The security situation in the Central African Republic remains dire, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said Thursday.

Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State, on Saturday, absolved himself of stigmatizing the state’s COVID-19 index case, Mrs. Susan Okpe (Nee Lawani). Ortom, who called on Mrs. Okpe to stop vilifying him, said he’s not the architect of her problem. The governor was responding to several videos by Mrs. Okpe wherein she accused him of […]

COVID-19: ‘I’m not architect of your problems, stop vilifying me’ – Gov. Ortom warns Benue index case, Susan Okpe

Most markets are getting increasingly competitive lately. As a way to stand out, companies are using a content marketing strategy. It’s no secret that content […]

The post 5 Tips For Gamifying Content Marketing appeared first on e-Learning Feeds.

I know you would do anything to protect your own child, so let’s make sure every mama has the same opportunity and resources to protect theirs.

Ajungi – pronounced AH-YUNG-EE – is a Nunavut-based music collective made up of up-and-coming artists from across the territory. The concept was created by artist and entrepreneur Thor Simonsen, the creative director of Hitmakerz, an Iqaluit-based record label that delivers music workshops to remote communities across Nunavut and records, produces, and releases music by many Inuit artists.

Simonsen joins us to talk about the project's inception and goals, what the workshops and recording sessions entail, how they benefit the artists' careers and communities, and a lot more.

http://canadianmusician.com http://ajungi.ca

Sure, it’s great to have clear blue skies but for most of the world the pandemic spells famine and disease, not the planet fighting back

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Cormorants are hunting fish in the now clear waters of Venice. Wild boars roam the avenues of Barcelona and wild goats the streets of Llandudno. Above Los Angeles are blue skies. From smogless Delhi, you can once more glimpse the Himalayas.

“The Earth is healing, we are the virus,” runs the meme spreading fast across the internet. It’s a sentiment echoed by many policymakers, commentators and celebrities.

Lewis Hamilton laid down a important marker ahead of qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix, setting a quickest time of 1:22.498 to finish ahead of Sebastian Vettel and the Ferraris of Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa on a glorious sunny morning at Monza

Red Bull drivers Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel suffered mixed emotions during qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix after finishing fourth and sixth fastest respectively

Jenson Button is expecting to have a strong race at the Brazilian Grand Prix this weekend, but is hoping for rain on Saturday to mix up the qualifying order

Lewis Hamilton admitted that his McLaren still needs a little more downforce after he finished fourth fastest behind the Red Bulls and Fernando Alonso's Ferrari in Friday free practice

Sebastian Vettel was thankful for a dry for Sunday morning qualifying at the Japanese Grand Prix, after he put his peerless Red Bull on pole

Toro Rosso's Carlos Sainz called his first qualifying session a "dream" after finishing eighth, but 17-year-old team-mate Max Verstappen was left rueing a mistake which cost him a place in Q3 in Australia

Most of the projections of the cost of meeting climate change mitigation targets hinge crucially upon assumptions made about the cost and timing of the development of breakthrough technologies. This paper seeks to uncover attributes of inventions – as reflected in patent data – which serve as "leading indicators" of subsequent technological and market development in climate change mitigation technologies.

The end of the mining boom has highlighted the urgent need for Chile to diversify its economy away from commodity-intensive sectors, according to a new OECD report presented by Secretary-General Angel Gurría today.

The 40-year-old wrote: 'Battling COVID-19 along with my 3-year-old son was the most physically and emotionally challenging experience I have gone through as a mother.'

The Budhan Theatre Group has become the nexus for a movement to change attitudes towards denotified tribes both within Ahmedabad's Chharanagar community and outside it.

Would a Pune-style bomb blast have happened in a Chinese city? Or a 26/11? Or any of the scores of terror attacks that India has been subjected to over the years?

The globalThis proposal introduces a unified mechanism to access the so-called “global object” a.k.a. “the global” in any JavaScript environment. It sounds like a simple thing to polyfill, but it turns out it’s pretty hard to get right.

A three-dimensional hydrogen-bonded network based on a rare mok topology has been constructed using an organic molecule synthesized in the solid state. The molecule is obtained using a supramolecular protecting-group strategy that is applied to a solid-state [2+2] photodimerization. The photodimerization affords a novel head-to-head cyclo­butane product. The cyclo­butane possesses tetrahedrally disposed cis-hydrogen-bond donor (phenolic) and cis-hydrogen-bond acceptor (pyridyl) groups. The product self-assembles in the solid state to form a mok network that exhibits twofold interpenetration. The cyclo­butane adopts different conformations to provide combinations of hydrogen-bond donor and acceptor sites to conform to the structural requirements of the mok net.

Although often presented as taking single `snapshots' of the conformation of a protein, X-ray crystallography provides an averaged structure over time and space within the crystal. The important but difficult task of characterizing structural ensembles in crystals is typically limited to small conformational changes, such as multiple side-chain conformations. A crystallographic method was recently introduced that utilizes residual electron and anomalous density (READ) to characterize structural ensembles encompassing large-scale structural changes. Key to this method is an ability to accurately measure anomalous signals and distinguish them from noise or other anomalous scatterers. This report presents an optimized data-collection and analysis strategy for partially occupied iodine anomalous signals. Using the long-wavelength-optimized beamline I23 at Diamond Light Source, the ability to accurately distinguish the positions of anomalous scatterers with occupancies as low as ∼12% is demonstrated. The number and positions of these anomalous scatterers are consistent with previous biophysical, kinetic and structural data that suggest that the protein Im7 binds to the chaperone Spy in multiple partially occupied conformations. Finally, READ selections demonstrate that re-measured data using the new protocols are consistent with the previously characterized structural ensemble of the chaperone Spy with its client Im7. This study shows that a long-wavelength beamline results in easily validated anomalous signals that are strong enough to be used to detect and characterize highly disordered sections of crystal structures.

Active cathode particles are fundamental architectural units for the composite electrode of Li-ion batteries. The microstructure of the particles has a profound impact on their behavior and, consequently, on the cell-level electrochemical performance. LiCoO2 (LCO, a dominant cathode material) is often in the form of well-shaped particles, a few micrometres in size, with good crystallinity. In contrast to secondary particles (an agglomeration of many fine primary grains), which are the other common form of battery particles populated with structural and chemical defects, it is often anticipated that good particle crystallinity leads to superior mechanical robustness and suppressed charge heterogeneity. Yet, sub-particle level charge inhomogeneity in LCO particles has been widely reported in the literature, posing a frontier challenge in this field. Herein, this topic is revisited and it is demonstrated that X-ray absorption spectra on single-crystalline particles with highly anisotropic lattice structures are sensitive to the polarization configuration of the incident X-rays, causing some degree of ambiguity in analyzing the local spectroscopic fingerprint. To tackle this issue, a methodology is developed that extracts the white-line peak energy in the X-ray absorption near-edge structure spectra as a key data attribute for representing the local state of charge in the LCO crystal. This method demonstrates significantly improved accuracy and reveals the mesoscale chemical complexity in LCO particles with better fidelity. In addition to the implications on the importance of particle engineering for LCO cathodes, the method developed herein also has significant impact on spectro-microscopic studies of single-crystalline materials at synchrotron facilities, which is broadly applicable to a wide range of scientific disciplines well beyond battery research.

Phase-contrast enhanced micro-computed tomography reveals huge discontinuities at the interfaces between dental fillings and the tooth substrate. Despite the complex micromorphology, gaps in bonding could be visualized and quantified in 3D.

Clays and soils produce strong small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) because they contain large numbers of nanoparticles, namely allophane and ferrihydrite. These nanoparticles are amorphous and have approximately spherical shape with a size of around 3–10 nm. The weight ratios of these nanoparticles will affect the properties of the clays and soils. However, the nanoparticles in clays and soils are not generally quantified and are sometimes ignored because there is no standard method to quantify them. This paper describes a method to quantify nanoparticles in clays and soils with SAXS. This is achieved by deriving normalized SAXS intensities from unit weight of the sample, which are not affected by absorption. By integrating the normalized SAXS intensities over the reciprocal space, one obtains a value that is proportional to the weight ratio of the nanoparticles, proportional to the square of the difference of density between the nanoparticles and the liquid surrounding the nanoparticles, and inversely proportional to the density of the nanoparticles. If the density of the nanoparticles is known, the weight ratio of the nanoparticles can be calculated from the SAXS intensities. The density of nanoparticles was estimated from the chemical composition of the sample. Nanoparticles in colloidal silica, silica gels, mixtures of silica gel and α-aluminium oxide, and synthetic clays have been quantified with the integral SAXS method. The results show that the errors of the weight ratios of nanoparticles are around 25% of the weight ratio. It is also shown that some natural clays contain large fractions of nanoparticles; montmorillonite clay from the Mikawa deposit, pyrophillite clay from the Shokozan deposit and kaolinite clay from the Kanpaku deposit contain 25 (7), 10 (2) and 19 (5) wt% nanoparticles, respectively, where errors are shown in parentheses.

Government authorities in the United States and Canada should use the current Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) to update nutrition information on food and dietary supplement labels so that consumers can compare products more easily and make informed food choices based on the latest science, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

Since 1930, the FBI has served as central coordinator of data on known criminal offenses, combining reports from approximately 18,000 local law enforcement agencies under the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.

The social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences make significant contributions to the National Science Foundation’s mission to advance health, prosperity and welfare, national defense, and progress in science, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

New research has identified major drivers of food waste around the world. For example, in developing countries a lack of refrigeration technology is a major driver of food waste, and in the developed world low prices and increased choice encourage wasteful behaviour from consumers. Experts predict that drivers such as these will continue to increase food waste.

The EU-27 have committed to a strategic goal of developing an innovative economy based on biotechnology and renewable resources — a so-called ‘bioeconomy’. To achieve this, however, the EU must successfully mobilise resources such as residual biomass — or waste products from organic matter resources. A new study1 has quantified the potential of key residual biomass streams in the EU-27. The results show that residual biomass has a theoretical energy potential equivalent to the annual energy consumption of Italy and Belgium combined, with straw and forestry residues comprising the two most productive potential sources. The findings also reveal specific opportunities for regions including Paris (France) and Jaen (south-central Spain).

Transaction costs can be incurred during various phases of environmental policy making, from planning through to enforcement. A recent study has examined what influences these costs and concluded that policy selection and evaluation could benefit from a better understanding of the causes of these transaction costs.

A recent study has proposed changes to the way REDD+ strategies are categorised, from an implementation perspective. This will simplify the monitoring, reporting and verification of the schemes. In addition, to encourage countries to make an early start on the REDD+ programmes, the study suggests that monitoring should initially focus on forests where it is easiest to implement REDD+ actions.

A new study has clarified the concept of the popular phrase 'energy security'. It suggests that measurements of energy security for a country or area should be multi-dimensional and include figures that represent fuel prices, the diversity of the energy market and political stability.

Urban green spaces provide important ecosystem services in cities, from recreation to the mitigation of noise and air pollution. This study quantified the ecosystem services (ES) provided by green spaces in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, using new methods to evaluate high-resolution land-cover data. The findings show that different types of green space provide different ES, highlighting the importance of careful design during city planning. The authors say their method to map ES supply will aid the design of healthy, climate-resilient cities.

Climate change is expected to increase the intensity and occurrence of regional floods in Europe. A recent study has examined existing natural and constructed retention (or holding) basins that can be adapted to provide flood defences. As part of the study, a classification system for flood defence structures was developed to help Member States design sustainable flood risk management plans.

Researchers attempting to establish the limits of coastal waters in Europe have found that national declarations of coastal waters contain a number of inconsistencies regarding the definition from the Water Framework Directive. In particular, the national declarations over-estimated the area of coastal waters by almost 12% overall, which could affect the results of ecological assessments required by several major EU environmental policies.

It is important to have a single definition of 'ecosystem services', but a single classification scheme for services is not appropriate, according to researchers. There are many contexts in which ecosystem services can be used and the context should help to determine which classification scheme is the most appropriate for decision making.

New research from central Italy shows that high nature value farmland in the region can be accurately identified by the presence of just four bird species. Once such groups of species have been identified for different regions, they can provide a quick and inexpensive tool for assessing the ecological value of farmland, the researchers say.

A new study has indicated that metallic pollutants in river basins have more sources than other dangerous substances. Sources include stormwater, industrial effluents, treated effluents, agricultural drainage, sediments, mining drainage and landfills.

Judging whether to replace a hazardous conventional chemical in a product with a nanomaterial — i.e. to assess which is the safer alternative — is challenging for many reasons. A new study suggests that chemical-alternative assessment frameworks could be adapted to better assess engineered nanomaterials with the help of new tools which provide data on hazards of, and exposure to, nanomaterials.

Environmental pollution is putting amphibians and reptiles at risk, yet these animals are not included in regulations regarding the environmental risk assessment (ERA) of pesticides. The extent to which other species already used in pesticide toxicity assessment (including fish, birds and mammals) can serve as effective surrogates is currently under debate. This study conducts a systematic review of the available literature. The results reveal a positive correlation between toxicity recorded on fish and aquatic amphibians, but indicate that birds and mammals are generally not good surrogates for reptiles and terrestrial amphibians. Moreover, some chemical-dependent trends were detected, with a number of insecticides found to be more toxic to amphibians or reptiles than to potential surrogates. These findings highlight an urgent need for further research to reduce uncertainties and contribute to future policymaking regarding the protection of amphibians and reptiles from potentially harmful pesticides.

How can we better anticipate environmental changes? In our rapidly changing world, risks occur from ongoing changes (such as those occurring in the climate), to more sudden-onset risks, such as mutating microbial pathogens. This Future Brief explores some of the tools and approaches that can be used to identify emerging risk, including strategic foresight tools, citizen science and state-of-the-art monitoring technologies.

There are some strange places around the world where objects appear to roll uphill against gravity.

To help erase unsightly yellowing brought on by air pollution, India's crown jewel is looking for new beauty miracles.

Congratulations, washing machine, your lonely days are now over as clothes dryers have become, at long last, eligible for Energy Star certification.

A light-emitting diode (LED) developed at MIT operates at 230-percent efficiency. That's not a typo. LEDs will provide 70 percent of the world's general lightin