Consider helping our honeybees by planting native flowers.

Student Jack Ross Pilkington is working to save dying bee populations and has even become a bit of a beekeeper.

Re-wilding nature is always controversial, as evidenced by the conflicting views in North Carolina over the reintroduction of the red wolf.

A new report from the Health Effects Institute says are breathing air that's considered unsafe by the World Health Organization.

Conservation efforts pay off for mountain gorillas, which have been re-classified from "critically endangered" to "endangered" by IUCN.

The western monarch population may be on the verge of collapsing.

In Japan, they call it "rougai." In North America, the rage against older generations is about to get much, much worse.

Habitat conservation and international assistance have helped India's tiger population rise 30% since 2015.

New Cognition Testing technology expands company's offerings to adults

The current worldwide population of professional developers is projected to grow from 23.9 million today to 28.7 million in 2024 according to Evans Data's Global Developer Population and Demographic Study.

With offices in Alpharetta and Sandy Springs, Atlanta Specialized Care offers a variety of counseling interventions to address many challenges but is unique in their additional area of expertise working with adults on the autism spectrum.

Each and every day, social media tools change the way that organizations
interact with their users.

A recent report from the Center For Urban Transportation Research at University of South Florida titled Routes To New Networks: A Guide To Social Media For The Public Transportation Industry (66p. PDF) explains how these new platforms offer not only more personal one-on-one interaction than traditional media, but also represent the essence of niche marketing.

It is undeniable that social media is all the buzz. For some, utilizing new media tools may come as second nature. For others, however, entering the world of social media means taking a giant leap into the world of online communications.

One thing is certain – social media platforms are allowing a new opportunity for transportation providers to directly communicate with their target audiences. Communication is moving in this direction – with or without your organization.

The report analyzes the usefulness of and applications for social networks, written blogs, audio/video blogs, microblogs (e.g. Twitter), photo sharing, video sharing, user-generated content and mobile web content.

The report states that key points to consider when determining which tool(s) to use are:

1) Who is my target audience and what tools are they using?
2) What type of information do I want to communicate?

Content must always resonate with your audience. What can you provide that would be of value?

Earlier this year, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) published Funding The Public Transportation Needs Of An Aging Population (57p. PDF).

It explains how rapid growth in the number of older people in the United States during the coming decades will lead to greatly increased needs for expanded and enhanced public transportation services. This report:

a) identifies the range of actions that will be needed to expand mobility options for older people, including accessible public transportation services;
b) quantifies the demand for these public transportation services; and
c) estimates the funding that will be needed to provide them.

Needed actions have been identified by means of a review of the extensive literature on this
subject. The actions needed to expand mobility options for older people include:

• Enhancements to fixed-route public transportation operations and planning such as additional bus operator training, incorporating travel needs of older people in route planning and stop placement, and coordination with other agencies and transportation providers
• Enhancements to public transportation vehicles such as low-floor buses, kneeling buses, improved interior circulation, additional stanchions and grab bars, ergonomic seating designed for older riders, and accessibility features either required or encouraged by ADA like lifts and ramps, larger letters on head signs, and stop announcements
• Actions to help older people take advantage of existing services, like presenting information in ways that are easy to read and as clear as possible, information and assistance programs to connect older people with appropriate services, and outreach and training programs
• Expansion of supplementary services including flexible route and community transportation services, ADA complementary paratransit, non-ADA demand-responsive services, taxi subsidy programs, and volunteer driver programs
• Application of universal design strategies at transit facilities, bus stops, and on streets and sidewalks in the immediate vicinity of transit facilities and stops

These are the actions of greatest concern to public transportation agencies, but they are not the
only actions needed.

Other important actions include assuring supportive services to caregivers
who provide transportation, encouraging further development of unsubsidized private
transportation services, increasing the availability of accessible taxicabs, coordinating with non-emergency medical transportation provided under Medicaid and Medicare, and supporting
modifications to automobiles and roadways to increase the safety of older drivers.

Finally, we wanted to take a closer look at U.S. Parking Policies: An Overview Of Management Strategies put out by the Institute For Transportation And Development Policy in New York.

This report highlights best practices in parking management in the United States.

In the last decade, some municipalities have reconsidered poorly conceived parking policies to address a host of negative impacts resulting from private automobile use such as traffic congestion and climate change. Unchecked, these policies have proven to be a major barrier to establishing a balanced urban transportation network.

Many aspects of current parking management in the United States do not work reliably or efficiently for anyone: Motorists find themselves circling for long periods in search of a place to park; retail employees take choice parking locations away from potential customers; developers are compelled to provide more parking than the market requires; and traffic managers encounter difficulty handling traffic generated by new parking as there is often no link between parking price, supply and the amount of available road space.

Finally, the old parking paradigm doesn’t work for the environment, as hidden subsidies encourage over reliance on private car use — a major, growing contributor to global warming and air pollution.

This report identifies core sustainable parking principles and illustrates how smarter parking management can benefit consumers and businesses in time and money savings, while also leading to more livable, attractive communities.

Margaret M. Parker, MD, MCCM, speaks with Rashid Alobaidi, MD, on his article titled Population-Based Epidemiology and Outcomes of Acute Kidney Injury in Critically Ill Children published in the January 2020 issue of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.

The Northwest Forest Plan (the Plan) is a large-scale ecosystem management plan for federal land in the Pacific Northwest. Marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) populations and habitat were monitored to evaluate effectiveness of the Plan. The chapters in this volume summarize information on marbled murrelet ecology and present the monitoring results for marbled murrelets over the first 10 years of the Plan, 1994 to 2003.

The marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) ranges from Alaska to California and is listed under the Endangered Species Act as a threatened species in Washington, Oregon, and California. Marbled murrelet recovery depends, in large part, on conservation and restoration of breeding habitat on federally managed lands. A major objective of the Northwest Forest Plan (the Plan) is to conserve and restore nesting habitat that will sustain a viable marbled murrelet population. Under the Plan, monitoring is an essential component and is designed to help managers understand the degree to which the Plan is meeting this objective. This report describes methods used to assess the status and trend of marbled murrelet populations under the Plan.

This is the second in a series of periodic monitoring reports on northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) population and habitat trends on federally administered lands since implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994. Here we summarize results from a population analysis that included data from longterm demographic studies during 1985–2008. This data was analyzed separately by study area, and also in a meta-analysis across all study areas to assess temporal and spatial patterns in fecundity, apparent survival, recruitment, and annual rates of population change.

By Jon Queally Common Dreams “This is the stuff that worries me most. We don’t know what we’re doing, not trying to stop it, [and] with big consequences we don’t really understand.” The first global scientific review of its kind … Continue reading →

By Kristie Auman-Bauer Penn State News Climate change is causing glaciers to shrink, temperatures to rise, and shifts in human migration in parts of the world, according to a Penn State researcher. Brian Thiede, assistant professor of rural sociology, along … Continue reading →

By Jon Queally Common Dreams “This is the stuff that worries me most. We don’t know what we’re doing, not trying to stop it, [and] with big consequences we don’t really understand.” The first global scientific review of its kind … Continue reading →

Classical studies on aspiration-based dynamics suggest that a dissatisfied individual changes strategy without taking into account the success of others. This promotes defection spreading. The imitation-based dynamics allow individuals to imitate successful strategies without taking into account their own-satisfactions. In this article, we propose to study a dynamic based on aspiration which takes into account imitation of successful strategies for dissatisfied individuals. This helps cooperative members to resist. Individuals compare their success to their desired satisfaction level before making a decision to update their strategies. This mechanism helps individuals with a minimum of self-satisfaction to maintain their strategies. If an individual is dissatisfied, it will learn from others by choosing successful strategies. We derive an exact expression of the fixation probability in well-mixed populations as in structured populations in networks. As a result, we show that selection may favor cooperation more than defection in well-mixed populations as in populations ranged over a regular graph. We show that the best scenario is a graph with small connectivity.

We consider the problem of efficiently simulating population protocols. In the population model, we are given a distributed system of $n$ agents modeled as identical finite-state machines. In each time step, a pair of agents is selected uniformly at random to interact. In an interaction, agents update their states according to a common transition function. We empirically and analytically analyze two classes of simulators for this model.

First, we consider sequential simulators executing one interaction after the other. Key to the performance of these simulators is the data structure storing the agents' states. For our analysis, we consider plain arrays, binary search trees, and a novel Dynamic Alias Table data structure.

Secondly, we consider batch processing to efficiently update the states of multiple independent agents in one step. For many protocols considered in literature, our simulator requires amortized sub-constant time per interaction and is fast in practice: given a fixed time budget, the implementation of our batched simulator is able to simulate population protocols several orders of magnitude larger compared to the sequential competitors, and can carry out $2^{50}$ interactions among the same number of agents in less than 400s.

King County added more people than only two other U.S. counties, which are located in the Sunbelt.

Demand for the Chinese medicine 'ejiao' is having humanitarian repercussions in Africa due to donkey poaching.

The drastic decline over the past four decades is linked to widespread drought which is causing bodies of water to disappear, devastating waterbird population numbers.

A combination of drought, disease and concerted eradication efforts have seen a huge drop in Queensland's feral rabbit population to their lowest levels in more than 30 years.

A large bushfire is continuing to burn through swamp and bushland on North Stradbroke Island, off Brisbane, ahead of an expected influx of 8,000 school holiday visitors.

The Federal Government announces it will stump up the funds in a bid to replenish native fish populations that were decimated during the summer fish kills.

High-density developments are cropping up in almost every Melbourne suburb and local resident groups have had enough.

Louise Murphy spends every day caring for her elderly mother, but says no-one is helping her care for herself. She says her carers' fatigue is compounded by the fact that respite care is expensive, and her fears about putting her mother into aged care.

Along the Victorian coastline, residents in booming seaside towns fear the rapid rate of development is ruining the character of the communities. The Government has promised to strike a balance between growth and protection, but residents fear it may be too little, too late.

Pastoralists are begrudgingly starting to buy fly nets for the first time, a bush fashion faux pas that is normally associated with overseas tourists visiting the outback.

With a rapidly ageing population, few Australians have been left untouched from navigating the vast and often complicated aged-care system be it for a parent, partner or themselves.

They are the lifeblood of Australia's smaller regional towns, selling everything from ammunition to bread, but what's it really like behind the counter at a country town's local store?

North Queenslanders plead with the government to help them eradicate an increasing number of wild pigs, which are threatening the environment and putting road users at serious risk.

The Sloane's froglet used to live and breed across vast areas of Victoria and New South Wales, but now it survives in just a few wetland pockets, which are being replanted to help it thrive.

This floodplain is a hotbed for ecology - but big floods may have drowned too many rats

South-East Queensland's bat population is in crisis as the species faces a mass starvation event which is seeing rescue groups inundated with as many as 50 calls a day reporting deaths and injuries in public spaces and backyards.

With an influx of 350,000 new residents expected by 2041, locals are concerned the planning and development will continue to alter the Gold Coast's unique identity.

Whale watchers spot hundreds of humpbacks, with the population looking healthy, on annual migration census day.

Given enough attention, a browser that closes the digital divide between us and our older generation could soon become a reality.

The world has lost more than one quarter of its land-dwelling insects in the past 30 years, according to researchers whose big picture study of global bug decline paints a disturbing but more nuanced problem than earlier research.

The world has lost more than one quarter of its land-dwelling insects in the past 30 years, according to researchers whose big picture study of global bug decline paints a disturbing but more nuanced problem than earlier research.

It is often said that good things come in groups of three, and that might be the case for a trio of research projects aimed at reducing a threat to Bermuda’s marine biodiversity: the invasive lionfish. BIOS said, “While many invasive species disrupt natural ecosystems by spreading disease or competing for food and habitat, lionfish […] (Click to read the full article)

After sequencing the Neanderthal genome, scientists discovered all modern humans carry some Neanderthal ancestry in their DNA — including Africans, which was previously not known. 

Combining two insect-control techniques, researchers largely prevented reproduction in a mosquito species known to carry Zika, dengue, and yellow fever.

MORE banks are now offering mortgages specifically designed for older borrowers and retirees, figures reveal. Lenders are clamouring to launch new products and change existing terms to meet an ageing population.

The snag that won attention this year tops out about 18 feet high, well away from my prying eyes.

When did you last see a glow worm? Most likely, quite some time ago. Depending on how young you are, you may have never seen one at all. Those light-emitting insects, Wordsworth's "earthborn stars", have been declining in the UK for decades. That means that scientists now see them in fewer places, and even in those pockets where conditions are right for them, there are fewer of them to be found.