Bed bugs like wood

Considering staff The last, and trickiest challenge for the Biden Administration’s sterilization efforts, has nothing to do with furniture, fixtures, or oxygen. It’s the challenge of personnel. The White House has 5,900 people on staff as of last count. Some of those people are in-house cooks, others might handle communications outside the Oval Office, others might oversee Camp David. These individuals don’t all literally work inside the White House, but they are considered key support personnel of the President. And those who work in the White House are actually at risk of carrying and transmitting COVID-19. … [Read more...] about You can’t use bleach to sterilize the White House. Here’s what experts recommend instead

In Hawaii, the startup built the world’s largest fully off-grid, solar-powered desalination system. With a half-acre of solar panels, there’s enough power to desalinate around 34,000 gallons of water per day, taken from a well on the site. A drip irrigation system sends the water to the roughly 1,900 native trees and shrubs that have been planted in the area so far. As the forest grows, proving that the system works, the company is working to replicate the same idea around the world. It’s creating seed banks that fit inside shipping containers and can store the millions of native seeds that are necessary for large planting projects. It’s also building open-source software that groups can use to collect data and track progress after trees are planted. … [Read more...] about Reddit’s former CEO is now in the forest-planting business

The first wave of COVID-19 closures in March came just two months after I had moved my mum in to live with me and my family. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in December. Upon hearing the heartbreaking news, I decided to move her from California to Colorado, where she would spend her final months under my care and under my roof. This meant I had officially joined the ranks of the sandwich generation. … [Read more...] about Female-founded companies will save our economy. Here’s why

Currently, our algorithm is able to consider a human plan for solving the Rubik’s Cube, suggest improvements to the plan, recognize plans that do not work, and find alternatives that do. In doing so, it gives feedback that leads to a step-by-step plan for solving the Rubik’s Cube that a person can understand. Our team’s next step is to build an intuitive interface that will allow our algorithm to teach people how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. Our hope is to generalize this approach to a wide range of pathfinding problems. … [Read more...] about This AI can explain how it solves Rubik’s Cube—and that’s a big deal

What does it look like to be the only developed country without a national paid family leave policy? We put our economy at risk, perpetuate systemic inequality, and compound the racial wealth gap. It’s a new mother in Arizona returning to waitressing just three weeks after her C-section to earn gas money to visit her daughter in the ICU. It looks like frontline domestic workers contracting COVID-19 in the workplace and bringing it home to their families. It looks like women rising through the corporate, athletic and academic ranks putting their careers on hold, perhaps permanently. … [Read more...] about In the face of divisive politics, paid family leave should remain a bipartisan priority