alyaza

While Western forestry experts accept some wildfire as redemption for the landscape, they’ve also learned that out-of-control megafires can do more harm than good. Now a new study puts a spotlight on the small, cartoon-cute creatures ready to serve as a stalwart defense against raging, 100,000-acre firestorms: the humble, hardworking beaver.

River segments hosting beaver-created dams fared far better during and after megafires than riverscapes without beaver activity, leaving pockets of intact habitat crucial for wildlife, and protecting waterways from runaway erosion, a study published in The Geological Society of America in January found.

Using a combination of infrared and optical satellite imagery, as well as field observations, a team of nine scientists assessed the burn severity along streams within the fire scars. They then compared reaches of stream that had beaver dams to stretches without, and to the surrounding forest.

“Beaver-modified riverscapes are resistant to megafire-scale disturbance,” the authors wrote. “This resilience is directly attributable to beaver dam- and canal-building activity.”

Yoakum is a core member of CoMo Mobile Aid Collective (CoMAC) in Columbia, Missouri. Tonight, she’s working a “Winter Warriors” shift, which entails checking on people experiencing unsheltered homelessness and offering a warm drink, supplies, and a ride to a place they can get inside. Members of the aid collective go out as Winter Warriors each night the weather dips below 35 or 45 degrees, depending on precipitation.

By taking the needs of their unhoused neighbors into their hands, the CoMAC is now a major part of homelessness services in its city of about 130,000. Beginning in 2022, the collective transitioned into an official nonprofit organization serving hundreds each week with meal routes, twice-weekly nursing clinics, and supportive services. Still, the group operates with a mutual aid framework, anarchist principles, and consensus-based decision-making.

In the collective’s four years of existence, it has shown remarkable adaptability, as organizers have updated tactics to meet greater demands, build local coalitions, and face rising criminalization of poverty, along with right-wing harassment.

• Wisconsin law generally requires trans people, including children, to publish their legal name changes in a newspaper. Some worry the requirement poses a higher risk with the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies.
• Lawyers working with trans people say Wisconsin’s publication requirements further endanger the trans community by creating a de facto dataset of people that some fear could be used for firing, harassment or violence.
• “We live just in constant terror of the wrong person finding out that we have an 11-year-old trans child. … All it takes is one wrong person getting that information, and what we could end up going through, becoming a target, is horrifying.”
• A Wisconsin law has dissuaded at least one transgender resident from going through with a legal name change. “It can put people at risk of violence and blatant discrimination simply because of who they are,” an ACLU lawyer said.

So I ran a marathon at the weekend.

I was going to say “my first marathon” - which it was, my first I mean - but that makes it sound like there are going to be many, which uh I don’t intend so much. Let’s see.

I expected a marathon to be hard. It was harder than I expected in a super interesting way.

Goals: (a) get round and (b) hit a target time of 3:45 if poss.

My time was 3 hours 40 minutes 12 seconds. I’m proud of that ngl (and wish I’d done better).

Sometimes, Josh Tetrick will quiz strangers in the dairy aisle. He’ll strike up a conversation with a fellow grocery store patron and ask if they’ve heard about “this egg that’s made from plants?” He might point out the golden-yellow boxes shaped like milk cartons sitting on refrigerated shelves, not too far from the egg cartons. Generally, he finds that people don’t know what he’s talking about. “Most people will be like, ‘What?’”

The product Tetrick is referring to — which, not coincidentally, he manufactures — is called Just Egg. It’s a liquid vegan egg substitute made from mung beans, a member of the legume family, and it’s designed to scramble just like a real chicken egg when cooked over heat. (The company also sells frozen omelette-style patties that can be heated up in a toaster oven and frozen breakfast burritos.) Along with his best friend Josh Balk, Tetrick cofounded the company Eat Just, formerly known as Hampton Creek, which developed Just Egg over years of testing. On a recent call with Grist, Tetrick described the products — which are meant to look, taste, and cook like real eggs — as “definitely, definitely weird.”

Over the years, Tetrick’s company, which also houses the cultivated meat subsidiary Good Meat, has received criticism for allegedly exaggerating its environmental claims and sales figures. In 2016, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the company — then called Hampton Creek — removed the climate benefits of its vegan mayonnaise product, Just Mayo, from its website after an external audit found they were inaccurate. Previously, Bloomberg reported that Hampton Creek had instructed contractors to buy back its vegan mayo from stores. Tetrick said that the buybacks were for quality assurance purposes only, but in 2016 both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched inquiries into the company for potentially inflating its sales numbers. The following year, both investigations were dropped.

Those in the plant-based industry say that once vegan alternatives taste as good as real meat and cost the same or less, then sales will go up. Entrepreneurs and advocates have focused on developing the technology, supply chains, and economies of scale needed to lower the price of animal-free protein products. But the current situation with vegan eggs suggests that change can also happen when the animal-based option becomes much more expensive. Prices vary from store to store and region to region, but on the online store for the Manhattan West location of Whole Foods, one 16-ounce carton of Just Egg, the equivalent of about 10 small eggs, costs $7.89. Meanwhile, a dozen eggs, depending on the brand, run from about $7 to up to $13.

The Geriatric and Medical Parole Reform bill allows some incarcerated people who are older or sick to apply for early release.

The bill will change how the Maryland Parole Commission evaluates requests for medical parole, and add a meeting between the incarcerated person and the commission.

Under the bill, the commission is required to consider the age of an incarcerated person when determining if they should be granted parole.

Lawmakers also passed the Second Look Act, a bill that allows courts to review long prison sentences for people who were convicted of a crime that occurred when they were between the ages of 18 and 25.

The Restorative Practices in Public Schools bill requires the Maryland Department of Education to create a guide to establish restorative practices in daily school activities.

The restorative approach is proactive in setting behavioral expectations that contribute to the well-being of students. The practices focus on holding students accountable for harmful behavior.

Property owners and landlords in New York City can now be fined $25 or more if residents are found throwing a banana peel in the trash. As of April 1, all New Yorkers must separate organic waste — that includes food scraps, food-soiled paper (like empty pizza boxes), and leaf and yard waste — from the rest of their trash, similar to how metal, glass, paper, and plastic is set aside for recycling.

This is how the city is encouraging — or indeed, mandating — participation in its curbside composting program, where food waste is collected weekly by the sanitation department, same as the trash and recycling. Mandatory curbside composting is still relatively new in New York City; the program only rolled out in all five boroughs late last year.

The best use of food, of course, is to feed people. When it can’t do that, composting is one tool to help reduce emissions from organic waste — the methane released as food decays in landfills is a major driver of global warming. As a whole, the United States wastes as much food as it did nearly 10 years ago, despite setting an ambitious goal to cut food waste in half.

When her phone vibrates with a WhatsApp alert from her “Task Hunters” group, she has little time to react.

Fuentes, 35, rushes to her computer and logs on to Appen, an artificial-intelligence data platform where she has been tagging data for the past decade. She works quickly as she competes with thousands of other crowd-workers for 5–25 cents per task. With each click, she may choose the genre of a movie, decide if an image is AI-generated, or solve a math problem.

Fuentes is among the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who do informal work for the tech industry. As Venezuela’s economic crisis worsened and its currency became nearly worthless around 2018, educated Venezuelans signed up on AI-training and freelancing platforms to earn in U.S. dollars. They formed up to 75% of the workforce at companies like Mighty AI and Scale AI in 2018. Remotasks even created a special program to attract Venezuelan workers.

They annotated all kinds of data to train AI tools, such as vision models, autonomous vehicles, and warehousing robots. They also moderated violent content and wrote articles to optimize websites for search.

But with the rise of generative AI, such digital jobs have become scarce and poorly paid, workers and researchers told Rest of World. Without formal contracts, the workers have little choice but to find ways to compete with AI, or quit.

archive.is link

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.88 trillion company and alter its power over the internet.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale.

Google has increasingly faced a reckoning over the dominant role its products play in how people get information and conduct business online. Another federal judge ruled in August that the company had a monopoly in online search. He is now considering a request by the Justice Department to break the company up.

Judge Brinkema, too, will have an opportunity to force changes to Google’s business. In its lawsuit, the Justice Department pre-emptively asked the court to force Google to sell some pieces of its ad technology business acquired over the years.