One of the largest bears to ever walk Europe was a vegetarian
The extinct cave bear Ursus spelaeus appears to have descended from a vegetarian line of bears.
U.S. nuclear chief wants faster reforms
One year after Japan's Fukushima crisis began, the U.S. nuclear chief says American reactors should adopt safety reforms more quickly.
In post-tsunami Japan, Zen meets zeal
One year after Japan's tragic earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, its 'gaman' spirit of patience is growing more proactive.
Guess who wants to be a farmer?
One of the world's oldest professions is gaining popularity among America's youth, thanks to demand for organic food and a desire to get back to basics.
Quinoa nutrition facts
One of the latest crowned superfoods is quinoa. What makes ‘keen-wah’ so nutritious? We’ve got the scoop on quinoa nutrition facts.
Climate change doesn't exist in Florida, apparently
One of the states most at risk from climate change has reportedly banned officials from using the phrase 'climate change.'
One stop shop for eco-lingerie
For a big selection of eco-lingerie, MNN's lifestyle blogger recommends FaeriesDance.com — which stocks many hard-to-find European eco-fashion brands.
Which is worse for you, a random bedtime or getting less sleep overall?
One study that looked at kids' sleep and behavior patterns might have missed the bigger picture. Another study looks at academic performance.
Precautionary Principle: decision-making under uncertainty – September 2017
One of the greatest challenges facing today’s environmental policymakers is how to deal with complex risks, such as those associated with climate change. These risks are difficult to deal with because they are not precisely calculable in advance. Where there is scientific uncertainty about the full extent of possible harms but ‘doing nothing’ is also risky, decision-makers may use the precautionary principle. This Future Brief explores the role of the precautionary principle in EU law and policy, and examines key points of discussion drawn from the evidence.
Cyclists inhale high levels of traffic pollution
One of the benefits of cycling is improved physical health. However, recent research suggests that cyclists inhale more air pollutants than motorists in traffic, mainly due to faster, deeper breathing. This suggests that town planners should carefully consider cycle routes.
One third of all reptile species in EU at high risk of pesticide exposure
Pesticide exposure can have negative impacts on many species and is a major threat to biodiversity. A new study is one of few to assess the risks specifically for European reptiles. The results suggest that at least one third of European reptile species are at high risk of exposure, with lizards showing the highest sensitivity to pesticides.
More than protected areas needed to stop biodiversity loss
One strategy to halt the loss of biodiversity has been to create protected areas in the sea and on land. However, a new study suggests that unless additional measures are taken, particularly those that tackle human population growth and the increased use of natural resources, even the development of new protected areas will be unable to reverse the trend of global biodiversity loss.
Biodiversity in decline, but conservation efforts making a difference
One-fifth of the world's mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish are threatened with extinction, according to a recent report. The study notes that there have been many conservation success stories, but far greater long-term resources are needed to improve the outlook for the world's threatened vertebrate species.
One fifth of world's plants at risk of extinction
Over one fifth of all the world's plants are at risk of dying out, according to a recent report. Loss of habitats through converting natural areas to agricultural use is the largest threat to plants, affecting 33 per cent of plants assessed by this study.
As Amazon rises, so does the opposition
One of Athena’s larger goals is to end what it describes as a system in which Amazon competes with other companies to make and sell goods and then dictates the terms by which those competitors find their customers on Amazon’s platform and controls how they ship their wares to market.
Water pollution: finding appropriate limits for particulate matter
One of the most common causes of water quality impairment is suspended particulate matter (SPM). A study by a team of UK researchers suggests that standards for SPM set by EU member states to help achieve the WFD should reflect the natural differences in the levels of this pollutant that are expected in contrasting environments. Their study provides hints as to how a potential alternative system for regulating SPM concentrations might be devised.
Influencing environmental behaviour through nudging and information
One of the greatest challenges facing environmental policymakers is encouraging people to behave more sustainably. A recent study explores how 'nudging' people to make environmentally friendly choices, together with providing information, can be a successful combination for achieving behavioural change.
Urea fertilisation of the sea for CO2 removal: Issues for consideration
One method that has been proposed for removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere is to ‘fertilise’ the ocean to encourage phytoplankton (algae) blooms. A recent study has outlined the environmental, legal and social implications of large-scale fertilisation of the sea with urea in the Sulu Sea off the coast of the Philippines.
One of the most significant Etruscan discoveries in decades names female goddess Uni
Archaeologists translating a very rare inscription on an ancient Etruscan temple stone have discovered the name Uni -- an important female goddess.
OneSignal launches Shopify App for customer engagement
One-Way Sidewalks And Parking Lot Dining Rooms: Is This The Future?
A man decorates a bistro table outside his restaurant amid the coronavirus pandemic in Atlanta on April 27. As states reopen, some are allowing restaurants to add outdoor seating in streets and parking lots.; Credit: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
Margaret J. Krauss | NPRSmall businesses are essential to cities and towns across the country. They create jobs, they create a sense of place — think of New York City without bodegas, Portland, Ore., without bike shops, or your town without its dance studio or hardware store — but they also create sales, income, and property tax revenues.
"[It's] super important that we make it very easy for people to keep their purchases local," said Karina Ricks, director of the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure in Pittsburgh, Pa.
Cities like Pittsburgh must make it possible to return to the streets and shop without losing the safety of physical distancing, said Ricks. If only so many people are allowed into a store at one time, how can others line up outside? If restaurants operate at 25 percent capacity, where will expectant diners wait?
"It's going to require us to reimagine our streets," she said. "How much of our streets can we turn over?"
Many cities have already removed cars from streets to allow more people to walk and bike. They'll need even more space if people are allowed to go to shops and restaurants again, said Brent Toderian, the former chief planner for Vancouver, Canada who now leads his own company, TODERIAN UrbanWORKS.
"All of it requires more space between buildings, more life between buildings," he said. "If we try to do all that without inconveniencing the cars, we will fail."
In Tampa, Fla., officials will allow restaurants to add tables to streets in front of their establishments. In an Atlanta, Ga. suburb parking lots are the new dining room. Ricks wonders if one-way sidewalks could limit people's exposures to one another the way one-way aisles do in grocery stores. She said some Pittsburgh streets may open to cars only at certain times of the day, or speeds could be dramatically reduced. That way, street parking could be dedicated for walking, biking, or cafe tables while an adjacent travel lane for cars remains.
"I don't have the answers right now, but it's something that we're actively looking at," she said, citing a new city task force that will investigate the issue.
Public space always influences health outcomes and can produce health risks, said Keshia Pollack Porter, a professor at John Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. Whatever "normal" cities think they're returning to, this is a chance to evaluate how the public realm worked before, she said.
"We know that there are significant inequities," she said, pointing to pedestrian and cyclist fatalities that continue to rise, and communities that have lacked access to safe streets for decades.
In a post-pandemic world, with even fewer dollars for infrastructure and transportation, officials must be more careful than ever, said Toderian.
"Where we put our money based on our assumed narratives around what people will want to do — drive more, take public transit less — will create self-fulfilling prophecies," he said, and could exacerbate that other existential threat, climate change.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.
How to Disable Bing Search in the Windows 10 Start Menu
One of the features of the Windows 10 Start Menu is a built-in Bing search when a local search fails to find anything. Whether it be due to privacy reasons, bugs, or just personal dislike, this article will explain how to disable Bing search in the Start Menu. [...]
One Year After Release, National Academies Report Guides Lawmakers and Communities Looking to Cut Child Poverty
More than 9.6 million children — or 13 percent of all children in the U.S. — live in families with annual incomes below the poverty line, according to data from 2015. As closures and restrictions related to COVID-19 begin to impact the U.S. economy, it’s clear many more families will be receiving fewer paychecks and less income in the coming months, putting more children at risk of falling below the poverty line.
One Year After Hong Kong Summit, Developments in Human Genome Editing Underscore Urgency for International Agreement on Standards and Oversight
It has been a little over a year since the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, where scientist He Jiankui (pictured above) announced the birth of twins whose healthy embryonic genomes had been edited to confer resistance to HIV.
National Crime Victimization Survey Is Likely Undercounting Rape and Sexual Assault - Justice Department Should Create New, Separate Survey
One of the nation’s largest surveys of crime victims is likely undercounting incidences of rape and sexual assault, making it difficult to ensure that adequate law enforcement resources and support services are available for victims, says a new report by the National Research Council.
New Dietary Guidelines Issued for Cats and Dogs
One out of every four dogs and cats in the western world is now obese. Like humans, dogs and cats that are obese run a higher risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, or other health problems.
Rotational switches in the two-dimensional fullerene quasicrystal
One of the essential components of molecular electronic circuits are switching elements that are stable in two different states and can ideally be switched on and off many times. Here, distinct buckminsterfullerenes within a self-assembled monolayer, forming a two-dimensional dodecagonal quasicrystal on a Pt-terminated Pt3Ti(111) surface, are identified to form well separated molecular rotational switching elements. Employing scanning tunneling microscopy, the molecular-orbital appearance of the fullerenes in the quasicrystalline monolayer is resolved. Thus, fullerenes adsorbed on the 36 vertex configuration are identified to exhibit a distinctly increased mobility. In addition, this finding is verified by differential conductance measurements. The rotation of these mobile fullerenes can be triggered frequently by applied voltage pulses, while keeping the neighboring molecules immobile. An extensive analysis reveals that crystallographic and energetic constraints at the molecule/metal interface induce an inequality of the local potentials for the 36 and 32.4.3.4 vertex sites and this accounts for the switching ability of fullerenes on the 36 vertex sites. Consequently, a local area of the 8/3 approximant in the two-dimensional fullerene quasicrystal consists of single rotational switching fullerenes embedded in a matrix of inert molecules. Furthermore, it is deduced that optimization of the intermolecular interactions between neighboring fullerenes hinders the realization of translational periodicity in the fullerene monolayer on the Pt-terminated Pt3Ti(111) surface.
One-Stop Shopping for Federal Scientific Collections
Federal agencies act as custodians of hundreds of diverse scientific collections that contain everything from plant and animal specimens, tissues, and DNA to microbes, minerals, […]
The post One-Stop Shopping for Federal Scientific Collections appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.
One way businesses are avoiding health care coverage for employees
Business Update with Mark LacterBusinesses are cutting back on hours to avoid having to provide health care coverage under the new Affordable Care Act.
Steve Julian: Business analyst Mark Lacter, who's affected here?
Mark Lacter: Thirty hours a week is the magic number for workers to be considered full time under the new law. If a business has 50 or more full-time employees, health care coverage has to be provided. Except that a lot business owners say that the additional cost is going to be a financial killer, so instead, some of them have been cutting back hours to below that 30-hour threshold. More than 200,000 Californians are at risk of losing hours from the health care law - that according to one study.
Julian: What kinds of businesses are doing this?
Lacter: Restaurant chains have received much of the attention, but the city of Long Beach, as an example, is going to reduce hours for a couple of hundred of its workers. And, last week came word that the L.A.-based clothing chain Forever 21 will cut some of its full-time employees to a maximum 29-and-a-half hours a week, and classify them as part time. That touched off an outcry on the Internet - people were saying that Forever 21 was being unfair and greedy - though the company says that only a small number of employees are affected, and that its decision has nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act. There's really no way to know - Forever 21 is a private company, which means it's not obligated to disclose a whole lot. What we do know is that those people will be losing their health care coverage.
Julian: And, the ultimate impact on businesses and workers?
Lacter: Steve, you're looking at several years before the picture becomes clear. Here in California, workers not eligible for health care through their employer can get their own individual coverage, and if their income levels are not over a certain amount, they'd be eligible for Medicaid. And, let's not forget many businesses already provide coverage for their employees. So, lots of rhetoric - but, not many conclusions to draw from, which does make you wonder why so many business owners are unwilling to at least give this thing a chance. Just doesn't seem to be much generosity of spirit for their workers, not to mention any recognition that if people can go to a doctor instead of an emergency room we'd probably all be better off.
Julian: Health care is far from the only controversy for Forever 21, true?
Lacter: In some ways, it's one of the biggest Southern California success stories. Don Chang emigrated here in 1981 from Korea at the age of 18, opened his first store in Highland Park three years later (it was called Fashion 21), and he never looked back. Today, revenues are approaching $4 billion. But, the guy must have some pretty hefty legal bills because his company has been accused of all kinds of workplace violations. The lawsuits alleged that workers preparing items for the Forever 21 stores didn't receive overtime, that they didn't get required work breaks, that they received substandard wages, and that they worked in dirty and unsafe conditions - sweatshop conditions, essentially.
Julian: Are most of their claims settled out of court? You don't hear much about them.
Lacter: They are, which means there's usually a minimal amount of media coverage. If a privately held company decides to keep quiet by not releasing financial results or other operational information, there's not likely to be much of a story - unlike what happens with a company like Apple, which is always under scrutiny. Sometimes, plaintiffs will try to organize class-action suits, but that's extremely tough when you're dealing with low-wage workers who are often very reluctant to get involved because of their legal status. And, let's not forget that Forever 21 - like any low-cost retailer - is simply catering to the demand for cheap, stylish clothes that are made as quickly as possible.
Julian: I guess you can't make that happen when wages and benefits are appreciably higher than your competition.
Lacter: The next time you walk into a Forever 21 store and wonder how prices can be so reasonable, that's how.
Mark Lacter writes for Los Angeles Magazine and pens the business blog at LA Observed.com.
This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.
One cold bug: Fossil beetle discovered in Antarctica
Antarctica is home to fewer insect species than anywhere else on earth. But it wasn’t always that way. A geologist digging in bluffs on Antarctica’s […]
The post One cold bug: Fossil beetle discovered in Antarctica appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.
One Scary Chicken—New species of large, feathered dinosaur discovered
Finding a fossil is the first step, recognizing it for what it truly is, is the real challenge. While closely studying three fossil skeletons from […]
The post One Scary Chicken—New species of large, feathered dinosaur discovered appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.
One in six stars has an Earth-sized planet
This artist’s illustration represents the variety of planets being detected by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. A new analysis has determined the frequencies of planets of all […]
The post One in six stars has an Earth-sized planet appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.
One supernova type, two different sources
Two very different models explain the possible origin of Type Ia supernovae, and different studies support each model. New evidence shows that both models are correct - some of these supernovae are created one way and some the other.
The post One supernova type, two different sources appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.
One hundred sixty years after his birth a racehorse’s bones return to Lexington
Known as one of the greatest racehorses of his day and sire to more winning horses than any other American thoroughbred before or since, this Smithsonian loan returned the legendary Lexington's remains to the town of his birthplace some 160 years after he was born.
The post One hundred sixty years after his birth a racehorse’s bones return to Lexington appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.
One-dimensional ladder gallium coordination polymer
A one-dimensional ladder-type coordination polymer, poly[[(μ2-hydroxido)(μ2-1H-pyrazole-3,5-dicarboxylato)gallium(III)] monohydrate], [Ga(C5H2N2O4)(OH)(H2O)]n or [Ga(HPDC)(OH)(H2O)]n, I, isotypic with a V3+ coordination polymer previously reported by Chen et al. [J. Coord. Chem. (2008). 61, 3556–3567] was prepared from Ga3+ and pyrazole-3,5-dicarboxylic acid monohydrate (H3PDC·H2O). Compound I was isolated using three distinct experimental methods: hydrothermal (HT), microwave-assisted (MWAS) and one-pot (OP) and the crystallite size should be fine-tuned according to the method employed. The coordination polymeric structure is based on a dimeric Ga3+ moiety comprising two μ2-bridging hydroxide groups, which are interconnected by HPDC2− anionic organic linkers. The close packing of individual polymers is strongly directed by the supramolecular interactions, namely several O—H⋯O and N—H⋯O hydrogen-bonding interactions.
The `id` attribute got more `class`y in HTML5
One of the more subtle yet awesome changes that HTML5 brings, applies to the id attribute. I already tweeted about this a few months ago, but I think this is interesting enough to write about in more than 140 characters.
The HTML5 `document.head` DOM tree accessor
One of the lesser known HTML5 JavaScript goodies is the document.head DOM tree accessor, which is a more efficient (and easier to type) alternative to document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]. Native support for document.head is very easy to detect…
One more Covid death takes toll to 10; cases cross 500
As 32 states and Union Territories imposed complete lockdown till March 31, the Centre asked them to clamp curfew wherever necessary in the wake of people defying lockdown orders.
One hundred years: the story of Henley's / by Ernest Slater
Archives, Room Use Only - TK5157.S53 1937
One hundred years of submarine cables / by G.R.M. Garratt
Archives, Room Use Only - TK5661.G38 1950
Besiktas player, staff member test positive for coronavirus
One Besiktas player and a staff member tested positive for the coronavirus three days after the announcement that the Turkish league will resume next month, the club said on Saturday.
COVID-19: WHO Hand Sanitiser Formula Can Disable Coronavirus, Study Finds
One of the most 'needed' things currently after protection masks, hand sanitisers are the next best thing to regularly washing your hands with soap. Due to the increased demand and lack of supply of hand sanitisers, spotting one at your regular
COVID-19: Can Farting Spread The Coronavirus?
One of the most common questions asked in the event of coronavirus being declared as airborne in places that use aerosols is, 'can the coronavirus spread through farting?.' As weird as it may sound, health experts assert that it is indeed,
Arvind Swami To Play Villain In Nag Ashwin’s Next Starring Prabhas?
One of the most popular actors from the 90s, Arvind Swami is nowadays preferring to play the antagonist in films. After playing a villain in films like Thani Oruvan, Chekka Chivantha Vaanam, Bogan and others, the Roja actor is all set