A select list of stories to read before you start your day

Kent earthquake 'causes homes to shake'  BBC News

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151 homes for Keyworth recommended for approval by council  West Bridgford Wire

Cornwall earthquake: Homes shake in Helston  BBC News

Climate change: Cardiff study says ground-water could heat homes  BBC News

Somerset earthquake: Homes shaken by 3.2 magnitude tremor  BBC News

The 1.3 million nursing home residents in the U.S. make up less than 0.5 percent of the nation’s population, but represent approximately 15 percent of COVID-19 related deaths to date.

Eight-year-old Mariana Aceves is doing her math homework — subtraction by counting backwards — while sitting on the bed she shares with her mom, Lorena Aceves.

They're sitting on the bed because they have nowhere else to go: they live in an 8-foot-by-12-foot room called a tiny house. It's part of Seattle's transitional housing where people experiencing homelessness can live until they find a job and a place of their own.

There's room for the bed they share, a TV shelf, "and a little tiny plastic dresser, and then all of our clothing and our food goes underneath our bed," Lorena Aceves says.

Tens of millions of kids are taking classes online at home right now because of the coronavirus pandemic. That's hard enough for most families. But, if you're homeless and have no computer, sketchy wifi, and no quiet place to study, it's even more difficult. That's the case for the one and a half million school kids currently experiencing homelessness across the U.S.

When Seattle's schools closed in March, Aceves had to quit her new job, because she couldn't find childcare. She and her daughter have been holed up in their tiny house ever since.

"It's the boredom," Aceves says, "and me trying to reach out and find resources — work, a car, things like that — while also making sure that she's entertained."

Aceves and her daughter have a tiny amount of private space. Other homeless families have no privacy at all.

Sixteen-year-old Capelle Belij is living with his parents at a shelter, part of a network of family shelters in the Seattle area run by the nonprofit Mary's Place.

The Belijes share a room with two other families, divided only by curtains.

"My friends, like, come up to my bed space and ask if I want to play or something," Belij says. "If we had our own place, I could learn better."

Three-quarters of children and youth considered homeless live doubled-up with another family. That's the situation for the family of 17-year-old Michelle Aguilar. She's part of KUOW's youth reporting program, called RadioActive.

"I can't really find a specific space where it's like quiet and calm and I can actually have wifi," Aguilar says.

Since Aguilar's shared bedroom doesn't have wifi, she ends up in the living room or kitchen with the rest of her family.

"And they just, like, continue their chaotic life of yelling and screaming and, like, playing music and listening to the TV and cooking," she says.

"Whenever I'm, like, in the environment of it being really loud," Aguilar says, "I tend to, like, read over and over and over and over the assignment."

"We're definitely very concerned with there being an achievement gap during this time," says Tisha Tallman, the executive director of the National Center for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. "The longer this goes, the more likely our children are to fall behind."

And, Tallman adds, schools provide much more than an education: many homeless kids get two meals per day there, and they rely on it as a safe and stable place to be.

Back in her tiny house, Lorena Aceves is trying to keep her daughter's education on track with a strict schedule of math, reading, and typing.

"Even though this is frustrating," Aceves says, "we are having this time together and that's something typically that we don't have."

Aceves says it's good to feel close to her daughter during a time that she has to stay far away from nearly everyone else.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Householders who believe that climate change increases flood risk are up to 12% more likely to protect their homes against flooding than those who do not hold this belief, finds recent research from Germany. The national survey also found that previous experience of flood damage increased the likelihood of households introducing flood protection measures.

Motivating homeowners to carry out energy-efficient refurbishments remains a significant challenge for policymakers. New research from Germany has called for more government incentives and better communication strategies to ensure homeowners are aware of the advantages of making energy saving changes to their homes.

A UK Government scheme, designed to help finance energy efficiency improvements in the home, has been assessed in a recent study. The researchers advise that better information for homeowners is needed to encourage uptake of the ‘Green Deal’ initiative, and point to Germany’s Passivhaus standard as an aspirational model for green retrofitting.

Simple measures to upgrade buildings by improvements to insulation or heating systems could result in energy savings of up to 85% in Italian homes, according to recent research. Across Europe, such measures could potentially provide energy savings of more than 40% on average, say the researchers.

The expression dog is man's best friend might have more weight in the case of first-year university students suffering from homesickness, according to a new UBC study.

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Air pollution via small particulate matter (PM) from diesel fumes and other sources is of growing concern in urban areas, and contributes to poor air quality. In European urban areas, PM pollution often exceeds World Health Organization (WHO) safe levels for human wellbeing. In response to this, the European Commission has encouraged researchers to develop a low-cost, sustainable material that captures these particles in order to clean the air1. This study created a new PM capture material using sustainable chemical processes where the carbon footprint and energy use of the production process of the remediation material is taken into account. The newly developed porous material is called ‘SUNSPACE’ (an acronym derived from ‘(SUstaiNable materials Synthesized from By-products and Alginates for Clean air and better Environment’).

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