SpaceX is taking recycling to a whole new realm — all the way to orbit. On this week’s supply run to the International Space Station, SpaceX will launch a Dragon capsule that’s already traveled there. The milestone comes just two months after the launch of its first reused rocket booster for a satellite. “This whole notion of reuse is something that’s very, very important to the entire space industry,” NASA’s space station program manager Kirk Shireman said at a news conference Wednesday. While the concept is not new — the …

An Indian charity is using big data to pinpoint human trafficking hot spots in a bid to prevent vulnerable women and girls vanishing from high-risk villages into the sex trade. My Choices Foundation uses specially designed technology to identify those villages that are most at risk of modern slavery, then launches local campaigns to sound the alarm. “The general Indian public is still largely unaware that trafficking exists, and most parents have no idea that their children are actually being sold into slavery,” said Elca Grobler, the founder of My …

Nearly 40 years ago, a respected doctor wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine with some very good news: Out of nearly 40,000 patients given powerful pain drugs in a Boston hospital, only four addictions were documented. Doctors had been wary of opioids, fearing patients would get hooked. Reassured by the letter, which called addiction “rare” in those with no history of it, they pulled out their prescription pads and spread the good news in their own published reports. And that is how a one-paragraph letter with …

The head of a New York-based advocacy group has called on President Donald Trump and his older daughter to help secure the release of three men who reported labor violations at a Chinese company that makes shoes bearing the Ivanka Trump brand. “We appeal to President Trump, Ivanka Trump herself, and to her related brand company to advocate and press for the release of our activists,” Li Qiang, executive director of China Labor Watch, the men’s employer, said Wednesday. The Ivanka Trump brand has declined to comment.  The White House …

In the hot and humid town of Caicara, in the heart of Venezuela, some 20 piers jutting out of the vast Orinoco river gather mildew and rust. Brazilian construction company Odebrecht was meant to build an 11-km (seven-mile) bridge in the town — the longest in the South American country — in 2011, but the project ground to a halt a year ago. Now, a handful of workers do basic maintenance work. The bridge, meant to link the towns of Caicara and Cabruta, is just one of several abandoned Odebrecht …