Not only can the smart contact lenses monitor glucose levels, they can also release medication directly into the membrane of the eye.

The post New Contact Lenses May Soon Allow Diabetics to Monitor Glucose Levels With Just the Blinks of Their Eyes appeared first on Good News Network.

Bike stunts, pet birthdays and a baby names which stumped the world are some of the trending topics on social media in Australia.

The Chugach and Tongass National Forests are changing, possibly in response to global warming.

Old-growth forests provide unique habitat features and landscape functions compared to younger stands. The goals of many forest management plans in the Pacific Northwest include increasing the area of late-successional and old-growth forests.

Fixing a problem when having vertical divide lines between horizontal link and using rollover images.

This report summarizes timber resource statistics for the 20 counties in eastern Washington. The inventory sampled all private and public lands except those administered by the National Forest System in 2001, and those that were reserved from management for wood products.

The importance to society of environmental services, provided by forest ecosystems, has significantly increased during the last few decades. A growing global concern with the deterioration of forests, beginning perhaps most noticeably in the 1980s, has led to an increasing public awareness of the environmental, cultural, economic, and social values that forests provide. Around the world, ideas of sustainable, close-to-nature, and multi-functional forestry have progressively replaced the older perception of forests as only a source for timber. The international impetus to protect and sustainably manage forests has come from global initiatives at management, conservation, and sustainable development related to all types of forests and forestry. A few of the more notable initiatives include: the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED); regional follow-ups to the Earth Summit such as the Montreal Process and Helsinki Accords; the forest elements of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD); and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC).

The Fall River research site in coastal Washington is an affiliate installation of the North American Long-Term Soil Productivity (LTSP) network, which constitutes one of the world's largest coordinated research programs addressing forest management impacts on sustained productivity. Overall goals of the Fall River study are to assess effects of biomass removals, soil compaction, tillage, and vegetation control on site properties and growth of planted Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco). Biomass-removal treatments included removal of commercial bole (BO), bole to 5-cm top diameter (BO5), total tree (TT), and total tree plus all legacy woody debris (TT+). Vegetation control (VC) effects were tested in BO, while soil compaction and compaction plus tillage were imposed in BO+VC treatment. All treatments were imposed in 1999. The preharvest stand contained similar amounts of carbon (C) above the mineral soil (292 Mg/ha) as within the mineral soil to 80- cm depth including roots (298 Mg/ha). Carbon stores above the mineral soil ordered by size were live trees (193 Mg/ha), old-growth logs (37 Mg/ha), forest floor (27 Mg/ha), old-growth stumps and snags (17 Mg/ha), coarse woody debris (11 Mg/ha), dead trees/snags (7 Mg/ha), and understory vegetation (0.1 Mg/ha). The mineral soil to 80-cm depth contained 248 Mg C/ha, and roots added 41 Mg/ha. Total nitrogen (N) in mineral soil and roots (13 349 kg/ha) was more than 10 times the N store above the mineral soil (1323 kg/ha). Postharvest C above mineral soil decreased to 129, 120, 63, and 50 Mg/ha in BO, BO5, TT, and TT+, respectively. Total N above the mineral soil decreased to 722, 747, 414, and 353 Mg/ha in BO, BO5, TT, and TT+, respectively. The ratio of total C above the mineral soil to total C within the mineral soil was markedly altered by biomass removal, but proportions of total N stores were reduced only 3 to 6 percent owing to the large soil N reservoir on site.

We monitored coarse woody debris dynamics and natural tree regeneration over a 14-year period after the 1991 Warner Creek Fire, a 3631-ha (8,972-ac) mixed severity fire in the western Cascade Range of Oregon. Rates for tree mortality in the fire, postfire mortality, snag fall, and snag fragmentation all showed distinct patterns by tree diameter and species, with Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) more likely to survive a fire, and to remain standing as a snag, than other common tree species. Natural seedling regeneration was abundant, rapid, and highly variable in space. Densities of seedlings >10 cm height at 14 years postfire ranged from 1,530 to 392,000 per ha. Seedling establishment was not concentrated in a single year, and did not appear to be limited by the abundant growth of shrubs. The simultaneous processes of mortality, snag fall, and tree regeneration increased the variety of many measures of forest structure. The singular event of the fire has increased the structural diversity of the landscape.

Statement Highlights: In a new scientific statement, the American Heart Association supports the creation of specialized multidisciplinary clinical programs that combine cardiovascular medicine and genetics expertise. These specialized programs would use genetic information to better treat patients with inherited heart conditions, as well as assess family members without current heart problems and take steps to reduce their risk.

Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a final rule that threatens to undermine the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. The American Lung Association, Allergy & Asthma Network, Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, American...

Was modern physics born in the Inferno? Motion video for an Boston Globe Ideas section about the influence of Dante's Inferno in Galileo Physics

Whether you’re into photography, there are so many basic skills that you can learn when it comes to photo editing that can make a huge difference in your photos and selfies. Between brightening up a photo, changing the size, or cutting something out, there’s always a small thing you wish you could change. In order to do that, you should learn these basic photo editing tools so that you can adjust your photos in the simplest manner. Adobe photoshop If you were to use only one software for photo editing, then it should be none other than Adobe Photoshop. With

The post Learning the Basics of Photo Editing appeared first on Photoshop Lady.

As most of us have spent the past two months in quarantine to flatten the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic, we recognize this unexpected crisis has dramatically changed our lives, country, economy and even our freedoms.

Just as the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers reframed and reshaped our national approach to security, this pandemic will have long-reaching effects on the way we interact with others at work, play and even how we worship from here on.

Make no mistake, COVID-19 is not finished with us. Even as it subsides in many states, we are being warned that it will resurge in the fall and winter months. Many lives and our economic stability will depend on elected officials’ ability to set aside the politics-as-usual, I-win-you-lose attitude.

These new times call not only for a Congress with a no-nonsense, solution-driven mind-set but members with the right experience and expertise. Among all of the candidates running to succeed Rep. David Loebsack, my life has uniquely prepared me for the challenges ahead to effectively protect us while minimizing the inevitable financial burden and social disruption.

I understand what it means to grow up in a working-class family and to work hard to achieve goals. I grew up as one of eight children of a father who was a U.S. Air Force enlisted man and a mother who had a general education degree. After being badly burned in an accident, I decided I would become a doctor.

I left home at 16 to attend community college, enlisted in the Army, eventually completing nursing school and then medical school. In all, I served 24 years on active duty and in the reserves. That experience taught me a great deal about discipline, organization and service to country.

Peers and former Gov. Terry Branstad have entrusted me in key leadership roles, electing me as president of the Iowa Medical Society and appointing me as director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, respectively.

In 2018, voters in southeast Iowa elected me in a Senate district that tilts Democratic. I believe it was because they see in me what they know to be true of themselves: the tenacity and perseverance to never quit fighting to better themselves and their communities and create a better future for their children and grandchildren.

The next session of Congress will require leaders with the knowledge and toughness to make difficult but necessary decisions based on facts, not emotion or partisanship. That’s why I’m running for Congress.

Mariannette Miller-Meeks is a candidate in the Republican primary for Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District.

It’s that time of year when Spoon Graphics gets a little older, with 2020 marking 13 years of tutorial creating, freebie sharing and article writing on what started as a blog that was attached to my portfolio website in 2007. Every April I take some time to reflect on the past 12 months and talk […]

The post Spoon Graphics Turns 13 Years Old — Traffic Down, Subscribers Up! appeared first on Spoon Graphics.

Photos and other images are used in different fields, so those who know how to work with high-resolution mockups are in demand as professionals. It is useful to be able to take photos, draw, edit...

2019 was the year of the “ethical source” licenses – or ‘open source with a moral clause’ licenses. It was also the year many in the open source movement labeled any attempt at adding moral clauses to open source licenses not only made them not open source licenses, but were a dangerous attack on the […]

The post Value Neutrality and the Ethics of Open Source appeared first on MOR10.

Online marketing with visual content continues to grow and drive tons of traffic. The team at Venngage gathered together the latest data in the 14 Visual Content Marketing Statistics to Know for 2019 infographic and built it using their own tool.

From Nadya Khoja at Venngage:

Two years ago I asked 300 different online marketers to help me figure out how they were using visual content as part of their marketing strategies in 2016 and their predictions for 2017.

This year I wanted to see if there were any changes in how marketers were creating visuals, and what kind of content engagement they were seeing.

I also asked a couple of additional questions to see how the use of various visual formats impacted their blogging strategies.

Conclusion:

The data says it all–visual content isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Not only are more brands leveraging the use for of visuals for various social media platforms, but there is a lot of added benefit when it comes to SEO and organic rankings as well, particularly in Google’s image search results.

And of course, creating engaging visual content is a surefire way to resonate with your audience and communicate your ideas more effectively.

There are a few things to unravel here:

• It’s good survey data, but take it with a grain of salt. Venngage is a visual design tool, sharing data about visual content marketing.

• The infographic is a fantastic format to summarize the survey results and use in social media to draw in readers to the full article.

• The infographic is built using Venngage, so it’s also a great way to showcase what their design tool is capable of. In fact, clicking on the infographic gives you the opportunity to use this design as a template for designing your own infographic.

• Sections 5 & 10 are disappointing visually. There are no data visualizations, just a bunch of percentage values shown in text.

• I’m not a fan of the bright color scheme, and it’s visually distracting from highlighting insights in the data.

• The article still references 2018 data, even though the infographic has been updated with newer data from 2019.

This paper begins the project of defining Arthur packets of all unipotent representations for the $p$-adic exceptional group $G_2$. Here we treat the most interesting case by defining and computing Arthur packets with component group $S_3$. We also show that the distributions attached to these packets are stable, subject to a hypothesis. This is done using a self-contained microlocal analysis of simple equivariant perverse sheaves on the moduli space of homogeneous cubics in two variables. In forthcoming work we will treat the remaining unipotent representations and their endoscopic classification and strengthen our result on stability.

Yang-Mills gauge theory on Minkowski space supports a Batalin-Vilkovisky-infinity algebra structure, all whose operations are local. To make this work, the axioms for a BV-infinity algebra are deformed by a quadratic element, here the Minkowski wave operator. This homotopy structure implies BCJ/color-kinematics duality; a cobar construction yields a strict algebraic structure whose Feynman expansion for Yang-Mills tree amplitudes complies with the duality. It comes with a `syntactic kinematic algebra'.

We use Ricci flow to obtain a local bi-Holder correspondence between Ricci limit spaces in three dimensions and smooth manifolds. This is more than a complete resolution of the three-dimensional case of the conjecture of Anderson-Cheeger-Colding-Tian, describing how Ricci limit spaces in three dimensions must be homeomorphic to manifolds, and we obtain this in the most general, locally non-collapsed case. The proofs build on results and ideas from recent papers of Hochard and the current authors.

We propose a general procedure to construct noncommutative deformations of an algebraic submanifold $M$ of $mathbb{R}^n$, specializing the procedure [G. Fiore, T. Weber, Twisted submanifolds of $mathbb{R}^n$, arXiv:2003.03854] valid for smooth submanifolds. We use the framework of twisted differential geometry of [Aschieri et al.,Class. Quantum Gravity 23 (2006), 1883], whereby the commutative pointwise product is replaced by the $star$-product determined by a Drinfel'd twist. We actually simultaneously construct noncommutative deformations of all the algebraic submanifolds $M_c$ that are level sets of the $f^a(x)$, where $f^a(x)=0$ are the polynomial equations solved by the points of $M$, employing twists based on the Lie algebra $Xi_t$ of vector fields that are tangent to all the $M_c$. The twisted Cartan calculus is automatically equivariant under twisted $Xi_t$. If we endow $mathbb{R}^n$ with a metric, then twisting and projecting to normal or tangent components commute, projecting the Levi-Civita connection to the twisted $M$ is consistent, and in particular a twisted Gauss theorem holds, provided the twist is based on Killing vector fields. Twisted algebraic quadrics can be characterized in terms of generators and $star$-polynomial relations. We explicitly work out deformations based on abelian or Jordanian twists of all quadrics in $mathbb{R}^3$ except ellipsoids, in particular twisted cylinders embedded in twisted Euclidean $mathbb{R}^3$ and twisted hyperboloids embedded in twisted Minkowski $mathbb{R}^3$ [the latter are twisted (anti-)de Sitter spaces $dS_2,AdS_2$].

We show that any toric K"ahler cone with smooth compact cross-section admits a family of Calabi-Yau cone metrics with conical singularities along its toric divisors. The family is parametrized by the Reeb cone and the angles are given explicitly in terms of the Reeb vector field. The result is optimal, in the sense that any toric Calabi-Yau cone metric with conical singularities along the toric divisor (and smooth elsewhere) belongs to this family. We also provide examples and interpret our results in terms of Sasaki-Einstein metrics.

The characterization of phase dynamics in coupled oscillators offers insights into fundamental phenomena in complex systems. To describe the collective dynamics in the oscillatory system, order parameters are often used but are insufficient for identifying more specific behaviors. We therefore propose a topological approach that constructs quantitative features describing the phase evolution of oscillators. Here, the phase data are mapped into a high-dimensional space at each time point, and topological features describing the shape of the data are subsequently extracted from the mapped points. We extend these features to time-variant topological features by considering the evolution time, which serves as an additional dimension in the topological-feature space. The resulting time-variant features provide crucial insights into the time evolution of phase dynamics. We combine these features with the machine learning kernel method to characterize the multicluster synchronized dynamics at a very early stage of the evolution. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usefulness of our method for qualitatively explaining chimera states, which are states of stably coexisting coherent and incoherent groups in systems of identical phase oscillators. The experimental results show that our method is generally better than those using order parameters, especially if only data on the early-stage dynamics are available.

We apply the paracontrolled calculus to study the asymptotic behavior of a certain quasilinear PDE with smeared mild noise, which originally appears as the space-time scaling limit of a particle system in random environment on one dimensional discrete lattice. We establish the convergence result and show a local in time well-posedness of the limit stochastic PDE with spatial white noise. It turns out that our limit stochastic PDE does not require any renormalization. We also show a comparison theorem for the limit equation.

The main aim of this paper is to detect dynamical properties of the Gy"orgyi-Field model of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction. The corresponding three-variable model given as a set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations depends on one parameter, the flow rate. As certain values of this parameter can give rise to chaos, the analysis was performed in order to identify different dynamics regimes. Dynamical properties were qualified and quantified using classical and also new techniques. Namely, phase portraits, bifurcation diagrams, the Fourier spectra analysis, the 0-1 test for chaos, and approximate entropy. The correlation between approximate entropy and the 0-1 test for chaos was observed and described in detail. Moreover, the three-stage system of nested subintervals of flow rates, for which in every level the 0-1 test for chaos and approximate entropy was computed, is showing the same pattern. The study leads to an open problem whether the set of flow rate parameters has Cantor like structure.

In this paper we study manifolds $M_{Sigma}$ with fibered singularities, more specifically, a relevant space $Riem^{psc}(X_{Sigma})$ of Riemannian metrics with positive scalar curvature. Our main goal is to prove that the space $Riem^{psc}(X_{Sigma})$ is homotopy invariant under certain surgeries on $M_{Sigma}$.