The post State and local tax exemptions drive more than half of nonprofit hospitals’ $37.4 billion tax benefit, study finds was curated by information for practice.

Academic journals are not immune from ideological bias.

The post Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings was curated by information for practice.

In the months leading up to the unexpected death of a baby boy, Oranga Tamariki staff incorrectly handled several concerns reported to them relating to his family.

The post Coroner finds ‘pervasive deficits’ in Oranga Tamariki social work practice before Napier baby’s death was curated by information for practice.

Children as young as four years old are being placed in residential care because there is no foster carer available, while there is a waiting list for admission to the country’s 15 special care beds, according to the latest report from the Child Law Project.

The post Children as young as four being placed in residential care, report finds was curated by information for practice.

Pasta, Dumplings, and More by EverOut Staff For obvious reasons, I suspect we could all use some soul-warming nourishment to bolster our spirits right about now. We've compiled this list of fortifying options, including noodle soups, pizza, dumplings, pasta, soul food, and more, so you can get your comfort food fix. For more ideas, check out our food and drink guide. PIZZA

Apizza Scholls
Serious Eats founder Ed Levine once dubbed this "Neo-Neapolitan" pizza destination "one of the top five pizzerias in America."
Sunnyside

In 60 seconds, the commercial showcases a medley of horror film tropes, including a maniacal doll that presumably kills a group of young people whenever they play a catchy pop song.

The Los Angeles medical examiner said cocaine and ethanol were also present at the time of death.

A performing arts group has found the child who was literally wowed by a recent classical music concert.

The past couple of weeks have been weird. Daily life changed gradually, then all at once. We now find ourselves at home practicing our best “social distancing” protocols. Incredible technology allows us to stay connected, and that’s fantastic. But it’s ok to put the phone down. It’s ok to turn down the news from time to time, and take a long walk outside in nature. This week, I took my own advice. Amidst the simple beauty of nature, I draw one deep breath… and then another. In the forest, I glimpse a furtive movement - beyond the shoulder of the rural, dirt road. One handsome squirrel sits perched on a fallen log, slowly twirling a hemlock cone in its forepaws. In the warm morning sunlight, he yawns…unimpressed with my presence. In his narrow economy, it’s spring and the kitchen larder of conifer cone seeds is running low. Above me, a March wind coaxes a flock of bluebirds to an open, sodden pasture. Springtime arrives this year, just as the bluebirds do– hopeful, tentative, uncertain.

An archaeological team’s excavation of an ancient city has uncovered “surprising” revelations about an early Christian church in Egypt, specifically, the discovery of 17 human remains and the story the bodies tell.

Known to millions as the drummer of the Grammy Award-winning band Hootie & the Blowfish, Jim “Soni” Sonefeld once appeared to have it all — a successful career, a loving family and a public image that masked his private struggles. Beneath the surface, however, he grappled with inner demons.

In the late '60s, a young man searching for peace, love and belonging traveled from the East Coast to San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district in search of fulfillment but only found darkness. 

In the Astrakhan region of Russia, fishermen showed what can be found inside a huge pike. The men said that they thus wanted to dispel the myth about jewelry, watches and other valuable items that other fishermen allegedly find in the pike that they catch. The video appeared on pages of The Astrakhan Hunting and Fishing community. "Many have seen fake videos online in which they find watches, chains, lures, jewelry inside the pike. Here, there is indeed a fish in the belly, we even know what kind, because its tail is sticking out of the throat," the fisherman said.

Utimaco has released new consumer research that has found a low level of trust around Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This has highlighted the need for more education from industry into how smart devices are secured with the latest digital security solutions.

Red Canary, the managed detection and response (MDR) provider, has released a new report, Security Operations Trends Report, providing insight into critical challenges facing modern cybersecurity teams. Partnering with independent research company Coleman Parkes, Red Canary surveyed 700 security leaders from the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Nordics. 

Forter, the Trust Platform for digital commerce, has released findings from its 2024 Consumer Trust Premium Report, which explores the evolving relationship between consumer shopping habits and brand trust, based on 2,000 survey respondents in the US and UK.

Austria's Raiffeisen Bank International considers selling the Russian division or withdrawing it from the structure of the group. Raiffeisen's "daughter" will continue running "certain banking activities" in Russia to maintain license. At the moment, the bank can not get rid of all of its business in Russia, but is striving for this to happen, RBI CEO Johann Strobl said. The RBI Group in Russia is represented by Raiffeisenbank, as well as leasing, insurance and management companies. The company's subdivisions employ over 9,000 people.

A new research report has revealed the innovative new ways retailers are using RFID technology in-store to improve profitability.

Nearly two-thirds of shoppers step into a store without a specific purchase in mind, looking to be inspired by retailers who can craft the ideal ambience through digital screens and interactive kiosks. 

New research by BSI reveals growing public confidence in AI capabilities, with over half (51%) of respondents saying AI could perform some aspects of their job, up from 38% in 2023.

Whilst the survey highlighted some concerns related to deployment, it showed that people are optimistic about AI’s capabilities....

Dallas Martin, a first-generation senior nursing major from Helena, Arkansas, really does it all. This wife and mom of two is a full-time student at UA Little Rock, set to graduate in December with her bachelor's degree in nursing, while also working full-time as a physician's registered nurse in oncology and hematology at Carti Cancer Center in Little Rock.

[Sports] :
The Korea Football Association(KFA) has rebutted the findings of a sports ministry investigation that found the association violated its own rules when it hired Hong Myung-bo as head coach of the national football team. In a statement released Wednesday, shortly after the ministry released the interim ...

[more...]

A novel automated high-throughput screening approach, ClusterFinder, is reported for finding candidate structures for atomic pair distribution function (PDF) structural refinements. Finding starting models for PDF refinements is notoriously difficult when the PDF originates from nanoclusters or small nanoparticles. The reported ClusterFinder algorithm can screen 104 to 105 candidate structures from structural databases such as the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD) in minutes, using the crystal structures as templates in which it looks for atomic clusters that result in a PDF similar to the target measured PDF. The algorithm returns a rank-ordered list of clusters for further assessment by the user. The algorithm has performed well for simulated and measured PDFs of metal–oxido clusters such as Keggin clusters. This is therefore a powerful approach to finding structural cluster candidates in a modelling campaign for PDFs of nanoparticles and nanoclusters.

Characterization of a material structure with pair distribution function (PDF) analysis typically involves refining a structure model against an experimental data set, but finding or constructing a suitable atomic model for PDF modelling can be an extremely labour-intensive task, requiring carefully browsing through large numbers of possible models. Presented here is POMFinder, a machine learning (ML) classifier that rapidly screens a database of structures, here polyoxometallate (POM) clusters, to identify candidate structures for PDF data modelling. The approach is shown to identify suitable POMs from experimental data, including in situ data collected with fast acquisition times. This automated approach has significant potential for identifying suitable models for structure refinement to extract quantitative structural parameters in materials chemistry research. POMFinder is open source and user friendly, making it accessible to those without prior ML knowledge. It is also demonstrated that POMFinder offers a promising modelling framework for combined modelling of multiple scattering techniques.

Macromolecular crystallography contributes significantly to understanding diseases and, more importantly, how to treat them by providing atomic resolution 3D structures of proteins. This is achieved by collecting X-ray diffraction images of protein crystals from important biological pathways. Spotfinders are used to detect the presence of crystals with usable data, and the spots from such crystals are the primary data used to solve the relevant structures. Having fast and accurate spot finding is essential, but recent advances in synchrotron beamlines used to generate X-ray diffraction images have brought us to the limits of what the best existing spotfinders can do. This bottleneck must be removed so spotfinder software can keep pace with the X-ray beamline hardware improvements and be able to see the weak or diffuse spots required to solve the most challenging problems encountered when working with diffraction images. In this paper, we first present Bragg Spot Detection (BSD), a large benchmark Bragg spot image dataset that contains 304 images with more than 66 000 spots. We then discuss the open source extensible U-Net-based spotfinder Bragg Spot Finder (BSF), with image pre-processing, a U-Net segmentation backbone, and post-processing that includes artifact removal and watershed segmentation. Finally, we perform experiments on the BSD benchmark and obtain results that are (in terms of accuracy) comparable to or better than those obtained with two popular spotfinder software packages (Dozor and DIALS), demonstrating that this is an appropriate framework to support future extensions and improvements.

In this Saturday, Sept. 6, 2014 file photo, Paris Barclay attends the LA Premiere Screening of "Sons Of Anarchy" at TCL Chinese Theatre, in Los Angeles. A new guild study says that women and minorities were largely shut out of the ranks of TV directors again last season. In a Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2014 statement, Directors Guild President Barclay said it can be "shockingly difficult" to persuade those who control industry hiring to make even small improvements.; Credit: Paul A. Hebert/Paul A. Hebert/Invision/AP

A new guild study says women and minorities were largely shut out of the ranks of TV directors again last season.

The Directors Guild of America report released Wednesday said employers have made no significant improvement in diversity hiring for TV series in the last four years.

According to the study, white males directed the vast majority of the 3,500 cable, broadcast and high-budget online episodes made for the 2013-14 season.

The same holds true for the three previous years, according to guild findings.

In a statement, Directors Guild President Paris Barclay said it can be "shockingly difficult" to persuade those who control industry hiring to make even small improvements.

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Many people turn to the Internet to find a Mr. or Ms. Right. But lemurs just give their potential partners a sniff. A study of lemur scents has found that an individual’s distinctive body odor reflects genetic differences in their immune system, and that other lemurs can detect these differences by smell. From just one whiff, these primates can tell which prospective partners have immune genes different from their own. The ability to sniff out mates with different immune genes could make their offspring’s immune systems more diverse and able to fight more pathogens. Shown here: Fritz the ring-tailed lemur sniffs a tree for traces of other lemurs’ scents.

Image credit: David Haring/Duke Lemur Center

A COVID-19 vaccination clinic last month in Auburn, Maine. A drop in life expectancy in the U.S. stems largely from the coronavirus pandemic, a new study says.; Credit: Robert F. Bukaty/AP

A new study estimates that life expectancy in the U.S. decreased by nearly two years between 2018 and 2020, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And the declines were most pronounced among minority groups, including Black and Hispanic people.

In 2018, average life expectancy in the U.S. was about 79 years (78.7). It declined to about 77 years (76.9) by the end of 2020, according to a new study published in the British Medical Journal.

"We have not seen a decrease like this since World War II. It's a horrific decrease in life expectancy," said Steven Woolf of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine and an author of the study released on Wednesday. (The study is based on data from the National Center for Health Statistics and includes simulated estimates for 2020.)

Beyond the more than 600,000 deaths in the U.S. directly from the coronavirus, other factors play into the decreased longevity, including "disruptions in health care, disruptions in chronic disease management, and behavioral health crisis, where people struggling with addiction disorders or depression might not have gotten the help that they needed," Woolf said.

The lack of access to care and other pandemic-related disruptions hit some Americans much harder than others. And it's been well documented that the death rate for Black Americans was twice as high compared with white Americans.

The disparity is reflected in the new longevity estimates. "African Americans saw their life expectancy decrease by 3.3 years and Hispanic Americans saw their life expectancy decrease by 3.9 years," Woolf noted.

"These are massive numbers," Woolf said, that reflect the systemic inequalities that long predate the pandemic.

"It is impossible to look at these findings and not see a reflection of the systemic racism in the U.S.," Lesley Curtis, chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, told NPR.

"This study further destroys the myth that the United States is the healthiest place in the world to live," Dr. Richard Besser, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (an NPR funder), said in an email.

He said wide differences in life expectancy rates were evident before COVID-19. "For example, life expectancy in Princeton, NJ—a predominantly White community—is 14 years higher than Trenton, NJ, a predominantly Black and Latino city only 14 miles away," Besser said.

Life expectancy in the U.S. had already been declining — albeit slowly — in the years leading up to the pandemic. And the U.S. has been losing ground compared with other wealthy countries, said Magali Barbieri of the University of California, Berkeley, in an editorial published alongside the new study.

The study estimates that the decline in life expectancy was .22 years (or about one-fifth of a year) in a group of 16 peer countries (including Austria, Finland, France, Israel, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) compared with the nearly two-year decline in the United States.

"The U.S. disadvantage in mortality compared with other high income democracies in 2020 is neither new nor sudden," Barbieri wrote. It appears the pandemic has magnified existing vulnerabilities in U.S. society, she added.

"The range of factors that play into this include income inequality, the social safety net, as well as racial inequality and access to health care," Duke's Curtis said.

So, what's the prognosis going forward in the United States? "I think life expectancy will rebound," Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth said.

But it's unlikely that the U.S. is on course to reverse the trend entirely.

"The U.S. has some of the best hospitals and some of the greatest scientists. But other countries do far better in getting quality medical care to their population," Woolf said. "We have big gaps in getting care to people who need it most, when they need it most."

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

People rest while riding a Los Angeles Metro Rail train amid the coronavirus pandemic on April 1, 2020 in Los Angeles, California.; Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Despite the racial reckoning going on in America right now, and despite the fact that attitudes towards race, inclusion and representation are different now than they were 30 years ago, new research from UC Berkeley shows that a large majority of American metro areas are more segregated now than they were in 1990. The new report from Berkeley’s Institute covers a number of topic areas, but among the key findings were from the national segregation report component of the project, which found Los Angeles to be the sixth-most segregated metro area with more than 200,000 people.

Today on AirTalk, we’ll talk with the lead researcher on the new report and a local historian to talk about how we see the findings of the report play out in Southern California.

Guests:

Stephen Menendian, assistant director and director of research at the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, which works to identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive, just, and sustainable society in order to create transformative change; he tweets @SMenendian

Eric Avila, professor of history, urban planning, and Chicano/a studies at UCLA

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

The Pathfinding Partnerships Award from CO-LABS recognizes impactful, collaborative research projects organized by four or more research entities, including federal labs, in Colorado. This year, the Wildfire Research (WiRē) team received this award for their support of evidence-based community wildfire education to help communities live with wildfire. 

A waitress wears a face mask while serving at Langer's Delicatessen-Restaurant in Los Angeles on June 15.; Credit: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

Normal is not easily defined.

The past 15 months, though, have certainly been anything but.

Americans are starting to believe a "sense of normal" is approaching fairly soon, however, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey. The poll also found that with the coronavirus receding in this country, mask-wearing is declining and Americans are going out more. But they remain cautious about being in large crowds.

As the country continues to open up, more focus turns to the economy, which cratered during the beginning of the pandemic last year. And Americans are split by race, gender and politics on whether President Biden's ambitious policies are helping or not.

Race, gender, party divides on Biden and the economy

Three months ago, in a similar survey, 49% of adults said the president's policies were strengthening the economy, while 44% said they were weakening it.

Now, that's declined a net of 6 points, as 44% of respondents in the new poll say Biden's policies have strengthened the economy and 45% say the opposite. The percentage who were unsure also jumped 4 points. It's all a little bit of a warning sign for Biden, as he pushes for two large — and expensive — spending packages.

There are significant splits by race and gender:

• Just 39% of whites said Biden's policies have strengthened the economy, but 52% of people of color say they have.
• 54% of independent men say his policies have weakened the economy, while 56% of independent women say they've strengthened it. 
• 45% of white male college grads say Biden has strengthened the economy, but a significantly higher 64% of white women with college degrees said so.

Inflation vs. wages by party

A quarter of Americans rank inflation as the U.S. economy's top concern. That's followed by wages, unemployment, housing costs, labor shortages, gas prices and interest rates.

But there's a sharp political divide on the question. Republicans and independents rank inflation as their top concern, while for Democrats, it was wages. Just 4% of Republicans said wages were their top concern.

Return to "normal"

Americans are growing increasingly optimistic about when life will return to a "sense of normal," as the survey labels it.

In April, three-quarters of Americans said they believe it will take six months or more. Now, it's just half. About a quarter (27%) say it will be less than six months, up from 15% two months ago.

People are also growing more comfortable doing certain things, saying they're:

• dining out at restaurants (78%) and 
• visiting unvaccinated friends and family (75%).

But they are not as comfortable doing others:

• almost 7-in-10 are not going out to bars; 
• about two-thirds are not attending live concerts or sporting events (65%);
• and a majority have also not resumed going to in-person religious services (54%).

COVID-19 vaccines and going back to work

While half say they are concerned about another coronavirus surge, almost 9-in-10 U.S. adults with jobs say they are at least somewhat comfortable returning to work.

Notably, a majority (57%) of those with jobs do not believe employers should require COVID-19 vaccines as a condition to return to in-person work.

More than a quarter of Americans say they will not get vaccinated. The most resistant to getting vaccinated continue to be supporters of former President Donald Trump. Half of them say they won't get the shot, the highest of any group surveyed. Trump has touted the vaccine and got it himself.

Since Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines came out, noting that Americans who have been vaccinated can largely set masks aside, there's been a double-digit decline in those saying they wear a mask even when it's not required.

There's also been a double-digit increase in those saying they generally do not wear a mask. In May, 49% said they wore masks even when it was not required. Now, that's just 36%.

One-in-five said they generally do not wear masks. Two months ago, it was less than one-in-10.

Affordability, not coronavirus, limiting vacations

Speaking of getting back to normal, a majority of Americans say they plan to take a vacation this summer.

But of the significant minority (45%) who say they aren't taking one, almost three times as many cited affordability (35%) as the main reason for not going, as opposed to concerns about COVID-19 (12%).

Methodology: The poll of 1,115 U.S. adults was conducted using live telephone interviewers from June 22 through June 29. Survey questions were available in English or Spanish. The full sample has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points, with larger margins of error for smaller group subsets.

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

Emerita Resources Corp. (EMO:TSX.V; EMOTF:OTCQB; LLJA:FSE) announces results from a metallurgical testing program at its wholly-owned Iberian Belt West (IBW) project in Spain. Read why one expert says the company is in "the right place to be."

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A new study shows that the West Antarctic Peninsula is experiencing some of the most rapid climate change on Earth, featuring dramatic increases in temperatures, retreats in glaciers and declines in sea ice. The Southern Ocean absorbs nearly half of the carbon dioxide -- the key greenhouse gas linked to climate change -- that is absorbed by all the world's oceans. The study tapped an unprecedented 25 years of oceanographic measurements in the Southern Ocean and highlights the need for more monitoring in the region. The research revealed that carbon dioxide absorption by surface waters off the West Antarctic Peninsula is linked to the stability of the upper ocean, along with the amount and type of algae present. A stable upper ocean provides algae with ideal growing conditions. During photosynthesis, algae remove carbon dioxide from the surface ocean, which in turn draws carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. From 1993 to 2017, changes in sea ice dynamics off the West Antarctic Peninsula stabilized the upper ocean, resulting in greater algal concentrations and a shift in the mix of algal species. That's led to a nearly five-fold increase in carbon dioxide absorption during the summertime. The research also found a strong north-south difference in the trend of carbon dioxide absorption. The southern portion of the peninsula, which to date has been less impacted by climate change, experienced the most dramatic increase in carbon dioxide absorption, demonstrating the poleward progression of climate change in the region.

Image credit: Drew Spacht/The Ohio State University

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On August 17, 2017, scientists made history with the first direct observation of a merger between two neutron stars. It was the first cosmic event detected in both gravitational waves and the entire spectrum of light, from gamma rays to radio emissions. The impact also created a kilonova -- a turbocharged explosion that instantly forged several hundred planets’ worth of gold and platinum. The observations provided the first compelling evidence that kilonovae produce large quantities of heavy metals, a finding long predicted by theory. Astronomers suspect that all of the gold and platinum on Earth formed as a result of ancient kilonovae created during neutron star collisions. Based on data from the 2017 event, first spotted by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), astronomers began to adjust their assumptions of how a kilonova should appear to Earth-bound observers. A team of scientists reexamined data from a gamma-ray burst spotted in August 2016 and found new evidence for a kilonova that went unnoticed during the initial observations.

Image credit: NASA/ESA/E. Troja

Family Builders, the adoption service of Catawba County Social Services, can now help adult adoptees, birth parents and their close relatives find each other. Not all counties in North Carolina offer this service, which is called Confidential Intermediary Services. Until recently all adoption records were sealed under North Carolina state law. In 2008, a new law took effect that allowed the release of certain records to adult adoptees and birth parents, if both parties agreed.

Increased research is the key to developing more widely applicable detection systems to find pipe bombs before they explode and to help catch the perpetrators when a bomb has gone off, says a new report from a committee of the National Research Council.

An analysis of more than 1,000 research articles concluded that few health problems are caused by or clearly associated with vaccines.

Young athletes in the U.S. face a culture of resistance to reporting when they might have a concussion and to complying with treatment plans.

As immigrants and their descendants become integrated into U.S. society, many aspects of their lives improve, including measurable outcomes such as educational attainment, occupational distribution, income, and language ability, but their well-being declines in the areas of health, crime, and family patterns, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

There would not be sufficient benefit to updating estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC) within a year based only on the revision of a specific climate parameter in the existing framework used by the government’s interagency group to measure the SCC, says a new interim report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Although more than $500 million in federally funded research on Persian Gulf War veterans between 1994 and 2014 has produced many findings, there has been little substantial progress in the overall understanding of the health effects, particularly Gulf War illness, resulting from military service in the war, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Ovarian cancer should not be categorized as a single disease, but rather as a constellation of different cancers involving the ovary, yet questions remain on how and where various ovarian cancers arise, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Although individual anglers – people who fish recreationally – generally take small numbers of fish, collectively, a large number of them can have a substantial impact on the overall stock.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) carries out experiments in which volunteer participants agree to be intentionally exposed by inhalation to specific pollutants at restricted concentrations over short periods to obtain important information about the effects of outdoor air pollution on human health.

While the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) Safety Measurement System (SMS) used to identify commercial motor vehicle carriers at high risk for future crashes is conceptually sound, several features of its implementation need improvement, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine takes a comprehensive look at evidence on the human health effects of e-cigarettes.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finds K-12 teachers face new expectations and more demands from policymakers, parents, students, and schools, including addressing changes in curriculum standards, the emergence of more explicit teaching goals, and shifts in what it means to support all students in their development.

A review of the New York City Watershed Protection Program, released today by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, says the program has been largely successful in maintaining and enhancing water quality for New York City’s drinking water since its inception in 1997.

New models for studying the human brain — human neural organoids, transplants, and chimeras — show promise for advancing understanding of the brain and laying the groundwork for new therapeutic approaches to brain diseases that have so far proved hard to treat, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Can disagreement lead to discovery? In one scientist’s quest to cure cancer, hope rises from the ashes of failure.