VOX
Why are three kids less common? Is it the car seats?
- Title
- Why are three kids less common? Is it the car seats?
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- By Phil Edwards
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- Title
- Why scientists started dropping cats in the 1800s #shorts
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- By Coleman Lowndes
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Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com
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- Title
- Why so many "election deniers" lost in 2022
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- The everyday people who beat back the assault on democracy (for now).
Send us your questions! https://forms.gle/ATu6kYgKNaEXSr3UA
The belief that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 US election is widespread among his most devoted followers. That belief rests on claims of massive voter fraud in the 2020 election that have never been substantiated. And in the 2022 elections, many “election deniers” ran for state-level offices that have direct control over elections, promising to limit access to voting if they won. Of all Republican nominees for election-administration positions this year, over half openly claimed that Trump won in 2020.
But when the election came, the most high-profile of those “election denier” nominees, many of whom were favored to win, actually lost. And the story of why many of them lost is actually the story of thousands of ordinary citizens using the tools of democracy to protect democracy.
Have you always...
- Title
- The chart that explains the 2022 US election #shorts
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- By Adam Freelander. Subscribe to our channel and turn on notifications (🔔) so you don't miss any videos: http://goo.gl/0bsAjO
Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com
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![How Wellness is evolving [Advertiser content from Fitbit]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SJQJwhVxi9s/2.jpg)
- Title
- How Wellness is evolving [Advertiser content from Fitbit]
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- The state of wellness is changing. Rather than reflecting a prescribed, universal fitness goal, the new world of wellness calls for a more holistic approach. Wellness is an interconnected experience, uniting mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. Physical fitness no longer describes a strict body type. Fitness isn’t appearance. Each individual must discover what wellness means to them, and how it fits into their lives.
Learn More - https://www.vox.com/ad/23415156/how-wellness-is-changing
- Title
- America's deadliest road, explained
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- US road design favors speed over pedestrian safety.
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Most American roads aren’t just unpleasant for pedestrians, they can be dangerous. Pedestrian fatalities have been rising in the past few years, and urban planners point to the way roads are designed as the culprit.
A group of urban planners identified 60 pedestrian fatality hot spots throughout the US, and a 1,000-meter corridor of US-19 in New Port Richey, Florida, topped their list. Seventeen pedestrians lost their lives along this short stretch of road in the study period of 2001 to 2016.
The fatality hot spots on the study’s list shared a lot of design characteristics. Many of them are arterial thoroughfares: roads historically built to keep high-speed traffic off of nearby residential streets. But the way US communities developed in a sprawling fashion along these roads meant th...
- Title
- It’s not you - movies are getting darker.
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Blame technology for how often you can’t see anything in your favorite shows.
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There’s a trend in movies and TV that you’ve probably noticed: everything has gotten extremely dark, and for some audience members, too dark to even see.
It comes down to both aesthetics and technology. The first one’s pretty simple: as popular content leans grittier and darker in tone (i.e. The Batman, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones etc) the visuals tend to reflect that.
But productions have also moved from shooting on film to shooting with digital cameras - and the way scenes get lit has changed dramatically. Shooting on film meant that you couldn’t see the final product until everything was developed. Under those limitations, it made more sense to flood dark scenes with light to ensure the footage would be usable. With digital cameras and digital mon...
- Title
- New Mexico's Constitutional Amendment 1 #shorts
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Voters in New Mexico, listen up! Senior producer Liz Scheltens breaks down Constitutional Amendment 1 for you.
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Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com
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- Title
- Oregon's governor race #shorts
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Voting in Oregon? Associate producer Halley Brown breaks down how climate policy could be affected by the governor’s race.
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Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com
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- Title
- What Michigan's Prop 3 means for abortion #shorts
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Senior producer Liz Scheltens breaks down what Proposition 3 means for abortion access in Michigan.
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Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com
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- Title
- The surprising reason we call each other "guys" #shorts
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Hey guys, senior producer Coleman Lowndes here to explain.
Source: “The Life of Guy” by Allan Metcalf
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Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com
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- Title
- 3 ways the 2022 election could go #shorts
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Story editor Adam Freelander summarizes.
Want to watch more? Check out our longer take: https://youtu.be/qeokW1-mds8
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Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com
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- Title
- The 3 possible outcomes of the 2022 US election
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Why the Congressional midterm results matter so much.
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On January 6th, 2021 (yes, during the capitol riots) the final Senate race of the 2020 election was called for a Democrat. All of a sudden Democrats had achieved something improbable: trifecta control of the presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives. It transformed the possibilities for Biden’s first two years, giving his party the ability to legislate on their own - which they did.
The trillion-dollar stimulus, the infrastructure bill, the climate investments of the Inflation Reduction Act — all of that was only possible because of unified Democratic control. But even under divided government, both houses of Congress will still wield an enormous amount of power over national affairs and policy. That’s why the 2022 election results aren't just a referendum on whether Democrats should keep ...
- Title
- Batteries are dirty. Geothermal power can help.
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- A better future can’t just be green, it must also be fair.
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Lithium-ion batteries are a transformative technology in the fight against climate change. Most notably, they power electric vehicles, which have the potential to replace emissions produced by road transportation.
But there’s a problem. These batteries require nickel. And in Indonesia, where the majority of nickel is produced, the production process emits large amounts of carbon and pollution. It’s impacting the people who live by the production centers, who are registering an increase in respiratory illnesses. The US is essentially outsourcing carbon emissions and pollution in exchange for green energy.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Indonesia sits along the Ring of Fire, one of the most geologically active regions in the world, making it an ideal place to produce geotherma...
- Title
- How to build a wood skyscraper
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Mass timber has gone from novelty to trend. But how does it change the construction process?
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Is there a way to replace steel and concrete with wood? That’s the idea behind mass timber — a relatively new construction technique that’s making its way from Europe to the United States.
In the above video, you can learn how mass timber changes the construction process. Vox’s Phil Edwards visited Ascent Milwaukee, the tallest mass timber building in the world, to see how it all comes together. Many different partners have to reinvent the construction process to make a building like this a reality.
Watch the video above to learn more.
Further reading:
Read Dave Robert’s coverage of mass timber, including the environmental implications.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/15/21058051/climate-change-build...
- Title
- Brazil’s Lula da Silva, explained
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Lula da Silva wants to be president for a second time. But Brazil has changed.
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On October 2, 2022, Brazilians voted in the first round of their presidential election. The top two finishers were current president Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Both candidates will face each other in a run-off on October 30. Lula is considered likely to win.
Lula is arguably Brazil’s most well-known and complex politician. He helped form a powerful political party, had two successful terms in office, and even served jail time over corruption and bribery allegations. After four years of Bolsonaro’s presidency, the core of Lula’s campaign has focused on restoring the Brazil of his own presidency. But a lot has changed in Brazil since his time in office.
Watch this video for a glance at Lula’s career and to understand why ...
- Title
- Why this instrument explains Black American folk music
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Jake Blount, a banjo scholar, explains.
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Jake Blount has built a career out of understanding the banjo’s connection to Black American folk music. In this video, he walks us through the instrument’s history — from West Africa to enslaved people in the US to the early record industry — to explain how Black folk music has evolved.
For example: The early record industry confined Black musicians to “race records” and white musicians to “hillbilly records.” Hillbilly music would have been early country and string band music. Race records restricted Black musicians to blues and jazz genres. Which meant Black musicians playing bluegrass-style banjo weren’t recorded — even if they were responsible for teaching white musicians.
Using field recordings, their own banjo and fiddle skills, and a deconstructed version of one of their o...
- Title
- How do we fix the zoo?
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Do the benefits of zoos justify the fact that some animals are clearly stressed out?
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Many of us have fond memories of visiting the zoo as a child (or at any age), and more than a few of us probably credit those visits with turning us into animal-lovers. So, how should we square those warm fuzzy feelings with research that shows the psychological harms of captivity for some animals?
That’s what Vox subscriber Gaurav Patil wanted to know, so producer Liz Scheltens started digging in. One way that zoos maintain their social license to operate despite our growing understanding of the harms to certain species is by marketing themselves as beacons of conservation.
Proponents argue that not only do zoos help preserve endangered wild populations, they also help make humans better conservationists. But when you look at the research, a different pi...
- Title
- Why this football pass seems physically impossible
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- The way a football moves through the air is almost paradoxical.
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When a football player throws a tight spiral pass, the ball glides through the air in a smooth arc, its nose pointing up toward the sky at the beginning of the toss, and then dropping down toward the earth as it lands in the receiver's hands.
The spiral pass is so familiar it’s easily overlooked as just being common sense — but it took physicists nearly 20 years to understand this trajectory.
Conservation of angular momentum suggests that the ball should not act this way. It should either keep its nose angled toward the sky the whole time or the ball should be flipping over itself as it moves through the air; but the fact that it just tips over elegantly is — to use a scientific term — weird as hell.
But it turns out the solution is easy enough to understand ...
- Title
- How trail designers build good hikes
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- The design secrets that make hiking trails feel “organic”
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Designing a hiking trail seems simple enough: It has to take a person from A to B, pass through scenic nature, and last through years of wear and tear. And for most of human history, trails did that without much intentional design at all.
But as trails shifted from essential transportation to a recreational destination, the way we make them did, too. Now, hidden in every trail is a carefully made design language of angles, alignment, and materials that keep them enjoyable for generations.
Watch our video to hear trail ecologist Jeffery Marion explain how these principles work — and why they’re more important now than ever.
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Vox.co...
- Title
- Why Americans want these insects dead
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Can we actually kill all the spotted lanternflies?
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Over the summer, for the first time in what feels like a while, Americans united under a single cause: to murder an invasive bug.
Okay, that’s a bit dramatic, but the situation itself was a bit dramatic. Social media was flooded with people in New York City, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey striking down spotted lanternflies in the most creative ways. Videos of the plant-sucking bugs that are native to parts of Asia showed them overtaking trees. Reports from Pennsylvania said they were capable of wiping out vineyards. Researchers warned they also threaten fruit trees and the hardwoods like black walnut. The public went on high alert. The messaging was clear: Stop this bug before it decimates the fruit and timber industries and costs the US tons of money.
People struck them down all summer long, ...
- Title
- What it’s like to work in the world’s greatest office
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- The SC Johnson administrative building was Frank Lloyd Wright’s corporate masterpiece. What does it feel like?
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SC Johnson’s Administrative Building and Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin, have become legendary as corporate headquarters buildings. The Administrative Building’s Great Workroom is a stunning example of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s unique approach to office design.
But what did it really feel like? Vox’s Phil Edwards visited the HQ to find out — and try actually working there. He also visited the Hardy House, an earlier Wright design that features many of the same Wright signatures found in the SC Johnson building, from custom designed furniture to ideas about compression and expansion.
Watch the video to see what it really feels like to work in such a space.
Further Reading:
https://www.amazon.co...
- Title
- Who's really using up the water in the American West?
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Hint: water scarcity in the Western US has more to do with our diets than our lawns.
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The Western United States is currently battling the most severe drought in thousands of years. A mix of bad water management policies and manmade climate change has created a situation where water supplies in Western reservoirs are so low, states are being forced to cut their water use.
It’s not hard to find media coverage that focuses on the excesses of residential water use: long showers, swimming pools, lawn watering, at-home car washes. Or in the business sector, like irrigating golf courses or pumping water into hotel fountains in Las Vegas.
But when a team of researchers looked at water use in the West, they uncovered a very different story about where most Western water goes. Their findings may hold the solution to dwindling water supplies in the W...
- Title
- Why Queen Elizabeth II was the queen of 15 countries
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- The Commonwealth, explained.
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After centuries of colonizing much of the world, the British Empire began its fast descent in the 1960s amid a global wave of independence movements. But when Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022, she was not only still queen of 14 countries besides the United Kingdom, she was also still the leader of an organization that on a map looks a lot like the British Empire.
The British Empire created the first iteration of the Commonwealth to appease white settler colonies looking for more autonomy. It granted them more independence to govern themselves but kept them under the crown. As British leaders realized their power might be at risk throughout their colonies worldwide, the monarchy made a play to keep ties and preserve their global influence by allowing newly independent republics to join the Commonwealth too. The only catch: They ...
- Title
- How Ukraine got the upper hand against Russia
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Ukraine’s breakthrough counterattack, explained.
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In the spring and summer of 2022, the war between Ukraine and Russia settled into a stalemate. The first phase of the war had been a rapid invasion that drew new battle lines across Ukraine; this next phase saw those battle lines harden and change very little over a long period of fighting. But in September, that chapter came to an end. For the first time in several months, Ukraine scored a major victory and won back significant territory from Russia.
Ukraine pulled this victory off by taking advantage of a surprising weakness in the Russian army: the difficulty it’s had maintaining its ranks of skilled soldiers, especially compared to the training and resources that Ukraine’s army has received from its allies. Reports suggest that Russia’s army has suffered catastrophic losses in the war, and that ...
- Title
- How "Spider-Verse" forced animation to evolve
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Non-photorealistic rendering has opened up an alternative to the ubiquitous “Pixar look.”
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When you think of CGI animated films, you likely think of Pixar. The studio practically invented the genre with 1995’s Toy Story — the first CGI animated feature film.
After Toy Story, almost all animation studios wanted to follow in Pixar’s successful footsteps, straight down to their style. Many studios sought out “The Pixar Look”: extremely high quality, physically based, and in some cases almost photorealistic.
It’s an appealing approach that remains popular at the box office — but animated movies started looking kind of homogeneous. And while studios and independent artists tested out more stylized approaches in short films, no studio would commit to a feature-length animated movie that looked so different.
That is, u...
- Title
- The real reason Egypt is moving its capital
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Cairo isn’t the problem.
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In 2017, Egypt’s government announced it would build a new capital city 45 kilometers outside of Cairo, the current capital. It was a shocking announcement since Cairo, a city of more than 10,000,000 people, has been the capital of Egypt for decades.
The government claims that Cairo has become too overcrowded and that moving the capital will give both Cairo’s residents and government workers more space. But this excuse is not new. For decades, Egypt’s rulers have been building brand new cities in the desert. None of them have solved Cairo’s density issue. And based on how construction is going, this new capital won’t be a solution either.
So why does Egypt want a new capital? Well, it has a lot to do with the political revolution in 2011.
Watch this episode of Vox Atlas to understand the rea...
- Title
- Why beavers matter as the planet heats up
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Beaver dams are cool(ing the air).
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If you know anything about beavers, it’s probably that they build dams. These giant structures made of sticks, stones, and mud can reach heights up to 10 feet (3 meters) and lengths averaging 20 feet (6 meters) — though the biggest one ever found was significantly larger and could be seen from space. Dams completely alter the surrounding landscape, flooding the surrounding area and creating wetlands. It’s one reason beavers have often been considered pests that can cause serious damage when they build dams too close to homes or roads.
But scientists have also understood beavers’ importance as “ecosystem engineers” for decades. And as the climate crisis continues to worsen, newer studies are finding that beavers play a vital role in dampening its effects — especially in areas prone to fire, drought, and even...
- Title
- How your TV settings ruin movies
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Your TV is ruining your TV. Make it stop.
Subscribe and turn on notifications 🔔 so you don't miss any videos: http://goo.gl/0bsAjO
Your TV finds lots of ways to adjust your picture. You might not want any of them.
Motion smoothing, sharpening, brightness, contrast, and saturation are all adjustments that your television makes to your picture. These can differ wildly from what filmmakers intend and, sometimes, that’s a nightmare.
As the above video shows, these adjustments are subtle but significant, especially when viewed alongside the original image. Fortunately, there is a solution — TV manufacturers have begun adopting new modes like “Filmmaker Mode,” which largely remove television tweaks to an image.
Further reading:
https://alliance.experienceuhd.com/
You can learn more about what the UHD Alliance is and what it does here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPk_FuQrL00
Filmmak...
- Title
- Why I'm obsessed with these cheap paintings of Paris
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Did this French painter ever exist?
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Henry Rogers' French impressionist paintings of Paris street scenes seem to only exist in online auctions and yard sales. The mystery of his identity deepens when you take a closer look at his art, and notice that his signature changes from painting to painting – sometimes it’s spelled “Henry” and sometimes the French “Henri.”
For years, the only place anyone could learn more about Rogers was on a blog called living-in-the-past.com — a site where one man documented his curiosities and passion projects, dating back to the ’90s.
The author of this site, Philip Lord, became obsessed with gathering information about Rogers but found nothing in his early online searches. So he started researching himself by analyzing dozens of Rogers’ paintings, many of them seeming to show the same street in Pa...
- Title
- This giant laser can simulate a planet’s core
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- How do you study the innards of alien worlds? You just need the world’s largest laser.
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As astronomers search for life outside our solar system, they have to try and answer one big question: What’s the recipe for a habitable planet? We tend to think about the ingredients we encounter every day: liquid water, the protective blanket of the atmosphere, a sun that is neither too warm nor too hot. But there are other factors that are probably equally important: Earth’s cooled and hardened crust, its gooey molten guts, its magnetic field, its volcanoes and deep sea vents. These are the features that fostered life as we know it – they were shaped by unseen processes hidden deep within the globe.
In short, if we want to learn how life could arise on other planets, we need to know what’s going on under the hood.
But that’s easier said than ...
- Title
- How “dementia villages” work
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Can miniature towns make dementia care more humane?
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On any given day at the Hogeweyk, you can see locals wandering the streets, going out for coffee, folding laundry, and tending gardens, all surrounded by lush outdoor space. Located in Weesp, a Dutch city just outside Amsterdam, the Hogeweyk is a planned village intentionally designed for one purpose: maximizing quality of life for its 180 residents — all of whom have severe dementia.
Inside, nurses and doctors don’t wear uniforms, meals are cooked inside the home with groceries from the village grocery store, and other Weesp residents are free to dine at the on-site restaurant. These design choices aim to deinstitutionalize senior living, blurring the line between what typically happens in front of residents and what happens out of sight.
The style of care that this facility pioneered ...
- Title
- How US corporations poisoned this Indigenous community
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Invisible chemicals changed the Mohawk way of life. They’re probably in you, too.
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In the 1950s, the US and Canada embarked on a massive project to widen the St. Lawrence River, transforming the region to facilitate commerce, attract industry, and boost both nations’ economies. But there was a third nation in the region whose people were not consulted, and whose lifestyle was completely transformed by the project: the Mohawk of Akwesasne.
The St. Lawrence River has been central to Mohawk culture in the region for thousands of years. The river’s fish form the central part of their diet. But for the Mohawk, the fish aren’t a “resource” to be used. They’re an equal partner in a relationship in which both humans and wildlife have sacred responsibilities to one another. These relationships are central to the Mohawk worldview, and they mirror simil...
- Title
- The fall (and rise?) of unions in the US
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- We answered a viewer’s question about the decline of unionization.
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📣 If the news feels chaotic to you these days, you're not alone. We want to answer your biggest questions about what's happening in the world today via our new video format: https://forms.gle/Mgp2oqa3gr8tNw1M7 📣
“How come we’ve seen such a decline in unionization in the US?” That’s the question we received from one of our viewers, Cameron when we put out a call for topics to explain. It comes at an interesting time.
Earlier this year, the Amazon Labor Union won its first election at a large warehouse in New York, and more than 200 Starbucks locations have voted to unionize since baristas in Buffalo broke the seal in December 2021. The National Labor Relations Board reports that petitions for union elections are up 56 percent this year compared to 2021.
- Title
- Humans finally figured out how to make it rain
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Cloud seeding, explained. We flew up to see it with our own eyes.
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For decades, drought-stricken areas around the world have practiced “cloud seeding,” a process where chemical flares full of silver iodide are shot into clouds to encourage them to rain. But until recently, the science didn’t quite back this practice up. In large part, that’s because operational cloud seeding programs don’t have the luxury of conducting controlled tests — they have an obligation to produce as much rain as possible for the people living under the clouds they seed.
But there’s been a new breakthrough. In 2017, a major cloud seeding experiment in the mountains of Idaho showed that cloud seeding works; shooting chemical flares into the sky does produce more precipitation.
As the world faces an increasing number of heat waves and droughts, banking wat...
- Title
- How F1 racers turn really fast
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- It’s all about using the entire width of the road and finding the ideal line.
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Cars travel at their fastest speeds when moving in a straight line, and Formula 1 is no different. F1 racers drive at over 215 mph on the straightest parts of the track. But when it comes to turning around tight corners, these kinds of speeds just aren’t possible. In order to avoid spinning out and crashing, racers have to slow down and use physics to strategically craft the most efficient turns while retaining the greatest amount of speed, ideally giving them a leg up against the competition.
The most efficient path through any corner (or set of corners) is generally referred to as the “ideal racing line.”
This line changes depending on the path of the track before and after the curve, but the goal is always to spend as little time in the turn as possible. ...
- Title
- This high-speed rail project is a warning for the US
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- California's "train to nowhere" shows the challenges ahead.
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In 2008, voters in California passed Proposition 1A, giving the state the go-ahead to build a high-speed rail line. In theory, it was a great idea. The train would whisk passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than 3 hours. Eventually it would also link San Diego and Sacramento. It was estimated that it would take until 2020 to complete.
But now it’s 2022, and so far California’s high-speed rail line is just a few concrete bridges and viaducts strewn across the rural Central Valley. Much of the plan had to be changed, redesigned, or even abandoned all together. Now the project is decades late and way over budget. And that isn’t just California’s problem. Because among the many factors that plagued the project, several are baked into the power structure of the US itself.<...
- Title
- Why US gun laws get looser after mass shootings
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Congress has rarely acted. But gun laws have been changing.
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For decades, the US Congress failed to make meaningful movement on gun reform in the aftermath of mass shootings. But that weak federal response has obscured another story: that state gun laws change after mass shootings all the time. And a study found that, in Republican-controlled state legislatures, a mass shooting roughly doubles the number of laws loosening gun restrictions in the next year.
In this video we look at Texas, where decades of mass shootings in the US have been met with laws that expand gun access. We spoke with Flo Rice, a survivor of the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting, where a gunman killed 10 people. Flo was shot six times. She and her husband, Scot, became advocates for gun safety, and tried to get tighter gun laws passed in Texas. Watch the piece above to see what happe...
- Title
- Why US schools are at the center of trans rights
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- A civil rights battle with transgender kids caught in the middle.
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In recent years, state legislatures in the US have introduced hundreds of bills targeting the rights of LGBTQ Americans. Many of those laws are focused in particular on the rights of transgender school children in public schools: what types of bathrooms they can use, whether their pronouns will be used, and whether they can participate in school sports. These laws are increasingly common in Republican-controlled states. Also, they may be violations of federal law.
This puts public schools in these states in a strange position: do they follow state laws that, under the Biden administration, could open them up to a federal civil rights investigation? Or do they ignore state law, and risk the state cutting their funding? Amid all that uncertainty, those who suffer most are the trans children c...
- Title
- 4 ways Americans are still getting abortion pills
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Banning abortion doesn’t eliminate the need for it.
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In June, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 landmark decision Roe v. Wade — eliminating the federal right to abortion, and giving the power to decide whether abortion is a crime to each individual state. As of July, many states have already banned abortion outright, and more are soon to follow. But heavily restricting or banning abortion doesn’t eliminate the need for it. And abortion care looks a bit different than it did in 1973.
Over 50 percent of legal abortions in the United States are now carried out early in pregnancy with the use of a two-medication regime known as “abortion pills” or “medication abortion.” Most people are able to take the medication in the privacy of their own home.
In December 2021, the federal Food and Drug Administration permanently allowed the p...
![Your brain on travel [Advertiser Content From Marriott Bonvoy®]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/f0KLHiJLbL0/1.jpg)
- Title
- Your brain on travel [Advertiser Content From Marriott Bonvoy®]
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Let’s go back in time to one of the most groundbreaking neuroscience discoveries in all of history. Some scientists once believed that the human brain was unchangeable and only declined with age. In the 1960s, neuroscientist Dr. Marian Diamond proved that this belief was false. Dr. Diamond, who famously studied the brain of Dr. Albert Einstein, proved that if the brain was in an enriched environment, it could grow and renew its connections.
One way humans can access an enriched environment? Travel.
Different brains’ synapses are sparked when humans are exposed to new foods, smells, tastes, and sensations within their environment. Traveling is one way humans can potentially develop new synaptic connections and transform archaic ways of comprehending.
Dr. Diamond found that the cerebral cortices of the rats in enriched environments were about six percent bigger than the rats in the bare cages. Also, the rats in the multi-sensory environment had ...
- Title
- Why motion capture is harder than it looks
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- The suits are just the beginning of the motion capture process.
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Motion capture has taken over a lot of computer animation for movies, video games, and TV. Coverage typically focuses on actors wearing funny suits and performing feats of imagination. But is it really that easy?
The above video shows that it’s a lot more complex than that. Motion capture requires heavy editing, tweaking, and processing after the actual capture to create animations that look real. That part of the process is key to understanding the images on your screen.
Watch the above video to learn more.
Further Reading:
https://plask.ai/
Plask.ai lets you try out these tools for yourself. It’s a fun way to see just how far AI-based motion capture can go.
https://www.mixamo.com/#/
Mixamo is one of many resources for motion captu...
- Title
- How abortion bans make inequality worse
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- And the study that offers a glimpse into a post-Roe v. Wade future.
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In 2008, researchers with the University of California San Francisco embarked on a study that compared the outcomes of two similar groups of women, each at a crucial juncture in their lives: a visit to an abortion clinic. The groups differed, though, in whether or not they were able to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. It was called the Turnaway Study, named for those who were turned away by the clinic because their pregnancies were past legal gestational limits, and it provides some of the best data we have on the impacts of abortion bans.
Among the study’s findings is the severe financial impact of being forced to parent a new child when someone is already living in difficult financial circumstances. People who seek abortions, especially later-term abortions, are far more likely than ...
- Title
- How the “lost cities” of the Amazon were finally found
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- And why they were so hard to see
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The Amazon has always been one of the most mysterious places on earth.
When European colonizers arrived in the 16th century, they were captivated by rumors of a golden city, hidden somewhere in the rainforest. Their search for “El Dorado” lasted more than a century, but only resulted in disaster, death, and further conquest of the indigenous people there.
Experts thereafter looked at the Amazon and saw only a desolate jungle; too harsh for extensive agriculture and therefore sparsely populated. They believed that it had always been this way.
Until recently.
Beginning in the late 20th century, archaeologists began looking more closely at the forest floor. Working with the indigenous people who still remained there, they excavated long ditches and mounds. After mapping them, the...
- Title
- Drag kings, explained by drag kings
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- Mo B. Dick, Maxxx Pleasure, Sigi Moonlight, Johnny Gentleman, and King Molasses explain the evolution of drag.
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Drag kings have historically gotten a lot less attention than drag queens, but that’s starting to change. We interviewed five drag kings about their relationships to drag, how the artform has transformed, and what they love about it.
In the words of King Molasses, drag is full of “that swag you get in the shower that nobody sees.” Drag king performances are all about playing with masculine identities: politicizing them, satirizing them, and having fun with them. And these performers have been around for centuries.
In China, documentation of “male impersonators” dates back to the Tang Dynasty, from 618 to 907 AD. In the mid-to-late 1800s, drag king pioneers like Annie Hindle, Vesta Tilley, and Ella Wesner began performing. ...
- Title
- Why roller coaster loops aren't circular
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- The G forces were out of this world.
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If you’ve ever been on a modern looping roller coaster, you’ve probably experienced a thrilling, safe, and mostly comfortable ride. But this wasn’t always the case. Just over 100 years ago, loop-the-loops were painful, not sturdy, and much more dangerous than they are today.
Between the 1840s and early 1900s, loops on roller coasters were perfectly circular — meaning riders would go from traveling in a fairly straight line to immediately moving into a curve. This rapid onset of curvature caused extreme G force spikes that rattled passengers to their core.
The first looping roller coaster in North America — Coney Island’s Flip-Flap Railway — could exert up to 14 G's on a person. For reference, astronauts in a spaceship launch experience 3 G’s. Fighter pilots with very special equipment and ...
- Title
- Why shipping container homes are overrated
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- They’re fun. They’re also way more difficult to build than they seem.
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Shipping container homes have been a trend for a while, from reality TV shows to housing policy discussions. But the truth is that these homes are a lot more difficult to build than you might think.
It’s easy to think that housing solutions are purely technological, but many obstacles to housing aren’t in construction but in the policies surrounding homebuilding. Moreover, many of the supposed advantages of shipping containers turn out to be more complicated in reality.
Vox’s Phil Edwards spent a night in a shipping container home to see how the experience of staying in a shipping container compares with the reality of building one.
Further Reading:
Mark Hogan’s 2015 opinion piece about shipping containers is a great introduction to the ...
- Title
- AI art, explained
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- How programmers turned the internet into a paintbrush. DALL-E 2, Midjourney, Imagen, explained.
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Beginning in January 2021, advances in AI research have produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts, effectively extending the human imagination. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed text-to-image tools that they have not yet released to the public, and similar models have proliferated online in the open-source arena and at smaller companies like Midjourney.
These tools represent a massive cultural shift because they remove the requirement for technical labor from the process of image-making. Instead, they select for creative ideation, skillful use of language, and curatorial taste. The ultimate consequences are difficult to predict, but — like the invention of the cam...
- Title
- We tracked what happens after TikTok songs go viral
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- A data investigation into how TikTok is shaping the music industry, in collaboration with The Pudding.
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It’s no secret that TikTok is a virality machine. Songs get turned into sounds that can be used in any video, and if they gain enough traction they can catapult a musician into the pop culture stratosphere. But we wanted to know exactly what happens between a song going viral and an artist becoming a bonafide success. So in the fall of 2021, we partnered with data analysis website The Pudding figure it out.
Along the way, we discovered that using data to concretely answer this question is quite a challenge. Our process included creating dozens of custom data sets, careful fact-checking, and conversations with both hit songwriters and music industry executives to match data with real experiences.
After seven months of spreadsheets, data de...
- Title
- Why Germany is hooked on Russian gas
- Date posted
- 4 years ago
- Description
- How Germany got stuck paying for Russia's war.
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Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU has sanctioned much of Russia’s economy, but Russia’s natural gas trade remains untouched. The EU gets nearly a quarter of its energy from natural gas, and almost half of that comes from Russia, the world’s largest gas exporter. As the EU’s largest economy, Germany is Russia’s biggest customer, paying Russia’s state-owned gas company 200 million euros. So while Germany has even sent Ukraine weapons, in a historic shift of military policy, through its gas supply Germany is helping to pay for the war it’s trying to stop.
It’s inherently hard to pivot away from piped gas. Unlike oil and coal, which can be rerouted, gas pipelines cost billions, take years to build, and physically connect producer and buyer directly, making them long-term commitments. Th...
