to have substantial geothermal resource potential, Singapore could consider the technology options available to deploy geothermal energy locally,” it said.

IMDA investigating virtual telco Gorilla for halting mobile services without seeking its approval

Users of Gorilla's mobile services in Singapore were advised to move to another provider to maintain uninterrupted service
as its mobile plans had to be suspended due to technical upgrades. Unsplash

• The Infocomm Media Development Authority is investigating Gorilla Mobile for not seeking the necessary approval before halting their mobile services
• Doing so before ending of services is required under the Service-Based Operations License, which allows an operator to provide services-based telecommunications services here
• The authorities' response came after the virtual telco earlier announced an abrupt cessation of its mobile services in Singapore

TAUFIQ ZALIZAN

January 19, 2023

New MIT system could cool buildings up to 10℃— without electricity

The system worked three times better than today’s state-of-the-art passive cooling system.

By Sam Jarman

October 13, 2022


As the world’s climate continues to heat up, the global demand for air conditioning is now skyrocketing. In 2019, the need for cooling drew in 8.5% of the world’s total electricity consumption, equating to some 1 billion tons of CO2 emissions.

As more air conditioning units draw ever more power each year, we now appear trapped in a cycle, only accelerating the problem of global heating further.

Resilience, self-sufficiency important but world will be worse off if we go too far: Lawrence Wong

Shipping containers seen at PSA Tanjong Pagar Terminal. (File Photo: CNA/Calvin Oh)

Yasmin Begum

14 Nov 2022 

SINGAPORE: Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong on Sunday (Nov 13) said that resilience and self-sufficiency are important attributes, but added that the world will be worse off if countries go too far.

At the evening reception for participants of the 17th Asia-Pacific Conference (APK) of German Business, Mr Wong noted that part of the desire of wanting to have greater resilience is about having more reliable networks.

This, Mr Wong said, meant complying fully with all international rules and obligations. 

Only 5% of plastic waste generated by US last year was recycled, report says

Americans discarded 51m tons of plastic in 2021 – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans or scattered in the atmosphere

Not a single type of plastic packaging in the US meets the definition of recyclable used by either the FTC or
the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s new plastic economy initiative. Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images

Nina Lakhani 

Mon 24 Oct 2022

Only 5% of the mountains of plastic waste generated by US households last year was recycled, according to new research by Greenpeace.

Americans discarded 51m tons of wrappers, bottles and bags in 2021 – about 309lb of plastic per person – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans or scattered in the atmosphere in tiny toxic particles.

The plastics problem is not just down to wanton consumerism or laziness – in fact the situation would still be bad even if every household separated every piece of plastic and disposed of it in a dedicated recycling plant, according to Greenpeace.

Not a single type of plastic packaging in the US meets the definition of recyclable used by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s new plastic economy initiative, the report found.

The SR 71 was at least 60 years ahead of its time.

The question was …is the SR 71 a product of its time? (Time frame would be late 1950s to 1966.)Former U-2 technician Damien Leimback wrote; the following *In my opinion, this man is brilliant.*He Disagrees with the question that the SR 71 was a product of its time.

I disagree because of the technologies that had to be invented or perfected in order for the plane to work that did not exist before the types (I include the A-12 here) introduction.

Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work

If the plastics industry is following the tobacco industry’s playbook, it may never admit to the failure of plastics recycling.

By Judith Enck and Jan Dell

The Atlantic

MAY 30, 2022

About the authors: Judith Enck is a former EPA regional administrator, the president of Beyond Plastics, and a visiting professor at Bennington College. Jan Dell is a chemical engineer and the founder of the Last Beach Cleanup.


Americans support recycling. We do too. But although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work. The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled—even though much of it wasn’t.

Recycling in general can be an effective way to reclaim natural material resources. The U.S.’s high recycling rate of paper, 68 percent, proves this point. The problem with recycling plastic lies not with the concept or process but with the material itself.

Commentary: Synthetic milk made without cows? That could radically disrupt the dairy industry

No cows needed. Unlike synthetic meat - which can struggle to match the complexity and texture of animal meat - synthetic milk is touted as having the same taste, look and feel as normal dairy milk, says this writer.

File photo. Draining leftover milk from the udder of a cow at a dairy farm in Dmytrivka, eastern Ukraine, Aug 10, 2022.
(AP Photo/David Goldman)

Milena Bojovic

31 Aug 2022 

SYDNEY: The global dairy industry is changing. Among the disruptions is competition from food alternatives not produced using animals – including potential challenges posed by synthetic milk.

Pair of new studies point to natural Covid origin

Fusion Medical Animation/Unsplash

The researchers concluded it was unlikely that there was human circulation prior to November 2019.

July 27, 2022

WASHINGTON — An animal market in China's Wuhan really was the epicentre of the Covid pandemic, according to a pair of new studies in the journal Science published Tuesday (July 26) that claimed to have tipped the balance in the debate about the virus' origins.

Answering the question of whether the disease spilled over naturally from animals to humans, or was the result of a lab accident, is viewed as vital to averting the next pandemic and saving millions of lives.

The first paper analysed the geographic pattern of Covid cases in the outbreak's first month, December 2019, showing the first cases were tightly clustered around the Huanan Market.

The second examined genomic data from the earliest cases to study the virus' early evolution, concluding it was unlikely the coronavirus circulated widely in humans prior to November 2019.

Both were previously posted as "preprints" but have now been vetted by scientific peer review and appear in a prestigious journal.

News Release: NREL Creates Highest Efficiency 1-Sun Solar Cell

May 18, 2022 

The record-setting solar cell shines red under blue luminescence. Photo by Wayne Hicks, NREL

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) created a solar cell with a record 39.5% efficiency under 1-sun global illumination. This is the highest efficiency solar cell of any type, measured using standard 1-sun conditions.

EMA issues Request for Information to assess geothermal energy potential across Singapore

Sembawang Hot Spring Park is one of the sites of the exploratory studies currently conducted by the
Nanyang Technological University. (Photo: CNA/ Jeremy Long)

Ang Hwee Min

20 Apr 2022 

SINGAPORE: The Energy Market Authority (EMA) has issued a Request for Information in its bid to assess the geothermal energy potential across Singapore, as part of moves to decarbonise the power sector for a more sustainable energy future.

The Request for Information is to facilitate a geophysical investigation into possible approaches, methodologies and execution details in carrying out the geothermal potential assessment, said EMA in a press release on Wednesday (Apr 20).