While most of the time you're probably happy just plunking down on the couch to watching 'Breaking Bad' for the umpteenth time, sometimes you need to watch a film or show that challenges your perception of the world.
Produced by Darren Weaver. Original reporting by Julia Calderone.
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Kolmanskop was once full of life. The former diamond mining town, located in the Namib desert in the south of Namibia, was home to over 1,000 people.
They had a ballroom, a hospital, and a bowling alley among other amenities, but by 1954, it was completely abandoned.
Australian photographer Emma McEvoy visited what's left of the town in November 2015 and took stunning photos of the empty homes filled with sand in her series "Sandcastles."
Keep scrolling to see inside the ghost town.
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A massive blizzard slammed the US in mid-February 2007. The day after the storm abated, I sat in my apartment, logged onto Kayak, and began considering my options for an upcoming weeklong vacation.
I settled on Nicaragua, but little did I know that what began as a backpacking trip would eventually turn into the award-winning documentary film"My Village, My Lobster" covering one of the most dangerous industries on the planet: commercial lobster diving. The five-year project would bring onboard film producer and cinematographer Brad Allgood and cinematographer Isabelle Carbonell.
This is the inside look at life onboard a real-life lobster boat.
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After several days in town, I felt the itch to move on. I mentioned to a few other travelers my intentions of exploring the east coast, about an hour's flight from Managua, and was quickly chided. The relative isolation of the Miskito coast serves as a main corridor for drug traffickers heading north from South America. It had a certain reputation for being dangerous, yet I decided to board the next flight out.
It was over a lobster dinner on Big Corn Island when I first learned about the savage, deadly commercial lobster industry. I wanted to experience it firsthand, so on to Puerto Cabezas — the capital of the region and home to the indigenous Miskito Indians — I went.
Last week saw the first significant increase in the number of active drilling rigs in the U.S. since the start of this year, suggesting that optimism is returning, albeit cautiously, to the shale plays, and nowhere did things look better than Texas’ prolific Permian Basin—long regarded as America’s ‘sleeping giant’.
Operators in the Permian added five rigs to their active count during the week, in the latest demonstration that the basin is perhaps the most viable across the shale patch, with its low production costs and abundant reserves.
The Permian is enjoying a lot of attention from the energy industry and from private equity alike. Those with a presence in the basin are upbeat about the future, and those without are trying to step into it in order to share in the riches.
One of the biggest operators in the Permian, Pioneer Natural Resources, just recently indicated its optimism for the short term. Speaking at an industry conference, Pioneer’s executive VP Joey Hall said the company is planning to allocate $1.8 billion—about 90 percent of its total budget—to operations in the Permian. What’s more, the company is ready to ramp up its rig count in its two Permian fields – Spraberry and Wolfcamp – and hasrevised up its overall production growth projections to 12 percent. A bold move in a still oversaturated oil market that has just seen the re-entry of Iran.
Another of the majors, Occidental Petroleum, is also planning a production increase in the Permian, of 4-6 percent, to be fuelled by capex of some $3 billion. The company is consistently working on lowering its production costs, which last year averaged around $40 a barrel, to ensure its profitability even if prices start sliding again.
Occidental Petroleum recently became the object of media speculation that had it buying smaller rival Apache Corporation. Although the report proved unfounded and was denied by Occidental, Apache’s stock shot up immediately, suggesting investors would favor some consolidation in the Permian, where Occidental has acreage of 5.4 million gross, and Apache has over 3.3 million acres.
Pioneer, by the way, was also suggested as a suitable takeover target for Occidental, reinforcing an impression that Permian operators should take advantage of the situation and consolidate to maximize the benefits low production costs and a stable oil price offer them at the moment. Tying up with a peer could indeed bring in synergies that will enhance profitability and resilience in the face of future price slumps. After all, it’s unclear how long this will last, especially after OPEC’s recent meeting ended with no change of the organization’s production policy: members can still pump as much as they can.
For now, however, both Occidental and Pioneer seem to prefer to go it alone, as do other players in the Permian, and they all sound relatively optimistic. A recent survey among Permian operators by the local Midland Reporter-Telegram found that there is a general consensus that oil prices will continue to be volatile in the short-term and that the drive to improve efficiency and reduce costs is the surest way to stay profitable in the lower-price environment. The general mood was positive.
Whether or not consolidation will rear its head in the Permian anytime soon, operators there have two things going for them that are unique for the play: the easier accessibility (hence low production costs) of the crude and its prodigious volume. Making the best of these while they last is the only reasonable course of action at the moment.
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Boyan Slat is just 21, but he's already developed a technology that could remove millions of pounds of plastic from our oceans.
In 2013, Slat, then only 19, founded The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to extract trash from oceans using a sophisticated system of floating barriers and nets. Basically, floating barriers are placed along currents where trash collects, which, once caught in the nets, will be removed and recycled.
A feasibility study conducted by the company estimates that a single one of these barriers could eliminate almost half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — about 154 million pounds of plastic — in just 10 years.
The company just announced that it has received full funding for its North Sea prototype test, which will begin this summer. The $1.7 million project was funded by marine contractor Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V., the Dutch government, and one anonymous philanthropist.
The 328-foot-long prototype will be deployed in the Dutch North Sea for one year in order to test its performance in extreme-weather conditions.
The prototype and additional details about the North Sea test are slated to be revealed on June 22, according to a press release.
Here's a look at Slat's technology in action:
Summertime is the perfect excuse to go for a splash in the pool.
And that seems to be what was going through a 250-pound black bear's mind when he went for a dip in a back yard pool in La Cañada Flintridge, California, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Afterward, KTLA 5, the female bear went to take a nap in a pine tree. And of course, news crews got aerial footage of the bear having a grand time.
The bear had wandered in from nearby Angeles National Forest (which borders La Cañada Flintridge). With all the commotion from police cars and helicopters that arrived on the scene, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife had to wait for her to come out of the tree. Around 5:30, she woke up and came out of the tree before heading back into the woods of her own accord.
Andrew Hughan, a spokesman for the Department of Fish and Wildlife told the LA Times that this isn't an uncommon occurrence. Earlier this year, there were other bear sightings. Hughan attributed it to younger bears, only a few years old, who get displaced once their mothers have to start taking care of their new babies in the spring. Because of their youth, they're likely to wander away from their comfort zone.
"It's their first time on their own, so they'll smell something and follow it, and next thing you know they're in downtown Pasadena," Hughan told the LA Times in May.
Here's the full video of the pool party:
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Glass Gem corn, a unique variety of rainbow-colored corn, became an Internet sensation in 2012 when a photo of the sparkling cob was posted to Facebook.
Shortly after, the company that sells the rare seeds, Native Seeds/SEARCH, began ramping up production to meet the high demand. The Arizona-based company still sells Glass Gem seeds on its website.
Meanwhile, a Facebook page devoted to Glass Gem allows growers to share pictures of the vibrant corn variety.
But the story behind Glass Gem is just as remarkable. It begins with one man, Carl Barnes, who set out to explore his Native American roots.
The history was largely retold by Barnes' protegee, Greg Schoen, in 2012, when the corn gained national attention. We've broken out the highlights.
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There's a floating apartment on top of the Great Barrier Reef, located off the coast of Queensland. Airbnb is holding a competition where four guests can win the chance to stay there.
Produced by Claudia Romeo. Original reporting by Chloe Pantazi.
Shark fin soup is a traditional Chinese dish that has become popular across the globe. It is viewed as a delicacy, so many restaurants are able to charge top dollar for the seafood broth.
With declining populations of sharks worldwide, there have been multiple bans on the sale of shark fins in the United States. However, some species are still allowed to be sold. It is also almost impossible to stop the sale of shark fins, Sea Shepherdsays, because many Asian markets often lie about the species they have caught and laws aren’t always upheld.
This so-called delicacy also leads to some major health problems.
The reason indulging in this dish can be so harmful is because of bioaccumulation, explains the Shark Research Institute. Toxins concentrate in animals when they move up the food chain. Since sharks are some of the largest and longest-living species in the ocean, they have a high position on the food chain, so they consume huge amounts of toxins that have accumulated in their prey.
A studypublished in Science of the Total Environment in 2014 measured levels of monomethylmercury (MMHg), the most toxic and volatile form of mercury, in 50 dried unprocessed fins of 13 species found in international trade, as well as 50 samples of shark fin soup prepared in restaurants across the United States. They found that concentrations of MMHg in fins ranged from 9 to 1720 ng/g and concentrations in fin soup were 0.01 to 34 ng/mL. The highest values came from sharks at the top of the food chain, like hammerheads. The consumption of a 240 mL bowl of shark fin soup containing high MMHg concentrations is 17% more than the EPA’s recommended amount.
This is a major problem for expecting mothers. A 2015 study published by researchers at Rutgers University measured mercury levels in different fish species in New Jersey. They found that most mako sharks, a fast-swimming large mackerel shark, has mercury levels exceeding 1.0 ppm, with the highest being 1.8 ppm.
Less than 2 parts in a million may seem trivial, but the US Environmental Protection Agency has set the limit at 0.3 ppm and the US Food and Drug Administration set their own level at 1.0 ppm. The US FDA has said that pregnant women should avoiding eating shark meat because prenatal doses can lead to behavioral deficits in infants and lower results on cognitive performance tests.
More symptoms of mercury poisoning can include harm to the brain, heart, kidneys, and immune system.
University of Miami researchers published a study in 2012 on a cyanobacterial neurotoxin (a nervous system-affecting toxin produced from photosynthesizing bacteria) known as BMAA. They sampled fin clips from 7 different shark species in South Florida. BMAA was detected in fins of all species they examined with concentrations ranging from 144 to 1836 ng/mg wet weight.
Sharks found both in areas with cyanobacterial blooms and without had the toxin in them, possibly due to their migratory lifestyles. This study found that shark size or lifespan didn’t have a significant effect on how much of the toxin was present. This means that even if the fin in your shark fin soup is from a smaller shark, there is still a chance it could be affected.
BMAA has been linked to neurogenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Eating shark fins can increase human exposure the toxin. Scientists at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center have published evidence suggesting this could be due to BMAA being improperly incorporated in the skin, leading to problems in the formation of connective tissue.
So while shark fin soup may appear to be an extraordinary dish to indulge in on a special occasion, it is definitely dangerous. Although there are bans, the soup can still be found in restaurants across the nation. Be sure to think twice the next time you consider ordering one of Asia's most famous dishes.
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Over the next century, as temperatures climb, precipitation patterns shift, and sea levels rise, there will be a dramatic altering of the American landscape.
Faced with these changes, some plants and animals will either have to adapt or flee to new, colder homes in order to survive. In fact, a number of species have already begun shifting their habitats, with most moving towards the poles or to the higher elevations of the mountains. Some animals might even need to move many hundreds of miles over the next half-century.
But, the untouched forests, deserts, mountains, and parks that these species call home are fragmented and divided by human development, such as cities, agriculture or roads. This, more often than not, leaves species no escape route if climate change continues to make their habitats inhospitable.
A new study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that only 41% of today’s natural areas are sufficiently connected to allow plants and wildlife to remain in their optimal climate.
The situation is even more dire in the eastern US: only 2% of natural lands provide the kind of connectivity needed for species to flee, compared to 51% in the west. Not only is the east more densely urbanized, but it also has less of a climate gradient due to smaller, older mountains. The west, in contrast, has much taller mountains (providing a bigger climate gradient) and much bigger swaths of untouched wilderness.
Species need “little plant and animal highways, paths that make it easier to move and disperse over the landscape,” Jenny McGuire, study author and research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Biology, told Business Insider.
These paths — called habitat corridors — would be one way of helping species adapt to a warming world. They could be created through the restoration of forests, bogs, and other areas in order to connect up the fragmented wildlife refuges, allowing plants and animals to shift or migrate if they need to.
The PNAS study findings suggest that creating corridors could improve the connectivity by as much as 65% nationwide, boosting the chances of survival of more species.
This would be especially important in the Southeastern part of the US, where such corridors could provide escape routes to northern climates for a variety of species, including amphibians such as woodland salamanders, which need cover to survive.
Without corridors, McGuire said, extinction will be higher and a lot of populations of species will be lost.
Habitat corridors have already been created in a few places. Wyoming has begun to invest in wildlife overpasses, researchers are working on digging tunnels for amphibians under busy roads in New York State, and North Carolina is looking into connecting bog land.
“An important contribution of this [PNAS study] is that it helps us, ecologists and managers, prioritize limited funding for research and habitat restoration efforts, by focusing on areas of the US where it will have the biggest impact on improving connectivity of habitat corridors for species,” Dr. Nate Nibbelink, associate professor of spatial ecology at the University of Georgia, told Business Insider. He was not directly involved in the study.
Habitat corridors have already been created in a few places. Wyoming has begun to invest in wildlife overpasses, while researchers are working on digging tunnels for amphibians under busy roads, and North Carolina is working for to connect bogs.
In future work, McGuire and her colleagues hope to examine individual species to determine which one are most likely to struggle with the changing climate and which areas of the country are most likely to be impacted.
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How do you ensure your employees and shareholders value environmental and social impact over short-term profits? If you ask Unilever CEO Paul Polman, the answer is to stop paying high bonuses, to stop reporting on your company’s stock value in quarterly reports, and to start chasing environmental and social goals in your company’s written objectives.
If you would ask any other CEO how that sounds for a strategy, they may tell you it sounds like the equivalent of writing your own termination letter. A CEO lives by the sword and dies by the sword – he or she is as good as the last quarterly results. But for Paul Polman, leader of the company that makes products like Axe deodorant, Lipton tea, or Magnum ice cream, it has turned out to be a winning recipe, and one for which he has won many accolades.
Oxfam International, for example, recently declared Unilever the best-in-class in terms of its agricultural sourcing policies. The Dow Jones Sustainability index named Unilever the world’s leading food and beverage company in sustainability performance. And Polman himself is a board member at the UN Global Compact and the chair of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, a function in which I welcomed him at a World Economic Forum press conference.
How did he do it? As The Guardian recently noted, Unilever’s recent commitments include launching “a sustainable living plan that includes a commitment to cut calories in its ice-cream products” and a pledge “to eliminate coal from its energy usage within five years, and derive all of its energy solely from renewable sources by 2030.” But the list goes on and on.
Interestingly, it pays off financially as well. Since Polman took the helm of Unilever in 2009, the stock price of the Dutch-British company has doubled, its revenues stand at some $60 billion, and its profits at $6 billion. It makes the Rotterdam-based firm the third largest consumer goods company in the world, behind only Nestle and Proctor & Gamble. Surprised? Polman isn’t. “Businesses are discovering that the costs of not doing things are becoming higher than doing things,” he told The Guardian.
Yet it didn’t always look like Polman would become a celebrated business leader. As a matter of fact, he had almost not become a business man at all. As he explained in a recent interview in Dutch financial daily FD, he initially wanted to become a priest and even visited a seminary. After dismissing that idea, he tried and failed three times to get into medical school, which in the Netherlands is based on a lottery. It was only when his father nudged him to give another study a go, that he started his economics studies, which led to his business career.
He was also not supposed the CEO of Unilever. He started his career at that other consumer goods giant, Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, and stayed there for 27 years (almost unimaginable for many of us Millennial professionals today, who switch jobs on average four times by the time we’re 32). Then, in 2006, he became CFO at Nestle, which put him in pole position to become CEO one day there. But in a surprise move, he left that company and ultimately became CEO of Unilever.
No, Paul Polman is far from a typical CEO. He is mostly traveling and rarely in the office, he says, and that should be fine. People shouldn’t depend on him to take decisions because he will be long gone by the time other employees retire. With 8 years at the top he is already past the median expiration date of a Fortune 500 CEO, which is less than 5 years. But that doesn’t mean that at age 60, he is about to slow down. A day has only 24 hours, but, he says, he usually has commitments for 48.
The reason for his overly ambitious schedule may be the same as the one he had for considering seminary: his strong-held internal belief that you should live your life in the service of others, not yourself. It may also be why he politely declined to be interviewed for this article:
“Thanks for the opportunity which is highly appreciated,” he wrote me. “However rather bring attention to the cause than to individual. Thanks for understanding. Warm regards. Paul”
Peter Vanham is a Global Leadership Fellow at the World Economic Forum. He wrote this contribution in his own name. It is based in large part on an interview Paul Polman gave to Jeroen Smit for the Dutch financial daily Financieel Dagblad.
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Rising sea levels appear to have wiped out a rodent species living on an island in the Great Barrier Reef. This is the first documented case of a mammal species going extinct due to manmade climate change.
The mammal, called the Bramble Cay melomys, was a long-tailed, whiskered critter, with reddish-brown fur that was about the same size as a small rat. It was considered the only mammal endemic — or native — to the Great Barrier Reef, living on a tiny island in the northeast Torres Strait between Queensland, Australia and the southern shores of Papua New Guinea.
While melomys had been abundant on the island in the 1970s, their populations had dwindled rapidly since over the last few decades, leading them to being listed as endangered. They were last spotted on the island in 2009.
From August to September 2014, scientists conducted a thorough survey effort of the island, using traps, cameras and daytime searches to try to spot and count the species — all to no avail — leading them to conclude that it had likely gone extinct.
“The assertion that Australia has lost another mammal species can be made with considerable confidence,” they wrote in their report to Queensland’s government. And anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change was blamed for the extinction.
“The key factor responsible for the death of the Bramble Cay melomys is almost certainly high tides and surging seawater, which has traveled inland across the island,” Luke Leung, study co-author and scientist at the University of Queensland told The New York Times.
The seawater is believed to have destroyed the creature’s small habitat. In March of 2014, the livable surface of the island had shrunk to its smallest point ever and refuge sites used by the critters, such as rock caves and crevices, had started to disappear. This also led to problems with food. While its diet was poorly researched, melomys were believed to be mostly vegetarian and they had to compete for food with nesting seabirds and turtles.
Many believe this extinction is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Climate change is putting enormous strains on species all across the globe, with a 2015 report finding that one sixth of the planet’s species could face extinction as a result.
“Certainly, extinction and climatic change has gone hand in hand throughout the history of the world,” John White, an ecologist from Deakin University, told The Guardian. “So, if this is one of the first, it is more than likely not going to be the last.”
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Washington (AFP) - May's temperatures broke global records yet again, as the northern hemisphere finishes its hottest spring on record, statistics released Tuesday by NASA showed.
The Arctic in particular experienced abnormal heat, causing Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet to start melting unusually early, said NASA.
Alaska recorded its warmest spring on record by a wide margin, and in Finland the average May temperature was between three and five degrees warmer than usual in most regions, according to data from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
"The state of the climate so far this year gives us much cause for alarm," said David Carlson, Director of Geneva's World Climate Research Programme, in a release from the World Meteorological Association.
Now dissipated, the El Nino weather pattern factored into 2016's record-setting heat, but meteorologists say greenhouse gases emitted from human activities remain the underlying cause.
"The super El Nino is only partly to blame. Abnormal is the new normal," Carlson added.
Strong El Nino temperatures did cause more than 53 percent of Australia to experience its warmest autumn on record.
May's exceptional warmth was accompanied by extreme weather events including abnormally heavy rains throughout Europe and the southern United States, as well as "widespread and severe" coral reef bleaching.
Austraila's Bureau of Meteorology blamed warm waters for "unprecedented" bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is expected to announce complete global May temperature records in the coming days.
Recent predictions by US scientists anticipate that 2016 will go down as Earth's hottest year on record -- on the heels of record-setting years in 2014 and 2015.
In late May, NOAA announced that April also registered its highest temperatures ever, marking the twelfth consecutive month of record heat.
The first four months of 2016 were the warmest globally in 136 years.
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One of the most talked-about consequences of climate change is ocean acidification, which particularly threatens creatures that build shells.
But there's another big problem in the ocean's chemistry that's beginning to get out of control: oxygen.
Even though they live underwater, fish breathe oxygen just like we do. Their gills pull dissolved oxygen out of the water.
But the warmer the ocean's water gets, the less dissolved oxygen it can hold. It's basically the underwater equivalent of a human panting in the thin air on a mountaintop.
There are naturally some parts of the ocean that have less oxygen in them. But as climate change gets worse, a lot of areas aren't going to be able to hold as much oxygen as they have in the past — and the fish that live there won't be able to breathe. Each of these low-oxygen pockets will expand, spreading both horizontally and up towards the surface.
A recent study found that within the next 15 to 25 years, whole swaths of the ocean will have noticeably less oxygen than they would without a changing climate.
Oxygen levels are highest at the surface, since the ocean gets its oxygen from mixing with the air and from plants that use sunlight to grow.
That means the deeper parts of the ocean are in the most danger. Some traditionally deep dwelling ocean creatures have been seen much closer to the surface than usual, forced into new zones where they can breathe.
It's hard to pin down oxygen levels precisely, and modeling what will happen gets complicated fast thanks to other factors at play. But none of the stats are comforting.
One prediction has deepwater oxygen levels plummeting as much as 20-40% in the next century. Some regions off the coast of California have lost a third of their oxygen in the past 25 years. For more than a decade, water off the Pacific Northwest has lost so much oxygen that National Geographic has called them a "lifeless wasteland."
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The Walt Disney World resort in Florida closed its beaches on Wednesday as the police searched for signs of a 2-year-old boy who was dragged into a lagoon by an alligator despite an attempt by his father to rescue him, according to officials and CNN reports.
Wildlife officials captured and euthanized four alligators from the lagoon to examine them for traces of the child after the Tuesday-night attack but found no evidence they were involved, said Nick Wiley, executive director of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
The local sheriff said on Wednesday that there was "no question" the boy is dead.
"We know that this is a recovery effort at this point," Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings told a news conference, about 15 hours after the child was attacked by the gator.
There are "no swimming" signs at the lagoon, but the alligator grabbed the boy as he played at the edge of the water while his family relaxed nearby on the shore, sheriff's spokesman Jeff Williamson said at a news conference.
The boy's father rushed into the water after the alligator struck and struggled to wrestle his child from the alligator's grasp, Williamson said.
"The father did his best," Williamson said. "He tried to rescue the child, however, to no avail."
The family, which was vacationing from Nebraska, was not named.
Disney has closed its beaches "out of an abundance of caution," CNN reported, citing a Disney representative.
The father suffered minor cuts on his arm in the struggle, Williamson said. Authorities had earlier said the boy's mother also tried to rescue him.
A lifeguard who was on duty by the lagoon also was unable to reach the boy in time, he said. "The gator swam away with the child," Williamson said.
Dozens of sheriff's deputies and wildlife officials were searching for the boy on Wednesday and expected to use sonar technology, helicopters, and divers.
Sheriff Jerry Demings told reporters the reptile was thought to be 4 to 7 feet (1.2 to 2 meters) long.
Alligators are not uncommon in the Seven Seas Lagoon, a man-made lake reaching 14 feet in depth, Wiley told reporters.
The wildlife commission works with the resort to remove "nuisance alligators" when they are reported, Wiley said.
Despite the prevalence of alligators in freshwater around Florida, he said it was very rare for humans to be attacked.
Williamson said searchers had been hindered overnight by the dark and by the lagoon's murky waters. "We're going to keep searching until we find something," he said.
A spokeswoman for Walt Disney World Resort said everyone there was devastated by the tragic accident. "Our thoughts are with the family and we are helping the family," she said.
The alligator incident comes as the Orlando area reels after a gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub there on Sunday.
On May 28, a 3-year-old boy fell into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo, causing zookeepers to kill a gorilla to protect the child.
(Additional reporting and writing by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Writing by Laila Kearney; Editing by W Simon and Bill Trott)
Trying to find the time or place to do laundry while traveling can be difficult, but it's a little easier if you have a washing machine with you at all times.
The Scrubba wash bag claims to offer an alternative to over-packed suitcases or smelly clothes. The lightweight bag easily folds or can lay flat at the bottom of a suitcase, and claims to clean clothes as well as a washing machine in as little as three minutes.
The waterproof bag has a transparent window, which makes it easy to see how much water and laundry detergent you're adding to your clothes. Once it's filled up, you simply close the bag and get rid of excess air with a valve on the side. Then it's time to get washing.
There are "nobules" inside the bag that act as a flexible, modern washboard. As you rub the outside of the bag, the clothes brush against the nobules, causing the friction and scrubbing action needed to get out stains. After 30 seconds, the clothes have had a quick wash, but after three minutes, the company says your fabrics will be as clean as if they were put through a washing machine.
A quick rinse afterwards to remove excess detergent and soiled water is the last step before leaving the clothes to dry.
We were skeptical too, but 120+ Amazon customers were raving about the tiny bag, giving it four out of five stars overall.
One Amazon customer used the Scrubba while on a business trip for their workout clothes. "I no longer have to pack so much stuff because this is handy, cheaper than hotel cleaners, plus safe/gentler on clothes than coin machines."
"I seriously had fun cleaning my delicates,"said another reviewer. "Rolling this little guy around on the floor was a blast!"
Many of the negative reviews are from people who didn't buy the product or mention the air valve breaking or cracking, a design flaw that most recent reviewers seemed to have escaped, as review from December 2015 mentioned that the product had an "'improved' air valve."
Top-ranked Amazon reviewer Beau Chevassus even made a Youtube video in which he used the Scrubba to clean a Nutella stained towel. He ultimately gave the bag five stars.
The Scrubba is available on Amazon for $50. While that price may seem a little steep for a tiny bag, it could end up saving you time, water, electricity, and money, as well as offer you an option in a pinch when you may not have access to a washing machine.
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On Tuesday night, a 2-year-old was playing near the water at a Disney World resort when an alligator dragged him into the water.
Though the alligator population is on the rise in Florida, deaths caused by alligators are not common.
At most, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has recorded three fatalities in a year (2006 and 2001), but in most years there are few if any deaths. In 2015 there were nine alligator attacks that resulted in a bite, with one death. This is a small number considering that there are an estimated 1.3 million alligators in Florida, where the American alligator population is the largest.
That means alligators are much less deadly than other creatures on earth, though the attack is still alarming.
"People — even small people — are not their typical prey," Nick Wiley of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission told USA Today. His theory is that the alligator most likely confused the toddler for a dog or raccoon, which are commonly snatched up.
The best way to avoid being mistaken for prey? "Just keep in mind that there might be alligators present,"James Perran Ross, a retired professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida told Live Science. "If you think of that, it changes your whole approach." Avoid the water particularly around dusk and dawn when alligators might be at their most active.
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Track meets were moved to the evenings to avoid the soaring temperatures.
Marching band members ditched their formal hats and uniforms.
Forecasters took to the airwaves to warn viewers, especially the elderly and infirm, to stay indoors and stay hydrated.
Temperatures soared over 110 degree F., in several areas. And that was just in the first week of June in the Western US.
Now the region is bracing for the weekend, when "a truly historic heat wave is likely to bring intense and all-time record challenging heat" to large swatches of the Southwest this weekend, according to AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Ken Clark.
The heat wave will center in Arizona and effect bordering states California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah.
Death Valley, Calif., holds the record for the highest temperature ever recorded in the world, at 134 degrees F., in 1913. Meteorologists note that the aptly named desert might reach 130 this weekend or early next week. Parts of California and Arizona will see temperatures in the 115 to 120 degrees F., range, with Phoenix predicted to near 122 degrees F.
Above normal temperatures are nothing new for 2016, which started off with the most abnormally hot month in the Northern hemisphere’s history, according to NASA. That was January, and then February broke that record, which is based not on average temperature but on deviations from the norms. In March, the Northern Hemisphere reached the milestone mark of 3.6 degrees above normal preindustrial levels for the first time ever.
While El Niño years do contribute to heat, scientists say that global warning, and not El Niño, has caused the record highs, The Guardian reports.
"The interesting thing is the scale at which we're breaking records," Andy Pitman, a climatologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia told The Guardian. "It's clearly all heading in the wrong direction."
And the Southwest prepares to deal with a localized version of this global trend this week. The El Niño weather system and "significantly above normal" temperatures will up the region's typically dry weather, James Sawtelle of the National Weather Service told USA Today.
The high heat and dryness will bring an elevated fire threat to a region that has been ravaged by wildfires in recent years and could exacerbate drought.
Drought restrictions and measures continue in California. This El Niño winter brought some easing of the state's five-year drought after higher winter temperatures melted snow. But not as much as predicted, nor was it enough to change ongoing drought forecasts.
A webpage dedicated entirely to the state's drought warns that vigilance is important for water conservation.
"Californians most need to keep up their impressive conservation in the summer months – wherever they are in the state," said Felicia Marcus, the state water board chair in a statement where she lauded the conservation efforts of Californians who are consuming a quarter less water then they did in 2013. "The fact is that we could be staring down the barrel of continued drought into 2017 and last winter's rain and snow could just be a punctuation mark in a longer drought."
Last month, the water board approved a "stress test" which requires local water agencies to announce how they calculate their water usage and what their projections are. To ensure that each region is setting and meeting appropriate goals all water boards will have to report their "conservation standard" by next Wednesday.
Meanwhile in Arizona, fire response crews are holding the lines on several contained or smoldering wildfires. According to a state website dedicated to wildfire updates, crews are "preparing for any potential flare-ups that could spread as the weather becomes hotter and drier." As of Tuesday the site listed four active fires burning in different parts of the state, including the Kaibab and Tonto national forests.
And while record temperatures in the region are not uniquely clustered within this recent decade (the Death Valley historic high was from 1913 and Phoenix’s historical high is from 1990), these heat spikes are occurring with greater frequency because of global warming, scientists say.
These long-term trends as the Earth warms have caused longer wildfire seasons, compounded by drier forests and more lightning. Drier, hotter conditions also lead to more droughts.
The West may even shift to a more arid climate altogether, according to the National Wildlife Federation.
As the Southwest gears up to bear the brunt this weekend, meteorologists issue a now-familiar warning to stay indoors, drink lots of water and avoid peak sun hours.
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As Americans ready themselves for the arrival of mosquitoes this summer, many may be wondering whether they are at risk for tropical diseases like Zika and whether climate change will raise the risks of infection.
My colleagues and I recently completed a study examining how projected changes in climate and human population may increase global exposure to the mosquito that spreads these viruses: Aedes aegypti.
We found that both climate change and human population change will play a part in driving future human exposure to Aedes aegypti globally.
In the United States, specifically, warming temperatures from climate change mean that this disease-spreading mosquito will be increasingly abundant in the southern and eastern US.
Aedes aegypti transmits the viruses that cause Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever. An ongoing Zika pandemic in Latin America and the Caribbean has been linked to birth defects in newborns and neurological disorders in adults, initiating a massive public health response and garnering extensive media coverage. The other three viruses are important threats as well: dengue viruses infect about 400 million people each year, chikungunya has been linked to chronic health problems such as arthritis and a new yellow fever outbreak in Angola has stoked fears of imminent vaccine shortages.
Aedes aegypti is a particularly effective virus spreader because of its dependence on humans. While many mosquitoes prefer natural areas for breeding, such as wetlands, Aedes aegypti exploits artificial water-filled containers such as tires, buckets, barrels and stray trash for its aquatic life stages (egg, larvae and pupae). Such containers are often found in backyards, meaning that when adult mosquitoes finally emerge, they are found in and near homes. And, while other mosquito species may be less picky about whom they bite, Aedes aegypti has a preference for humans.
Climatic factors affect Aedes aegypti in a number of ways. Warmer temperatures (up to a certain point) enable faster development during the aquatic life stages, and greater survival rates at all life stages. Precipitation, which can be affected by climate change, provides water needed to complete aquatic life stages.
Aedes aegypti is primarily found in warm, wet tropical and subtropical urban areas. However, it also can thrive in arid desert environments, particularly in areas where humans may store water in barrels or cisterns during dry spells. The range of the mosquito expands and contracts seasonally in the United States, which is at the temperature-limited margin of its survival.
Our study attempted to go beyond using climate change projections to explore how global warming may affect the future range of Aedes aegypti. This has been done before.
Instead, we sought to estimate how many humans may be exposed to the mosquito in the future, based on a new set of population projections as well as factors related to climate change. This allowed us to forecast how many people will be exposed to Aedes aegypti in the future and determine the relative roles of climate change and population growth.
We first mapped the historic range of Aedes aegypti based on the different climate patterns in which the mosquito can survive, ranging from seasonal to a year-round presence. We used previously established relationships between monthly temperature and precipitation and data on the actual presence and abundance of the mosquito.
Next, we produced future maps of the Aedes aegypti global occurrence patterns for 2061-2080 using projections for air temperature and precipitation patterns.
These models were derived from two plausible future scenarios for air pollution and greenhouse gas pathways in the 21st century: one in which greenhouse gases are mitigated so that global average warming doesn’t exceed 2 degrees Celsius average temperature increase over preindustrial levels and another in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow unchecked.
Finally, we examined population growth for two different possible future socioeconomic conditions. The “low vulnerability” scenario assumes improved living standards and falling birthrates in poorer countries, and another “high vulnerability” scenario has continued low living standards and high birthrates in poorer countries.
From the historical results, we estimated that 63 percent of the global population is presently exposed to Aedes aegypti.
To isolate climate change from population trends, we modeled how the level of exposure would change if population remained at historical levels (an unrealistic assumption but useful for our projections). In this scenario, we found that the percentage of humans exposed to Aedes aegypti would grow to 68-70 percent of the global population by 2061-2080, depending on how much emissions rose. The projected changes were primarily driven by warming rather than changing rainfall patterns.
Including population growth, the percentage of the exposed global population would grow to 71-74 percent under the lower vulnerability socioeconomic pathway. Under the higher vulnerability pathway of continued low living standards and high birthrates, we found 77-80 percent of global population would be exposed to Aedes aegypti.
Not only would more humans be exposed under the higher-vulnerability pathway, but we found much of the population growth would occur in urban slums in developing countries in the tropics and subtropics; these areas are ideal breeding grounds for Aedes aegypti and have high virus transmission potential.
Importantly, the differences among the projections are driven mostly by uncertainty in how and where human populations may change, rather than uncertainty due to different climate change scenarios. This result underscores how important it will be for the research community to continue improving socioeconomic projections, such as population growth.
As always, the devil is in the details. For example, our analysis found wealthier regions that are the margins of the present-day range for Aedes aegypti– Australia, North America and Europe – would benefit the most from reducing greenhouse gases. Minimizing warming means changes to the mosquitoes' range will also be minimized at these cool margins.
It is noteworthy that there are numerous limitations to the study. Specifically, there is uncertainty related to future emissions, future geopolitics, mosquito control practices, human behavior, transportation networks and other competing mosquito species.
Still, the implications for public health policymakers are that, all else equal, climate change and population growth will likely increase the percentage of humans exposed to this important virus vector mosquito, including parts of the U.S. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions can make a dent. Improving public health preparedness and response in the near term will build the capacity to deal with greater exposure in the future.
Andrew Monaghan, Scientist Research Applications Laboratory in Climate Science & Applications Program, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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