Read our live updates on coronavirus HERE Coronavirus: The symptoms

The Duke of Sussex has helped launch a new mental fitness platform aiming to help servicemen and women manage their mental health.

One month after the debut of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19, the database of coronavirus-related research papers has doubled in size – and has given rise to more than a dozen software tools to channel the hundreds of studies that are being published every day about the pandemic. In a roundup published on the ArXiv preprint server this week, researchers from Seattle's Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft Research and other partners in the project say CORD-19's collection has risen from about 28,000 papers to more than 52,000. Every day, several hundred more papers are being published, in… Read More

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Haircare just went hi-tech

Devices that buzz when someone comes too close and wearables that tell you how long you've spent in the company of someone with covid-19, how tech is trying to break us out of lockdown

Vodafone's new thermal detection cameras will help businesses scan the temperature of people entering the building

Thinning the Sierra Nevada forest by removing trees by hand or using heavy machinery is one of the few tools available to manage forests. However, finding the best way to thin forests by removing select trees to maximize the forest's benefits for water quantity, water quality, wildfire risk and wildlife habitat remains a challenge for resource managers.

Evidence continues to mount that the Neandertals, who lived in Europe and Asia until about 40,000 years ago, were more sophisticated people than once thought. A new study from UC Davis shows that Neandertals chose to use bones from specific animals to make a tool for specific purpose: working hides into leather.

What's the weirdest thing you learned this week? Your answer is about to get a lot weirder.

High-quality tool kits come in a variety of sizes and styles for your home repair needs. Just a hammer and a flathead screwdriver won't cut it.

Enjoy the real feel and sound of drumming without any of the noise (or neighbor complaints).

Sharing third-party AWS workflow options that can be integrated to increase your operation's effectiveness and productivity when working in the cloud. 

Keep on reading: Automating the Cloud: AWS Tools and Tips

With a few dollars, researchers replicated an instrument that typically costs thousands 

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today released a new report showing that the government’s health care fraud prevention and enforcement efforts recovered more than $4 billion in taxpayer dollars in Fiscal Year 2010.

At a Chicago summit highlighting a new high-tech war against health care fraud, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder today discussed how the Affordable Care Act and the Obama Administration’s Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT) are helping fight Medicare fraud.

The Justice Department announced today that a federal court has permanently barred Cash Management Systems, a Virginia corporation, from promoting two tax schemes that allegedly involve disguising wages as tool-reimbursement or tool-rental payments.

The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut announced today, together with the town of East Haven, Conn., and the East Haven Board of Police Commissioners, they have selected Kathleen O’Toole as the Joint Compliance Expert to assess and report on the implementation of a comprehensive settlement agreement to reform the East Haven Police Department.

Today, the Justice Department released a new tool to help state and local courts assess and improve their language assistance services for limited English proficient litigants, victims and witnesses who need access to court services.

by Charles Ornstein and Lena V. Groeger

Nursing home residents have been among those hardest hit by the new coronavirus. In some states, more than half of the recorded deaths have been long-term care residents. Some of the homes have been cited for putting residents at “immediate jeopardy” of harm or death, our analysis showed.

And many of the affected homes have been previously written up for violating federal standards. That’s true in California, New Jersey and New York.

We’re updating Nursing Home Inspect to include more information about nursing homes across the country, including past problems with infection control practices, and which ones have had cases of COVID-19 among residents or staff.

We introduced this resource in 2012 as a way to search through tens of thousands of nursing home inspection reports to find problems and trends.

You can easily compare the nursing homes in your state based on how many times they have been cited for violating infection control protocols in the past three inspection cycles (roughly three years). We’ve also added data from The Washington Post on homes with COVID-19 cases. Nursing Home Inspect also allows you to sort by the number of health deficiencies cited by regulators; the number of serious deficiencies per home (that is, deficiencies in which patients were put in immediate jeopardy of harm); the amount of fines imposed; and how often the government has suspended payments to the home for new patients, another type of penalty.

Our data is from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which has its own website called Nursing Home Compare. We’ve taken the information and organized it into an easy-to-use resource for families and residents, as well as researchers and other journalists.

Our site includes:

• State pages: Every state has its own section that allows you to compare all of the homes in a state on a variety of indicators.

• Individual nursing home pages: Every home has a section listing all of the health deficiencies identified within the past three survey cycles (roughly three years). The full text of these deficiency reports, if available, can be accessed via links from this page to CMS. Each home’s page also has ownership status — whether for-profit, government-run or nonprofit — and whether the home has been labeled by the government as a Special Focus Facility, meaning that it has many more problems than other homes. We’ve also labeled Special Focus Facility candidates, which meet the criteria to be a special focus facility but haven’t yet been designated as one. (We only include health deficiencies, not fire and safety violations, in this database.)

• State-by-state maps: The main page of the app shows how states compare in terms of the percentage of homes with at least one serious deficiency, the average fine paid by homes in the state, and the percentage of homes in each state with at least one infection-related deficiency.

• Top 20 Lists: We’ve listed the homes that have paid the most in fines in the nation and those with the highest number of serious deficiencies.

If homes violate federal standards, CMS may impose fines or suspend Medicare/Medicaid payments to the nursing home for new residents until the facility corrects the deficiency.

If problems persist or are not fixed, CMS can end its agreement with the nursing home. Additional details about CMS’ approach to enforcement can be found here.

Nursing Home Inspect continues to allow you to search through nearly 80,000 inspection reports by keywords, such as “choke” or “maggots,” to look for issues you care about. These search results can be sorted by date, city, state or severity of the deficiency.

Nursing homes are inspected on both a regular schedule and when there is a complaint. Inspectors typically work for state agencies paid by Medicare. If they find problems, known as deficiencies, they rank them on a scale of A to L, the most severe. The vast majority are either labeled D or E.

What you won’t find on these pages are self-reported quality measures for each home. Those can be found on Nursing Home Compare. We also don’t list the state sanctions imposed against homes because those are not centrally collected. For information on penalties within a given state, you should consult the state agency that regulates nursing homes. The federal government has a list of contacts available here.

When reading through inspection reports, it is a good idea to keep in mind the caveats we’ve outlined previously.

How We Combined Data Sources

To compile our app, we used different datasets: a listing of all Medicare-certified nursing homes, inspection violations and penalties, and deficiency report narratives.

We merged spreadsheets containing findings from routine inspections and those identified during complaint visits and kept only health violations, not fire safety violations.

We used each home’s unique identification code to match penalties imposed to the dates of their corresponding inspections so we could display that data together for each home. (We also noted some cases in which a penalty date did not have a corresponding inspection in the database.)

You can find the data we used on these sites:

• For a list of nursing homes: https://data.medicare.gov/Nursing-Home-Compare/Provider-Info/4pq5-n9py

• For penalties: https://data.medicare.gov/Nursing-Home-Compare/Penalties/g6vv-u9sr

• For health deficiency information: https://data.medicare.gov/Nursing-Home-Compare/Health-Deficiencies/r5ix-sfxw

• For deficiency report narratives (updated in April 2020): http://downloads.cms.gov/files/Full-Statement-of-Deficiencies-April-2020.zip

When the world economy was starting to face financial fragility, the external shock of the COVID-19 pandemic put it into freefall. In response, the United States Federal Reserve launched a series of facilities, including extending its swap lines to a number of other advanced economy central banks and to two emerging economies. Outside of the…

Editor's Note: In this blog, Vera Songwe introduces the African Leadership Transitions Tracker, a new interactive that aims to start a broader conversation about leadership transitions and what they mean for the region and beyond. On March 28, Nigerians voters will go to the polls to participate in their nation’s fifth election since the military…

Architects usually keep their proprietary research locked up and closely held. Perkins + Will has done the opposite and made it a public service. Launched at Greenbuild the Precautionary List is a compilation of available data on chemicals and

Vibrantly colored wire is saved from the landfill and woven into recycled fan cages to produce these fresh pieces of furniture.

It reveals what we already know but needs repeating – that more time in nature equals greater happiness in kids.

Raid other rooms for items that can help you cook more efficiently.

This classic design is 80 years young and some famous designers pay hommage.

Companies will do anything to protect their brand – maybe even redesign packaging.

Want to get quickly into the tree canopy? This modular set of stairs can be quickly and easily wrapped around any tree, without doing damage to the trunk.

In stark contrast to other flat-pack furniture designs, Groovebox is meant to be as simple to put together as possible, with no fasteners, tools, or mammoth assembly instructions needed.

This flexible line of furniture is made for people who are on the move a lot, and need furniture that's easy to assemble and customize.

The big day is over and it's time to think about getting rid of the tree. If you've got a sturdy one and want a piece of furniture, here's an idea.

Some are even containerized and self-service, and have a lot more than just tools.

Karaoke video explaining not to drink water from wells painted red as they contain high levels of arsenic (YouTube via RDI-Cambodia) For this writer, karaoke has long been thought as an activity to be endured rather than enjoyed (and I am sure I am not

These will make your task easier, more efficient, and altogether more pleasant.

One craftsman is on a mission. Not only is he reclaiming and repairing quality hand tools. He is taking on corporate hegemony in the process.

We love transformers, those things that serve multiple functions. But I wonder about this one.

The laser-outfitted satellite will be able to pick up shifts in the ice on a very small scale.

Access to safe, reliable and affordable sanitary napkins is a big barrier to equal opportunity for many girls in developing countries. This inexpensive and clever set allows girls and women to clean, dry and carry their pads discreetly.

If you like craftsmanship, woodworking, and traditional hand tools, or you just enjoy watching somebody else do all the work, you'll love this short film.

As Seattle welcomes yet another tool library, there are bigger picture lessons to be learned about the value of sharing.

Another product from Colombian studio DosUno Design (whose Rubix transformer furniture set we reviewed yesterday), Deckstool is a simple wood mat that folds into a stool. Apart from being perfect for small spaces,