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Tailored messaging increases understanding of climate change in Republicans

A team of researchers at Yale University's Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has found that the use of tailored advertising can increase awareness among Republicans of the dangers posed by climate change. In their paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the group describes field...
Source: phys.org

Reuters, New York Times win Pulitzers for coverage of racial injustice, COVID-19

Reuters and the Minneapolis Star Tribune each won a Pulitzer Prize on Friday for journalism about racial inequities in U.S. policing, while the New York Times and the Atlantic were honored for chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic, the two topics that dominated last year's headlines.
Source: reuters.com

China’s GPT-3? BAAI Introduces Superscale Intelligence Model ‘Wu Dao 1.0’ | Synced

The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) releases Wu Dao 1.0, China’s first large-scale pretraining model.
Source: syncedreview.com

'Big risk': California farmers hit by drought change planting plans

Joe Del Bosque is leaving a third of his 2,000-acre farm near Firebaugh, California, unseeded this year due to extreme drought. Yet, he hopes to access enough water to produce a marketable melon crop.
Source: reuters.com

Tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants

 All viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, change over time. Most changes have little to no impact on the virus’ properties. However, some changes may affect the virus’s properties, such as how easily it spreads, the associated disease severity, or the performance...
Source: who.int

Then and now: Pandemic clears the air

Air pollution is highly damaging to the environment, but Covid lockdowns show we can clear the air.
Source: bbc.com

Covid-19 news: England sees rise in cases for first time in 5 weeks

The latest coronavirus news updated every day including coronavirus cases, the latest news, features and interviews from New Scientist and essential information about the covid-19 pandemic
Source: newscientist.com

Greta Thunberg aims to change how food is produced

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has set her sights on changing how the world produces and consumes food in order to counteract a trio of threats: carbon emissions, disease outbreaks and animal suffering.
Source: reuters.com

University of Northampton: The impact of COVID-19 on digital delivery - initial trend analysis

The speed and intensity of transitioning to mass online delivery of teaching has left in its wake a unique digital record, the patterns and trends of which reveal the story of the sector grappling to respond.
Source: jisc.ac.uk

Royal Mail trials drone delivery to Isles of Scilly

The drones could be used to fly post to some of the most remote communities in the UK.
Source: bbc.co.uk

Apple AirTags, Now Jailbroken, Could Become Even Bigger Privacy Nightmare - ExtremeTech

The new Apple AirTag is not the first smart tracker, but it's so good at what it does that it could actually be a privacy nightmare, an even greater concern after a security researcher has shown it's possible to "jailbreak" one.
Source: extremetech.com

US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack

The US acts to keep fuel flowing after its largest pipeline was hit by a ransomware cyber-attack. "Cyber-security firm Digital Shadows says the Colonial attack has come about due to the pandemic - with more engineers remotely accessing control systems for the pipeline from home. James Chappell, co-founder...
Source: bbc.com

Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid?

"The importance of airborne transmission in the pandemic was clear long before the World Health Organization finally began to acknowledge it." "If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small...
Source: nytimes.com

No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents' Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased

Digital technology is ubiquitous in modern adolescence, and researchers are concerned that it has negative impacts on mental health that, furthermore, increase over time. To investigate whether technology is becoming more harmful, we examined changes in associations between technology engagement and...
Source: sagepub.com

Human remains from Mary Rose show diversity of Tudor crew

A team of researchers with Cardiff University, the Mary Rose Trust, HM Naval Base and the British Geological Survey's National Environmental Isotope Facility has found evidence of racial diversity among the crew of the Mary Rose—a warship from the time of King Henry the VIII. In their paper published...
Source: phys.org

Bank of England predicts rebound in the economy

"The Bank of England said Britain's economy would grow by the most since World War Two this year and slowed the pace of its trillion dollar bond-purchasing programme, but stressed it was not reversing its stimulus." Strong indications finally of a bounce back in the economy highlight the devastating...
Source: reuters.com

Essential Technologies: The Tally Stick - The Scholarly Kitchen

From the Upper Paleolithic Era up until the mid 1800s, the tally stick was a remarkably long-lived piece of technology.
Source: sspnet.org

IEA issues 'dire warning' on CO2 emissions as it predicts 5% rise

Global CO2 emissions from energy are seen rising nearly 5% this year, suggesting the economic rebound from COVID-19 could be "anything but sustainable" for the climate, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday.
Source: reuters.com

It just got a little easier to move your Facebook posts to some other platform

Social networks have typically followed the roach motel model of customer data: Make it easy to push data in, but hard/impossible to pull it back out. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter all make money by knowing what information you've (wittingly or unwittingly) handed over â…
Source: niemanlab.org

Constructing Transformers For Longer Sequences with Sparse Attention Methods

"We show that carefully designed sparse attention can be as expressive and flexible as the original full attention model. Along with theoretical guarantees, we provide a very efficient implementation which allows us to scale to much longer inputs. As a consequence, we achieve state-of-the-art results...
Source: googleblog.com