Kenya's push to make 'boda-boda' motorbike taxis go electric
"The government wants Kenya's three million motorbike taxi riders to go green but only a few have done so." I last went to Kenya over 10 years ago and I got around Kitale on the back of push bikes by local riders. Motorised bikes 'boda-boda' were only just being introduced at the time. Apparently there...
Source: bbc.com
Elevated genetic risk for multiple sclerosis emerged in steppe pastoralist populations
"The last 10,000 years have seen some of the most extreme global changes in lifestyle, with the emergence of farming in some regions and pastoralism in others. While 5,000 years ago farmer ancestry predominated across Europe, a relatively diverged genetic ancestry arrived with the steppe migrations around...
Source: nature.com
Machines may be better at assisting, not replacing us.
Journalist Kawandeep Virdee sees if he can be replaced by AI by writing some predictions for 2024. "I gave ChatGPT the last 13 years of Nieman Lab predictions ... [and asked it what I'd write about in 2024]" [ChatGPT suggested] Navigating the infodemic: Strategies for media in the era of misinformation...
Source: niemanlab.org
The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment
Money always helps, but for the very poor, one lump sum can last a long time.
Source: vox.com
Recent waning snowpack in the Alps is unprecedented in the last six centuries - Nature Climate Change Carrer, Marco. Dibona,
Snow cover in high-latitude and high-altitude regions has strong effects on the Earth’s climate, environmental processes and socio-economic activities. Over the last 50 years, the Alps experienced a 5.6% reduction per decade in snow cover duration, which already affects a region where economy and...
Source: nature.com
Surfers offer free wooden bellyboards to cut plastic pollution
Traditional bellyboards are available for free across the UK, thanks to a startup that is committed to tackling discarded polystyrene boards
Source: positive.news
British Science Festival: The fight against microplastics
The British Science Festival is coming up In September, and one of the topics being explored across different events is microplastic pollution and how to tackle it. We discuss the events and why taking action now matters.
Source: britishscienceassociation.org
The Lyonesse Project: a study of the coastal and marine environment of the Isles of Scilly (OASIS ID cornwall2-58903)
This project was commissioned by English Heritage and carried out between 2009 and 2013 by Historic Environment Projects, Cornwall Council with a team of specialists from Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Exeter and Plymouth Universities, English Heritage's Scientific Dating Team, volunteers and local experts and...
Source: archaeologydataservice.ac.uk
Senior health professionals call for urgent climate briefing of all MPs by the chief scientific adviser: open letter to
Dear prime minister,
We wish to make you aware of our concern for the health of Angus Rose, a 52 year old man, who at the time of writing is on day 34 of a hunger strike outside Parliament, consuming only fluids, vitamins, and minerals.
His not unreasonable demand is that all members of parliament...
Source: bmj.com
Early warnings and emerging accountability: Total's responses to global warming, 1971-2021 Global Environmental Change.
Building upon recent work on other major fossil fuel companies, we report new archival research and primary source interviews describing how Total responded to evolving climate science and policy in the last 50 years. We show that Total personnel received warnings of the potential for catastrophic global...
Source: sciencedirect.com
Psychology of panic buying
I've been fascinated by the psychology of panic buying and it is clearly an area for future research. It has an enormous impact on delivery infrastructure and I wonder if anyone has been tracking the data of the causes and the impact in the current fuel 'crisis'. A systematic review from last year identified...
Source: nih.gov
Mirror, Mirror 2021: Reflecting Poorly | Commonwealth Fund
"How the 11 Countries Rank on Performance. The top-performing countries overall are Norway, the Netherlands, and Australia. The next three countries in the ranking — the U.K., Germany, and New Zealand — perform very similarly to one another." The UK was ranked #1 overall in 2017 - the last time this...
Source: commonwealthfund.org
Clinically contextualised ECG interpretation: the impact of prior clinical exposure and case vignettes on ECG diagnostic
Does teaching ECGs with a clinical vignette improve training? Not greatly ... but having seen a condition previously (and presumably the ECG that went with it) is probably best. The researchers concluded that "ECG training should therefore not rely on experiential learning
alone, but instead be supplemented...
Source: biomedcentral.com
Turkey's plastics ban: Where does the UK send its waste now?
Turkey is due to ban most plastic waste sent from the UK, so tonnes of packaging will need a new home.
Source: bbc.com
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
UK PM urges calm as Belfast protesters hijack bus, attack police
Crowds of youths in a pro-British area of Belfast set a hijacked bus on fire and attacked police with stones in the latest of a series of nightly outbreaks of violence that began last week.
Source: reuters.com
Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets
Last summer I blogged about using a Deep Neural Network to generate tweets but only used 3200 of my tweets. Since then I've used Twitter's archive mechanism to retrieve ALL my tweets (just over 30,000) to train a network. Not any old network - the GPT-2 model from OpenAI. This 'finetuning' of an existing...
International dual and joint degrees to get green light
"India is set to greenlight dual and joint degrees awarded by Indian universities with international partners as part of its internationalisation plan being pushed through forcefully since its inclusion last year in the National Education Policy (NEP), a blueprint for the next decade." These dual and...
Source: universityworldnews.com
Why European vaccine suspensions could have unintended consequences
Europe’s difficult rollout of covid-19 shots took another blow over the weekend, as several countries halted deployment of the AstraZeneca vaccine amid worries it could cause blood clots. On Monday Germany, Spain, Italy, and France were among those to suspend deployment of the vaccine, following similar...
Source: technologyreview.com
Opinion: The UK has a huge rubbish problem – but building new waste incinerators isn’t the answer
Some take waste directly from businesses, but the vast majority burn the contents of our wheelie bins – and around 12 per cent of that is plastic
Source: independent.co.uk
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