Over the last 25 years, deep-water oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico has increased significantly.

The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident should serve as a wake-up call to nuclear plant operators and regulators on the critical importance of measuring, maintaining, and restoring cooling in spent fuel pools during severe accidents and terrorist attacks, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

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The post Episode 963 Scott Adams: Reviewing the Two Movies of Reality and the New Press Secretary’s First Days appeared first on Scott Adams' Blog.

Hackers have hidden malware in a legitimate two-factor authentication (2FA) app for macOS to distribute Dacls, a remote access trojan associated with the North Korean Lazarus group. [...]

Effective flood-risk management requires accurate risk-analysis models. Conventional analysis approaches, however, are based on the evaluation of spatially homogenous scenarios, which do not account for variation in flooding across a river reach/ region. Since flood events are often spatially heterogeneous (i.e. unevenly distributed), this paves the way for error. Now, scientists have developed a novel framework for risk analysis that accounts for their heterogeneity, and successfully demonstrated the accuracy of the approach by applying it in a proof-of-concept exercise in Vorarlberg, Austria. By facilitating improved prediction and quantification of flood events, this model is likely to inform future flood-risk management and related decision-making.

Surveys have suggested that the public have become more annoyed by aircraft noise over recent decades. A recent study has investigated whether these results are partly caused by changes in survey methods and participants. However, no methodological issues considered could satisfactorily explain the rise in reported levels of annoyance at a given noise exposure level.

Consumers in France, Germany and the USA perceive ‘environmentally friendly’ packaging to be reusable, recyclable and ‘biodegradable’1, finds a new study. These results suggest that producers should emphasise the end-of-life merits of packaging to appeal to consumers’ environmental concerns, and design packaging that is reusable, recyclable and ‘biodegradable’. However, they also indicate a need to raise public awareness of packaging’s true life-cycle environmental impacts, such as those during production and transport, which are greater than consumers generally perceive them to be.

Wind and solar energy are effectively limitless resources, but construction of renewable power must compete for a finite amount of land. This study uses a constrained assessment of available land to see whether global energy demand could be fully met by renewable sources. The analysis predicts that by 2070, the world could produce between 730 and 3700 exajoules of electricity per year (EJ/a1) from renewable power, which, even at lowest available land estimates, could meet 2070 electricity needs in most countries.

Researchers have examined two cases of managed realignment in the UK, whereby coastal areas are deliberately flooded to recreate protective salt marshes. They demonstrated that a sequential decision support system (DSS) can be combined with an ecosystem services approach to provide a robust economic valuation of managed realignment’s benefits. For the case studies analysed, the benefits of managed realignment were found to outweigh costs in the long-term.

In the real-time economy, the demand for cloud services keeps growing with the hybrid cloud as the optimal architecture for handling the inevitable complexity of the agile company’s IT infrastructure.

New research has explored public expectations of public transport. Surveys of Spanish citizens revealed that existing bus users have different expectations of transport quality compared to non- or “potential” users. The results may help to inform future public transport policy and campaigns which encourage more people to use public transport.

National Forest Programmes (NFPs) aim to incorporate the views of a wide range of stakeholders into the management of national forests. However, an analysis of NFPs in Bulgaria and Germany found they had little impact on forest policy. Despite this, stakeholders who took part in the NFP negotiations welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the policy-making process, even though they realised they may have little impact.

From 1980 to 2000 China quadrupled its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) whilst only doubling its energy use. New research has indicated that this trend will not continue and China is likely to experience much greater energy use, coal demand and CO2 emissions than has been forecast by international energy agencies.

Informing consumers about their energy use and giving advice on how it can be improved can result in lower public energy consumption, new research suggests. However, if such information campaigns are based solely on monetary savings they are not effective, the study concludes.

Alongside fines, prison sentences are important punishments for environmental crime, but there is uncertainty about how often they are used. This study summarises evidence from several countries, showing that prison is indeed a genuine threat for environmental criminals, but that more needs to be done to improve its credibility.

Twitter has introduced an update to its API platform to allow developers and researchers to study crucial public conversations around COVID-19 in real time.

Researchers have demonstrated how the ERICA Integrated Approach can be used to assess the effect of releasing radiation into the environment on local wildlife in a real-world situation. The study applied ERICA to a river in Norway and found that local wildlife was only exposed to low levels of radioactivity from the routine aquatic discharges of a nearby research reactor, although historical exposure was higher.

Controlled fires could help the regeneration capacity of some insects in regions of intensively managed forests, according to a recent study of Finnish forests that are part of an EU LIFE restoration project. Results indicated that fire can be an effective conservation measure but its impact depends on the region???s history and context.

New research has combined two different techniques for identifying hazards and assessing risks into a single dynamic risk assessment process. The new approach fills a gap in many current risk assessment techniques as it can be applied throughout the lifetime of a process, not just during its design phase, taking into account new information to update risk assessments and calculations systematically.

A method for developing ecological scenarios for assessing pesticides’ risks to aquatic wildlife has been developed. It is based on the selection of vulnerable taxa according to biological trait information, exposure conditions and environmental properties. The method should help decision makers define what to include in ecological models used for future pesticide risk assessments and is proposed as a way to increase the ecological realism of pesticide risk assessment.

Environmental policy makers increasingly rely on computer models to test traffic policies. Researchers have investigated the impact of reducing speed limits on traffic emissions using two different models, but the models produced some contradictory results. The researchers therefore warn policy makers to interpret model results very carefully and to avoid relying on simple 'macroscopic' models.

The results of a new study appear to support the view that the Montreal Protocol has been effective at protecting the ozone layer. Researchers modelled the impacts of the Protocol's phasing out of ozone depleting substances and found that they matched actual changes of global ozone over the last 50 years.

Measurements of individual vehicle emissions are usually made in laboratory tests. In this study, researchers followed cars driving in real conditions to measure emissions of air pollutants, including black carbon and nitrogen oxides. The study shows that diesel cars contribute disproportionately to air pollution, and highlights the value of on-road measurements.

The real-time economy requires instant processes in an increasing number of business functions.

This week, Myke quizzes Grey about the devices he uses to get his work done, and Grey gets very disappointed about how Myke arranges his iPhone.

Cutting edge neural network and artificial intelligence technologies, combined with the imaginative work of the $1 million Zillow Prize winners, creates most accurate Zestimate ever

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With its fresh and bold design, engaging content, and the creative use of augmented reality (AR) in its bimonthly magazine for students, NTU has earned approval from new and old readers alike, and now the evaluators at the prestigious International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Gold Quill Awards this year....

With Saudi Arabia as the linchpin, OPEC's importance in the global oil market is clear.

Many people are angry at Sony Pictures, calling out the filmmakers of "Peter Rabbit" for portraying the dangers of food allergies irresponsibly.

When we're hungry, our brains get more excited about high-calorie foods.

All of the oat-based cereals tested by EWG had traces of what the World Health Organization has named a "probable carcinogen."

Though childbirth is frequently spoken of in terms of pain and punishment, some women do experience what are known as orgasmic or ecstatic births.

New research concludes that hypersexuality is not a neurological or physiological disorder, but just heightened libido.

Even water tastes sweeter when you're in love, new research finds.

Kermit pops into ‘Saturday Night Live’ to discuss the school lunch standards.

Sensational headlines and varying reports about a North Carolina school lunch incident would have us think so.

Exotic beetles are killing America's ash trees, a popular source of wood for baseball bats. And as these verdant invaders spread into the Northeast, their grow

What good can an additional serving of fruit or vegetables a day do?

You know those baby registry lists you get in the mail when someone slips those retailers the news that you’re expecting? You’ll find everything from Exersa

The health benefits of almonds, which are an amazing superfood, are verified in several new studies.

If you want to get the most nutrients out of your veggies, don't worry about gaining polyphenols or losing nutrients. Just eat them.

Team at Seattle university is creating largest 3-D reconstruction that anyone has ever attempted, rebuilding the world one pixel at a time.

Your avatar may be just a virtual identity, but it can also affect how you are in the real world.

Being eco-minded on Earth Day is like being merry on Christmas. It's to be expected. But here are seven things you can actually do to wake you from your eco-slu

The ancient Romans saw 'Pluto's Gate' in what is now modern-day Pamukkale in Turkey as the entrance to the underworld. Now we know how it worked.

An honest story from an organic Japanese farm about what to do with an unneeded goat.

Fusion energy has proven an elusive goal.