Adansonia is a genus made up of eight species of medium to large deciduous trees known as baobabs. Previously classified within the family Bombacaceae, they are now placed in the Malvaceae. They are native to Madagascar, mainland Africa, and Australia.Trees have also been introduced to other regions such as Asia. The generic name honors Michel Adanson, the French naturalist and explorer who described Adansonia digitata. The baobab is also known as the “upside-down tree”, a name that originates from several myths. They are among the most long-lived vascular plants and have large flowers that are reproductive for a maximum of 15 hours. The flowers open around dusk; opening so quickly that movement can be detected by the naked eye and are faded by the next morning. The fruits are large, oval to round and berry-like, and hold kidney-shaped seeds in a dry, pulpy matrix.
In the early 21st century, baobabs in southern Africa began to die off rapidly from a cause yet to be determined. Scientists believe it is unlikely that disease or pests were able to kill many trees so rapidly, and some speculated that the die-off was a result of dehydration from global warming. Wikipedia
Fish school, insects swarm and birds fly in murmurations. Now, new research finds that on the most basic level, this kind of group behavior forms a new kind of active matter, called a swirlonic state.
Physical laws such as Newton’s second law of motion — which states that as a force applied to an object increases, its acceleration increases, and that as the object’s mass increases, its acceleration decreases — apply to passive, nonliving matter, ranging from atoms to planets. But much of the matter in the world is active matter and moves under its own, self-directed, force, said Nikolai Brilliantov, a mathematician at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia and the University of Leicester in England. Living things as diverse as bacteria, birds and humans can interact with the forces upon them. There are examples of non-living active matter, too. Nanoparticles known as “Janus particles,” are made up of two sides with different chemical properties. The interactions between the two sides create self-propelled movement.
To explore active matter, Brilliantov and his colleagues used a computer to simulate particles that could self-propel. These particles weren’t consciously interacting with the environment, Brilliantov told Live Science. Rather, they were more akin to simple bacteria or nanoparticles with internal sources of energy, but without information-processing abilities.
On February 18, if all goes according to plan, Perseverance, NASA’s latest-and-greatest rover, will land on Mars. Around 3 PM EST, Percy will attempt its tricky Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) maneuver. If it survives the experience, Percy will join the Curiosity rover as humanity’s foremost interplanetary explorers.
To get this tricky orbital choreography just right, NASA pushed forward with the $2.7 billion mission despite the spread of the novel coronavirus. “It’s very expensive if we have to take Perseverance and put it back in storage for a period of two years,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, said at a June 17 press conference.
Perseverance wasn’t the only mission hoping to take advantage of the orbital alignment. China National Space Administration rover (and orbiter) Tianwen-1 arrived at the Red Planet last week, and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Mars orbiter arrived as well. ESA and Roscosmos were supposed to launch their ExoMars rover, dubbed Rosalind Franklin, in summer 2020, but work was delayed due to the spread of the coronavirus and the agencies postponed the launch. The rover will blast off in about two years.
NASA hopes that its newest rover, designed and developed in cooperation with partners from the European Space Agency, as well as researchers from Norway, Spain, and France—will be the first to find evidence of life outside of our pale, blue dot.
If you sit at a desk all day, stretching your arms up to the sky has likely become one of those mid-meeting tics that you don’t even realize you’re doing… until one day, you reach toward the ceiling, and your shoulder pings with pain. It’s one of the tell-tale signs that you’re dealing with inflammation and a cue that you should start treating your body to some shoulder impingement exercises before it gets any worse.
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“A shoulder impingement is an acute weakness and pain in the front and side of the shoulder, especially while the arm is in motion,” says Joey Cifelli, the assistant fitness manager at Crunch Union Square in New York City. It can happen for a number of reasons, including poor posture or simply going too hard on shoulder day. No matter how it started, though, trainers agree that you’ll want to nip it in the bud. Scroll on for everything you need to know about shoulder impingement, plus the exercises you can do at home to make those Zoom stretch sessions painless.
What is shoulder impingement?
Shoulder impingement happens when the tissues and tendons in your shoulders stop doing their jobs properly. Usually, these two elements act as a sort of protective cushion between your joints and muscles, absorbing the force of your movements so that you can raise and lower your arms without pain. “Usually, when we’re doing something like trying to lift our arms overhead, our muscles will transfer the force to a tendon, which helps transfer the movement from muscle to bone,” says athletic trainer Cristian Plascencia, CSCS. “But when people experience shoulder impingement, this ability to transfer and absorb force is compromised due to high amounts of inflammation in the shoulder joint.” The result: You’re not able to move through your full range of motion without feeling pain, which can lead to issues both on the mat and in your everyday life.
Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It stands on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of southern Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core of the Ottawa–Gatineau census metropolitan area (CMA) and the National Capital Region (NCR). As of 2016, Ottawa had a city population of 934,243 and a metropolitan population of 1,476,008 making it the fourth-largest city and the fifth-largest CMA in Canada. In June 2019, the City of Ottawa estimated it had surpassed a population of one million.
Founded in 1826 as Bytown, and incorporated as Ottawa in 1855, the city has evolved into the political center of Canada. Its original boundaries were expanded through numerous annexations and were ultimately replaced by a new city incorporation and amalgamation in 2001 which significantly increased its land area. The city name Ottawa was chosen in reference to the Ottawa River, the name of which is derived from the Algonquin Odawa, meaning “to trade”. Wikipedia
Here’s the situation: you’re typing a report for work, and you suddenly have to write the phrase “Jones née Berkowitz.” Or you are adding a phrase in Spanish and need to use the word “años.” How do you add the special characters to the letters?
Special characters (also known as diacritical marks) may be more common in certain languages, but there are plenty of circumstances in which English speakers may need to use them. But because they are so rare in English, native English speakers may not have learned how to add those marks to documents, emails, or other writings. It’s not difficult to add them to your Windows document, although it’s not quite as smooth an operation as on a Mac, where all you have to do is hold the appropriate key down. (In fact, once upon a time, you would have had to look up the symbol character codes…)
“Everything should calm down a little bit in seven months,” they said.
It was 9 February 2016, when I began my career as a critic of Fox News at Media Matters for America, a not-for-profit progressive research center dedicated to monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the US media.
Most people, eventually including Donald Trump, assumed Hillary Clinton would be elected the 45th president of the United States that November. Most people were wrong about a lot of things.
Nearly four years later, the US political world revolves around the tweets of an erratic Fox News-watching grandpa who just so happens to run the most powerful country on Earth. Like any avid TV viewer, Trump has his favorite stories, and few rival the morning show Fox & Friends, where he spent years making frequent appearances before diving into politics.
Since July 2018, I’ve been one among a lucky few live-tweeting the show along with the president. And after consuming thousands of hours of Rupert Murdoch’s finest drivel, I’ve learned a few things about how America’s No 1 news network is dragging the United States into ruin.
At Fox News, opinion is king – not news
Fox & Friends’ main hosts – Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade – are a consistent train wreck of shameless hackery, even managing to turn a report about Trump’s $1bn in business losses into a glowing endorsement of his bold, wealthy brilliance.
False claims that the coronavirus vaccines can be passed – or “shed” – from an immunized person to an unvaccinated woman and then somehow affect the woman’s reproductive system are whipping around social media. Top medical experts agree that it is impossible for a person to transmit the vaccines to people they happen to be near and for a woman to experience miscarriage, menstrual cycle changes, and other reproductive problems by being around a vaccinated person.
“This is a conspiracy that has been created to weaken trust in a series of vaccines that have been demonstrated in clinical trials to be safe and effective,” said Dr. Christopher Zahn, Vice President for Practice Activities at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading U.S. organization for medical professionals in women’s healthcare.
Calling the vaccines “our single best tool for confronting a global pandemic that has taken 600,000 lives in this country alone,” Zahn added in a statement emailed to Reuters that “such conspiracies and false narratives are dangerous and have nothing to do with science.”
An image of Baobab Trees
Photo: Getty Images/Travel Couples
An image from Ottawa, ON, Canada
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