Is it safe to go to big sporting events during the pandemic? Not yet, but there are ways to make it safer if you go. “Yelling, chanting, hugging and generally pouring out our sports enthusiasm is still not the safest activity,” noted Jennifer Dowd, associate professor of population health at University of Oxford and chief scientific officer of Dear Pandemic, a website that offers expert opinions. If you do decide to go to a game, outdoor stadiums are safer…
The story of westward migration during the 19th-century is one of triumph and tragedy. Thousands of graves dot the western United States, where pioneers succumb to disease, hunger, and accidents. Most have been lost to time, but along Highway 20 in the Sierras is one lone grave that receives thousands of visitors a year. Many modern roads and highways follow the same routes used by overland emigrants during the 1800s. Such is the case for Highway 20 in the……
Gr4vy, (pronounced ‘gravy’) is a cloud-native payments company with a “payment orchestration platform (POP)” that merges a Cloud platform with payments infrastructure. It’s also announcing a Series A funding round of $11.1M, led by Nyca Partners (a VC with a bench of partners who are ex-Visa ), with participation from Activant Capital (a fintech investor), Global Founders Capital, and Firestartr bringing its total funding to $12.2M. So what is Gr4vy tackling here? Over a video call, John Lunn, founder……
Currently used as a public library, this late 15th early 16th-century building contains a facade that reflects the position of its original owner, Rodrigo Arias de Maldonado who was a physician in the court of Queen Isabella I. Maldonado was a professor at the University of Salamanca and a member of the Chivalric Order of Santiago, whose symbol is the scallop shell. The facade of this amazing building is adorned with 300 carvings of scallop shells. The scallop shell……
Sydney Anh Mai Contributor Sydney Anh Mai is an award-winning product designer at Kickstarter. Her work has appeared on The Verge, Design Weekly and Core 77. Growing up, did you ever wonder how many chairs you’d have to stack to reach the sky? No? I guess that’s just me then. As a child, I always asked a lot of “how many/much” questions. Some were legitimate (“How much is 1 USD in VND?”); some were absurd (“How tall is the……
Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, join for us the second part of this journey that began with the world’s largest conveyor belt in the Western Sahara and ends on your dinner plate. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet some……
BEIJING (AP) — China on Thursday launched the core module for its first permanent space station that will host astronauts long-term. The Tianhe, or “Heavenly Harmony,” module blasted into space atop a Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Launch Center on the southern island province of Hainan, marking another major advance for the country’s space exploration program that has chalked up a series of accomplishments in recent months. The launch begins the first of 11 missions necessary to…
BEIJING (AP) — China launches core module as work begins on country’s first permanent space station to host astronauts long-term. Source
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on President Joe Biden’s first joint address to Congress (all times local): 11 p.m. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott has used the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s address to Congress to vow that “America is not a racist country.” Scott, the only Black Republican senator, seized on Biden’s calls earlier in the evening that passage of major police reform could help stamp out institutional racism nationwide. Scott countered that “today, kids are being…
A startup that is helping over 125,000 neighborhood stores in India secure working capital, inventory from top brands, and work with e-commerce firms to boost revenues said on Thursday it has raised a new financing round as it looks to further its reach in the world’s second largest internet market. Pune-based ElasticRun said it has raised $75 million in its Series D financing round co-led by existing investors Avataar Ventures and Prosus Ventures. Existing investor Kalaari Capital also participated……
Mike Murphy Contributor Mike Murphy is the founder and CEO of Rosecliff Ventures, a New York City-based investment firm focused on venture capital and private equity opportunities. Consumer technology is an inherently risky investment sector: even the best idea can fall flat if the story of the product is not sold properly to the end user. The stats can only take you so far, and, eventually, customers want to believe in the product. Traditionally, companies that have successfully told……
In 2019, a Boston restaurant closed. Normally, a restaurant closing in a major city wouldn’t cause much of a commotion, but this was different. Durgin-Park had been open for almost 200 years, and was famed for serving what food historian Paul Freedman calls the “first forgotten cuisine” of the United States. Durgin-Park, located in Boston’s Faneuil Hall market, was truly the last of its kind. Something of a tourist trap in its later years, the restaurant slung crock after……
Not so long ago, watching a movie on a smartphone seemed impossible. Vivienne Sze was a graduate student at MIT at the time, in the mid 2000s, and she was drawn to the challenge of compressing video to keep image quality high without draining the phone’s battery. The solution she hit upon called for co-designing energy-efficient circuits with energy-efficient algorithms. Sze would go on to be part of the team that won an Engineering Emmy Award for developing the……
Researchers from the Low Energy Electronic Systems (LEES) interdisciplinary research group at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, together with MIT and National University of Singapore (NUS), have found a method to quantify the distribution of compositional fluctuations in the indium gallium nitride (InGaN) quantum wells at different indium concentrations. InGaN light emitting diodes (LEDs) have revolutionized the field of solid-state lighting due to their high efficiencies and durability, and low costs. The……
In the north of Portugal‘s Serras de Aire e Candeeiros Natural Park is an amazing collection of dinosaur footprints, some of the longest in the world. Before this site was a natural monument, it was a quarry. One day in July 1994, a young man discovered a set of footprints, then it was made a contract with the owner Rui Galinha. The site has been studied by scientists, and in 1997 it was turned into a Natural Monument. The……
