Five critically endangered Cuban crocodiles hatched at the National Zoo’s Reptile Discovery Center between July 29 and Aug. 7. The eggs were laid by Dorothy, […]

The post Five Critically endangered Cuban crocodiles hatched at National Zoo appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Judy Garland’s iconic ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz” are one of the most popular attractions at the National Museum of American History. But […]

The post Crowdfunding campaign to restore Ruby Slippers surpasses mark appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Part 1 – Public Programs Coordinator Gloria Kenyon demonstrates crafting for the next Handi Hour program at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art […]

The post Handi-hour crafting – Cross Stitch Embroidery appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Strategically placed honeybee hives can deter African elephants from raiding crops, but the hives must be actively managed by beekeepers to work, according to a […]

The post Study: Managed beehives can discourage crop-raiding elephants appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Skinny lines of ants snake through the rainforest carrying leaves and flowers above their heads—fertilizer for industrial-scale, underground fungus farms. Soon after the dinosaur extinctions […]

The post Some ants still trying to get crop domestication right appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Fort Pierce, Fla. – Fall in southern Florida is festival season: when the weather stops being oppressively hot and 70 degrees is positively autumnal.  On […]

The post Annual Smithsonian-led science festival draws crowds in Fort Pierce, Florida appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Internet and phone connections are essential for effective communicators and for success in business. New results from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama show […]

The post Ant bridges connect tropical tree crowns appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Rainforests on infertile wet soils support more than half of all plant species. Shrublands on infertile dry soils in southwestern Australia, jokingly called “knee-high tropical […]

The post Microbes rule in ‘knee-high tropical rainforests’ appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Corn, known also as maize, is a vital crop in the U.S. and throughout the Americas. First domesticated in Mexico some 9,000 years ago, scientists […]

The post Study dates corn as staple crop in Central America beginning 4,300 years ago appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

To catch lizards on the offshore islands close to St. Croix in the Caribbean, Smithsonian herpetologist Nicole Angeli uses a lasso of thread looped at […]

The post Mongooses wiped them out. Now Nicole Angeli wants the St. Croix ground lizard home again appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

For several versions of Windows

The new Cross-Border Payments and Commerce Report 2019 – 2020 depicts the major trends driving growth in cross-border payments, cross-border commerce, and marketplaces.

Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan
Apr 17, 2020; 133:jcs245928-jcs245928
Meeting Report

The 2020 State of Disbursements: APAC Outlook Report by Rapyd...

Bacteria that resist antibiotics can be passed from food animals to humans, but not enough is known to determine the public health risks posed by such transmission, says a new report by a committee of the National Research Council.

Many U.S. farmers who grow genetically engineered (GE) crops are realizing substantial economic and environmental benefits -- such as lower production costs, fewer pest problems, reduced use of pesticides, and better yields -- compared with conventional crops, says a new report from the National Research Council.

On average, Americans die sooner and experience higher rates of disease and injury than people in other high-income countries, says a new report from the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine.

An extensive study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has found that new technologies in genetic engineering and conventional breeding are blurring the once clear distinctions between these two crop-improvement approaches.

The National Academies Committee on Genetically Engineered Crops - Past Experiences and Future Prospects authored an almost 600-page landmark report, released in May 2016. It was perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of genetically engineered crops to date.

New Report Outlines Research Agenda to Better Understand the Relationship Among Microbiomes, Indoor Environments, and Human Health

Producing more precise county-level estimates of crops and farmland cash rents will require integrating multiple data sources using model-based predictions that are more transparent and reproducible, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

While a variety of services and programs exist to support the needs of children with disabilities and their families, a focus on achieving specific near- and long-term goals that help prepare for adulthood and coordination of care within and across service sectors are integral to encouraging healthy growth and development, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

In recognition of the need for a national coordinated and collective response to the epidemic of opioid addiction in the U.S., the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), in partnership with the Aspen Institute, launched a public-private partnership made up of more than 35 organizations representing federal, state, and local governments, health systems, associations and provider groups, health education and accrediting institutions, pharmacies, payers, industry, nonprofits, and academia.

The federal government should foster collaboration and decrease obstacles that can keep foreign atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physicists from working in the United States, if the nation is to maintain its position as leader in these fields, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

When I was a kid, it was clear, when traveling with my family in summer—That we were cosmopolitan in attitude, but bohemian in cash.  We would criss-cross Europe, yes—  But we were car-camping, our luggage strapped to the roof of our shuddering VW fastback.  Lunch was sweaty cheese and days-old ham from an unrefrigerated metal cookie tin.  The bathrooms in our one-star hotels were. . . shared.

When I travel now with my teen daughters, I'd say we are basically middle-class—?  But due to the complexity of mom's travel points—?  We never know if we'll have a first or third world experience.

For instance, recently, using air miles, we flew United to Denver for free!  Mostly.  I splurged on the extra hundred dollars so we could actually sit together, rather than, as Basic Economy requires, being seated randomly all over the plane.  I did not allow any extra bags carried or checked, because my girls may one day go to college.

Kayak-ing the white water rapids of cheap car rentals, I'd found a company called ACE offering a tiny car that looked like a Yugo—  But, as they used to say at IKEA, "Impossible Price"! Upon arrival, I find out why. Our instructions? Walk past the Ground Transportation counter, get into "lane four," then turn left and walk half a mile, past all the Avis, Budget and Enterprise signs and wait, literally, and I quote, "under the sign that is blank."

 "I know that we're not Platinum members of anything," I grouse to my daughters, "but standing under a blank sign?  Can ACE at least not tape their logo up there?  It's so humiliating!"

"Maybe they didn't have enough money to commission a logo," says my older daughter.  Shuttle after shuttle whooshes by.

 "We'll be lucky if the car has four wheels!" says my younger.

Forty-five minutes later, the ACE shuttle finally arrives.  I'm strangely comforted that there are other passengers, as humiliated as we are.  We are the people too cheap to get a real rental car.  None of us make eye contact.  We study our crumpled Expedia printouts as though we are important business travelers splitting the atom.

We are shuttled to the far side of town.  Though not quite a van down by the river, the rental office is in fact a trailer. 

On the upside, we are led to a vehicle that, while splattered with mud, is a giant black Ford Explorer.  Added plus: it comes loaded with Sirius 1970's Radio!  The minus —  The first song that comes on is The Captain and Tenille, "You Better Shop Around!"

Next week: Running on Dr. Pepper, dry shampoo and Special K.

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

A scene from Tomislav Mrisic's "Cowboys (Kauboji)," which screened at the Palm Springs Film Festival.; Credit: Kino films

It has escaped the average filmgoer's notice, but Eastern Europe has been in the midst of a cinematic renaissance for quite a while now. A few individual titles and filmmakers have bubbled to the surface in U.S. cinemas, including Danis Toanovic's Serbian antiwar satire "No Man's Land," which won an Oscar in 2001, and Cristian Mungiu's Romanian abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days," which nabbed the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2007.

Those are both great movies, but they are also the small tip of a very large iceberg. This year, Estonian filmmaker Zaza Urushadze's "Tangerines" — a humanist drama about the Georgian civil war of 1992 — is a leading contender for a foreign film Oscar.

As of now, its main competitor for the trophy would seem to be the Polish film "Ida" by Pawel Pawlikowski, which has taken most of the top critics prizes for foreign film this awards season. And who has heard of Radu Jude, the witty Romanian director of "The Happiest Girl in the World," or Kamen Kalev, Bulgaria's great hope for the cinematic future? Among so many others.

A sort of "Waiting for Guffman" with a Croat twist, the delightful Croatian Oscar entry "Cowboys (Kauboji)" isn't in the same league as the best Eastern Europe has to offer, and in an odd way this is one of its strengths.

Tomislav Mrisic's film utterly lacks pretension, which is not to say that it has no point to make. If there's an Eastern European precedent for "Cowboys'" assured mix of satire, drama and farce, it's probably the "Loves of a Blonde"-era Milos Forman.

Mrisic shares with Forman an acute eye for the foibles of small town bureaucracy and a soft humanism that simultaneously allows "Cowboys" to embrace its rag-tag ensemble of eccentrics and to spoof them mercilessly.

(A screen shot from Croation Oscar entry "Cowboys (Kauboji)")

The plot sees Sasa (Sasa Anlokovic), a failed and hangdog theater director with health problems, returning to his small and economically desolate Croatian town, where he is enlisted by an old friend-turned-local-bureaucrat to bring Big City "culture" to the sticks.

Aware that his lung cancer may have fallen out of remission and that time may be running out for him, Sasa sets about the task of creating what may be his last opus with the clay available to hand: a half dozen unskilled, uneducated and, in most cases, un-hygienic misfits, culled from the dregs of the town. They decide to create a Western stageplay based on their shared love of "Stagecoach," "High Noon" and John Wayne. Something decidedly unlike "Stagecoach" is the result.

There are titters and belly laughs abounding in "Cowboys" — a film that may actually be even funnier to an American audience than it is in Croatia, given Mrisic's deft mangling of the worn-out genre cliches of old school horse opera.

The performances are all solid and specific: This is no undifferentiated cluster of cliche yahoos, but rather a broadly drawn ensemble, in which each character has a specific logic and an unspoken need he or she is trying to fill.

WATCH the "Cowboys" trailer in the original Croatian

Mrisic finds much to mock in his small town provincials, but also much to celebrate. "Cowboys" is a smart film that still sees goodness everywhere it looks, which makes it a refreshing change not just from the American school of rote affirmation comedy but also from the relentless bleakness we associate with so much European fare.

For all the farce on hand, "Cowboys" is in the end a covertly passionate defense of the creative act: Its imperishability and its importance for its own sake, excluding aesthetic considerations. It is also a plea for that hoary old chestnut, the healing power of laughter. While that may read like a cliche, with "Cowboys," Mrisic's point is made.

Off-Ramp contributor R.H. Greene is covering the 26th Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival and will be posting regularly from there.

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

; Credit: CSA-Archive/Getty Images

This week, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that more than $300 million from the first coronavirus rescue package will go to two education grant competitions for K-12 and higher ed.

States will be able to apply for a piece of the $180 million allotted to the "Rethink K-12 Education Models Grant" and $127.5 million allotted to the "Reimagining Workforce Preparation Grant."

The money is 1% of the more than $30 billion set aside for education in the CARES Act. Those billions are intended to help states with the highest coronavirus burden.

States can access the money by creating proposals to fund virtual or work-based learning programs. The grant categories include two of DeVos' pre-existing pet policy ideas: "microgrants" that go directly to home-schooling families, and microcredentials that offer a shorter path to workforce preparation.

On the higher ed side, the secretary has long pushed for workforce-oriented education and shorter paths to a degree. She's been praised for this stance by online and for-profit colleges, while traditional institutions have been less sanguine.

Similarly, the secretary is a longtime advocate of alternatives to public schools, including home schooling. She has praised programs like Florida's Gardiner Scholarship, which provides up to $10,000 to the families of children with special needs to support home schooling. Last fall, DeVos proposed a $5 billion "Education Freedom Scholarship" program, which would have used federal tax credits to support, essentially, a voucher program that families could use both for private schools and home schooling.

While this week's announcement is significant for the policy directions it signals, it's a comparatively small amount of money. Education groups have asked the federal government for $200 billion (with a B) more in funds to maintain basic services.

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

Will Davidson and his Minecraft creation, modeled off the Santa Cruz Mission; Credit: Steve Henn

Minecraft is a deceptively simple video game. You're dropped into a virtual world, and you get to build things. It's like a digital Lego set, but with infinite pieces.

Its simplicity makes it a big hit with kids, like 10-year old Will Davidson. Last year, Will built a Spanish mission for a school report. He modeled his off the Santa Cruz Mission. "I made a chapel over here," Davidson says. "I also have a bell tower."

After he turned in his report, he added a few things. Like skeleton archers. "And zombies ... and exploding things, and spiders, that try to kill you," he said.

Minecraft is popular with kids because they're free to create almost anything, says Ramin Shokrizade, a game designer.

Also, kids aren't manipulated into clicking buttons to buy add-ons within the game. In other games, designers give players a special power for free at first, then take it away and offer it back at a price.

Zynga, the creator of Farmville, calls this fun pain, according to Shokrizade. "That's the idea that, if you make the consumer uncomfortable enough, and then tell them that for money we'll make you less uncomfortable, then [they] will give us money," he says.

Kids, Shokrizade says, are especially susceptible to this — and Minecraft has a loyal following, in part, because it doesn't do it.

Susan Linn, from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, agrees. She says a big reason she likes Minecraft is because after you purchase the game upfront, that's it.

"Parents don't have to worry that their kids are going to be targeted for more marketing," Linn says. "How forward-thinking!"

But Linn is worried. Microsoft bought Mojang, the company that created Minecraft, on Monday for $2.5 billion, and she says that any time a large company spends billions to acquire a smaller company, executives are bound start looking for new ways to get even more money out of it.

Maurice Jackson of Proven and Probable speaks with Andy Schectman, president of Miles Franklin Precious Metals Investments, about the present situation with physical precious metals.

Updates for the critical-rated vulnerabilities, which are being actively exploited in the wild, are still weeks away

The post Microsoft warns of two Windows zero‑day flaws appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

Microsoft plugs a security hole that could have enabled attackers to weaponize a GIF in order to hijack Teams accounts and steal data

The post Microsoft Teams flaw could let attackers hijack accounts appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

Coda Payments and Riot Games have announced that players...

Researchers have discovered high levels of plastic particles and fibres, as well as black carbon (BC), which is formed by the incomplete burning of fossil fuels, in the waters of the Jade Bay, an inshore basin off the coast of Germany in the Southern North Sea. The concentration of suspended particles are of concern because they have the potential to be ingested by fish and other marine life, and enter the food chain.

A circular economy, in which waste is minimised and resources are kept within the system, relies upon inventive ways of turning waste into a resource. A new study explored the possibility of using the microalga Scenedesmus obliquus to refine and process brewery wastewater. The alga efficiently removed pollutants from the effluent, produced biomass and biofuels in a range of different forms — and with different bioactive compounds — and encouraged waste barley and wheat to germinate at increased rates. This is especially important for breweries, as barley seeds are one of the main feedstocks for the industry — and thus are key to increasing its sustainability and circularity.

How can we grow more crops without taking too much water away from freshwater ecosystems for irrigation? A new study indicates that it is possible to double crop production by 2050 without exceeding set limits for water extraction if more crops are grown in regions with higher rainfall and with corresponding shifts in international trade and agricultural management. However, without appropriate safeguards, and if we follow the current business-as-usual scenario, this could come at the ecological cost of converting natural land and forest into cropland. This research provides a ‘first-step’ in analysing potential trade-offs in the global food-trade-water nexus.

Increasing resource efficiency is a central aim of European environmental policy, and effective waste management must play a key role in this. A new report assesses waste management in 32 European countries, and identifies key lessons. Landfill taxes and mandatory separate collections of different waste types are highlighted as particularly successful policy instruments.

Microsoft Edge is now giving users the ability to hide those pesky browser notification dialog boxes that are commonly used by web sites to push their content, or even spam, on visitors. [...]

Researchers at the Stowers Institute have established a definitive link between the makeup of the microbiome, the host immune response, and an organism's ability to heal itself.

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Parts of Africa and the Asia-Pacific region may be vulnerable to outbreaks of the Zika virus, including some of the world's most populous countries and many with limited resources to identify and respond to the mosquito-borne disease, a new study says.

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University of Oregon researchers have found links between the levels of antimicrobial chemicals and antibiotic-resistance genes in the dust of an aging building used for athletics and academics.

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Whilst there is interest in bioenergy as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels, there is also concern about its environmental impact. A recent study demonstrates that potential bioenergy crops in Hawaii are 2 to 4 times more likely to be invasive than other plants.

A Dutch study has assessed the water requirements of 13 bioenergy crops across the world. The findings could help select the best crops and locations to produce bioenergy.

A new study has investigated the effects of interbreeding a genetically modified squash crop with its wild relative. The findings demonstrate that it could cause wild or weedy relatives to become more resistant to disease.