BCIT is providing a power-nap room, hoping to allow some of their students — already sleeping in other parts of the school — to boost their energy levels.
The sleep room, launched Monday, is available to book for hour periods between 12:30 and 5 p.m. four days per week — Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Students can check bed availability at any time on the university’s online portal.
There are 10 beds in the low-lit room — which is also a racquetball court — and a station where students can pick up clean pillow cases and sanitizer. Students are required to spray and wipe the vinyl beds after use.
The nap room has a set of rules provided by the BCIT Student Association. Cell phone noise and talking is prohibited in the nap room and beds are not allowed to be pushed together.
The room was initiated after BCIT authorities noticed students sleeping all over the campus and realized that their students must be very tired. In addition to the benefits of alertness during classes, the school also hopes to cut down on driving accidents. Many BCIT students commute to the university from significant distances.
Students are already using BCIT’s new nap room
The new nap room will be available to students for one booking per week “to start,” according to the BCITSA, and they have plans to eventually allow one booking per day.
This javascript-based visual representation of the Earth spinning in space was developed and shared on the website CodePen by programmer Eric J Nesser.
Holding down the mouse left-click button while scrolling will zoom or change the viewing angle of the representation of the Earth.
ECOFE (European Consortium for Open Field Experimentation), a network of agricultural resources at various locations around Europe, has been proposed by a group of scientists in order to do for agricultural science what CERN has done for nuclear research.
The organization would be a community of research stations across Europe — from an outpost in Sicily to a field in Scotland. Among the benefits looked forward to by the researchers behind the project are the ability to study a wide range of soil properties, atmospheric conditions, and temperatures, and, prospectively, the ability to finance more expensive equipment, which would be shared.
For example, open-field installations that allow researchers to study the effects of artificially elevated levels of carbon dioxide, would be a shared cost and a shared tool.
“Present field research facilities are aimed at making regional agriculture prosperous,” said co-author Hartmut Stützel of Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. “To us, it is obvious that the ‘challenges’ of the 21st century–productivity increase, climate change, and environmental sustainability–will require more advanced research infrastructures covering a wider range of environments.”
The benefits of community research are also associated with potential downsides: researchers would have to sacrifice some of their scientific autonomy in order to focus on targeted research goals.
“It will be a rather new paradigm for many traditional scientists,” said Stützel but I think the communities are ready to accept this challenge and understand that research in the 21st century requires these types of infrastructures. We must now try to make political decision makers aware that a speedy implementation of a network for open field experimentation is fundamental for future agricultural research.
The report is titled “The Future of Field Trials in Europe: Establishing a Network Beyond Boundaries.” It was completed by Drs. Stutzel, Nicolas Bruggermann, and Dirk Inze, and was published in the journal Cell.
Chimpanzees played the trust game to find out the basis of individual preference for other chimps
Trust is the foundation of close relationships in the world of chimpanzees, according to anthropologists at Max Planck Institute.
“Humans largely trust only their friends with crucial resources or important secrets,” said Dr. Jan Engelmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “In our study, we investigated whether chimpanzees show a comparable pattern and extend trust selectively toward those individuals they are closely bonded with. Our findings suggest that they do indeed, and thus that current characteristics of human friendships have a long evolutionary history and extend to primate social bonds.”
Previous studies of chimpanzee friendships had shown that the animals were attracted to sociable partners for friendships, and that they extended their favors to those they preferred. The Max Plank researchers wanted to know if the basis for this preference was “trust.”
Research situation of chimps
In order to find out, the researchers spent five months at Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya. They set up an arena where the Sweetwaters chimps could play “the trust game” — a game in which two separated chimpanzees get to decide if their partner gets a delicious treat or a less savory one. The partner in turn has the opportunity to share some of their treat back with the one who pulled the rope that opened the door to the treat.
The best case scenario is considered to be that the chimp with the rope will provide the other with the tasty treat, and the other will share some with the first chimp.
Before the researchers put the chimps in the experimental setting, the researchers observed the chimpanzee group to decide for each chimp which other animal was their favorite and least favorite. These two would be paired up against the first chimp in the game.
Each chimp played 12 rounds of the game with each their favorite and least favorite group member.
The result was that chimps were ” significantly more likely to voluntarily place resources at the disposal of a partner, and thus to choose a risky but potentially high-payoff option, when they interacted with a friend as compared to a non-friend.”
Proportion of trust choices
Proportion of reciprocation
The researchers interpreted this finding to mean that chimpanzees show much greater trust when it comes to friends than non-friends.
“Human friendships do not represent an anomaly in the animal kingdom,” Engelmann said. “Other animals, such as chimpanzees, form close and long-term emotional bonds with select individuals. These animal friendships show important parallels with close relationships in humans. One shared characteristic is the tendency to selectively trust friends in costly situations.”
The report, “Chimpanzees Trust Their Friends,” was completed by Drs. Jan Maxim Engelmann and Esther Herrmann and was published in the journal Current Biology. View the research paper at this link.
Designer Nick Kaloterakis has worked on a wide range of future design concepts, incluing vehicles, and this is his SNAP! design. It is a personal wheel vehicle that can attach to other similar vehicles to form collective vehicles.
Kaloterakis works in 3D renderings to develop his concepts. By trade he is a digital artist at 3D/VFX in Syndey, Australia, in addition to owning his own design studio called “kollected.”
This is the ASIG nohero/nosky Concentric D. wrist watch, a concept for CD2 that was designed by Row Zero aka Simon Williamson, an associate professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts, which redesigns not just the surface but also the case of the watch.
Instead of a motor of gears rotating the arms of the watch from its center, the ASIG Concentric D. powers itself from the border of the watch face, leaving the face empty and transparent.
The arms radiate inward rather than outward, and must run along three tracks on the inside of the watch face border.
The ASIG Concentric D. concept also maintains the traditional feature of the watch winder, whether the winder is used to tension springs within the border of the face or is just for show is not known.
The watch hands are decorated with rows of tiny lights for night wear.
The ASIG Concentric D. has garnered a significant amount of attention based on its design alone. The unique concept watch is not in production, and Future Now does not know of any similar watches using the layout conceived by Williamson.
Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose confirmed rumors Monday that the original Guns N’ Roses would reunite and play the Coachella festival in 2016. The hard rock singer confirmed the reunion with his former bandmates on Twitter, less than one week after Tweeting opaquely that “The only thing I know ‘confirmed’ is my LOVE of Taco Bell!”
“Ok,ok…,” tweeted Rose, “It’s ‘confirmed!’ Guns N’ Roses is Headlining Coachella 2016!! See Everyone There!!”
The tweet followed an announcement by The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival that the lineup for the festival would include Guns N’ Roses, LCD Soundsystem, Calvin Harris, Ellie Goulding, Ice Cube, Disclosure, Sia, and dozens of other bands.
From the International Space Station’s 400 km perch, astronauts like New Jerseyite Scott Kelly have been taking impressive photos of the world over the past almost two decades of the ISS’s use.
Kelly, the current Commander of the Year Long Mission aboard the ISS, has been tweeting his photos to his followers for the duration.
Here are some of the best shots from the space above the Great White North, Canada:
Want to try to guess them? The photographs show:
1. North Vancouver Island and Rocky Mountains
2. Vancouver from above
3. Aurora over Calgary
4. Aurora over Saskatchewan
5. Great Lakes near Salte Ste. Marie
6. North of Georgian Bay, Ontario
7. Montreal from above
8. Quebec City from above
In the previous year, Islamic violence took the lives of over 27,000 people and critically injured another 26,000, according to an extremism watch organization that tracks Islamic attacks. 2015’s attacks took place in 52 countries worldwide, and included 475 suicide attacks.
The Religion of Peace, an organization that collects information about attacks motivated by Islamic ideas and tallies various statistics, published their yearly figures Friday on their website.
The December figures — 225 deaths and 273 critically injured in 47 separate attacks, brought the totals for the 2015 year to 27,435 deaths and 26,144 critically injured in 2,849 separate attacks in 52 countries.
The numbers provided by TROP are actually lower than what the total deaths would be, the organization’s editor Glen Roberts told The Speaker, because the organization relies on news reports for their tallies. Not all deaths are reported in the news, and deaths that occur after news has been published are usually not included.
The numbers have remained fairly consistent since TROP’s first entries, which date back to the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001.
“It looks like there have been only 12 days since the beginning of 2005 without at least one Islamic attack,” Roberts noted.
There are an average of 5 separate attacks every day that result in at least one death, motivated by Islamic ideas, according to TROP. The numbers tallied do not include deaths like honor killings, although the group does monitor these incidents as well.
