Relationships and Going Places
Firearms and Domestic Violence: The Intersections; Identifying and Preventing Gender Bias in Law Enforcement Response to Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence
Panelist Jacquelyne Campbell from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, noted that in the United States, when women are murdered, 40 to 50 percent are killed by their husband, boyfriend or ex-partner. That's nine times the rate killed by strangers. In comparison, 5 to 8 percent of men are killed by their partner. Panelist April Zeoli presented data from four longitudinal studies showing that when laws are in place that restrict abusers from purchasing guns, there is an associated decrease in intimate partner murders. more »
New Year's Peeve! Forgetting Self-improvement Vows
Rose Madeline Mula writes: Am I glad I didn't live in Babylonia four thousand years ago. There the New Year celebration lasted eleven days. One is bad enough. By the eleventh day, the Babylonians must have had prodigious hangovers. They probably weren't even fully conscious for the first month of the new year. That's not for me. It would mean missing all those great post-holiday sales. When I was young, I hated New Year’s — the whole shebang, beginning with New Year’s Eve. The forced gaiety. The pressure to be happy! It was all so depressing. more »
Happy Holidays Aloft: Flight Engineer Peggy Whitson On Third Long-Duration Mission to the International Space Station
Whitson and her crewmates, Cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet launched on November 17, 2016. The Iowa native completed two six-month tours of duty aboard the station for Expedition 5 in 2002, and as the station commander for Expedition 16 in 2008. She has accumulated 377 days in space between the two missions, the most for any US woman at the time of her return to Earth. Whitson has also performed six spacewalks, totaling 39 hours and 46 minutes. more »
How Many Kinds of Birds Are There and Why Does It Matter? Gifting at the American Museum of Natural History
For the new work, Joel Cracraft, George Barrowclough, and their colleagues at Nebraska University, Lincoln and Washington University examined a random sample of 200 bird species through the lens of morphology — the study of the physical characteristics like plumage pattern and color, which can be used to highlight birds with separate evolutionary histories. This method turned up, on average, nearly two different species for each of the 200 birds studied. This suggests that bird biodiversity is severely underestimated, and is likely closer to 18,000 species worldwide. more »
