'Abandoning a child'

Big Tech evaded any accountability for the damage they inflict on American children

Fleeing to the basement shelter of a hotel during a tornado isn’t exactly a mood-setter for a romantic dance, but that’s exactly the bizarre situation that 25-year-old newlyweds Alex and Sarah Schilke found themselves in back in June. Hosting their wedding at the Grand Geneva Resort and Spa Hotel in Wisconsin, the reception was already […] The post When Tornado Interrupts Wedding They Had First Dance in Basement Shelter: ‘Restored my faith in humanity’ appeared first on Good News Network.

Books On the Profound Importance of Ordinary Characters: Rejoicing in Brandon Sanderson’s Tress Tress is an ordinary person—and she remains an ordinary person, even while helping others and fulfilling her quest. It’s an inspiring and much-needed departure from the usual heroic narrative… By Ratika Deshpande | Published on July 31, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share [Contains spoilers for Tress of the Emerald Sea.] People are made up of, among other things, the books they read. Not only do we (try to) become like our favorite characters, they become our favorites because we already share specific interests and experiences with them. A part of me exists in the women of The Stormlight Archive—in Shallan’s curiosity and her bad jokes; in Jasnah’s fierce protectiveness of her family; in Navani’s craving of appreciation for her work. Bits of me are also present in Isabella, the in-world author of The Memoirs of Lady Trent; in Lucy Carlyle from Lockwood and Co.; in Robin and Rami from Babel. Then I read Brandon Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea, and for the first time it brought all those pieces together in a single character. The book gave me a sense of wholeness, a deep feeling of excitement and gratitude, for it’s a story that’s comfortingly familiar. Every page of the book was a joy to read; I simply couldn’t put it down. I could have been Tress—and, given that humans have invented the concept of self-insert fan fiction, there is no reason I can’t be. But as a writer I tire of relating the story of my life over and over, of always being the storyteller rather than the listener. Tress’s book felt as if someone was saying to me, “We do see you, working for your family. We see that your worth isn’t attached to how much you stand out from others, that you had to grow up too soon.” To read Tress of the Emerald Sea was to receive acknowledgement for the story I’d lived but never found being told by anyone else. While I saw familiarity and even boredom, Brandon Sanderson saw potential for magic and adventure in a young girl who hadn’t seen much of the world, always considered her family in all decisions, and was on the whole quite content with her life. They say that to wait is the most excruciating of life’s torments. “They” in this case refers to writers, who have nothing useful to do, so fill their time thinking of things to say. Any working person can tell you that having time to wait is a luxury.Tress had windows to wash. Meals to cook. A little brother to watch. Her father, Lem, had never recovered from his accident in the mines, and though he tried to assist, he could barely walk. He helped Tress’s mother, Ulba, knit socks all day, which they sold to sailors, but with the expense of yarn they turned only a meager profit.So Tress didn’t wait. She worked.Chapter 4, The Son Tress and I are similar in way too many respects; the one that stands out the most, even more than our shared responsibility-taking, economic standing, and fondness for tea, is her relationship with her family. She takes charge of their meals when she notices her mother giving up her own share of the food and going hungry as a result. She shares her heartbreak openly with her mother, Ulba. When she decides to go rescue Charlie, she talks to her parents first—and Lem and Ulba, in turn, listen to her and help her out. They respect her decisions—just like my parents do—and don’t patronize or dismiss her. When Tress gets her own ship, she sends for her family, bringing them along to wherever she’s headed next, because when it came to “seeking adventure in foreign oceans,” Hoid tells us, “Tress found that notion frightening. How could she leave her parents and brother?” If I had been reading a physical copy of the book, this is where I would have underlined the entire paragraph, then made a curly bracket and written in capital letters: ME!!!!!! As I’ve grown up, edging closer to the day when I’ll be married and move away, I’ve spent hours thinking (and crying) about the fact that I’ve already spent most of the total time I will get with my family. When I’ve questioned my mother about her own experience of this separation, she told me that one soon gets used to living with one’s partner and in-laws, and then when you do return to your former home for visits, you start longing to go back to your new place. I find it frightening how rarely this topic is discussed among women and in the media, and have pondered dozens of setups where I could be close to my family without them having to uproot their entire lives for me. I’ve been told on a couple of occasions to accept that this is just how things are—you spend over two decades with your parents and siblings, get married, then see them only a few times a year for the rest of their lives. To see Tress bringing her family along made me feel a little less ashamed, a little less out-of-place for mourning this eventual parting, and grieving the time that won’t be spent with my loved ones. The Importance of Being Ordinary As I’ve written before, all of us are worthy, and so are the things we make. It’s a difficult truth to remember, though, which is why we need to remind ourselves of that fact again and again. Sometimes, things get so hard that we doubt the effectiveness or worth of our own voice, our own words. We need someone else to show us not just what’s possible in the future, but that there’s enough magic and beauty in the lives we already lead, the people we already are. Reading Tress inspired me to try harder—for she represents at once both the person I am and the person I want to be—yet her story never made me feel like my life was lacking, or that I was inadequate. So often, art focuses on trauma and suffering, and while those stories are needed, we also need stories of possibilities that do not require suffering or horrific loss in the name of narrative depth or character growth. Tress is ordinary, and to me that ordinariness was just as necessary; I rejoiced in it because it’s not portrayed as a problem to overcome. “Absolutely!” she said, joining him in the hall, though she was strangely reluctant to leave her research. That was silly. She had no formal training in academics; her schooling had ended at basic reading and arithmetic. Surely she wasn’t secretly a scholar. A window-washing girl? If she’d been inclined toward research, she’d have realized it before.The truth was, she’d simply never encountered a topic interesting enough—or dangerous enough—to engage her.Chapter 37, The Scholar At the same time, Tress is not a liability for not having any obvious special abilities. Her ordinary life and the things she did as part of her routine—cooking, cleaning, listening, being considerate—end up serving her quest instead of limiting her. Scrubbing the deck saves her from being dumped into the spore sea, while her resourcefulness in the kitchen endears her to the crew. She stays on the Crow’s Song even when she’s given the chance to escape. She thinks too much, as Hoid says, and feels too much, but retains some of her practicality too. Examples of her empathic nature are woven like a thread through the book; my favorite instance is when, realizing that the dragon Xisis cannot help her, Tress uses the boon she’s earned to help her friends instead, including procuring a much-needed pair of glasses for the assistant cannonmaster, Ann. Earlier, despite internally grappling with the pain of possible loss and failure, Tress was sensitive enough to understand Ann’s longing and frustration and was able to give her the gift of firing the cannon (although, of course, Tress being Tress, she would not think of it that way). She could have been bitter or disappointed at that moment, but she wasn’t. Tress’s ordinariness, therefore, is never limiting; rather, her core skills and traits only strengthen as the story progresses, while also giving way to the development of new qualities, such as her growing assertiveness and a surprising dexterity in handling spores. Rethinking the Heroic “Those stories always leave something out,” Tress said. “It’s really not a problem that someone needs to be saved. Everyone needs help. It’s hard to be the person who makes trouble, but the thing is, everyone makes trouble. How would we help anyone if nobody ever needed help?” […] “The part the stories leave out,” Tress said as the Sorceress’s runes formed into a vibrant wall, “is everything that comes before. You see, I’ve discovered that it’s all right to need help. So long as you’ve lived your life as the kind of person who deserves to be rescued.”Chapter 64, The Hero Tress, over the course of the book, grows because of and along with the crew. Interacting with them helps her understand new perspectives on living—Fort’s trades, Salay’s determination, and even Crow’s ruthlessness. And it’s because of this new family she creates that she is able to rescue Charlie. She doesn’t send the Sorceress away from the planet—they all do. In this, Tress’s story deviates from the familiar narrative of the individual hero—who rises above the side characters and must face the climactic test or showdown on their own—which also makes this a necessary book; a refreshing change in our storytelling that feels more and more crucial when we’re all facing problems that need to be solved through collaboration and communal effort. The real world was never made for lone heroes anyway, and it’s always the ordinary, everyday people who come together and put in the work who ultimately make a difference—be it fighting the climate crisis, supporting elderly neighbors during a pandemic, or helping a young girl rescue the man she loves.[end-mark] Buy the Book Tress of the Emerald Sea Brandon Sanderson A Cosmere Novel Buy Book Tress of the Emerald Sea Brandon Sanderson A Cosmere Novel A Cosmere Novel Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleIndieBoundTarget The post On the Profound Importance of Ordinary Characters: Rejoicing in Brandon Sanderson’s Tress appeared first on Reactor.

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The speed of light in a vacuum is the same wherever you measure it in the universe, according to Einstein's special theory of relativity. Whether you're sat on Earth, Mars, or Andromeda, if you measure the speed of light you'll find it chugging along at a cool 299,792,458 meters per second (983,571,056.43 feet per second), the absolute speed limit of the universe.Sound is not the same as light. As the poster for Alien explains, in space no-one can hear you scream. Or to put it another way that won't sell as many movie tickets, sound cannot travel through a vacuum because it is a vibration propagating as an acoustic wave through a medium, be it liquid, solid, or gas. Sound moves at different speeds through those mediums, traveling faster through greater densities. On Earth, sound moves at 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) per second in water, and in air around 340 meters (1,115 feet) per second. In solids, sound moves much faster, though how fast depends on the solid. Scientists attempting to calculate the fastest that sound could possibly travel found that it decreases with the mass of the atom, implying that sound would be fastest if it were to propagate through solid hydrogen. Though solid hydrogen only occurs at astonishingly high pressures like those found inside gas giants like Jupiter, they calculated that sound would move along at 36 kilometers per second (22 miles per second) in it, likely the fastest possible speed that sound can travel.So, what about smell? Firstly, smell occurs when odors – volatized chemical compounds – bind to receptors in your nasal cavity. Some compounds are more volatile than others, meaning that they evaporate more easily in normal Earth conditions, which is what you end up smelling. Since it is the volatile chemical compound that you are detecting, rather than a wave traveling through a medium, smell is a lot slower than sound. It depends upon the medium through which the smell is traveling. Like sound, pressure and temperature affect how fast smell can propagate.                          Smell will diffuse in all possible directions until equilibrium is reached, thanks to the pesky second law of thermodynamics. At some point, assuming the room in which you farted is large enough, the smell will become so diffuse that your olfactory receptors are unable to detect it. Before this time, smells are subject to air flows in the environment/elevator in which you find yourself.Different compounds travel at different speeds, as shown by Graham's Law of effusion, with heavier molecules effusing more slowly than lighter molecules. While the speed of a smell is heavily dependent on the factors of pressure, temperature, and air flow, there are ways of approximating it.Using Graham's Law, for example, Alasdair Wilkins of Gizmodo compared a compound used in perfume to a compound thought to be one of the main ones responsible for the smell of farts, finding that farts travel slightly quicker. Do with this information what you will.

Uranium ore – the radioactive material that is refined for use in the production of nuclear fuel and atomic weapons – has started to be hauled out of a controversial mine located just south of Grand Canyon National Park. Grand Canyon Trust told IFLScience that two trucks had been spotted leaving the Canyon Mine – officially known as the Pinyon Plain Mine – on Tuesday, July 30, embarking on a 482-kilometer (300-mile) journey across northern Arizona and the Navajo Nation toward the White Mesa Mill in southern Utah.Once fully up and running, six large uranium haul trucks are expected to make this journey every day.The Navajo Nation passed a law in 2012 to ban the transportation of uranium across their reserve and has expressed deep disappointment about the recent news of "illegal transport of uranium across the reservation."In a test of the law, tribal police were ordered to stop the trucks as they crossed the land, but they reportedly failed to catch up to them.“Obviously the higher courts are going to have to tell us who is right and who is wrong. But in the meantime, you’re in the boundaries of the Navajo Nation,” Navajo President Buu Nygren told The Associated Press (AP).The mine sits near the south rim of the Grand Canyon within the boundary of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument.A map showing the route between the Pinyon Plain Mine in Arizona and the White Mesa Mill in southern Utah.Image credit: Grand Canyon TrustMining of the radioactive ore commenced in December 2023 against a deluge of opposition and environmental concerns. The Havasupai Tribe, the Grand Canyon Trust, and many other groups had attempted to stop activity at Pinyon Plain Mine from moving forward using legal challenges, but a court ruling in February 2022 upheld the view that the miners had valid existing rights.The Havasupai Tribe relies on water from aquifers that sit below the Canyon Mine. In January 2024, they released a statement claiming the mine was "desecrating one of our most sacred sites and jeopardizing the existence of the Havasupai Tribe.” "A whole set of unknown and new problems will exist when the company begins transporting uranium over the land," added the Havasupai Tribe.Their concerns have been backed up by peer-reviewed research on mining in the Grand Canyon, which concluded: “Contaminants, either from land-surface or subsurface sources, are likely to be transported into the deep aquifer, which is the primary source of South Rim springs and drinking water wells.”There is also a long and dark history of Native American communities such as the Navajo People being negatively impacted by uranium mining on the Colorado Plateau.For their part, Energy Fuels, the company that operates the uranium mine, claims their operations aren’t a danger to people or the natural world, citing “extensive controls in place to ensure protection of air, water, wildlife, and the environment.”“Tens of thousands of thousands of trucks have safely transported uranium ore across northern Arizona since the 1980s with no adverse health or environmental effects. Materials with far greater danger are transported every day on every road in the county. Ore is simply natural rock. It won’t explode, ignite, burn or glow, contrary to what opponents claim,” the president and chief executive of Energy Fuels, Mark Chalmers, said in a statement, according to AP.

Earth is not flat, but it isn't as round as you might think when you look at a globe. First off, we should ask why are planets generally round? This is actually somewhat of a circular question. Under the current definition, to be called a planet an object must have a (roughly) spherical shape. Objects above 1023 kg tend to be spherical, and if they meet other criteria such as clearing their orbit, they are called a planet. Objects under this size tend to not be spherical, which should give you a clue that the spherical shape has to do with our old friend (and deadly nemesis) gravity.Planets are formed by bits of matter bumping into each other over time in protoplanetary disks around stars, forming bigger clumps. As the mass increases, so does the new planet's gravitational pull, drawing in even more matter. When you have a planet-sized clump of hot, molten planet, gravity then sets to work smoothing it into the roundish objects we know and like to stand on/gawp at today."An object’s gravitational pull will always point towards the centre of its mass. The bigger something is, the more massive it is, and the larger its gravitational pull," Jonti Horner, professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland, explained in a piece for The Conversation. "But the thing is, gravity is actually surprisingly weak. An object must be really big before it can exert a strong enough gravitational pull to overcome the strength of the material from which it’s made. Smaller solid objects (metres or kilometres in diameter) therefore have gravitational pulls that are too weak to pull them into a spherical shape."This is why smaller objects and planets have less of a uniform shape, for instance Comet 67P which looks a little like a rubber duck. If you're wondering whether smaller rocky objects like asteroids could spin fast enough to mold them into a spherical shape, the answer is that they wouldn't have enough mass to do so. As they spin faster, loose rock would be ejected due to the small object not having enough mass to hold it together via gravity. It would then orbit the object as a moonlet.So why isn't the Earth a perfect sphere?Gravity is too weak to pull the Earth into a perfect sphere, but it also isn't the only force affecting a planet's shape. As well as tectonic activity moving continents, creating and destroying landmasses and mountain ranges, the Earth is shaped by the centrifugal force, discovered centuries ago.In 1671, astronomer Jean Richter traveled from Paris, France, to Cayenne, French Guiana in South America. With him, he took a pendulum clock. While the clock had been accurate in Paris, he noticed that in Cayenne it ran slowly, losing a full two and a half minutes every day. No biggie, the pendulum was shortened to make the clock accurate. However, when he returned to Paris he found that the clock was running too quickly, by two and a half minutes each day.Though it may feel the same when you jump up and down in Brazil or Canada, the rate at which you fall is not uniform. What mathematician Christiaan Huygens realized after hearing of Richter's clock was that it was experimental evidence that the Earth was rotating. The clock's change of pace was not due to some weird error, but because of the shape of the Earth itself.Later, Newton showed using data from a similar pendulum clock and Jupiter's equatorial bulge, that the Earth bulged at the equator due to the centrifugal force (think about how you are pushed to the outside edge of a roundabout as it spins) of its rotation, and estimated by how much. Near the equator, gravity acts upon you less than it does near the poles, as you are further away from the bulk of the Earth's mass, explaining why the pendulum ran differently.The faster the centrifugal force, the more likely you are to see these bulges. Dwarf planet Haumea, a planet roughly the size of Pluto, is shaped much like an egg due to how fast it is rotating. Earth, while not completely egg-like, bulges at the equator about 43 kilometers (27 miles).

Humans have being waging war against mosquitoes for as long as they’ve been feeding on us, from the humble – but highly fatal – slap, to the creation of mosquito repellent sprays, nets, and noises. Now, a new long-lasting mosquito repellent is borrowing bacteria from human skin to create a genetically engineered assault on the world’s most deadly animal.If you’ve ever squashed a mosquito it might be hard to see them as all that dangerous, but their deadly accolade rests on the fact that they kill more people than any other creature. Malaria, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, Zika, chikungunya – the list of mosquito-borne illnesses goes on, so how can we keep them at a safe distance?Enter a novel mosquito repellent that has looked to human skin for the answers. Staphylococcus epidermidis and Corynebacterium amycolatum are two microbes that are common on our skin, and they produce a type of lactic acid that’s like catnip to mosquitoes.A team of scientists decided to test if they could lessen the appeal of human skin by engineering bacteria so that they don’t produce that delicious lactic acid. The first test didn’t involve any other animals and demonstrated that the mosquitoes were less attracted to engineered microbes compared to the kind you find on our skin. This drop in attractiveness for edited S. epidermidis ranged from around 22 to 55 percent depending on the mosquito species, which included Culex quinquefasciatus, Aedes aegypti, and Anopheles gambiae.A second experimental design looked at how wildtype versus engineered S. epidermidis bacteria influence the attractiveness of mice to mosquitoes. In the wildtype control, the mosquitoes flocked to the mice as normal, and in the engineered control, there was a drop off in attraction by 64.4 percent. Similar results were seen in further trials looking at edited versions of C. amycolatum.The mosquito repellent effects did take three days to kick in, but once it began working, the effect lasted for 11 days. Such a long-lasting treatment could be a game changer for people living in areas where they are constantly exposed to potentially disease-carrying mosquitoes, and if effective, could strip these insects of their “world’s deadliest” title.The repellent has yet to be tested on humans, but if it makes it through future trials it could become a remarkable and mind-boggling approach to mosquito repellent. After all, how often do you get to say your skincare is made up of an army of miniature GMO bacterial soldiers? And while we're waiting, there's always coconut soap.The study is published in PNAS Nexus.