The investment project is aligned with the following impact: Adequate, quality, sustainable, resilient, and safe transport infrastructure provided in the Greater Capital Region for the economic transformation of the country. The investment project will have the following outcome: Efficiency of road travel improved and the following outputs: (i) Output 1: Climate-resilient expressway along Laguna Lakeshore built; and (ii) Output 2: Institutional capacity of the Department of Public Works and Highways strengthened.

In the Laguna area, the government has prioritized improvement of public transport and is developing the South Commuter Rail Project, connecting Manila and Calamba. The government also released the Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program in 2017 to improve the efficiency of road-based public transport operations, and started to establish bus terminals, such as the Paranaque Integrated Terminal Exchange, for more efficient and convenient bus operations.

Asia and the Pacific’s developing economies are projected to grow 5.0% this year on the back of resilient domestic demand and strong export growth, particularly in the electronics sector.

The project will continue the support of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to Bangladesh in managing the influx of around one million displaced people from Myanmar (DPFM) since 2017. Now a protracted situation, the crisis is putting significant pressure on infrastructure and causing substantial challenges in terms of food, shelter, health, security, water, sanitation, and other services in the DPFM camps and host communities.

The proposed project will build a bridge across the Fanga'uta Lagoon in Nuku'alofa, the capital of the Kingdom of Tonga (Tonga). The crossing will consist of an approximately 720 m long bridge and 4.96 km of approach roads from Nuku'alofa to Vaini, southern Tongatapu.

For approval in 2023.

The South American lungfish has a whopping 180 gigabases of DNA in each cell, compared with 6 gigabases in human cells

Male fireflies caught in an orb-weaver spider’s web start flashing in an unusual pattern, a deadly deception that seems to attract additional victims for the spider

The veteran presenter adds authority to Secret Lives of Orangutans, a film about a family of endangered orangutans in Sumatra. File this new entry in his vast oeuvre under lovable but lightweight

The Origins and Habitability Lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a testbed exploring how geological conditions could impact life in environments such as early Earth, Mars or the icy moons of Jupiter

These photos showcase some of the intricately created birds' nests found in the Natural History Museum in Tring, UK, home to one of the world's largest ornithological collections

A survey found 66 species of insects making their homes in cobbled pavements on the streets of Berlin, and greater biodiversity near insect-friendly flower gardens

Captive dolphins are more likely to make an open-mouthed expression when their playmate can see them and they often reciprocate, hinting that it is a form of visual communication

Kew scientists use paramotorists to collect rare plant species from Peruvian desert oases

A new book from the science-writing legend is an Attenborough-esque romp through some of the wonders of the natural world. Just beware the title's misfiring metaphor

During a fight between two male mice, one will often run to a female mouse to distract their aggressor, a bait-and-switch strategy that could help abate social conflicts

Dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico have tiny bits of plastic in their breath, and this is probably a worldwide problem

Colossal, a US firm that is aiming to revive lost species such as the woolly mammoth, says it now has a near-complete genome of the extinct thylacine

For nervous newbie gardeners, starting out with a single plant in a small pot is pitched as an easy win by the horticultural industry. James Wong explains why it isn't

Single-celled organisms called archaea can become multicellular when compressed, highlighting the role of physical forces in evolution

DNA analysis suggests Pando, a quaking aspen in Utah with thousands of stems connected by their roots, is between 16,000 and 81,000 years old

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Never underestimate what a single gopher can achieve in a day: one of the burrowing mammals helped boost soil fungi in an area blanketed by ash from the explosive eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington state

Are points of infinite curvature, where general relativity breaks down, always hidden inside black holes? An audacious attempt to find out is shedding light on the mystery of quantum gravity

The New Horizons mission to Pluto, now zooming out of the Kuiper belt, has made a discovery that could upend what we know about where the solar system ends

People don't realise just how bad our antibiotic resistance problem is, says Jeanne Marrazzo, the top infectious disease specialist in the US

Whether space and time are part of the universe or they emerge from quantum entanglement is one of the biggest questions in physics. And we are getting close to the truth

Devices that let people with paralysis walk and talk are rapidly improving. Some see a future in which we alter memories and download skills – but major challenges remain

The International Space Station will burn up and splash down into the Pacific sometime around 2030. What could possibly go wrong? And will we ever see anything like the ISS again?

We instinctively know that relaxing feels good, but we are now figuring out what it does to the brain and uncovering the best ways to unwind to maximise its benefits

What anxiety actually is has puzzled scientists for decades. Now we are starting to figure out how it may arise from miscommunication between the body and the brain

How did the supermassive black holes we’re now seeing in the early universe get so big so fast? Astrophysicist Sophie Koudmani is using sophisticated galaxy simulations to figure it out

Daniele Oriti’s pursuit of a theory of quantum gravity has led him to the startling conclusion that the laws of nature don’t exist independently of us – a perspective shift that could yield fresh breakthroughs

Friends who blow hot and cold put more strain on your physical and mental health than enemies. Here's how to spot them and handle them

Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse peddles the idea that we have overlooked an extraordinary ancient civilisation. Flint Dibble explains why that is wrong, and why real archaeology is more exciting

What life is and how the mind works fall within the compass of one bold concept. But critics say that by attempting to explain everything, it may end up explaining nothing

Physicists finally know whether black holes destroy the information contained in infalling matter. The problem is that the answer hasn’t lit the way to a new understanding of space-time

The systems we use to produce food have many problems, from horrifying waste to their dependence on fossil fuels. Vaclav Smil explains how to fix them

Recent research shows that anti-inflammatory diets are not as faddish as they might sound, with the power to reduce the risk of heart attacks and some cancers

Diets that claim to control excess oestrogen or stress hormones are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. They could be good for us, just not for the reasons claimed

Our ancestors probably used a wide range of plant-based tools that have since been lost to history. Now we're finally getting a glimpse of this Botanic Age

Claudia de Rham has spent much of her life dedicated to unravelling the true nature of gravity, thinking deeply about gravitons, the hypothetical carrier of this enigmatic force

A super-stretchy hydrogel can stretch to 15 times its original length and return to its initial shape, and could be used to make soft inflatable robots

Cosmological puzzles are tempting astronomers to rethink our simple picture of the universe – and ask whether dark matter is even stranger than we thought

Information contained within quantum objects gets scrambled when they interact. Physicists have now derived a speed limit for this process, challenging the idea that black holes are the fastest data scramblers

The quantum principle of superposition – the idea of particles being in multiple places at once – could help make quantum batteries that charge within minutes

Ultra-fast pulses of laser light can be shaped into vortices similar to smoke rings – when chained together, they can carry enough information to transmit a simple image

The Linac Coherent Light Source in California fired an X-ray pulse that lasted only a few hundred billionths of a billionth of a second but carried nearly a terawatt of power

When I heard Stephen Hawking extol the mysteries of black holes, I knew theoretical physics was what I wanted to do. There is still so much to learn about these strange regions, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein