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As of this morning, thousands of nurses at two major hospitals in New York City are officially on strike. While tentative deals had been reached for nurses at several other hospitals in the area, talks with three of Montefiore Medical Center’s locations in the Bronx and Mount Sinai’s flagship hospital on Manhattans’s Upper East Side broke down overnight. In a statement released today, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) said, “After bargaining late into the night at Montefiore and Mount Sinai Hospital yesterday, no tentative agreements were reached....

The smallest of the three is only four times the size of Earth. The HARPS spectrograph is one of only two instruments capable of detecting planets this small. Even so, it took five years of careful observation of the host star for the researchers to establish the existence of the planet. The discovery, along with other data collected by HARPS, suggests there may be a prevalence of exosolar terrestrial bodies in our galaxy....

“Our data very clearly shows that [microscopic particles in the air] can transmit the flu,” says study author William Ristenpart, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Davis. These particles, properly known as “aerosolized fomites,” are composed of everything from skin and poop to microscopic fragments of tissue or (in the case of guinea pigs, who were the model animal used in the research) cage sawdust. Viruses can hitch a ride and sail through the air toward uninfected beings, just like they do in the tiny aerosolized moisture droplets that leave our mouths and noses when we speak or sneeze....

Smart home gadgets are undeniably cool and sometimes show up in your house whether you buy them or not. And while the Internet of Things has its advantages, these internet-connected devices are still just computers and come with similar security risks. In 2019, a researcher found that LIFX smart bulbs were storing WiFi passwords without any encryption whatsoever. So by chucking one of these bulbs in the trash, you’d essentially make breaching your WiFi network as simple as dumpster-diving....

What’s more, the turkeys on our dinner table this week have less genetic variation than both their wild counterparts and other domesticated animals, including pigs and chickens. The lack of variance can be explained by the way Americans like their turkeys–big and huge-breasted. Variation in genes that code for those traits can lead to more scraggly and therefore less appetizing turkeys. Rob Fleischer, head of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics, said the team wanted to compare how domestic Thanksgiving turkeys compared with their ancestral wild brethren from southern Mexico....

But despite its seeming simplicity (just empty your mind and focus on your breathing) and potential benefits, meditation is much easier said than done. A small cadre of researchers is exploring whether a technology called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can help make meditation easier and get more people to do it regularly. All you have to do is put two electrodes on your forehead and deliver a mild shock to your brain....

Even if you’ve only seen the word on the side of a blueberry box, you’ve heard of antioxidants. It’s a lot less likely that you have a solid grasp on what they actually are. The companies selling us antioxidants, whether they be produce distributors or supplement stores, have drilled home the basics: antioxidants help fight free radicals. What are free radicals? They’re bad, and that’s all you really need to know....

Having multiple certifications under your belt signals technical prowess, and the more you have, the more skillful you are in the eyes of your colleagues, employers, and clients. The 2022 CompTIA and AWS, Cisco Certification Paths Bundle offers you unlimited access to not just one, not two, but 13 certification paths, and this Memorial Day, you can grab it at a deep discount. This is a best-selling course bundle and this is your last chance to grab it at a deep discount for Memorial Day....

If you’re able to pick your phone up to do something without getting sucked into doom-scrolling on Twitter or mindlessly refreshing Instagram, you’re my hero. I struggle to have the discipline to just put my phone away. Something simple—like throwing on a favorite playlist—can easily lead to me wasting 15 or 20 minutes doing, well, very, very little. The problem isn’t my phone. It’s me, and I know I’m not alone in this....

The company has been using E2E encryption to secure two-person chats since 2016. But unlike WhatsApp or Signal, Facebook Messenger doesn’t use this protocol by default. If you want to protect your data, you’ll have to activate it. But there’s a catch: this update only allows you to turn on E2E encryption when you create a new group chat. If you want to protect the groups you’re already in, you’ll have to delete them and start all over again....

It wasn’t an uncommon move at the time—Facebook and even Instagram shifted from their once-orderly ways. The algorithms had taken over social media, Skynet style. Now, in 2018, Twitter is letting users get back to a purely chronological timeline without all of the extra stuff and reorganization injected into it. To go back to the pre-2016 era, open up your Twitter app or go to twitter.com, then go to Settings and Privacy > Content Preferences > and turn off the toggle switch at the top....

But there may be a lot more to those mounds than meets the eye. In a new paper based on observations of the gophers in a patch of long-leaf pine forest in Florida, Putz and a recent undergraduate, Veronica Selden, argue that the critters are actually farming grass roots for food. The construction of those long, subterranean tunnel systems that pocket gophers call home present a mystery. Each individual keeps its own network, which can stretch for hundreds of feet, and defends it fiercely....

Virtual reality isn’t going to be huge at first, partially due to the problem I just described and partially due to the fact that the graphics card needed to run real VR costs at least $300. But it is undoubtedly the future of gaming, and 2016 is when that future will start to be realized. Both the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, which is supported by gaming company Valve, will be available for purchase this year....

Folks, this is human ingenuity at its apex. Enjoy. ** Related Content from our friends at This Old House** Wackiest Kitchen Gadgets Wackiest Bath Products Wackiest Pet Products Wackiest Yard & Garden Gadgets

Performers regularly contort their vocal muscles into shapes alien to their native tongue, past research has shown. And according to results presented yesterday at a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association in Victoria, British Columbia, many artists also produce sounds entirely unknown to modern linguists. Now you can see exactly what produces those extra-lingual effects. You’re looking at the beat boxer’s tongue, pulsating like an alien worm as it rides a wave of pressure from the throat’s vocal cords to an explosive exit from the lips....

Made to fly through the vacuum of space in a work of fiction, Star Destroyer bodies aren’t terribly aerodynamic. In fact, very few vehicles from Star Wars are, but that hasn’t prevented hobbyists from making TIE Fighters, Millennium Falcons, and even speeder bikes. There have even been earlier Star Destroyer drones, though none as large as this one. Most of these earlier drones are quadcopters bodies attached to them. This Star Destroyer, instead, is a giant wedge, powered by a pair of rotors in the front and with massive flaps in the rear....

My woodcock season opens right about now. The landscape is colorless, trees are still black skeletons, but these little birds are seemingly celebrating the coming of spring with a sky dance that few hunters ever witness. The performance may begin as early as February in some places, as late as May in others. Completing their night flights from the south where they overwintered, woodcock seek out hillside pastures or abandoned fields rimmed by woodland and studded with alders, cedars, or thornapples....

Those floods are often framed as a hint of what climate change will bring to America’s coasts. But they’re also a result of sea level rise that’s already occurred, and a signal of the country’s limited preparedness to deal with more water. The crisis is already here. Over the next 30 years, average sea level around the United States will be about a foot higher than it is today, according to recent projections from an interagency report released by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, based on tighter estimates of sea level rise in recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports....

Despite the cold (it averages 8 degrees below zero) and lack of sunlight, as well as the extreme isolation and high salinity (six times greater than that of normal seawater), these bacterial colonists survive, and apparently have been surviving for some time. Previous studies of Lake Vida suggest the icy habitat has been isolated from the surrounding environment for more than 3,000 years, making it an excellent analog for the conditions that might be found in the subsurface environs of Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s Enceladus....

Earlier this year, Google announced it wants to block certain cookies on Chrome, but it’s not the first—Mozilla and Apple have spent years tightening the rules around how Firefox and Safari, respectively, handle cookies. If you’re wondering why this is happening, or even what cookies are in the first place, let’s start with a basic definition: Cookies are small files that websites leave on your computer, phone, tablet, and other digital devices whenever you visit....