Decade-long study shows half of all rivers in the world heavily impacted by humans
A team of researchers from several institutions in France and China has conducted a decade-long study of the degree of human impact on river systems around the world over the past two centuries. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study and what their findings revealed.
Source: phys.org
Feeding your cat a very meaty diet may mean it kills less wildlife
In a small trial in the UK, pet cats fed on an unusually meaty diet brought home 36 per cent fewer prey animals than cats given a typical diet. "Domestic cats seem to hunt less when their diets are richer in animal-sourced protein, suggesting that feeding cats more meat could help reduce their impact...
Source: newscientist.com
Perseverance on Mars: Where it is, and what the next steps are
NASA's first chat about its newest rover talks about the landing and what's next. "In their first press conference following Perseverance's successful landing on Mars, NASA and JPL scientists revealed some information on where the rover landed and what to expect for the next several days and weeks as...
Source: arstechnica.com
Nasa's Perseverance rover in 'great shape' after Mars landing
"Perseverance will now spend at least two years looking for evidence of past life on the Red Planet. The American space agency has successfully landed its Perseverance rover in a deep crater near the planet's equator called Jezero. "The good news is the spacecraft, I think, is in great shape," said Matt...
Source: bbc.com
Increasing Students Critical Thinking Skills and Learning Motivation Using Inquiry Mind Map
These researchers from Indonesia explore the use of inquiry-based models in encouraging critical thinking in medical students. "Critical thinking skills are very important to have for students given the rapid distribution of information. To promote the critical thinking skills of the student, it could...
Source: online-journals.org
Declining Life Expectancy in the United States
This Viewpoint reviews the social and economic drivers of declines in longevity in the US, especially among lower socioeconomic status groups, and proposes policy options for the Biden-Harris administration to mitigate the trend, including an increase in the federally mandated minimum wage. Atheendar...
Source: jamanetwork.com
No, frozen wind turbines aren't the main culprit for Texas' power outages
"Lost wind power makes up only a fraction of the reduction in power generating capacity that has brought outages to millions of Texans across the state during a major winter storm." Plenty of disinformation out there. There have been posts apparently showing a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine but it...
Source: texastribune.org
46,218 news transcripts show ideologically extreme politicians get more airtime
"We found that the House that’s shown on the news is much more ideologically extreme than the actual House."
Source: niemanlab.org
Abydos beer factory: Ancient large-scale brewery discovered in Egypt.
"The archaeological find in the Abydos burial ground is thought to date back about 5,000 years." They brewed beer in batch sizes of about 220 hectolitres and I bet they got away without paying much beer duty. Wonder if we can work out some of the recipes.
Source: bbc.com
Abundant Rain Turns Namibia Green
The landscape has been transformed by the wettest rainy season since 2011. "January 2021 saw rainfall totals double to triple the norm in the northeastern, central, and southern parts of Namibia. According to a weather monitor in Windhoek, 228 millimeters (9 inches) of rain fell in January; the long-term...
Source: nasa.gov
Greeks domesticated grapes about 4000 years ago to improve wine-making
We know that the ancient Greeks made wine as early as 4300 BC, but a new analysis of preserved seeds suggests grapes were domesticated around 2000 BC
Source: newscientist.com
Sharks at unprecedented risk of extinction after 71 per cent decline: Numbers of oceanic sharks and rays have declined at
Sharks at unprecedented risk of extinction after 71 per cent decline: Numbers of oceanic sharks and rays have declined at an “alarming” 71 per cent over almost half a century, leading to an unprecedented increase in their risk of extinction
Source: newscientist.com
Brain-Based Learning, Myth versus Reality: Testing Learning Styles and Dual Coding | Science-Based Medicine: Ed. Note: Today
Brain-Based Learning, Myth versus Reality: Testing Learning Styles and Dual Coding | Science-Based Medicine: Ed. Note: Today we present a guest post from Josh Cuevas, a cognitive psychologist and assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of North Georgia. Enjoy! "Since early on...
Source: sciencebasedmedicine.org
3D Scene Understanding with TensorFlow 3D
Posted by Alireza Fathi, Research Scientist and Rui Huang, AI Resident, Google Research "The growing ubiquity of 3D sensors (e.g., Lidar, depth sensing cameras and radar) over the last few years has created a need for scene understanding technology that can process the data these devices capture. Such...
Source: googleblog.com
Stonehenge: Did the stone circle originally stand in Wales?
Archaeologists now believe the stone circle stood 150 miles from its current location in Wiltshire. "One of Britain's biggest and oldest stone circles has been found in Wales - and could be the original building blocks of Stonehenge. Archaeologists uncovered the remains of the Waun Mawn site in Pembrokeshire's...
Source: bbc.com
Using whale songs to image beneath the ocean
Using whale songs to image beneath the ocean’s floor: Seismic data generated by whale songs helps build a picture of the ocean's base. "The song of a fin whale is not exactly the sort of thing you'd typically describe as musical. It's generally in the area of 20Hz, which sounds more like a series of...
Source: arstechnica.com
Using Technology to Teach the Complex Science of Climate Change
"The world of education is no stranger to controversy. Every year, you'll find a splashy headline about how different school districts teach different versions of history from very different history textbooks. Or you'll encounter one special interest group or another objecting to teachers covering topics...
Source: emergingedtech.com
Phrase of the day: Scaling Kubernetes to 7,500 Nodes
Scaling Kubernetes to 7,500 Nodes: We've scaled Kubernetes clusters to 7,500 nodes, producing a scalable infrastructure for large models like GPT-3, CLIP, and DALL·E, but also for rapid small-scale iterative research such as Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models. Scaling a single Kubernetes cluster...
Source: openai.com
Word of the day: deprecated
Geek talk. The tech behind this blog which takes any link that I find interesting and, instead of curating it for LinkedIn / Twitter / Facebook, curates it here on something I have control over broke. I accidentally upgraded the server to PHP8 and an old function in PHP each() no longer worked. Took...
Frontline workers left "risking lives to provide treatment and care"
"The Department for Health and Social Care's decision to prioritise hospitals at the beginning of the pandemic meant social care providers were left exposed by lack of PPE, says the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee in its first report on PPE procurement published today." "While government...
Source: parliament.uk
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