The stars of Ghost - the Musical talk about their production.

On this Special Edition of Political Rewind, it’s a look at the biggest political stories of 2019. A new governor put his unique stamp on Georgia, an unexpected resignation put the state front and center in the race for Senate, and two Georgia members of Congress announced their departures.

Residents in Richmond’s District 5 are calling for investment in arts and culture from their city leaders. And, in a new episode of Book It, the power of stories in medicine.

In the right hands, the acoustic guitar becomes a world of sound that transgresses the limitations of the instrument and the role as mere accompaniment. Genres become blurred and suddenly the strings start to sing instead of the troubadour. Or perhaps more correctly, the instrument becomes an extension of the guitarist, and the strings tell stories that seem to come out of everywhere and nowhere... [ read more ]

Connor Bedard's former coach says the World Junior hockey phenom is something special; how Buffalo is rallying together after Damar Hamlin's near death on the football field; how the bid to keep Prince Harry's memoir from leaking plays into the hype; seriously though, what exactly is Ozempic?; Toronto bartender mixes alcohol-free cocktails for Dry January and beyond; why BioNTech's plan to ship prefabricated mRNA vaccine factories to Rwanda is controversial; and more.

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Podcasts are increasing in popularity but if no one knows about your podcast then you're unlikely to get many downloads. To increase traffic to your podcast people have to be able to find it and the easiest way of achieving this is by submitting your podcast to a selection of key podcast directories.

The post Top Podcast Directories to Submit Your Podcast appeared first on Richard Farrar.

Does she have what it takes?

“All Overseas Territories with financial centres are committed to global tax transparency standards,” Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon said. During the British Parliament’s session on June 10th, Liberal Democrat Lord Jones of Cheltenham asked “what progress they have made on reforming procedures in the UK’s Overseas Territories to eliminate [1] tax avoidance, and [2] money laundering.” […]

The Role of Google Authorship If you are the author of the article, can Google tell the difference when using article submission services? The facts point to no at this point, but there are more and more sites starting to follow the same authorship standard and business site verification standards. With authorship being more common […]

Professor Wendy Laura Belcher and a primarily Ethiopian team of researchers and translators have brought new insight and access to Marian miracle stories — all now available on a website.

High school scientists dazzled us with their innovations—while new studies revealed insights about math mastery and how we can prepare young people for real-world challenges.

Scientific advancements helped humans push through both the pandemic and the atmosphere this year, and a long-awaited visit from some underground insects set the country abuzz.

NASA nudges an asteroid, weird things emerge from water, and scientists tackle a new epidemic.

Students across the country are participating in NOVA's film production program to make videos about climate change solutions in their local communities.

I am proud to announce that globalissues.org now also carries stories from UN News.

UN News recently reached out to engage in a partnership program whereby I am permitted to reproduce their news stories on globalissues.org. Together with IPS News, whose news stories I already carry, both are sources of important quality news global news. I hope you like them.

And many apologies for the lack of messages in recent years. I am still overcoming some personal challenges, but I have been keeping the site going behind the scenes. I hope to resume write my own content soon.

Sir David Attenborough praises the "beauty" created by the BBC in its natural history shows.

Following news that Gary Lineker will leave Match of the Day at the end of the season, how does the BBC cover stories about itself?

velocityconf: LAST DAY for #velocityconf EU call for speakers http://t.co/qShofQCDPl Share your best #WPO, #Ops, and #DevOps stories.

News24 brings you the top stories of the day, summarised into neat little packages. Read through quickly or listen to the articles via our customised text-to-speech feature.

Oxylipins are potent lipid mediators involved in a variety of physiological processes. Their profiling has the potential to provide a wealth of information regarding human health and disease and is a promising technology for translation into clinical applications. However, results generated by independent groups are rarely comparable, which increases the need for the implementation of internationally agreed upon protocols. We performed an interlaboratory comparison for the MS-based quantitative analysis of total oxylipins. Five independent laboratories assessed the technical variability and comparability of 133 oxylipins using a harmonized and standardized protocol, common biological materials (i.e., seven quality control plasmas), standard calibration series, and analytical methods. The quantitative analysis was based on a standard calibration series with isotopically labeled internal standards. Using the standardized protocol, the technical variance was within ±15% for 73% of oxylipins; however, most epoxy fatty acids were identified as critical analytes due to high variabilities in concentrations. The comparability of concentrations determined by the laboratories was examined using consensus value estimates and unsupervised/supervised multivariate analysis (i.e., principal component analysis and partial least squares discriminant analysis). Interlaboratory variability was limited and did not interfere with our ability to distinguish the different plasmas. Moreover, all laboratories were able to identify similar differences between plasmas. In summary, we show that by using a standardized protocol for sample preparation, low technical variability can be achieved. Harmonization of all oxylipin extraction and analysis steps led to reliable, reproducible, and comparable oxylipin concentrations in independent laboratories, allowing the generation of biologically meaningful oxylipin patterns.

The Chatham House Sustainable Laboratories Initiative: Prior Assessment Tool Other resource sysadmin 14 June 2019

Laboratories are critical for supporting effective infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response. This tool is meant to help structure a conversation between funding partners and recipient countries on how to most effectively establish or repurpose laboratories in low-resource environments.

Introduction

Laboratories are critical for supporting effective infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response, and lack of adequate laboratory capacity is a global challenge. As part of global health security initiatives, cooperative threat reduction efforts and international development programmes, sophisticated laboratories have been provided to mitigate biological threats and bolster a country’s capacity for detection, diagnosis and storage of high-consequence pathogens. Very often, these use the assumptions, standards and templates applied in high-income countries. However, it can be difficult or even impossible to sustain these facilities in low-resource environments. There can sometimes be limited local technical capacity and capability, which can result in a high reliance on imported expertise, skills, equipment and other resources. Sustainability can therefore be hard to achieve. In addition, when a funding partner withdraws, the laboratories can become disused, foundering without the trained personnel and financial resources to sustain them.

To help address this situation, a proposal gaining increasing support internationally is to adopt an approach based on a local risk assessment, whereby laboratories are appropriately and optimally tailored to the local risks and to the resources available, both in the short and longer term, without compromising biosafety and biosecurity.

A Chatham House workshop was convened in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2018 to explore what West African countries would find most appropriate in terms of building laboratory capacity, what the main challenges have been so far, and what needs to be done to improve the sustainability of laboratories in the region. It emerged that there was a need for a more structured conversation between the funding partner and recipient country early in the process – prior to embarking on the detailed planning phase for the establishment or repurposing of a laboratory. This should involve careful consideration and an assessment of existing and planned capacity, needs and contextual issues, together with proposals for how to address the issues revealed, so that any ensuing laboratory demonstrably supports the national strategy and therefore flourishes.

A collection of stories from the previous week that you may have missed.

A collection of short news stories from this week.

A collection of stories from the previous week that you may have missed.

A collection of articles you may have missed from the previous week.

A collection of articles from the previous week that you may have missed.

Virginia Gov.-elect Ralph Northam has said he would further restrict that state's charter laws, and New Jersey Gov.-elect Phil Murphy has promised to pull the state out of the PARCC testing consortium.

A special state panel in Wisconsin has rejected a financially strapped district's request to dissolve.

A collection of stories from the previous week that you may have missed.

A collection of articles from this week that you may have missed.

A collection of stories from the week that you may have missed.

A collection of stories from the week that you may have missed.

A collection of articles from this week that you may have missed.

A collection of short news stories from the last week.

A collection of stories you may have missed.

A new book from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture shows the images and impacts of athletes on and off the playing field

The power behind the music of Our Native Daughters comes from giving voice to the struggles of those who came before us—and few have struggled to be heard as much as black women.

From the moment they arrived at the concentration camp, Jews and other Holocaust victims were treated like animals, and only a lucky group survived the experience.

A new study has shattered historians' long-held assumptions about some of the people who died in Mount Vesuvius' eruption in 79 C.E.

A new exhibition at the British Library explores the public, private and spiritual lives of such figures as Joan of Arc, Christine de Pizan and Hildegard of Bingen

From bravery on the field of battle to stoicism behind the lines, New Brunswickers of all backgrounds made their marks.