Bayard
Bayard's JournalPetit Pli kids clothing expands to fit as children grow
Most parents would agree: children grow up far too quickly. But they grow out of their clothes even quicker. A London-based designer wants to change that with a range of outerwear for kids that grows as the child does.
Called Petit Pli - French for 'little pleat' - the garments have an innovative pleat system that lets them expand in multiple directions but also contract back to their original size.
"It's designed for continuous fit adjustment, so it'll never be a little bit too short or a little bit too long," designer Ryan Mario Yasin, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, told Reuters. "It's always changing its shape and morphing with the child even in motion. So as the child is running around the pleats are deforming in both directions either folding together or expanding, and moving in synchrony with the child."
According to Yasin, children grow seven clothes sizes during their first two years, meaning parents are left with a lot of clothes that have barely been worn before they're too small for the child. Petit Pli was designed to save parents money and to reduce the waste in the fashion industry, he said.
With a background as an aeronautical engineer specialising in deployable structures, Yasin said his outfits embed a special structure in fabric that was inspired by the ancient Japanese art of origami.
"This is really engineering meets fashion. I've taken my knowledge of materials and folding origami and applied that to a product which is aimed at reducing the waste in the fashion industry," he said.
Petit Pli has been designed for children aged from four months to 36 months, and the expanding fabric eliminates discrepancies in children's sizes so they're always the perfect fit. Yasin said he approached the durability of his garments by regarding children as 'extreme athletes'; always on the move and in need of clothes that can keep up.
"It's super lightweight so you can layer it on top of your clothes at any time of the year. It's windproof and waterproof with a hydrophobic coating," said Yasin.
The patent-pending pleating process has been rigorously tested to prove that the pleats won't fall out with use, and the garments are even machine washable.
Yasin is now working on different sizes and designs and looking for commercial partners to scale-up production to bring Petit Pli to market.
How far would you go for fast food?
Turtle Humor
We don't get many sloth videos here.....
The End of Oil is Near--The pandemic may send the petroleum industry to the grave
THIS PAST SPRING, coastlines around the globe took on the feel of an enemy invasion as hundreds of massive oil tankers overwhelmed seaports from South Africa to Singapore. Locals and industry analysts alike used the word armada—typically applied to fleets of warships—to describe scenes such as when a group of tankers left Saudi Arabia en masse and another descended on China. One distressed news article proclaimed that a “floating hoard” of oil sat in tankers anchored across the North Sea, “everywhere from the UK to France and the Netherlands.” In April, the US Coast Guard shared an alarming video that showed dozens of tankers spread out for miles along California’s coast.
On May 12, Greenpeace activists sailed into San Francisco Bay to issue a challenge to the public. In front of the giant Amazon Falcon oil tanker—which had been docked in the bay for weeks, loaded up with Chevron oil—they unfurled a banner reading, “Oil Is Over! The Future Is Up to You.”
The oil industry has turned the oceans into aquatic parking lots—floating storage facilities holding, at their highest levels in early May, some 390 million barrels of crude oil and refined products like gasoline. Between March and May, the amount of oil “stored” at sea nearly tripled, and it has yet to abate in many parts of the world.
This tanker invasion is only one piece of a dangerous buildup in oil supply that is the result of an unprecedented global glut. The coronavirus pandemic has gutted demand, resulting in the current surplus, but it merely exacerbated a problem that’s been plaguing the oil industry for years: the incessant overproduction of a product that the world is desperately trying to wean itself from, with growing success.
Today, the global oil industry is in a tailspin. Demand has cratered, prices have collapsed, and profits are shrinking. The oil majors (giant global corporations including BP, Chevron, and Shell) are taking billions of dollars in losses while cutting tens of thousands of jobs. Smaller companies are declaring bankruptcy, and investors are looking elsewhere for returns. Significant changes to when, where, and how much oil will be produced, and by whom, are already underway. It is clear that the oil industry will not recover from COVID-19 and return to its former self. What form it ultimately takes, or whether it will even survive, is now very much an open question.
Under President Donald Trump, the United States has joined other petroleum superpowers in efforts to maintain oil’s dominance. While government bailout programs and subsidies could provide the lifeline the industry needs to stay afloat, such policies will likely throw good money after bad. As Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Federal Reserve governor and former deputy secretary of the Treasury, has written, “Even in the short term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment. . . . It also forestalls the inevitable decline of an industry that can no longer sustain itself.”
(snip)
Clearly, leaving Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Mohammed bin Salman in charge of a global solution is a sure way to lock in a world order tied to oil. The extent to which governments are already stepping in to provide the capital that is otherwise draining from the industry is a testament to Big Oil’s remaining political prowess. Led by President Trump and Republicans in Congress, oil and gas companies in the United States had, by June, received billions of dollars in both direct federal COVID-19 benefits and indirect payouts through new Federal Reserve pandemic-relief spending, according to my own calculations for Sierra.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2020-5-september-october/feature/end-oil-near?utm_source=insider&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter
Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Council's message to the US Senate and President Trump.
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BY THE LAS VEGAS BAND OF PAIUTES TRIBAL COUNCIL
The Desert National Wildlife Refuge and the Sheep Mountain Range within it are known to us Paiutes as Nah’gah Kai. It is a landscape mountain range that holds special meaning for our people, a landscape that is central to our Nuwuvi history, stories, and beliefs, a landscape that has been under constant attack by the United States Air Force for decades. Cultural sites, bighorn sheep, and the endangered desert tortoise are among the many other precious resources central to our people’s ways and culture that are found within the refuge—and which long have been within the bombing practice area of air force pilots. Now, the air force is pushing to ramp up its destruction of our people’s history and culture by seeking to expand by 300,000 acres its bombing range within the Desert National Wildlife Refuge. It is critical that Congress ban the expansion of bombing that air force leaders are seeking to include in the National Defense Authorization Act, as the expansion would inflict permanent damage on this sacred site and violate our tribal sovereignty.
In 2018, the Moapa Band of Paiutes wrote and passed a resolution that opposed the expansion of the Nevada Test and Training Range into the refuge. The Las Vegas Paiute Tribe passed a similar resolution in 2019. These resolutions rejected the expansion of the bombing range, and the air force’s jurisdiction within the desert refuge. Both were both passed unanimously by the Tribal Councils and are the words and will of the Tribes. As sovereign nations, our Tribes must be acknowledged and respected.
Western expansion has historically reduced the ability of Southern Paiutes to use the expansive lands we consider our homeland. The creation of reservations further reduced the Tribes’ ability to use the land for travel and subsistence. So much has been taken from the Indigenous people of this land.
The United States government cannot justify the continued destruction, loss of history, and bombing of irreplaceable artifacts. The sacred sites within the refuge are central to our people’s traditions and identity. The Tribes have worked alongside cultural preservation experts, other Tribal communities, and conservationists to push back against the plans to expand military testing into the refuge. Tragically, these efforts to preserve our history and ancestral lands continue to be eclipsed by the agenda of the military-industrial complex.
The air force already controls nearly 3 million acres of land in Nevada—leaving our Tribal communities with limited access to our traditional resources and historical places. Currently, even without the air force having primary jurisdiction of the land, our Tribes have limited access to our ancestral lands and cultural sites. The air force has not upheld its promises to Native people nor acted in trust as stewards of our people, lands, and culture. That has been made abundantly clear by the severe damage of Pintwater Cave, which holds a special place in our religious beliefs and stories. Pintwater Cave held artifacts dating back thousands of years with an importance to our culture that can never be replaced. Bombing our sacred sites is the opposite of stewardship.
Also, the air force will only allow two trips a year to this site, with only 15 participants per trip to these places that are vital to our telling of history and identity. With more than 20 Tribes and a limited number of participants, the Southern Paiute people’s ability to pass down our culture, traditions, history, and knowledge is severely impaired.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/desert-refuge-sacred-don-t-bomb-it?utm_source=insider&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter
Things haven't changed much in a couple hundred years....
'Everything has changed': How hurricane preparations are adapting to a deadly pandemic
Thousands of hotel rooms, a million masks—safely escaping this season's hurricanes is forcing cities and states to meet an unprecedented challenge.
COVINGTON, LOUISIANA
People who live along the low-lying reaches of coastal Louisiana can be surprisingly sanguine about what hurricane season delivers come August. Lesser storms with names like Danny or Gustav sweep ashore and are soon forgotten. On Saturday, residents of New Orleans will observe the 15th anniversary of Katrina—the unforgettable, massive hurricane whose storm surge fed the collapse of the levees but still could not wipe their famously below-sea-level city off the map.
There’s no playbook, though, for fending off powerful hurricanes that hit in the midst of a pandemic—let alone one that arrives where the infection rate surged to one of the highest this summer. Officials guided by more than a century of hurricane preparedness have been forced to rewrite procedures this year to safeguard against spreading highly contagious COVID-19 along evacuation routes or in crowded shelters.
Although Hurricane Hanna rolled onto south Texas shores as a Category 1 storm last month, Louisiana this week was confronted with two major storms in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time. That’s a historic first, with the potential to deliver a one-two punch to southwest Louisiana.
Tropical Storm Laura, the greater threat, is forecast to grow into a Category 3 hurricane as it crosses the warm waters of the Gulf and is on course to make landfall in southwest Louisiana Wednesday night. Tropical Storm Marco, two days ahead of Laura, pelted rain before beginning to break up Monday—a bit of good luck for harried emergency planners, though Gov. John Bel Edwards also credits prayer.
As a back-up, he also has 2,000 National Guardsmen on standby, has positioned 94 high-water vehicles and 55 boats across the region, and has ordered up 218,000 ready-to-eat meals and 372,000 bottles of water.
(snip)
Scientists predict double disaster
Louisiana’s experience after Laura washes ashore may also serve as a primer across the Southeast hurricane zone in an unusually active season. Forecasters said the area could see from 13 to 19 named storms before the season ends Nov. 1, and as many as six major hurricanes.
Before Marco and Laura even registered as tropical disturbances in the Atlantic Ocean, scientists cautioned that major storms could lead to the spread of more COVID-19 infections.
New research by scientists from Columbia University and the Union of Concerned Scientists found that fierce storms ranked as Category 3 or higher could result in thousands of new COVID-19 infections. The scientists modeled an infection scenario by retracing the evacuation routes of the 2.3 million southeastern Floridians who fled Hurricane Irma in 2017. That same number of evacuees on the move today could prompt as many as 61,000 new cases of COVID-19, the study found. It is still undergoing peer review before publication in a scientific journal.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/how-hurricane-evacuations-shelters-change-with-coronavirus/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=Science_20200826&rid=2D7EBD8232363870D75E126868635ACF
How a 5-Ounce Bird Stores 10,000 Maps in Its Head
IT WEIGHS ONLY four or five ounces, its brain practically nothing, and yet, oh my God, what this little bird can do. It’s astonishing.
Around now, as we begin December, the Clark’s nutcracker has, conservatively, 5,000 (and up to 20,000) treasure maps in its head. They’re accurate, detailed, and instantly retrievable.
It’s been burying seeds since August. It’s hidden so many (one study says almost 100,000 seeds) in the forest, meadows, and tree nooks that it can now fly up, look down, and see little x’s marking those spots—here, here, not there, but here—and do this for maybe a couple of miles around. It will remember these x’s for the next nine months.
How does it do it?
32 Seeds a Minute
It starts in high summer, when whitebark pine trees produce seeds in their cones—ripe for plucking. Nutcrackers dash from tree to tree, inspect, and, with their sharp beaks, tear into the cones, pulling seeds out one by one. They work fast. One study clocked a nutcracker harvesting “32 seeds per minute.”
These seeds are not for eating. They’re for hiding. Like a squirrel or chipmunk, the nutcracker clumps them into pouches located, in the bird’s case, under the tongue. It’s very expandable …
The pouch “can hold an average of 92.7 plus or minus 8.9 seeds,” wrote Stephen Vander Wall and Russell Balda. Biologist Diana Tomback thinks it’s less, but one time she saw a (bigger than usual) nutcracker haul 150 seeds in its mouth. “He was a champ,” she told me.
Next, they land. Sometimes they peck little holes in the topsoil or under the leaf litter. Sometimes they leave seeds in nooks high up on trees. Most deposits have two or three seeds, so that by the time November comes around, a single bird has created 5,000 to 20,000 hiding places. They don’t stop until it gets too cold. “They are cache-aholics,” says Tomback.
When December comes—like right around now—the trees go bare and it’s time to switch from hide to seek mode. Nobody knows exactly how the birds manage this, but the best guess is that when a nutcracker digs its hole, it will notice two or three permanent objects at the site: an irregular rock, a bush, a tree stump. The objects, or markers, will be at different angles from the hiding place.
Next, they measure. This seed cache, they note, “is a certain distance from object one, a certain distance from object two, a certain distance from object three,” says Tomback. “What they’re doing is triangulating. They’re kind of taking a photograph with their minds to find these objects” using reference points.
Psychologist Alan Kamil has a different view. He thinks the birds note the landmarks and remember not so much the distances, but the angles—where one object is in relation to the others. (“The tree stump’s 80 degrees south of the rock.”) These nutcrackers are doing geometry more than measuring.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/12/03/how-a-5-ounce-bird-stores-10000-maps-in-its-head/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=SpecialEdition_Escape_20200820&rid=2D7EBD8232363870D75E126868635ACF
Really quite fascinating.
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