We can save the earth without giving up bacon. Here’s how.

Bacon is fried up in a pan in a kitchen. REUTERS/Rick Wilking Each week, Brian Kateman is co-founder and president of the Reducetarian Foundation. You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the memo: Too much meat is Yet despite increased pressure to eliminate meat from our diet, consumption rates have been slow to budge. Americans are eating less beef, but So how do we move the needle on meat consumption — can we do it in one fell swoop? Will extreme approaches succeed in making a lasting change? While the determination of vegans and vegetarians is laudable, too often the “all-or-nothing” message turns people away from reducing meat in whatever style or at whatever pace feels most comfortable — in fact, those in the vegan community can feel uncomfortable or To that end, I co-founded a whole new campaign called “ Changing minds and behavior takes time, but this incremental progress can be complemented and accelerated by redesigning the “food environment”: the social and physical space within which we make our daily eating decisions. With a growing global demand for meat and dairy, tech-savvy entrepreneurs and the “ Grown in labs, cultured meat A meat-free future is possible. Importantly, this shift can happen without asking meat-lovers to forgo their favorite flavors and meals, and without pressuring the not wholly convinced to turn away from a burger on the Fourth of July. Investing in cultured meat and plant-based substitutes can fill the gap between aggressive policy approaches and lower-impact awareness campaigns — changing the food marketplace to make it easy for consumers to embrace sustainable, healthy and humane diets. Other perspectives: Laura Wellesley: We need to eat less meat. Should the government step in? Blake Hurst: The latest threat to the American cowboy: Environmentalists


The families of British troops killed in Iraq are crowdfunding a legal case against Tony Blair

of Britain's decision-making in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blair came under renewed scrutiny after the release of the Chilcot inquiry. The report included evidence suggesting that he had misrepresented intelligence ahead of the war. In one memo from July 2002 before the war, Blair writes to President George W. Bush that “I will be with you, whatever” — which many took as implying that he would support the war, no matter the opposition. At a news conference after the report was released, Blair said that he was sorry for what had happened but that he could not apologize for the removal of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. “I did it because I thought it was right,” the former British leader said. The Chilcot inquiry had stopped short of offering a view about whether the war was illegal, though it noted that the legal justification for British military involvement in Iraq was found to be "far from satisfactory." Numerous legal experts have noted that calls to put Blair on trial at the International Criminal Court are likely to fail: The ICC doesn't have the ability to investigate or prosecute the crime of aggression. Others, including former Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond, have suggested that Britain's Parliament could use an obscure "impeachment" law to have Blair face a trial within the legislative body. However, the law has not been used since 1806, and it is unclear how it could work in the modern day. Many consider a civil suit the most likely course of legal action against Blair and other British leaders involved in the decision-making over the Iraq War. Retired Gen. Michael Rose, a former military leader representing some families, has previously said that they would move to sue Blair if it was revealed that intelligence was "negligently handled." The note on the fundraising site for the Iraq War Families Campaign says that the money raised will be used to pay the legal firm McCue & Partners to conduct a "full and forensic legal analysis" of the Chilcot inquiry and prepare a comprehensive legal opinion. The Telegraph reports that the hope is to build a civil case of misfeasance in public office against Blair or other British officials. "It’s down to us — and we hope you will help — to seek justice where there has been none," a statement from the group says. "We want


Meet the new chef behind D.C.’s Charlie Palmer Steak

Palmer Steak to work in Northern California, Washington was a very different kind of drinking and dining town. Back then, the city had no production breweries or distilleries. The 14th Street corridor was still viewed with skepticism by locals who knew it as an unsavory strip for drugs and prostitution. And if you could find ramen at all, it was mostly in instant form behind dorm room doors. More than a decade later, Ellis has returned to Charlie Palmer Steak, where he takes over for Jeff Russell as executive chef. (Russell, incidentally, will help open a new location of Charlie Palmer Steak in Napa, Calif.) Ellis, an Olney, Md., native, has been getting up to speed on the changes in Washington while also developing new "homecoming" menus dedicated to the bounty and suppliers of the Mid-Atlantic. "There's a lot more restaurants," Ellis says about the D.C. dining scene. "There's so much more activity in D.C. over the last five to six years. Like all of Bryan Voltaggio's restaurants, all Mike Isabella's restaurants, José Andrés's expansion. . . It seems like it's become more of a chef-driven landscape." Ellis and I talked about his Michelin ambitions (ten years ago, he earned a star as chef de cuisine at Charlie Palmer's Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg, Calif.) as well as his opinions on Michael and Bryan Voltaggio, the sibling chefs who led the kitchens at Dry Creek (Michael) and Charlie Palmer Steak (Bryan) while Ellis worked at them. Below are the edited highlights from our chat. [A Perfect Steakhouse Experience? Elusive.] Kitchen work kept Ellis out of trouble as a teenager Ellis once worked more than 35 days straight at Dry Creek Kitchen until Charlie Palmer stepped in Ellis feared he was getting fired when he first learned about his Michelin star The magnetic pull of family brought Ellis back to Washington [If D.C.’s steakhouse days are over, why do so many new ones keep opening?] His time at Dry Creek Kitchen influenced how Ellis will develop menus at Charlie Palmer Steak His goal at Charlie Palmer Steak is to nurture a happy kitchen, not earn a Michelin star Ellis prefers Bryan Voltaggio's cooking style over his brother's. Read more: - Bryan Voltaggio: From a teenager ‘amok’ to ‘Top Chef Masters’ - If D.C.’s steakhouse days are over, why do so many new ones keep opening? - A perfect steakhouse experience? Elusive.


Greenland lost a staggering 1 trillion tons of ice in just four years

just a handful of glaciers composing less than 1 percent of the ice sheet’s total area. Each of these five glaciers flows outward into the sea, so that a combination of both rising air temperatures and ocean temperatures likely play a part in their ongoing retreat. Among these was the iconic Jakobshavn glacier, a well-studied location now famous for its recent massive ice losses. It’s been known to calve blocks of ice boasting several square miles in surface area, as measured from above. Scientists were already fairly well aware of the massive losses being suffered by these glaciers, McMillan acknowledged. But the finding helps reinforce previous observations and drive home their disproportionate role in the ice sheet’s contributions to sea-level rise. “Also … it means that going forward, we’re able to kind of develop long-term and systematic records that we can [use to] regularly monitor these glaciers and see how they’re changing into the future,” he said. In fact, the study’s results match up reasonably well with measurements taken by certain other satellites. After doing some comparisons, the researchers found that data from NASA’s In this way, the study reinforces many beliefs that were already widely held about Greenland’s precarious condition. But the techniques used to do so may strengthen future measurements, which will be used to inform the climate models that help scientists make predictions about how the ice sheet will behave in the future — a crucial step in determining the amount of sea-level rise we might expect over any given time period. “I guess the most significant or the most novel aspect of the study is really the resolution or the detail that we’re able to measure,” McMillan said. “Although satellite techniques give us a holistic view of how the ice sheet as a whole is changing, what we’re able to do by using this specific technique is identify specific regions that are changing. And that’s really important because it kind of gives us more of an idea of the processes that are causing the changes.” Read more at Energy Environment: The world’s clouds are in different places than they were 30 years ago Scientists think they’ve just pinpointed the key driver of ice loss in Antarctica The diversity of life across much of Earth has plunged below ‘safe’ levels For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here.


Full ‘Buck Moon’ to light up the mid-summer night sky Tuesday and Wednesday

A beautiful capture of June’s full moon in 2016, known as the “Strawberry Moon.” What made this one special is that it coincided with the summer solstice — something that hasn’t happened since the “summer of love.” (Dave Lyons) As the moon rises Tuesday evening, it will appear round and gleam brilliantly over much of the United States. It is the time that the July moon, known as the “Buck Moon”, becomes totally full. The moon technically reaches fullness at 6:57 p.m. Eastern time, before it becomes visible in the eastern sky. But it will still appear practically full as it rises at 8:03 p.m. in New York, 8:12 p.m. in Washington, 8:37 p.m. in Cleveland, 8:02 p.m. Central time in Chicago, and 7:52 p.m. Pacific in Los Angeles. If local cloud cover obstructs moon viewing Tuesday evening, the moon will also appear almost full on Wednesday evening. The name “Buck Moon” arises from buck deer beginning “to grow velvety antlers” at the time of year according to Earth Sky. The July moon is also sometimes referred to as the Thunder Moon — due to storms prevalence, and the Hay Moon — since it’s the time farmers begin storing hay. In June, the so-called “Strawberry Moon” garnered attention for coinciding with the summer solstice for the first time since 1967.


PM Update: Heavy overnight storms, then less humid Wednesday; Mammatus clouds invade region

A storm hit D.C. late Tuesday night, bringing bright flashes of lightning, pounding hail and flash flood warnings. Watch the storm unfold from our rooftop camera at the Washington Post and from social footage taken during the downpour. 12:25 a.m. update: We will have a detailed recap on what happened with these storms – which produced torrential rain, damaging hail inside the District, high winds, and frequent lightning – in the morning. Hey @TerpWeather major damage on national mall. Trees split in half and light posts uprooted 12:05 a.m. update: 1) Southern Prince George’s County, where a severe thunderstorm warning is in effect through 12:45 a.m.: ⚠ Take Cover! Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Clinton MD and Forestville MD until 12:45 AM EDT https://t.co/XzeQuRYAqU Heavy rain, lightning, some strong wind gusts, and perhaps some hail are possible in the area from roughly Friendly to Marlton. 2) Eastern Fairfax County and Arlington, where a new storm is flaring up. It’s pressing southeast into Alexandria and may have pass through the southern part of the District, marking the third storm of the evening there. Heavy rain, lightning and small hail will be the main hazards with this storm. Remember a flash flood warning remains in effect through 2:30 a.m. in the District. 11:45 p.m. update: The lightning this evening has been unbelievable: The view from Pentagon City tonight. @capitalweather @FujifilmX_US #fujifilm #XT10 https://t.co/AJrXcMTle3 11:30 p.m. update: 11:25 p.m. update: ⚠ Take Cover! Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Adams Morgan DC and Washington DC until 11:45 PM EDT https://t.co/WzJufT7GfR 11:20 p.m. update: @capitalweather from Capitol Hill. Big enough to bust street lights. https://t.co/lrgRM7JPy2 https://twitter.com/josie/status/755601843510665216/ @capitalweather @theHillisHome - Hail galore in Capitol Hill SE! https://t.co/fyPGBfutNV At @Nationals park. @NWS_BaltWash @capitalweather https://t.co/9s4KZSWQHm 11:10 p.m. update: ⚠ Take Cover! Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Washington DC and Clinton MD until 12:00 AM EDT https://t.co/Dj8wQf3jic 10:25 p.m. update: ⚠ Take Cover! Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Adams Morgan DC and Washington DC until 11:00 PM EDT https://t.co/APcb4hHitA ⚠ Take Cover! Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Adams Morgan DC and Washington DC until 11:15 PM EDT https://t.co/koSpwBJsdR Original post Mammatus over Oakton, VA this afternoon. (Kevin Ambrose) Our current 90-degree day streak just barely survived today, with D.C. quickly touching 90 this afternoon. Lots of clouds helped keep temperatures back a little from what they could have been, though. Highs were mainly in the upper 80s elsewhere. Still warm, just not super hot.


Why clean-tech and driverless cars are the future of ‘German engineering’

in emerging technologies. “There’s been a clear shift of emphasis in the messages they’re putting out after the VW crisis. I think a lot of the electrification was already in the pipeline before what happened last October, but what we’re hearing now is a lot more on that,” Bedwell said. Volkswagen’s settlement with the U.S. government also calls for investing billions of dollars in what many analysts regard as a key technology for the adoption of electric cars: the charging infrastructure that will allow drivers to travel for as long and as far as their counterparts who drive gas guzzlers. “This is what it looks like when a massive corporation whose reputation was built on trust and belief in the integrity of a brand seeks to battle its way back into a changing market,” wrote Timmons Roberts, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, in a blog post last month. Some countries are beginning much further ahead than Germany, at least when it comes to electric-vehicle adoption. In Norway, electric cars accounted for 6.2 percent of all new cars sold in 2013, according to a report by the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. The Netherlands was close behind at 4.2 percent. Germany ranked seventh, at a paltry 0.2 percent. (By comparison, the same figure for the United States stands at less than 1 percent.) Other non-European automakers are also leaping into high-tech solutions. Beyond the research on automated vehicles being done by U.S. firms, Japanese companies such as Honda and Toyota have invested resources into fields such as battery technology and robotics. But as the case of Volkswagen suggests, German automakers feel renewed pressure to lead the industry through its next iteration. Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW hold 15 percent of the global market share for light vehicles, according to LCM Automotive, a position the automakers will be keen to maintain, if not grow, as electric vehicles become more widely adopted. And if history is any indication, Germany’s engineering prowess and industrial fortitude may again work in the industry’s favor. “The German industry is on the one hand proud of its history, but on the other hand knows exactly why it has been so successful: They reinvented themselves every decade,” said Eckehart Rotter, a spokesman for the Berlin-based German Association of the Automotive Industry. “This is a real worldwide competition going on, and it’s a matter of speed but it’s


Here’s what 29 million tweets can teach us about Brexit

of Immigration, Sovereignty, and the Economy in ‘Brexit’ Twitter Data, July 2015 – July 2016. (Data: NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab; Figure: Alexandra Siegel) ‘Brexit’ became an increasingly global hashtag Although online discussions of Brexit were primarily concentrated in the United States and Europe, as the vote neared, interest became increasingly global. The international reach of Brexit tweets can be seen in the map below. All geolocated tweets referencing Brexi, July 2015 – July 2016. (Data: NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab; Figure: Alexandra Siegel) Diverse languages were also popular in each period. In the months preceding the vote, four non-E.U. languages made the top 15: Indonesian, Turkish, Japanese and Russian. During the vote, Thai also reached the top 15 and remained popular after the vote. Across all three periods, “Brexit” tweets appeared in a wide variety of European languages, from Greek to Swedish. Top tweet languages before, during, and after Brexit vote, July 2015 – July 2016. (Data: NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab; Figure: Alexandra Siegel) Celebrities, ordinary ‘tweeps,’ and jokes dominated the ‘Brexit’ discussion Finally, examining the top Brexit-related retweets provides a cautionary tale. In the period leading up to the referendum, the most retweeted content came from celebrities and ordinary Twitter users, not from political figures. For example, top retweets in the days preceding the vote came from Harry Potter author @jk_rowling, actress @ElizabethHurley, actor @StephenMangan, and a member of the British alternative rock band @Truman_Black. On the day of the vote, the top retweets were primarily jokes such as “Dear Britain, This Brexit vote is all wrong. If you want to leave the E.U., dump some tea in the harbor and fight a war. Sincerely, America” or “A Brexit vote would be historic because England usually exits Europe on penalty kicks.” Despite the gravity of the referendum, the most widely disseminated content made a mockery of the process. Journalists and politicians have only recently begun to dominate the Twitter conversation about Brexit since the vote. Preliminary conclusions While hindsight is always 20-20, our data suggest that the “leave” campaign was consistently more popular than “remain” on Twitter, dating to February. Furthermore, preliminary analysis of location data indicates that regions that had polled as solidly “remain” may have been more divided. Additionally, our observation that discussions of the economy were almost as popular as mentions of immigration and border


With no males, these butterflies are evolving into separate species

is just a byproduct of the males dying in their eggs," he said very matter-of-factly. "Many caterpillars eat their own eggs after hatching, so it's probably just a by-product of that." Spiroplasma ixodeti Although the microbe is fairly widespread, it had not been found to have an effect on the pretty yellow-winged African queen butterfly that exists throughout East Africa. The new research, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is the first to discover its lethal effects on males hatched by the two subspecies in Nairobi, an odd zone where every night is ladies' night. The researchers discovered that these butterflies have an odd chromosome that may make them susceptible to the microbe's man-killing ways. With no males, one might naturally wonder, how do the African queens manage to procreate? The answer, the author said, is immigration. Males from elsewhere travel into the realm for sex in a world of females. But the joke's on them. "Mating in the hybrid zone is presumably fun," ffrench-Constant said, "but his mating won't make any male heirs." "The reason this system is so interesting is that it's a smoking gun for speciation," he explained. "We can see the subspecies splitting apart." The agent of this change is the baby-killer microbe. The subspecies live side-by-side but, without males, can never interbreed and so are becoming more and more genetically distinct. "We tend to think of new species coming about due to environmental changes but here it's clearly the microbe that is driving these two subspecies apart," he said. "This means that no males are made in the hybrid zone, and that mating success in the zone is effectively zero, thereby creating a barrier with a new species on either side," ffrench-Constant said. The study was led by David Smith, who worked at the Natural History Museum at Eton College, when the work was carried out. The research took 13 years of field work by teams of scientists from England, Germany and Nairobi. Ian Gordon, a researcher at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, carefully recorded the sex and color pattern of butterflies around Nairobi. Read More The Monarch massacre: How nearly a billion butterflies vanished Maryland's honeybees are being wiped out, and you might have killed a few Here's what the butterfly decline says about the environment The louder the howler monkey, the smaller his, well ..., you know


Unilever to buy start-up grooming brand Dollar Shave Club

The logo of the Unilever Group is seen at a factory in France. (Reuters) Unilever announced Wednesday that it has agreed to buy men’s grooming brand Dollar Shave Club, a deal that would bring a disruptive start-up under the wing of a goliath of the consumer product business. Dollar Shave Club has rapidly amassed 3.2 million members in its e-commerce subscription shaving business, which allows men to sign up for monthly deliveries of razor blades to their doorsteps. It’s a model that seems to have some momentum with customers right now: Harry’s, another start-up, has a similar setup. And stalwart razor brand Gillette, owned by Unilever rival Procter & Gamble, launched a subscription service when it saw the kind of traction the newcomers were getting. The deal suggests that Unilever, a giant that includes brands such as Dove, Vaseline and Axe, is looking for ways to gird itself for a changing shopping environment. In a news release announcing the deal, a Unilever executive noted Dollar Shave Club’s “unique consumer and data insights,” suggesting it might want to figure out how to leverage some of the start-up’s know-how in that area to lift up its other personal care brands. It’s also noteworthy that Unilever praised Dollar Shave Club as “the category leader in its direct-to-consumer space.” In other words, Dollar Shave Club is accustomed to selling directly to consumers, while, Unilever, of course, is accustomed to people shopping for its brands in drug stores or in supermarkets. It’s not hard to see why Unilever would want to join forces with a brand steeped in that kind of selling. Many consumer goods lines that have traditionally sold through stores — from packaged foods to sporting goods — are giving fresh consideration to whether it’d be advantageous for them to sell online without retailers as an intermediary. Meanwhile, the industry has surely taken notice of Amazon.com’s forays into making private-label products such as diapers and apparel. And that probably means companies such as Unilever are looking for ways to be prepared for potential threats to their turf from the e-commerce giant, which has a loyal base of tens of millions of Prime members. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.) The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, but Bloomberg News reported it was worth about $1 billion. Dollar Shave Club launched in 2012 and found an


The irony of the GOP’s new promise to cut mass transit funding? Donald Trump loves trains

on mass transit, an inherently local affair that serves only a small portion of the population, concentrated in six big cities. Additional funds are used for bike-share programs, sidewalks, recreational trails, landscaping, and historical renovations. Urban transit advocates argue that funding for bikes and public transit projects actually have sizable benefits for the highway system: When more people use trains, buses and bikeways, there is more space on roads for people who need to drive and trucks carrying goods across the country. And public transportation can be a lifeline in rural areas where people don’t have the money to own cars. But Republicans are also pushing to eliminate public subsidies for passenger rail services such as Amtrak, and allow private companies to operate them. And they want to axe all federal support for California’s high-speed rail project. “We reaffirm our intention to end federal support for boondoggles like California’s high-speed train to nowhere” they wrote in their policy statement. The irony? Donald Trump is actually a big fan of public transit — and it’s one of the issues on which he’s been absolutely consistent since he entered the race. He often talks in glowing terms about the state-of-the-art train systems he sees during his international travels. Take this speech back in March, in which Trump highlighted the need to upgrade America’s train networks and airports to match the much more technologically advanced infrastructure that exists in Europe and Asia: “You go to China, they have trains that go 300 miles an hour. We have trains that go ‘Chug, chug, chug.’ And then they have to stop because the tracks split, right?” That jibes with Trump’s promises to make infrastructure a priority during his administration, if he becomes president … and he’s not just talking about a wall on the border with Mexico. In the preface of his 2015 book, “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again,” he talks about the need for an overhaul – both when it comes to roadways and public transit. Domestically, we need to undertake a massive rebuilding of our infrastructure. Too many bridges have become dangerous, our roads are decaying and full of potholes, while traffic jams are costing millions in lost income for drivers who have jobs in congested cities. Public transit is overcrowded and unreliable and our airports must be rebuilt. You go to countries like China and many others and you


Main Street Morning: Uber logs two billion rides

brick-and-mortar retailers bring customers back. Sales Marketing - A “black olives matter” billboard sparks outrage – and pizza sales. - Men are spending more on underwear, but that’s about it. - Over 9,000 business owners rate the trustworthiness of 37 key brands in this new research report. Travel - A new service will automatically detect when your flight is delayed and request compensation. - Airbnb will start collecting taxes for Los Angeles rentals. Finance - Why there is still racial discrimination in mortgage lending. - Slack’s first big round of start-up investments shows that it wants to do more than kill email. Start-ups - Start-up deal activity keeps falling worldwide. Technology - Seagate unveils hard drives with up to 10 terabytes of capacity. - The densest-ever memory system uses individual atoms to store data. - New biodegradable packaging extends the shelf life of cheese and pasta. Online - LinkedIn adds Gmail and CRM integration to its Sales Navigator. - 33 percent of local search business is from non-locals. - Google My Business is now offering some businesses email-based verification Social Media - Twitter announces a new application process for Verified Accounts. - Actress Leslie Jones gets bullied off of Twitter. Ideas - This incredible guy can transform himself into game of Thrones characters. - How you can add a chicken coop to your backyard. On This Day in 1969 - Neil Armstrong walks on moon (oh and in 1801 a 1,235 pound cheese ball was pressed at the farm of Elisha Brown, Jr. and then later presented to U.S. President Thomas Jefferson at the White House.) Around the Country - Now there are Pokemon Go city tours in Austin. - The business outlook for San Diego drops to all-time low after a minimum wage increase, according to a report issued by the Chamber of Commerce. - Younger business owners in Yakima Valley seek community and advice from their peers rather than older mentors. - A competition in a Michigan county is stimulating local businesses there. - Leaders in Muskegon, Michigan are calling a business owner a “cyber bully”. - A 145-year-old factory closes in Crystal Lakes, Illinois. - San Antonio, Texas businesses owners have come up with $32,000 to save an old highway. Around the World - Pokémon Go will launch in Japan today with the game’s first sponsored location. - North Korea broadcasts strange codes on the radio and


Melania Trump and the culture of cheating in Eastern European schools

communism persisted. There was much memorization of historical facts and minimal debate about various theories. In part this was because the faculty and teachers were largely the same as during communism. Another important element of the post-communist educational experience was the prevalence and acceptance of cheating. My own admissions exam to Warsaw University in Poland is a good example. Roughly 200 students were packed into a lecture hall on Krakowskie Przedmiescie, the university’s main campus. We had been assigned to one of three groups, each taking a different version of the exam. This meaning that I was answering a different set of questions than the students on my left and right. Moreover, 20 faculty and teaching assistants and faculty were proctoring the exam. In this context, cheating would risk your chance of getting into the university. But it was common. If someone asked for an answer, people would give it to them. My entrance exam was not an exception. The very fact that college entrance exams were called for, merely two months after the standard test taken upon graduation from high school — the Polish equivalent of the SAT — suggests how widespread cheating was. Cheating on those high school exams was so prevalent that teachers themselves would frequently pass on the correct answers to their students to increase the students’ chances of college admission. How did does such a norm set in? First, cheaters weren’t called “cheaters.” They were called “borrowers” and were considered street-smart. Neglecting to study for an exam but passing it by whatever means possible was considered a greater achievement than passing the exam after careful studying the material. In fact, it was those who reported cheating who were ostracized and considered to be “collaborators.” I left Eastern Europe more than 15 years ago, but I am skeptical that much is different. Culture changes slowly. As Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker argue,”You can take the boy out of Eastern Europe, but you cannot take Eastern Europe out of the boy.” So the potential to cheat remains great even now. A friend who graduated from my university seven years after me described how her cohort had their final theses scanned through anti-plagiarism software that only scans for content appropriated from the Internet. It cannot detect plagiarism of material available only in hard copy or not on the Internet. Nor can it check for appropriated content that has


The surprising reason mountain lions’ killer instincts could save human lives

entire hemisphere. While they’re now mostly in the west, crowding is causing them to expand their range. There are now breeding populations in Nebraska and South Dakota, for example, and one male cougar even made it to Connecticut in recent years. In most of the eastern half of the country, deer have proliferated in the absence of cougars, destroying vegetation and contributing to so many car crashes that they’ve become the most dangerous large mammal to humans in North America. To control them, officials have resorted to culling and more expensive efforts, including contraception and special highway crossings. Two bucks and a doe stand in a field under a flock of Canada geese in Huntingtown, Md. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) Laura Prugh, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Washington, said she and her co-authors wanted to bring a consumer-friendly, “‘Freakonomics’ kind of thing” to her research on large carnivores’ roles in ecosystems. They examined well-established data on deer-vehicle collisions, cougar predation on deer, available cougar habitat and deer populations in 19 eastern states. They assumed each cougar would kill 259 deer over an average six-year life span; to be conservative, she said, they assumed about 75 percent of those ungulates would have died anyway from other causes such as starvation, which is happening more often as deer strip eastern vegetation. To backstop their findings, they looked at South Dakota, where about half the counties on one side of the Missouri River have been recolonized by cougars in recent decades. Before the cougar repopulation, deer-vehicle collisions were increasing at a steady rate each year. But in the counties where cougars set up shop, Prugh said there was a “very dramatic change” within eight years: Deer-vehicle collisions dropped by 9 percent, preventing 158 such collisions annually that cost $1.1 million every year. During that time, Prugh said, there was no big change in vegetation that might have led to a deer population decline, and deer hunting actually decreased, which might have led to a rise in collisions — if not for the cougars. “That was very striking,” she said. “When I looked at it, I was like, that looks like made-up data.” A mountain lion, or cougar, in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles. (National Park Service/AP) Michelle LaRue, a University of Minnesota wildlife ecologist who is executive director of the Cougar Network, which tracks cougar recolonization in the Midwest,


Researchers just doubled what we know about the map of the human brain

Health as part of the Human "Connectome" Project, referring to the connections within the brain. "If things aren’t aligned, the features will be blurry," said Glasser, who likened the difference between the old and new cortical maps to the difference between observing the night sky with a ground telescope vs. one in space. "Stars twinkle because of turbulence in the universe," he said, "but if you put a telescope in space, there’s no atmosphere so you don’t have that blurring. If you’re not aligned, it’s like twinkling. … If they are, you just get a much sharper image." The magnitude of the breakthrough can be measured against how long it took to get here. The cortical map used most frequently today by both researchers and clinicians is essentially the same one developed more than 100 years ago by anatomist Korbinian Brodmann. The German scientist delineated almost 50 basic brain regions, several of which bear his name. In the decades between then and now, the number only increased incrementally to 83. Glasser and Van Essen's team have developed an algorithm that will now make their data collection protocol available to researchers and clinicians around the world. "These are discrete areas that have unique fingerprints," said lead author Glasser, "meaning anybody who gets an MRI scan [the doctor or researcher] will be able to find the same cortical areas." Accuracy was critically dependent on finding a new method of comparing brains. Up until now, that method was largely dependent on comparing the complex folding patterns in gray matter. "But every person’s brain is folded differently," Van Essen said. "You can’t align [brains] by relying on a particular fold." Instead of comparing folds, the team relied on measures that included not just cortical topography, but thickness, white matter content and activity. "Being able to discriminate differences, say, in location and size as well as connectivity," Glasser said, "means investigators will know if we’re talking about the same thing, as opposed to a neighboring area." Both researchers cautioned that there remains much to be learned, primarily understanding the functioning of these new brain regions. One of the newly identified areas, called 55-B, is in the frontal cortex, Van Essen said, and is "very distinctive in language-related tasks, in contrast to neighboring areas of eye movement control. It’s part of a language network that includes much better studied regions in the frontal lobe," including both


For the first time, scientists explore the atmosphere of an Earth-sized exoplanet

would pass in front of their star from the Hubble's perspective at the same time. "That meant we would be able to gather the first pieces of information about the atmosphere of two planets at once," said Julien de Wit, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. "I thought that maybe that was a good excuse to reach out to NASA at the last minute." Luckily their proposal — which they put together in 24 hours — was accepted, and they got the data they were hoping for. As the Hubble gazed upon TRAPPIST-1 during the lucky transit, the system's inner two planets caused starlight to dip and warp as it passed through their atmospheres. According to de Wit and his colleagues, the wavelengths of light didn't vary much as the planets transited, suggesting a compact atmosphere like the ones found on Venus or Earth (as opposed to a sprawling, puffy gas giant atmosphere). "They're most likely planets we'd call terrestrial," de Wit said. "Not necessarily Earth-like, exactly, but a rocky planet like Earth or Venus or Mars." There's plenty of work left to do on these promising planets. For starters, the third most distant world in the system — which has yet to be confirmed as a rocky planet — is actually the most probable spot for habitability. The two planets described in Wednesday's study are probably too close to their sun to hold liquid water (though there may be exceptions in a few spots, because half the surface is void of sunlight and that's got to make some weird stuff happen). The third planet may be in just the right orbital spot to have lakes and oceans, but scientists have yet to catch signs of its atmosphere. Even the two planets that have been most recently studied will require some follow-up. Researchers still have to determine the composition of these compact atmospheres, puzzling out the individual molecules represented by the changing wavelengths of TRAPPIST-1's light during planetary transits. The researchers are continuing to study the system with the Hubble, but they expect to get a much higher-resolution look at the atmospheres in question after the 2018 launch of the new James Webb Space Telescope. They'll also be on the lookout for more planets in the same star system and other, similar systems nearby. Around 15 percent of the stars near the sun are ultra-cool dwarf stars like TRAPPIST-1, so if


Justice Dept. blesses marriage of two beer giants

The Justice Department cleared the $107 billion merger of the world’s largest beer makers, Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller, in a deal that would create a global giant controlling much of the world’s brew. The Justice Department on Wednesday cleared the $100 billion merger of the world’s largest beer makers, Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller, in a deal that would create a global giant controlling much of the world’s brew. U.S. antitrust officials began studying the deal late last year, concerned that the combined new company would have too much market power and drive up prices. But the companies agreed to take several steps to address those concerns, including SABMiller divesting its entire U.S. business and the worldwide Miller beer brand rights. As a result, the competitive landscape in the United States will remain the same, according to the Justice Department. “The remedy we secured will help preserve and promote competition in the multibillion-dollar U.S. beer industry,” Sonia Pfaffenroth, deputy assistant attorney general, said in a statement. Still, the merger puts some of the country’s most popular beers under one roof: Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Budweiser and Corona and SABMiller’s Peroni. Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Bud Light alone accounts for 1 in every 5 beers sold in the United States. Anheuser-Busch InBev, which is based in Belgium, and SABMiller, which is based in London, have held the No. 1 and No. 2 spots in the beer market for at least a decade, according to data from Euromonitor. The companies control 70 percent of the U.S. beer market and 30 percent of the global market, according to the research group. But global beer sales have started to slow and traditional beer markers are facing more competition from smaller craft brewers. The merger could give the combined company the leverage to enter new markets, including in Africa and Latin America. The combination will also allow the companies to save money on ingredients, packaging, distribution and the many other expenses that come with running a worldwide enterprise. Perhaps, more important, the takeover could put the new company in a better position to combat the rise of smaller craft brewers. The beer companies have been seeking regulatory approval across the world, from Canada and Australia to Ukraine and Mexico. But U.S. regulators were expected to be the toughest arbiters. In a statement, This comes at a time when the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission, which share responsibility for antitrust


With a tweet, astronomers crack open mystery of a massive bulge at the center of our galaxy

neighborhood, Lang combs through that information, translating it into pictures. Occasionally, he tosses interesting images up on social media. I love my job http://t.co/U8grqRBZMA WISE was designed to look outward, not inward. But the picture Lang tweeted in May 2015 concerned something a little closer to home — the Milky Way, that spiral disk of stars and dust that also contains you, your loved ones and everything else in the solar system. @davidwhogg ok fine http://t.co/fqD57WIjhf Next to galactic whoppers like M87 and Hercules A, the Milky Way is a bit of a runt. By any other standard, though, it is incomprehensibly large, 100,000 light-years across and boasting about 400 billion stars. It is possible to see an arm of the Milky Way with the naked eye, if the sky is clear of clouds and light pollution — a fluffy glowing band that arcs through the night. What is impossible to spot without some technological help is the massive bulge at the galactic center, obscured by interstellar dust and extreme distance. Using powerful telescopes that sense nonvisible light, such as X-rays, astronomers can pierce the veil of space. At the very heart, like the eye of a hurricane, scientists believe exists a supermassive black hole, named Sagittarius A*. It also turns out the Milky Way’s gut buckles outward in an unusual pattern. The bulge, made of a cluster of ancient stars, was visible in the center of Lang’s tweet. The shape caught the eye of several astronomically inclined Twitter users, but it was Ness who recognized its true significance. The X that marks the galactic bulge, enhanced and zoomed in. (Dustin Lang/Dunlap Institute) Of this bulge, “there were hints of it in previous imaging, and some good indirect evidence,” Lang said, in an email he wrote to The Washington Post, from a telescopic observatory in Chile. “The beautiful images we get from WISE provide a much higher-resolution view, making the X more clear.” Computer models implied that the X-shape should exist, and other spiral galaxies like the Milky Way have similar bulges, too. In February 2010, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer showcased its first stunning images. Take a look at those beautiful images in this video courtesy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ness and Lang recently published the discovery in the Astronomical Journal, noting that, in the parlance of astronomers, the thick middle of the Milky Way has a “boxy/peanut


Is Brexit a cautionary tale for African integration?

Politicians attend a meeting of the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development on July 16 during the 27th AU Summit. (Cyril Ndegeya/AFP/Getty Images) The final impact of the British people’s dramatic decision to leave the world’s most ambitious regional integration project has yet to unfold. But what does the Brexit mean for other regional integration efforts around the world? In Africa, national governments as well as continental institutions like the African Union (AU) and the Pan-African Parliament will no doubt grapple with the broader political significance of the U.K. decision to exit the European Union. These two institutions in particular are at the forefront of the continent’s integration initiatives. True, the European integration project had reached a far more advanced stage, and few direct comparisons were possible between the E.U. and AU. But to many AU watchers, the E.U. had seemed an impenetrable supranational project. Are there any lessons here for the AU and its quest for a fully united Africa? By most accounts, the “leave” vote was won on the back of a widely held belief among Britons that the U.K. has relinquished its sovereignty to Brussels’ bureaucrats. And, as successive opinion polls have shown, they are not alone in thinking that. Across mainland Europe, ordinary people blame the E.U. for their growing difficulty making ends meet in a context of low growth and rising unemployment. Migration inflows, which they view as a threat to both their cultural and economic security, has for many become a primary target of their ire. This much Brussels knew, because for more than a decade now there has been an uptick in right-wing nationalist parties across Europe. The E.U. was not, however, prepared for its vulnerability to the backlash, and the ramifications for the expansion of the union. What about sovereignty in Africa? The question of sovereignty also stands central to Agenda 2063, the AU’s blueprint for continental integration, adopted in 2013. This framework document envisages “a sovereign, independent and self-reliant continent” where “[t]he political unity of Africa will be the culmination of the integration process, including the free movement of people, the establishment of continental institutions, and full economic integration.” This political unity, it acknowledges, will be a long-term endeavor requiring a major paradigm shift in the minds of Africans. According to the framework document, a core component of this shift must be that “Africa should speak with one voice and


Russia’s Olympic track ban upheld by Court of Arbitration for Sport

The Court of Arbitration for Sports dismissed Russia's appeal over its track and field athletes' participation in the Rio Olympic Games on July 21. The Court of Arbitration for Sport on Thursday upheld the Rio Olympic ban levied on Russia’s track and field teams after multiple investigations uncovered a systemic, government-run doping operation that had been in place for years. The sanction, handed down earlier this year by the International Association of Athletics Federations, could be extended to all of Russia’s athletic teams at this year’s Olympics, which begin Aug. 5. The International Olympic Committee said earlier this week that it would weigh its legal options over a full-scale Russian ban and would use Thursday’s CAS ruling as a guideline. Russia’s Olympic Committee had appealed the IAAF ban to the CAS on behalf of 68 athletes who were not implicated in the doping scheme, but the court sided with world track and field’s governing body, a decision decried by the Kremlin. “I certainly regret such a decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport which refers to absolutely all of our athletes,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, per Reuters. “The principle of collective responsibility is hardly acceptable.” IAAF statement on CAS decision upholding its ban of Russian team from Rio. https://t.co/a8yeLzGKEm On Monday, the World Anti-Doping Agency released the results of an investigation, confirming earlier media reports that uncovered a government-run doping operation in Russia that began after a poor showing at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. In response, the IOC said it would consider banning Russia from the Rio Olympics entirely. That decision is expected by Sunday at the latest. The CAS also ruled that some Russian athletes could compete in Rio under a neutral flag if they meet a certain number of criteria, such as being drug-tested outside the country.


A bright ‘buck moon’ rises over Washington, D.C. (Photos)

(Jim Knapp via Flickr) A full “buck moon” rose bright over Washington, D.C., on Tuesday and Wednesday night. July’s full moon receives its name from the young male deer whose antlers are just beginning to sprout velvety antlers at this point in the year. But the moon is also referred to as the “thunder moon,” thanks to July’s stormy nature, and the “hay moon,” since this is the point at which farmers begin to store hay. The buck moon reached fullness at 6:57 p.m. Tuesday, but thunderstorms limited sky-watching that evening. It appeared nearly-full on Wednesday night. Thanks to everyone who shared their buck moon with us on Flickr, Twitter and Facebook! Aim for moon. if you miss, you may hit a star. #quote #BuckMoon @weatherchannel @capitalweather @yourtake https://t.co/iI3XNoKkQp (George Jiang via Flickr) (George Jiang via Flickr) (George Jiang via Flickr) (88_Spartans via Flickr) (Jim Havard via Flickr) (Carol Jean Stalun via Flickr)


These amazing wild birds understand when people call them to help hunt for honey

for example, chimpanzees also raid beehives, but they sort of “smash and grab” the nest and then “run like hell,” leaving behind wax that would still be full of angry bees very capable of killing honeyguides. The Yao, on the other hand, make a nice bundle of dry wood, wrap it in palm leaves, light it and hoist it on a long pole to the nest. And voila — bee danger averted. “The crucial point is that honeyguides love wax, whereas humans love honey,” Spottiswoode said. “So there’s no conflict of interest over the reward.” Some of the bounty harvested by a human-honeyguide partnership in Mozambique’s Niassa National Reserve. (Claire N. Spottiswoode) This isn’t the case everywhere. In Tanzania, for example, hunter-gatherers known as the Hadza also find beehives with honeyguides’ help. But as explained by Atlas Obscura, they often withhold the wax from the birds to keep them hungry — and eager to guide. In Niassa, the partnership is far more equitable, said Spottiswoode, adding that she thinks the Yao would be shocked to hear about the Hadza strategy. The Yao make a point of rewarding honeyguides by collecting little bits of wax and presenting them on a bed of leaves. “They’ll make a little honeyguide salad,” she said. But honeyguides, despite their sweet name, also have a dark side. Like some cuckoos and brown-headed cowbirds, they’re brood parasites. That means they don’t build their own nests but instead lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, leaving the other species to raise the honeyguide chick. Afterward, honeyguide mothers often stab the other eggs in the nest to reduce competition for their own chick. If the host birds’ chicks survive that assault, the baby honeyguide takes care of the competition in its own gruesome way: It’s born with two sharp hooks on its beak, which it uses to stab and shake its foster siblings to death. “They start with this really dark beginning in life,” said Spottiswoode, who has documented the gore. Within a month, their hooks are gone, they leave the nest, and they’re transformed into man’s best honey-hunting friend. For now, at least. Spottiswoode said the human-honeyguide relationship is breaking down in many parts of Africa as more people find sweetness in sugar at the market rather than in beehives in tall trees. That makes the Yao-bird collaboration all the more amazing, she said. An earlier version of


PM Update: Relatively comfortable tonight before the blow torch turns on tomorrow

(By the Bay Photos via Flickr) If there was ever a night to force yourself outside, tonight might be it. We get one more evening with semi-comfortable conditions before the heat is turned to full blast. After that, I’m thinking that most of us won’t want to be more than 10 feet from an air conditioner. Some downright oppressive stuff moves into the area tomorrow and looks to stick with us through the weekend and into next week. I am almost starting to sweat just thinking about it. Through Tonight: View the current weather conditions at The Washington Post. Tomorrow (Friday): See Matt Rogers’s forecast through the weekend. And if you haven’t already, join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram. For related traffic news, check out Dr. Gridlock. One giant leap! #OTD in 1969, #Apollo11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked on the moon. https://t.co/IVOyNujp9z Yesterday marked the 47th anniversary of the first moon landing. Pretty cool stuff! But if you are a weather nerd like me, you might wonder what the weather was like in the District on that fateful evening. Well, it sounds as if it was pretty wet. According to Weather Underground’s weather almanac, a lot of rain fell (1.45 inches) in what was probably a pretty intense thunderstorm. Safe to say the moon was visible only on television that night. Want our 5 a.m. forecast delivered to your email in-box? Subscribe here.


How to predict Olympic results before the Games even start

population, the world's largest. While population and wealth explain most of the results of the Olympics, contributing about equally to the results, the researchers say there are a few other factors they need to take into account. One is the so-called “home field advantage,” which the data shows has been an influential force in Olympic Games. Athletes may be more motivated to perform in front of an enthusiastic audience of their compatriots, and host countries also often lead the introduction of new sports at which they themselves excel. Finally, they find that past performance is also a predictor of future success. This is in part because talented trainers and athletes are “durable” — they tend to compete and win over multiple Olympic Games. Interestingly, the researchers have found that Soviet countries experienced a medal boost during the Communist era, with Soviet satellite states winning roughly 3 percent more medals than the model predicted. This effect no longer exists, but the researchers say it is evidence that the Communist bloc was particularly successful at mobilizing resources to “manufacture” gold medals. This year, the researchers say they don’t expect Brazil to benefit as much from being a host country as some past hosts, like China and Britain, have done. “Brazil didn’t win a lot of medals in the last Olympics,” says Gonzales. “You have to have the resources and you have to direct it. It doesn’t have a super high income per capita, and it doesn’t focus a lot of its investments in sports and athletes.” Overall, Gonzales says they are very confident about the model's performance for the upcoming Olympics. However, there is one area of uncertainty. They have revised the Russian total down significantly compared with the London Games, due to a doping scandal that has barred its track and field teams from competing. Russia could still be banned from the games entirely -- and Gonzales says that would introduce a lot of uncertainty into the model. “We could have a few surprises. In some ways, it could make the Games more egalitarian, because if you don’t have a huge player that wins a lot of gold medals, there is an opportunity for other countries.” You might also like: Three basic mistakes people make at casinos, according to a math expert How to predict the future better than anyone else There’s a mathematical reason you’re less popular than your friends


Four bars you should try in Bethesda right now

bowls of Japanese-style curry rice. The framed record covers on the wall include a fair few jazz titles, but also extend to the Beatles and the Doobie Brothers, and the music selection is heavy on pop hits. Here's a tip: Don't think about those things. Just bring grab a table on the covered patio, and order food and drinks to share. Thursday's all-night special features $10 pitchers of Shock Top; on Monday and Friday, pitchers of Bud Light are $9. Buckets of five Buds or Bud Lights are $10 all day and night Saturday and Sunday. The regular happy hour, offered from 3 to 7 p.m. on weekdays, brings half-price drafts ($2.50 for Flying Dog), $4 rail drinks and $5 wine. [Here come the BonChon imitators] Tapp'd Bethesda 4915 St. Elmo Ave. tappdbethesda.com. After 10 years of darts, pint and fish and chips, the owners of Union Jack's were ready for a new challenge: a craft beer bar with 40 taps and a focus on Maryland beers. "Our goal is to have half of the drafts from within 50 miles," general manager Rob Cousins told me back in June. Right now, that number is 23 of 40 -- if you count the five house beers, which are sold under the name of Tapp'd but are actually produced by Oliver Brewing Company in Baltimore. (That's about 43.8 miles away.) The bar itself got a makeover since its pub days. Booths with individual TV screens surround a large U-shaped bar. The game room now features air hockey and skee-ball as well as pool tables. (Pro tip: Pool's free all day Sunday through Wednesday.) The bar regularly hosts brewery-specific tap takeovers – Frederick's Milkhouse Brewery brought eight of its beers on July 14. Happy hours include two-for-one house beers on Mondays, and a late-night happy hour with $4 beers and wines from 11 to close Sunday through Thursday and 10 p.m. to close Friday and Saturday. Pinball machines at VÜK, a Bethesda pizza parlor that opened in May. (Photo by Fritz Hahn/The Washington Post) VÜK 4924 St. Elmo Ave. facebook.com/vukpinball. VÜK, which opened in May, is the perfect place to end a Bethesda bar crawl. (Honestly, if I had started here, I'm not sure I'd have made it much further.) The concept is incredibly simple: 10 pinball machines, from 1970s pre-digital games to the latest Metallica and "Game of Thrones" machines; a couple


Your air conditioner is making the heat wave worse

ice bath for a patient suffering an extreme fever, treating the symptom while leaving untouched the underlying cause — in this case, the one-two punch of climate change and the distorted physical and social structure of our cities. And by making our world temporarily cooler, air conditioning is making it permanently hotter, thanks to the increases in greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, vehicle fuel consumption and refrigerant production that keep the cool air flowing. I calculate, based on figures from the Energy Information Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, that the air conditioning of America has a climate impact equivalent to 500 million tons of carbon dioxide — more than all industrial processes combined. About three-fourths of the impact is from generating the electricity to cool buildings, and the rest is split evenly between excess fuel consumption by air-conditioned vehicles and leakage of refrigerants used by all air conditioners. So as temperatures rise this weekend, it’s a good time to question the prevailing assumption that adapting to more frequent heat waves in the future will simply mean using even more air conditioning. That will be an exercise in tail-chasing. It will do nothing for the millions of people who work outdoors or in the many industrial plants that are well out of air conditioning’s reach. Global warming will take an especially harsh toll on them. Climate adaptation can work only if it’s linked to stopping global climate disruption, and both require us to start digging up root causes. Acute problems should have priority. We must help the most distressed urban hot zones cool down again by jackhammering concrete, re-creating green space and improving the quality of housing. All that would help fight the “urban heat island” effect, which can make cities as much as 22 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than their surrounding areas. Reducing air conditioning dependence in urban areas will require a serious overhaul: things like steadily shrinking parking and driving space, accompanied by improvements in public transportation; depaving and revegetating the rescued space; retrofitting large buildings with ventilation shafts to allow air in when weather permits; and mandating that all new construction be designed for non-air-conditioned comfort at times of the year when it’s achievable, with features such as windows that can open, better air-flow within buildings and building shapes that give everyone an external window. For significant parts of the year in much of the country, air


Video shows baby panda Bei Bei doing tricks for treats at National Zoo

Bei Bei, the 11-month old panda at the National Zoo practiced some tricks for the world to see during a training session broadcast on Facebook Live on July 22. Bei Bei, the National Zoo’s baby giant panda, performed tricks in exchange for treats of apple and sweet potato pieces Friday in a Facebook Live video. Keepers who work with the 11-month old panda offered a glimpse behind the scenes of their roughly 5- to 10-minute sessions. Laurie Thompson, an assistant curator at the giant panda habitat at the zoo, walked through the training of Bei Bei in Friday morning’s video. Bei Bei followed her simple commands to lie down, put his paw under the cage door, and “stand,” moving on his hind legs with long, sharp-looking claws poking through a cage. Thompson said Bei Bei now weighs about 64 pounds. She described him as a “big, big boy” and said he was “bigger than both of his siblings at this age.” Thompson said, “We don’t have any worries about him.” Bei Bei was given his name, which means “precious” or “treasure,” five weeks after his birth by U.S. and Chinese first ladies Michelle Obama and Peng Liyuan. Thompson said the training sessions help experts check his health and look for any injuries, as they can see him up close at the cage. And it helps to build a relationship between him and his trainers. Eventually, he becomes more responsive, she said, to commands like “come inside from the yard.” Thompson said Bei Bei has shown interest in the training sessions and usually hangs back from his mother as she heads to the outside part of their enclosure. His mother, Mei Xiang, is kept out in the yard while he is trained. On Friday, Mei Xiang celebrates her 18th birthday. When mama panda realized he was getting treats and she was in another part of the habitat, she began to poke her nose against the cage. “Mom’s figured out that he’s getting treats, so she’s a little jealous,” Thompson said, laughing slightly. Thompson said Bei Bei has a personality like his father. “He’s very easygoing,” she said. “Very laid-back. And he loves his food — especially sweet potatoes.” She declared that sweet potatoes are his “favorite thing in the whole world.” Bei Bei turns one in August, and zoo officials are planning a celebration to commemorate it. After about five minutes


Two Middle East locations hit 129 degrees, hottest ever in Eastern Hemisphere, maybe the world

record from 1913, the 129.2-degree reading from Mitribah Thursday would tie the world’s highest known temperature, also observed in Death Valley on June 30, 2013, and in Tirat Tsvi, Israel, on June 22, 1942. But Masters says the Israeli measurement is controversial. Basra, the city of 1.5 million about 75 miles northwest of the Persian Gulf, has registered historic heat on two straight days. On Thursday, it hit 128 degrees (53.6 Celsius), the highest temperature ever recorded in Iraq, which it then surpassed on Friday, rising to 129. While the Middle East’s highest temperatures have occurred in arid, land-locked locations, locations along the much more sultry Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman have faced the most oppressive combination of heat and humidity. Air temperatures of about 100 degrees (38 Celsius) combined with astronomical humidity levels have pushed heat index values, which reflect how hot the air feels, literally off the charts. In Fujairah, on the east coast of the United Arab Emirates, the dew point — a measure of humidity — reached 90 degrees (32 Celsius) at 4 p.m. local time Thursday. The 90-degree dew point, combined with the air temperature of 97 degrees (36 Celsius), computes to a heat index of over 140 degrees (60 Celsius). However, this combination of temperature and humidity is so extreme that it’s beyond levels the heat index is designed to measure. The index, developed by R.G. Steadman in 1979, is actually only intended to compute values up to about 136 degrees. In Bandar Mahshahr, Iran, on Thursday, the air temperature soared to 106 degrees (41 Celsius), which, combined with a dew point of 86 (30 Celsius), would produce a heat index over 140 (60 Celsius), also over the limit. These conditions were only slightly less extreme than July 31 last year, when Bandar Mahshahr posted an air temperature of 115 degrees (46 Celsius) and dew point of 90 (32 Celsius), which resulted in an over-the-limit heat index of 165 degrees (74 Celsius). Bandar Mahshahr sits adjacent to the Persian Gulf in southwest Iran. In the much more arid Basra, when the temperature hit 129 degrees Friday, the dew point was only in the 30s while the relative humidity was a bone-dry 4 percent. These conditions produce a heat index lower than the actual air temperature — of about 115 degrees (46 Celsius). That is, the ultra-dry air made it feel not as hot.


Russia facing ban at Paralympics as state-sponsored doping scandal spreads

during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. (Phil Noble/Reuters) Russian parathletes hoping to compete in this summer’s Paralympics in Rio got some bad news Friday when officials moved to ban the country from the Games amid Russia’s ongoing doping crisis. The news comes a day after the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the Rio Olympic ban on Russia’s track and field teams in connection to a multiyear, systematic doping program known by the government. “This decision was not taken lightly,” International Paralympic Committee President Sir Philip Craven said in a statement. He added that after considering new evidence this week, “the IPC believes that the current environment in Russian sport — which stems from the highest levels — is such that NPC Russia appears unable to fulfill its IPC membership obligations in full.” The call to suspend Russian athletes comes after a report conducted by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren uncovered 35 “disappearing positive samples” from the same Russian lab accused of operating the systematic, state-sponsored doping program that led to Russia’s suspension from track and field events at the Rio Olympics. The IPC said it now plans to conduct further analysis on 19 samples from the 2014 Paralympics in Sochi that were identified in the McLaren report as possibly having been swapped out for clean samples during the Games. When those results come in, the IPC said it will make its final decision. Officials expect to make the announcement the week of Aug. 1. “Should (Russia) be suspended they will have 21 days to appeal the decision,” the statement adds. Allegations of widespread doping in Russia began circulating after a documentary aired in Germany in late 2014, accusing the state of knowing about rampant tampering. The allegations gained steam, however, in May of this year when the former head of the lab that oversaw athlete testing spoke to the New York Times about the extent of the program. That inspired multiple investigations, which uncovered rampant government involvement at several levels, including intelligence. For example, the investigation conducted by the World Anti-Doping Agency found evidence that a Russian intelligence officers disguised himself as a plumber to break into the doping lab at the Sochi Olympics to swap out test samples. The IPC president called the scale of reports’ findings “unimaginable” and said the “findings are of serious concern for everyone committed to clean and honest sport.”


Update: Power should be restored to museums, agencies on the Mall by Saturday

Due to a power outage in this part of town, the museum on the mall is closed. Updates to follow. Please stay cool. https://t.co/48eXCQbH2r Updated at 7:35 p.m. Pepco officials said power should be restored to the Mall by Saturday at noon. The outage, which happened Friday afternoon, shut down museums and government agencies in the surrounding area. Pepco crews were dispatched to 3rd and E streets SE around noon. Marcus Beal, a spokesman for the utility company, said some type of equipment failure caused the power loss, but the exact origin of the failure is unknown. A press release said Pepco gave portable generators to agencies that lost power and crews are working working “around the clock until all customers are restored.” Original post at 4:52 p.m. A power outage on the Mall left some museums and government agencies dark Friday afternoon, leading to the evacuation of some buildings and sending some government workers home. At around noon, the outage left the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian and other tourist spots without power. The Holocaust Museum was evacuated, a receptionist for the museum said, and a spokesman for the Federal Trade Commission said the agency planned to have employees finish their workday at home. A Pepco spokesman said the outage was the result of an underground equipment issue, but said crews were still dispersed throughout the area trying to determine what the issue was. It wasn’t known when power would be restored, and about 200 customers were affected, as the agency tweeted. 1/2 Crews are responding to an underground equipment failure in D.C. affecting approximately 200 customers. https://t.co/XktAVS6UIP Many buildings affected by the outage appeared to be clustered on the south side of the Mall. Not all buildings there, however, were affected; the National Air and Space Museum remained open with the air conditioning running, as the Smithsonian pointed out in a tweet. Other museums were not so lucky. The Smithsonian tweeted that the power was out at the Hirshhorn Museum, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, the National Museum of African Art and the Ripley Center, which were closed for the rest of the day. An alphabet soup of government agencies was also darkened: the USDA and FEMA, as well as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to D.C. police. Traffic signals in the area were also affected, police said, and a spokesman for


Why Clinton’s pick for vice president might contradict her message on Wall Street

secure new loans, so they must be able to cover their existing debts without borrowing money from another bank. If depositors doubt a firm's ability to do so, there could be a run on the bank, forcing taxpayers to bail out the institution. For that reason, from the perspective of some liberal reformers, the daily requirement is "incredibly important" for containing the fallout from a future financial crisis, said Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute in Washington. Confidence can evaporate quickly in a panic, Konczal noted. "It doesn’t matter if you could pay me next year or pay me next month if you have to pay me tomorrow," he said. Kaine and his colleagues agree that the requirement is important, but they argue it should apply only to the very largest banks. The letter suggests that somewhat smaller banks should be required to report their liquidity only once a month. That is already true for banks with less than $250 billion in assets, but Kaine and his colleagues call that an arbitrary threshold. They argue that banks that are somewhat larger should also be exempt if they are involved in similar kinds of finance. There are only a handful of financial institutions in this category that could conceivably benefit if the rule were relaxed, federal data on the assets of major banks suggests. They include Capital One, PNC Bank, Bank of New York Mellon and TD Bank. The authors of the letter contend that these banks, while large, are not as critical to the financial system and don't require the same kind of scrutiny as the largest institutions, such as Citibank and Wells Fargo. For Konczal, that reasoning contradicts the basic argument that Clinton's campaign has made on Wall Street. In her debates with Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, she argued that the size of a bank was not the most important issue, and that even smaller firms could fail and cause a crisis if improperly regulated. "My proposal is tougher, more effective and more comprehensive because I go after all of Wall Street, not just the big banks," the former secretary of state told Sanders in a primary debate last year. "Her argument was that you didn’t have to break up the big banks, because the real problem was with these smaller and mid-sized players being prone to runs and collapse," Konczal said. Kaine's position "really goes against


Australia won’t move into Rio Olympic Village after toilets fail stress test

Australian athletes refused to stay at the Athletes' Village in Rio de Janeiro less than two weeks before the Olympic Games because they found the accommodations unsafe and chose to go to nearby hotels instead. The Olympic Village in Rio de Janeiro flunked a stress test conducted by the Australian Olympic Committee, which found uninhabitable conditions and was left scrambling to find other quarters for its first athletes to arrive in Brazil. The AOC encountered plumbing and electrical issues that included “blocked toilets, leaking pipes, exposed wiring, darkened stairwells where no lighting has been installed and dirty floors in need of a massive clean.” And the committee offered even more sobering details. “We decided to do a ‘stress test’ where taps and toilets were simultaneously turned on in apartments on several floors to see if the system could cope once the athletes are in-house,” Kitty Chiller, the AOC’s chef de mission, said in a statement published in the Sydney Morning Herald. “The system failed. Water came down walls, there was a strong smell of gas in some apartments and there was ‘shorting’ in the electrical wiring.” Chiller added that Great Britain and New Zealand encountered similar problems Saturday night, and the Herald reported that the Rio organizing committee has sent in workers. Chiller added that the AOC welcomed a decision by the International Olympic Committee to carry out stress tests throughout the village on fire alarms and plumbing. Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes responded flippantly Sunday, saying, “I almost feel like putting a kangaroo in front of their building to make them feel at home.” Another official promised that “last-minute details” would be completed quickly. “There are lights, beds, air conditioning, but we still lack a few details,” an unnamed official told Reuters. “There really are last-minute details to finish, but it will be done this week.” An official for the Great Britain team said it had encountered only minor plumbing and electrical problems. “We are confident that our accommodation is ready to receive athletes and will be to the highest standards within the Village,” Team GB communications director Scott Field told Reuters. “Whilst we have encountered some maintenance difficulties, this is not uncommon with new build structures of this type and we have been working hard to overcome them.” In the meantime, the first of Australia’s 401 Olympic athletes — boxers and canoeists — were scheduled to move into the


The Daily 202: With DWS ouster on eve of convention, 10 questions for the week ahead in Philadelphia

in another proof point that Rio is going to be a mess, Australia is refusing to let its athletes stay in the Olympic Village. The government says problems with gas, electricity and plumbing make it “unlivable." Keep in mind, the games start in two weeks! (Courier Mail) - Islamic State attackers in Kabul detonated a series of coordinated blasts Saturday that killed 80 and injured 230 others. The target was Afghanistan's Shiite ethnic Hazara minority, and it has raised fears of rising Sunni-Shiite violence. (Sayed Salahuddin and Pamela Constable) - Lawyers in Turkey say they have gathered “credible evidence” of serious human rights violations by the Erdogan administration. The government claims it is following due process, but thousands are allegedly being held in horse stables and face abuse. More than 9,000 people are in custody related to the failed coup, and an estimated 50,000 were fired from their jobs. (Loveday Morris) - The Turkish government announced that it has now seized more than 2,250 social, educational and health-care institutions connected with political dissidents since the Friday before last. (AP) - A Georgia appeals court ruled that taking pictures up a woman’s skirt in a public place is not actually a crime, siding with a grocery store employee who was captured taking inappropriate cell phone videos. (Katie Mettler) - Dallas police report a 344 percent spike in employment applications following the July 7 shooting that killed five officers. The surge comes after the chief said officers were under “too much strain” and urged Black Lives Matter protesters to become part of the solution. “We’re hiring,” Brown told demonstrators. “Get off that protest line and put an application in!” (Jacob Bogage) - Work that involves complex thinking and social interaction can potentially help ward off Alzheimer’s Disease, according to research presented in Toronto. The study found that occupations with the highest levels of insulation include lawyer, teacher, social worker, engineer and doctor. (Tara Bahrampour) - Chris Froome, 23, became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France three times, cruising to victory over Romain Bardet of France in the 70-mile final stage of the race. Froome previously won in 2013 and 2015. (Cindy Boren) - Ken Griffey Jr. was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame Sunday. He used his ceremony to make some zany fashion statements: The center fielder donned a pinstripe suit reading “Hall of Fame Class


More than half of adults misuse medications, study finds

(Bigstock) More than half of adults and 44 percent of children who were drug-tested by a national clinical laboratory last year misused their prescription medications, according to a study released Monday by Quest Diagnostics. Misuse of medications can mean that patients were either taking too much, too little or none of their medications. It also can mean test results showed they were using other drugs that had not been prescribed, including illicit drugs -- as 45 percent of adults were doing, the study found. “These are situations where the patient is placing their life at risk,” said Leland McClure, a director with Quest, which is the nation’s largest provider of clinical laboratory testing. The rate of misuse identified by the study might skew higher than what would be found in the general U.S. population. Some patients were tested because their health providers determined there was a “high probability” of them mismanaging medications, the study said. The study also identified the drugs most often misused by patients depending on their age: amphetamines for youth 17 and under, but benzodiazepines and anti-anxiety medications for adults 25 and older, followed by opioid painkillers. The study provided regional results for adults. The highest rate of misuse, nearly 66 percent, occurred in Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. The lowest rate of misuse, about 51 percent, took place in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. This fifth year of the prescription drug study made use of more than 3 million test results. The testing checked for 44 drugs in 2015, up from 26 drugs in 2010. For the first time, the latest analysis also included 155,646 heroin test results, which showed that nearly one-third of patients tested positive for benzodiazepines. Both heroin and that group of medications lower respiratory rates. When they are combined, patients can stop breathing, have heart attacks and die, McClure said. And those combinations are happening with an “alarming magnitude,” he added. Read more: Opioid bill clears Congress, despite ongoing funding fight FDA adds new warnings on risk of addiction overdose and death for some prescription opioids CDC warns doctors about the dangers of prescribing opioid painkillers


Women will attempt Army Special Forces training soon — but they’re not the first

Army Special Operations soldiers descend by rope from an MH-60 helicopter in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. (Courtesy of the U.S. Army) Two female Army officers have been selected to enter the training pipeline to join all-male Special Forces units, becoming the first soldiers to do so since Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter rescinded a ban that banned women from ground combat assignments. The women are among 340 soldiers who were selected for Special Forces Assessment Selection, or SFAS, said Maj. Melody Faulkenberry, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, N.C. The news was first reported by The Washington Times. The Army has not identified the women, beyond saying that one graduated from Officer Candidate School and the other was in a Reserve Officers’ Training Course (ROTC), a college-based commissioning program. They were selected by the Army Special Operations Office Accession Panel, which considered applications primarily from soldiers who entered the service in 2013, according to an Army message. Last December, Carter repealed a longtime ban on women serving in ground combat assignments. The decision followed three female soldiers graduating from the Army’s Ranger School last year after the service opened it to women as part of gender integration research, and the performance of Army female cultural support teams (CSTs), which deployed alongside Army Rangers and Special Forces teams in combat in Afghanistan. Carter’s move has proven controversial with critics who question whether full gender integration could weaken the military or cause unnecessary distractions. But proponents, including Carter, have said that if women can meet all requirements for a job, they should be allowed to do so and could in fact boost combat effectiveness. The female soldiers selected for Special Forces training were among 860 who applied, including nine women, Faulkenberry said. The officer selection panel is one of three ways in which soldiers can join Special Forces units. The other two include joining the Army as a Special Forces candidate and shifting into Special Forces as an enlisted soldier through the Army’s Special Operations Recruiting Battalion; neither of those pathways have yet yielded any potential Green Berets. Soldiers conduct marksmanship training during cultural support team (CST) training at Fort Bragg, N.C., in May 2011. (Staff Sgt. Russell Klika/ U.S. Army) Women have not attended Special Forces training in decades — but it has happened before. One officer, then-Capt.


Doctors warn of increase in Colorado toddlers exposed to recreational marijuana

Colorado and calls to poison control centers in the state from January 2009 to December 2015. Marijuana-related visits and calls ticked upward in the wake of Colorado’s recreational weed legalization, the pediatricians say. The researchers, all based in Colorado, predicted that there would be a bump after the Colorado law took effect in 2014, said Genie Roosevelt, a Denver Health Medical Center pediatrician and study author, in an interview with Live Science. “What we didn’t anticipate,” she said, “is how much it was going to go up.” It is true that, for Colorado children younger than 10, hospital visits related to marijuana nearly doubled, when the rate two years before the 2014 legalization was compared with the two years after legalization. Though the increase was large, the actual hospitalization rate is still small. On average, 2.3 children per 100,000 population were hospitalized, up from 1.2 children per 100,000 before recreational marijuana was approved. Regional poison control cases increased from nine in 2009 to 47 in 2015. The vast majority of children hospitalized did not show lasting injury, though four suffered severe effects. An 11-month-old whose urine tested positive died after arriving unconscious at the Colorado hospital; any link between the death and marijuana was not clear, the Denver Post reported. In about half of the cases overall, the offending substance was an edible. “The scary thing about this stuff is it looks like breakfast items or dessert items or soda pop,” Sgt. Jim Gerhardt, of the Colorado Drug Investigators Association, told ABC 7 at the time of the freezer cookies incident. “So, the element of confusion for kids is tremendous.” As The Post noted in 2014, considering how low the pre-2014 baseline of hospitalization rates was, it would be more surprising if legalization did not trigger a bump. Risk is a function of hazard and exposure — which is why diaper cream, far more prevalent around young children than marijuana, contributed to more than 100 times more poisonings than the drug in 2012. Alaska, Oregon, Washington state and D.C. have joined Colorado in legalizing recreational marijuana. Twenty other states allow medical marijuana use, and several others are mulling allowing recreational use as well. As legal prohibitions against marijuana wane, debate around how to market the drug is increasing. Roosevelt told Live Science that the way Colorado’s marijuana-infused treats are packaged, in vibrantly hued palettes, can be “very enticing to kids.”


This map shows how many people are getting high near you

the period from 2010 to 2012, when SAMHSA last looked at these numbers. Marijuana use rates have become a hot topic since Colorado first opened up its legal marijuana market in 2014, with several other states following suit. But since this data mostly covers the period before 2014, SAMHSA's Hughes says you can't really see many of the effects of legalization here. Marijuana use in Colorado is relatively high, but it's been that way for quite a while. "There are some states where we see rates on the high end even before legalization," Hughes said. The map above does potentially illustrate the relationship between marijuana policymaking and marijuana use. Different states have had radically different marijuana policies in place for years now, evident in the sometimes stark differences in use rates on either side of a state border. Look again at the high use rates in Colorado — where marijuana has been decriminalized for some time and medical marijuana has been available for years — compared to the rock-bottom usage across the state line in Kansas. Of course, the causality could run both ways here: States where people are naturally inclined to use more marijuana may end up enacting looser marijuana laws. One thing that the survey does point out is a potential, if unsurprising, link between attitudes on marijuana and rates of marijuana use. Across the board, people who use marijuana less are more likely to say that marijuana use is harmful. Conversely, those who use it more are less likely to say that use is harmful. The most relaxed attitudes toward marijuana use were found right here in the District of Columbia, in wealthy Ward 3, where the average household income is $253,000 a year. Only 14 percent of Ward 3 residents said there was "great risk of harm" from smoking marijuana monthly. Roughly 1 in 10 Ward 3 residents said they smoked marijuana that often. By contrast, nearly 50 percent of people living in Miami-Dade county in Florida saw a great risk of harm in regular marijuana use. Roughly 5 percent of Miami-Dade residents smoke monthly. Again, the causality here could go either way: People with lax attitudes about the risks of marijuana use may be more likely to use it. Or, people living in areas where many of their peers smoke weed may adopt more relaxed attitudes toward the drug. Some researchers are starting to question


British badgers are more afraid of the BBC than of bears — and that’s very bad

respond to predators, a Blumstein, who wrote an entire book on animal fear and escaping from predators, noted that scientists have spent years studying how fear can impact ecosystems. The most famous case study took place in Yellowstone, where wolves were reintroduced in the mid-1990s. Within a few years, the park's elk and bison had dramatically changed their behavior to account for the fearsome new predator. They spent more time watching and listening for wolves, rather than eating, and were less likely to forage in open areas where they were vulnerable to attack. That in turn led to the recovery of trees those herbivores once chowed down on, which allowed for the reemergence of beavers and songbirds. "It's not just the killing of prey, which is important, but it's these fear effects contributing as well, so that the total effect on prey populations is way more than just the killing," Zanette said. In this way, "restoring the fear of a top predator has all these cascading effects on other tiers in the food chain," she continued. "Restoring fear can actually restore the ecosystem." If that's the case, then isn't it a good thing that creatures like badgers are petrified of us humans? Not quite, Zanette warned. "It's not a one-to-one relationship," she said. We may be scaring badgers, but we're also killing their predators, providing them with new sources of food like crops and trash, and reshaping their habitats. Zanette said much more study is needed to understand the cascading effects of this new landscape of fear. And Blumstein added that he'd like to see Zanette and her colleagues study habituation — whether badgers, once they've been protected for a while, learn to stop fearing humans. "Humans are distorting ecosystems in new ways that we haven’t really thought about before," Zanette said. It's not clear how things will shake out in the end. But one thing is obvious, she said: "It's quite clear that having humans in the environment is not keeping ecosystems healthy." Perhaps that is truly the scariest thing about us. Read more: Dolly the sheep died young – but her clones seem perfectly healthy as they turn 9 Astronauts are diving deep under the ocean to prepare for life in space Was this ancient organism the first life on Earth, or just the luckiest? Dear Science answers your questions about evolution Lichen is a famous biological partnership


Only 12 of 31 buildings in the Rio Olympic Village have passed safety inspections

system could cope once the athletes are in-house,” Kitty Chiller, the Australian Olympic Committee’s chef de mission, said in a statement published in the Sydney Morning Herald. “The system failed. Water came down walls, there was a strong smell of gas in some apartments and there was ‘shorting’ in the electrical wiring.” The AOC also encountered plumbing and electrical issues that included “blocked toilets, leaking pipes, exposed wiring, darkened stairwells where no lighting has been installed and dirty floors in need of a massive clean.” By Monday evening, Chiller was saying that she expected all of her athletes could move from their temporary hotel rooms into the village on Wednesday. There is likely to be a kumbaya moment when Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes, who flippantly told the Australians, “I almost feel like putting a kangaroo in front of their building to make them feel at home,” hands over the keys. Spokesman Mário Andrada told The Guardian that only 12 of the 31 tower blocks had been checked, although officials promised to have issues cleared up by Thursday, a week and a day ahead of the Opening Ceremonies. “This should have been tested a long time ago,” he said.“But the problem is there, and now our task is to fix it as quickly as possible and to ensure everything is safe.” As for the fire in the Dutch rooms, Andrada explained that “a technician was working on a fuse box. There was a short circuit and a small fire, which he extinguished himself. The electricity was disconnected, and there was no need for an evacuation or to call firefighters.” Overall, only about 10 percent of the athletes who will compete have arrived. Patrick Sandusky, the chief external affairs officer for the U.S. Olympic Committee, told The Guardian they are monitoring the situation. “As is the case with every Games, we’re working with the local organizers to address minor issues and make sure the Village is ready for Team USA,” he said. On Tuesday, it was Belarus’s turn to decry conditions in its quarters. It refused to move its athletes in because of health concerns over a lack of hot water and a failing sewage system and posted photos of a dirty shower and windows online. “There remains much for the Rio organizing committee to do so that the living conditions meet sanitary requirements,” the country’s Olympic committee told the Associated Press.


Knee issues will cause Roger Federer to miss Olympics, rest of ATP season

Shutting it down for the year. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau, File) Tennis great Roger Federer announced Tuesday that he will sit out the rest of the season, including next month’s Olympics, in order for his surgically repaired knee to heal. Federer, 34, had surgery to repair a torn meniscus in February after injuring his knee one day after a loss to Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open semifinals. He missed 10 weeks and then sat out the French Open because of a back injury that also had been bothering him, ending his record run of 65 consecutive Grand Slam appearances. The 17-time major winner returned for Wimbledon, falling in the semifinals to Milos Raonic. Federer won doubles gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and a singles silver four years ago in London, but he won’t go for a third medal at this year’s Rio Games. The world’s third-ranked player also will miss the U.S. Open for the first time as a professional. The Last Time Roger Federer: Did not play in Olympics 1996 Did not play in US Open 1999 Finished season with 0 titles 2000 World No. 1 Novak Djokovic, No. 2 Andy Murray and No. 4 Rafael Nadal all are on the final entry list for Rio. Nadal, the 2008 singles gold medalist, hasn’t played since he pulled out of the French Open with a wrist injury.


The dwarf planet Ceres is mysteriously missing a bunch of craters

tumultuous early days where collisions were much more frequent and violent than today.” Take a flight over dwarf planet Ceres in this video made with images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. The simulated flyover was made by the mission's camera team at Germany's national aeronautics and space research center (DLR). Instead, while many small craters mark up the surface, the largest impact crater they found was just 175 miles across. In contrast, Vesta — half the size of Ceres — has a whopper of an impact crater some 500 miles wide. When they crunched the numbers, Marchi and the rest of the study team found that there was a less than 2 percent chance of Ceres getting through 4 billion odd years with the assortment of craters it seems to sport. "Thus, it points to something special about Ceres, something that we could not have guessed." Marchi told Space.com. With the help of computer models and data from Dawn, Marchi and his colleagues conclude that the "peculiar composition and internal evolution" of Ceres must have erased larger impact basins somehow. The researchers found signs of multiple large, circular craters hiding just below a surface smoothed and marked up with smaller impacts. This representation of Ceres' Occator Crater in false colors shows differences in the surface composition. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA) "It is as though Ceres cures its own large impact scars and regenerates new surfaces, over and over," Marchi said in a statement. The researchers can't be sure yet exactly how Ceres managed to turn back the clock and achieve this youthful look. But they're floating two ideas: Briny, subsurface liquids and ice volcanoes. It could be that this icy, salty layer just below the surface is viscous and flowing. This substance might allow the craters to smooth out over time as the ground settled, or it could even have flowed over the crust and formed an entirely new surface. Alternatively, ice volcanoes — which may have been more active when the planet was younger and warmer — could have spewed out roiling water that resurfaced the globe. Read More: British badgers are more afraid of the BBC than of bears — and that’s very bad Astronauts are diving deep under the ocean to prepare for life in space Dolly the sheep died young — but her clones seem perfectly healthy as they turn 9 Dear Science answers your questions about evolution Save Save


Climate change is as dangerous as ISIS, says Kerry, and part of the problem is your airconditioning

consumption is expected to rise by more than 80 percent due to more air conditioning, and an increased use of fridges and fans. Rapidly growing use of air conditioning and fridges has already led to more energy consumption. Perhaps even more worrisome, it has also increased emissions of so-called HCFC gases that are known to fuel climate change. Kerry was in Vienna last Friday to help find an agreement to limit their international use — and he made clear that it was not a laughing matter. "Yesterday, I met in Washington with 45 nations — defense ministers and foreign ministers — as we were working together on the challenge of Daesh, ISIL, and terrorism," Kerry said, referring to the Islamic State group. "It’s hard for some people to grasp it, but what we — you — are doing here right now is of equal importance because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself," he said, referring to climate change in general and the hope to curb the use of HCFC gases in particular. About 90 percent of those gases are used in fridges or air conditioning systems. Vehicles driving along a road are seen through heat haze in Chandigarh, India, April 20, 2016. (REUTERS/Ajay Verma) "The concern is that if the world doesn’t transition away from HCFCs, that will cause problems because the developing world, including China and India, are poised — as they develop and as the climate warms — to become enormous markets for air conditioners and other uses of these chemicals," said Anthony Leiserowitz, the Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. While the U.S. and Europe agree that HCFCs should be phased out and replaced by less damaging gases, Europeans believe Americans should also do more to lower their reliance on air conditioning. While American demand for air-conditioning has continuously increased over the past decades, Europeans have started to think about alternatives. To be fair, summers in Vienna and northern Europe in general can hardly be compared to the hot, humid mess of a summer in Washington D.C. and many other American cities. Advocates of air conditioning cannot only be found in the U.S.: Lee Kuan Yew, a former prime minister of Singapore, called air conditioners the greatest invention of the last century. Studies suggest that in hotter countries, air conditioning can increase workers' productivity and make the countries