Suburban Life: As Towns Become Overcrowded, Voters Slow Growth (WSJ)

As more and more Americans move south, Lake Wylie, a suburb of Charlotte, has tripled in size. Now, the town is saying no more. WSJ’s Valerie Bauerlein explains.

Housing Boom In Charlotte Suburbs US Census Bureau WSJLAKE WYLIE, S.C.—This lakefront suburb of Charlotte, N.C., is among the Sunbelt’s strongest magnets for young families.

Since 2000, Lake Wylie has tripled in population to 12,000 on the strength of its good schools, low taxes and proximity to Charlotte’s jobs in the financial and technology sectors. But those schools are filling up, the water system frequently fails under increased demand and 20-mile commutes are stretching to 90 minutes.

Now, the town that grew too fast wants to stop growth.

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Future Of Boating: “2020 Serenity 64” Solar-Electric Catamaran

Serenity Yachts will make its U.S. debut at the 2020 Miami International Boat Show at the Miami Marine Stadium. 

Serenity Yachts Serenity 74 All Electric Catamaran 2020

We offer pure electric and hybrid yachts that use solar panels to give you a power catamaran with a virtually endless range. Not only do we strive to eliminate the dependency on fossil fuel, we are also committed to building yachts that cannot be outdated. Instead of relying on current technology that may quickly become obsolete, we have designed many of our systems in a way that makes them easy to upgrade as new and improved technologies become available.

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Future Of Driving: Behind The Scenes Look At “Rivian Electric Trucks” (Video)

A behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to build a new kind of car company. Follow the Rivian team out of stealth mode and into the wild as we prepare to launch the world’s first electric adventure vehicles.

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Science Podcasts: CRISPR & Immunotherapy, Ice Age Cave Art Dated With Wasp Nests (ScienceMag)

scimag_pc_logo_120_120 (2)On this week’s show, Staff Writer Jennifer Couzin-Frankel joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about Science paper that combines two hot areas of research—CRISPR gene editing and immunotherapy for cancer—and tests it in patients.

Sarah also talks with Damien Finch, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, about the Kimberly region of Australia and dating its ice age cave paintings using charcoal from nearby wasp nests.

Website

Retro Tech: “Gearbox Automatic Turntable MkII”

GEARBOX AUTOMATIC TURNTABLE MKIIThe Gearbox Automatic has created quite a buzz in the audio world, a plug & play turntable that plugs a gap in the portable turntable sector. It features high-quality components, meaning the sound is astonishing for its price class. This you would expect from Gearbox of course, but it also does things no other turntable has ever done before.

What also sets this turntable apart is the high-fidelity built-in valve phono stage, (the first in the world to have one), which has been designed and tuned for moving magnet cartridges such as the pre-fitted Ortofon OM10. This means that you can plug the turntable straight into any line input and enjoy the warm and open acoustics, right from the box.

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Healthcare: Mergers & Profit Strategies Force Many Rural And Smaller Hospitals To Close (Video)

In rural towns across the U.S. hospitals are in crisis. Since 2010, 121 rural hospitals have closed. And, the National Rural Health Association says more than one-third of all rural hospitals in the U.S. are at serious risk of shutting down.

But not all hospitals are losing money. A series of mergers and acquisitions that began in the 1990’s has created massive hospital groups. Many of these hospital consortiums are turning huge profits every year by offering high priced services to well insured patients.

Research: CalTech Scientists Target Cancer Cells With Ultrasound

From a CalTech news article (February 4, 2020):

Ultrasonic-Cancer-Treat-14-50.2e16d0ba.fill-310x200-c100The hope, Lee says, is that ultrasound will kill cancer cells in a specific way that will also engage the immune system and arouse it to attack any cancer cells remaining after the treatment.

A new technique could offer a targeted approach to fighting cancer: low-intensity pulses of ultrasound have been shown to selectively kill cancer cells while leaving normal cells unharmed.

CalTech logoUltrasound waves—sound waves with frequencies higher than humans can hear—have been used as a cancer treatment before, albeit in a broad-brush approach: high-intensity bursts of ultrasound can heat up tissue, killing cancer and normal cells in a target area. Now, scientists and engineers are exploring the use of low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) in an effort to create a more selective treatment.

A study describing the effectiveness of the new approach in cell models was published in Applied Physics Letters on January 7. The researchers behind the work caution that it is still preliminary—it still has not been tested in a live animal let alone in a human, and there remain several key challenges to address—but the results so far are promising.

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Arts: “2019 International Landscape Photographer Of The Year” Awards

 

2019 International Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards

From website: Congratulations to Oleg Ershov, Russian Federation, the International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2019!

And to all the other winners and, most importantly, all the Top 101 photographers! It was a huge year and one of the toughest yet – the quality continues to get better and better!

The prize winners are:

  • Oleg Ershov, Russian Federation, the International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2019
  • 光 杨 (Yang Guang), China, The International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2019 – Second Place
  • Blake Randall, Canada, The International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2019 – Third Place

2019 International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2nd Place Awards

2019 International Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards Book
See Photos in Book

 

Heart Health: “Marine Omega-3s” Are “Greatest Protection Against Arrhythmic Events” (BMJ)

From a British Medical Journal (BMJ) Open Heart online article:

BMJ Open Heart Journal February 2020The intake of marine omega-3s has consistently been found to have antiarrhythmic effects. When marine omega-3s are consumed, there is an increase in cellular membrane fluidity, inhibition of L-type calcium channels and a reduction in the chance of arrhythmic events during susceptible times. Prospective data suggest that maintaining an omega-3 index of about 8%, which requires consuming seafood rich in omega-3 up to five times per week or consuming over 3 g of EPA and DHA per day, may provide the greatest protection against arrhythmic events.

Marine omega-3s for the prevention of arrhythmias

Omega-3s have been theorised to increase membrane fluidity by reducing compression of the acyl chains of membrane phospholipid fatty acids, which can lead to a reduction in the ‘spring-like’ tension on membrane ion channels. This spring-like tension can reduce the ability of ions to freely move in and out of the ion channel and hence reduce its conductance. This is known as the ‘Andersen membrane spring-like tension hypothesis’ and is just one way marine omega-3s may prevent arrhythmias.

Dietary omega-3s are mainly consumed as triglycerides, which are absorbed as free fatty acids and monoglycerides. These fats then get rapidly resynthesised in the intestine and liver back to triglycerides with subsequent integration into chylomicrons, very low-density lipoprotein and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) (LDL can actually deliver omega-3s to tissues via LDL receptors).

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Tributes: 90-Year Old Literary Critic & Novelist George Steiner (1929-2020)

From a New Yorker online article (February 5, 2020):

The New Yorker logoHe was the real thing, the last of the great middle-European intellectual journeyers, one with Benjamin and Cioran and the other exiles, for whom books were the one constant country and reading them a matter of life and death. With him gone, we can only reread his writing, determined to honor the intensity of his commitment by intensifying our own.

The word “awesome” is most easily used by adolescents these days, but the range of learning that the critic and novelist George Steiner possessed was awesome in the old-fashioned, grown-up sense: truly, genuinely awe-inspiring. Steiner, who died on Monday, at the age of ninety, knew modern languages, ancient languages, classical literature, and modern literature. He had memorized the rhymes of Racine and he could elucidate the puns in Joyce and he could tell you why both were, in his thorny but not cheaply won view, superior to the prolixities of Shakespeare. He was what many people call a human encyclopedia—not in the American sense, a blank vault of facts, but in the French Enlightenment one: a critical repository of significant knowledge.

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