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What 30 Years of Studying the New England Woods Reveals About the Colors of Changing Leaves

An ecologist’s long walks and detailed observations allowed him to chronicle the shifts in an iconic habitat and grow a once-overlooked branch of science





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Nearly three years since launch, Webb is a hit among astronomers

Demand for observing time on Webb outpaces supply by a factor of nine.




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Thousands of hacked TP-Link routers used in yearslong account takeover attacks

The botnet is being skillfully used to launch "highly evasive" password-spraying attacks.




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Pentagon secrets leaker Jack Teixeira is sentenced to 15 years in prison

A federal judge sentenced Jack Teixeira, a Massachusetts Air National Guard member, to prison after he pleaded guilty to leaking highly classified military documents about the war in Ukraine.




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Court hears from 9-year-old girl who says she was sexually assaulted by Manitoba priest last year

A now nine-year-old girl who says she was sexually assaulted by a priest last year in Little Grand Rapids First Nation told court on Tuesday she remembers feeling scared as the priest allegedly walked her to his bedroom inside the church that day.



  • News/Canada/Manitoba

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Hopes And Fears For The Future Of The World, With Ted Koppel

The conflict in Syria rages on, the United States' relationship with Iran remains strained, and China is taking hold as an emerging superpower. As part of TOTN's "Looking Ahead" series, NPR commentator Ted Koppel looks to the future of international relations.




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After 11 Years Behind The Host Mic, Neal Conan Signs Off

NPR's Neal Conan reflects on his 11 years of hosting Talk of the Nation and thanks some of the influential contributors to the show along the way. After 36 years at NPR, Conan signs off.






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Squadron 42’s new 2026 launch date will miss its original target by 11 years

RSI said single-player Star Citizen campaign was "feature complete" a year ago.




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Pièce de résistance: 25 years of ‘One Piece’

A quarter-century in, Eiichiro Oda’s sprawling Japanese pirate saga has transformed into an ever-evolving odyssey, spawning a multimedia franchise to rival its Western counterparts 




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Lead melam artiste Satheesan Marar gears up for Kerala’s annual temple festival season

Peruvanam Satheesan Marar recalls his initiation into the percussion ensemble and how he gained expertise in playing different instruments




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5 years after ICE raid, Mississippi chicken workers more prepared

President-elect Trump has promised mass deportations, including workplace raids like those that took place during his first term at chicken processing plants in rural Mississippi.





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Software unicorn Sirion appears to have moved its headquarters out of Washington

The contract software company closed a $110 million Series D round in 2023, one of the largest venture capital deals in Washington last year.




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A ‘Mystery Mollusc’ Has See-Through Skin and Wears a Hood to Capture Prey

Researchers describe a new nudibranch that is genetically drastically different from its closest relatives.




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Coleen Rooney clears up ‘rubbish’ rumours about her I’m a Celeb stint

TV personality responded to rumours that she is exempt from some challenges




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Musical duo Simon & Garfunkel recently had emotional reunion after years of silence

The sound of silence, no more: Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, who as folk duo Simon & Garfunkel were one of the most popular American musical acts of the 20th century, recently reunited after years without speaking.




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Annual rental prices fell for the 1st time in over three years, but only in big cities

Canadian rental prices fell 1.2 per cent in October compared to the same time last year. It's the first time that annual rents have declined since July 2021, according to a new report.




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Border agency clears employee after Indian media reports link him with terrorism

A Canada Border Services Agency superintendent is speaking out after being targeted by the Indian government with allegations of murder and terrorism — allegations Canadian authorities say are not backed by any evidence.




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Fears of secrecy over bungles

A plan to penalise public hospitals for procedures that resul­t in errors is proving harder than first thought.




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Hardie Polymers celebrates 100 years

Founded in 1924 as J&G Hardie, Hardie Polymers, the Glasgow-based polymer supplier, celebrates its 100th anniversary.




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The International Space Station Has Been Leaking for Five Years

Pesky leaks on the International Space Station aren’t the most serious issue facing U.S. human spaceflight




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Revised APRA Bill Clears House Subcommittee

The proposed American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) has taken its first step U.S. House legislative process with several issue disagreements becoming more evident. On May 23, the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Data, Innovation and Commerce approved the updated APRA, advancing the bill to full committee consideration. Just prior to the […]




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Sea Turtle Ears Inspire a New Heart Monitor Design



This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

Sea turtles are remarkable creatures for a number of reasons, including the way they hear underwater—not through openings in the form of ears, but by detecting vibrations directly through the skin covering their auditory system. Inspired by this ability to detect sound through skin, researchers in China have created a heart-monitoring system, which initial tests in humans suggest may be a viable for monitoring heartbeats.

A key way in which doctors monitor heart health involves “listening” to the heartbeat, either using a stethoscope or more sophisticated technology, like echocardiograms. However, these approaches require a visit to a specialist, and so researchers have been keen to develop alternative, lower cost solutions that people can use at home, which could also allow for more frequent testing and monitoring.

Junbin Zang, a lecturer at the North University of China, and his colleagues specialize in creating heart-monitoring technologies. Their interest was piqued when they learned about the inner workings of the sea turtle’s auditory system, which is able to detect low-frequency signals, especially in the 300- to 400-hertz range.

“Heart sounds are also low-frequency signals, so the low-frequency characteristics of the sea turtle’s ear have provided us with great inspiration,” explains Zang.

At a glance, it looks like turtles don’t have ears. Their auditory system instead lies under a layer of skin and fat, through which it picks up vibrations. As with humans, a small bone in the ear vibrates as sounds hit it, and as it oscillates, those pulses are converted to electrical signals that are sent to the brain for processing and interpretation.

iStock

But sea turtles have a unique, slender T-shaped conduit that encapsulates their ear bones, restricting the movement of the similarly T-shaped ear bones to only vibrate in a perpendicular manner. This design provides their auditory system with high sensitivity to vibrations.

Zang and his colleagues set out to create a heart monitoring system with similar features. They created a T-shaped heart-sound sensor that imitates the ear bones of sea turtles using a tiny MEMS cantilever beam sensor. As sound hits the sensor, the vibrations cause deformations in its beam, and the fluctuations in the voltage resistance are then translated into electrical signals.

The researchers first tested the sensor’s ability to detect sound in lab tests, and then tested the sensor’s ability to monitor heartbeats in two human volunteers in their early 20s. The results, described in a study published 1 April in IEEE Sensors Journal, show that the sensor can effectively detect the two phases of a heartbeat.

“The sensor exhibits excellent vibration characteristics,” Zang says, noting that it has a higher vibration sensitivity compared to other accelerometers on the market.

However, the sensor currently picks up a significant amount of background noise, which Zang says his team plans to address in future work. Ultimately, they are interested in integrating this novel bioinspired sensor into devices they have previously created—including portable handheld and wearable versions, and a relatively larger version for use in hospitals—for the simultaneous detection of electrocardiogram and phonocardiogram signals.

This article appears in the July 2024 print issue as “Sea Turtles Inspire Heart-Monitor Design.”




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208236: Punjab Home Secretary fears Hafiz Saeed's release

Admitting that they are "facing a tough time in the courts," Asif related that the LHC has asked for the evidence that the Home Department used to extend the detention. "There has never been a case against them," he noted, "and we have no criminal record of these gentlemen."





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Iran and Nuclear Verification: 20 Years of Continuing Sturm and Drang

Report by Trevor Findlay about recent politics surrounding the Iranian Nuclear Program.









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Delve into 90 years of British architectural history with Google Arts & Culture

Explore RIBA's online collection with Google Arts & Culture, featuring new virtual tours and stories.



  • Arts & Culture
  • UK

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Three Years

For 18 months after Charlie’s death, my only desire was to grieve. I celebrate how deeply I let myself experience my grief and how completely I prioritized myself during this time. I took a sabbatical, and only did what I felt like doing. At first it was mostly crying in bed. After a couple of […]




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100 Years of Writer’s Digest (#WritersDigest100): Some Thoughts

Writer’s Digest is celebrating its 100th anniversary, which is pretty epic. At the same time, the parent company of F&W is also declaring bankruptcy. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… I’ve been at the writing game since the early 1990s. I was a teenager when I first mailed off […]





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Earth is now gaining less heat than it has for several years

The recent surge in warming led to fears that climate change may be accelerating beyond model projections, but a fall in how much heat Earth is gaining makes this less likely




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One course of antibiotics can change your gut microbiome for years

Antibiotics can reduce diversity in the gut microbiome, raising the risk of infections that cause diarrhoea - and the effects may last years




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Oldest tadpole fossil known to science dates back 161 million years

A fossil of a tadpole from Argentina is 161 million years old - and isn't that different from some modern species




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Carbon emissions from private jets have exploded in recent years

The climate impact of flights taken by the super-rich rose sharply from 2019 to 2023, fuelling calls for a carbon tax on private aviation





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Liz Hears A Who

whatchoo tolkien about




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'Not a single person ever paid me back': Man loans friends over $18,000, friends avoid repaying him for years

This person is lending out way too much money to their friends! There's only so much you can do for your friends before you're officially the one being taken advantage of. After all, friendship is supposed to be a give-and-take. You laugh together and cry together. You listen to their troubles and they listen to yours. If it's not reciprocal, it can leave one or both of you with conflicting feelings. You might start to wonder why you're always the one who has to pay the bill at the end of a meal because your friend keeps insisting they've fallen on hard times. Or in this person's case, you might accidentally loan your friends thousands of dollars over time, leaving you with an entire friend group who owes you big.

This person, u/mastagoose, has learned the hard way that they need to be cautious when mixing money with friendship. There's that common rule that states that if you're going to loan someone money, just give it as a gift, and don't expect to get it back. That way, there won't be any hard feelings when you notice your friend wearing a new outfit or buying an expensive meal, knowing that they haven't paid you back. This guy not only hasn't forgotten about their numerous loans to friends, but they made a list about it, and the people of the internet were not exactly kind to them. Instead, they were repeatedly told that they should stop lending people money ASAP. Maybe they'll take the internet's advice! 

Up next, read about one 22-year-old employee who "decided to start including the Chairman/CEO…on all emails" in order to get their coworkers to reply to their emails. 




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'Leaving was the best thing I did': Employer of 3 years hires new employee at $30k higher than experienced worker, they quit

It's no secret that a lot of employers in as many industries allocate more budget to hiring than they do to staff retention. This is a bit silly when you consider that large organizations will go on to spend tens of thousands of dollars on recruiting, onboarding, and training processes—in addition to value lost due to lost time and productivity of vacant roles. Though some of this cost is silent or not immediately apparent on the books and, in contrast, the idea of approving even half that money in the upfront cost of giving a raise is daunting. While this is an organizational flaw that often occurs, there are, of course, more intentional reasons why employers choose not to give their workers even deserved raises.

Whatever the reason or cause, unfortunately, this ends up with a turnover of the most experienced staff who are frustrated at their own lack of advancement and pay that is falling behind the market rate, discovering that new hires are being paid more than them despite their experience and contribution.

That's what this worker in a "niche" field discovered had happened when they learned that their employer of 3 years had hired a new hire at $30k more than they were currently earning. Frustrated, they found a new job as fast as possible.





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28-year-old employee flirts with supposedly single 40-year-old coworker, turns out she's been married for 16 years: 'She was lying about being single'

Here is another example of why one should never try to form a romantic attachment with a coworker. It never works out for a plethora of potential reasons. In this instance, however, the reasons had less to do with the professional side of things and more to do with this lying coworker's personal life.

The Redditor described how their close friend, a 28-year-old male employee at their company, had been engaging in continuous flirtations with his 40-year-old female coworker, who had led everyone in the office to believe that she was single. These weren't assumptions; she was actively advertising her single lifestyle to anyone who would listen. The younger employee even took her out on several dates, and the two seemed to be keeping their romantic lives and their professional lives separate.

Unfortunately for the younger guy, he and the Redditor discovered that she had been hiding her marriage of over 16 years. When the employee decided to get even with his coworker, things went south very quickly and HR ended up getting involved. Keep scrolling below for the full story. For more, check out this post about a company that tried to steal a job candidate's idea.




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Budget boost to UK economy forecast to fade after two years

The government's official forecaster raises its prediction for UK growth in 2024 and 2025 but reduces it for later years.




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Bitcoin tops record $80,000 as Trump nears sweep of US Congress

On the campaign trail the president-elect pledged to make America "the crypto capital of the planet".