World

UbiQD And Solvay Announce Greenhouse Technology Development Partnership

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Greenhouses with UbiGro® consistently produce larger crop yields by enhancing the spectral quality of sunlight. Courtesy/Solvay

BUSINESS News:

  • Cooperation focuses on developing and commercializing next-generation quantum dot-based specialty agricultural films for greenhouse coverings

LOS ALAMOS and BRUSSELS — UbiQD, Inc., an advanced materials company powering product innovations in agriculture, clean energy, and security, and the Solvay Group, announced today that they have agreed to partner on the development of next-generation luminescent greenhouse technology

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World Futures: Distance Learning And Teaching – Part One

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By ANDY ANDREWS
Los Alamos World Futures Institute

In the fall of 1989, the Cognitive Systems Engineering Group in the Los Alamos Nation Laboratory held a distance learning conference at the Inn of the Mountain Gods in Mescalero, N.M.

At the time, the two dominant terms were distance education and distance training. Distance education was the dominant terminology used by the formal education system, led by the University of Wisconsin.

In contrast, distance training seemed primarily the purview of government instructional bodies, particularly the military, plus motivated private companies. Read More

TOTH: Garage Sales Benefit Juarez Homebuilding Mission

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Scene of children helping the House of Hope team members from Trinity on the Hill Episcopal Church build a home in the colonias near Juarez, Mexico.Courtesy/TOTH

Scene from the House of Hope team members from Trinity on the Hill Episcopal Church building a home in the colonias near Juarez, Mexico. Courtesy/TOTH

By LYNN FINNEGAN
TOTH

Work From Home. Stimulus Package. Paycheck Protection Program. Our vocabulary in the United States has been expanded to include these pandemic-related changes, but the people in the colonias near Juarez, Mexico have no such options or protections.

Many live in Read More

LANL: Newer Variant Of COVID-19–Causing Virus Dominates Global Infections

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This chart tells the essential story of how the pandemic has shifted over time from orange (the original D type of the virus) to blue (the now-widespread G form, D614G). Courtesy/LANL

Chart: ARS-CoV-2 Spike. Courtesy/LANL

LANL News:

  • Virus with D614G change in Spike out-competes original strain, but may not make patients sicker

Research out today in the journal Cell shows that a specific change in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus virus genome, previously associated with increased viral transmission and the spread of COVID-19, is more infectious in cell culture.

The variant in question, D614G, Read More

COVID-19: An Opportunity For Enhancing School Health

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By RACHEL LIGHT
Los Alamos

COVID-19 brings up many negative feelings for people, such as fear, uncertainty, and social isolation. For many, the days repeat themselves like a scene from the movie Groundhog Day and it’s hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Yet, COVID-19 provides us with the perfect opportunity to put sustainable public health measures in schools, such as regular handwashing, that could yield benefits way beyond the current pandemic.

Implementing regular handwashing at key times in school has many benefits for reducing illness beyond COVID-19. This includes the potential Read More

HU Alumna Receives UK Scholarship For Film Study

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Shanea Strachan

NMHU News:

Las Vegas, N.M. – Shanea Strachan, a New Mexico Highlands University media arts and technology alumna, received a United Kingdom Chevening Scholarship to enroll at Bournemouth University in Dorset, England to pursue a master’s degree in producing film and television.

The British High Commission Nassau awarded Strachan, a Freeport, Grand Bahama native, the scholarship. She is the only Bahamian to receive the honor this year.

“My passion is to focus on original content creation of television shows and movies,” Strachan said. “The stories that are most important Read More

RSF: Let’s Not Allow Beijing To Stifle Press Freedom

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Courtesy/RSF

RSF News:

Christophe Deloire, the secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the world’s democracies to take action to prevent Beijing from imposing a national security law in Hong Kong that will be used as means to prosecute journalists.

The 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China, which is today, July 1, comes at a time of deep concern for the future of freedoms in the former British colony. Despite China’s previous commitments, the Beijing regime is attempting to impose a national security law allowing it to intervene in the territory and crack down Read More

LANL: Building Better Electron Sources With Graphene

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An added layer of graphene allows photocathode substrates to be cleaned and reused repeatedly in place inside electron microscopes and accelerators. Courtesy/LANL

LANL News:

Photocathodes that produce electron beams for electron microscopes and advanced accelerators can be refreshed and rebuilt repeatedly without opening the devices that rely on them, provided the electron emitting materials are deposited on single-atom-thick layers of carbon known as graphene, according to a new study published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

“The machines that rely on these electron Read More

Skolnik: Please Tell It Like It Is – Before It Is Much Too Late

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By RICHARD SKOLNIK
Los Alamos

Providing the public with regular, clear, evidence-based, and actionable messages has been key to successfully addressing every major public health problem. Successful messaging has also centered on creating a popular consensus around understanding outbreaks and taking the measures needed to deal with them. This has been true, for example, about messaging in the U.S. on tobacco and seat belts. It was also true for how governments dealt with HIV in Thailand and Uganda and with Ebola in West Africa. Messages in the above manner have also been at the core of the global Read More

NIST: Cybercrime … It’s Worse Than We Thought

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Image by Pete Linforth/Pixabay

By Douglas S. Thomas, an economist in the Applied Economics Office at NIST

The cyber world is relatively new, and unlike other types of assets, cyber assets are potentially accessible to criminals in far-off locations. This distance provides the criminal with significant protections from getting caught; thus, the risks are low, and with cyber assets and activities being in the trillions of dollars, the payoff is high.

When we talk about cybercrime, we often focus on the loss of privacy and security. But cybercrime also results in significant economic losses. Read More