Beautiful time lapse video from Tobias Straka, taken at night from the Grauseeli lake in the Bernese Alps, near Gimmelwald, Switzerland. It’s amazing how much a soundtrack can liven up a video. In this case, the music adds a whole other dimension to it.
http://vimeo.com/5843652
Grauseeli from Tobias Straka on Vimeo.
Courtesy of the Greenhall's Trust - WI
In Peru, vampire bats are increasingly biting people, and death is often the result of their normally innocuous bites. Researchers are exploring the possibility that the bats are carrying a strain of rabies known as paralytic or dumb rabies, which causes disorientation, muscle weakness, then death.
The vampire bats normally stick to biting wildlife or livestock, but as more people infringe on their habitat, through deforestation and agriculture, the growing bat population turns to them as another food source.
Research is focusing on how the disease persists in the bat population, and also on where it is located, so that health authorities may know where people will need to be vaccinated against this particular strain of rabies.
Derek Thompson from The Atlantic picked up a post I wrote a couple of years ago, entitled “13 arguments for telecommuting“, in an article which proposes a twist on the idea: a 4-day workweek. The State of Utah switched to just such a program a year ago for its government employees, and the results are in: everyone loves it.
I wouldn’t have minded a 4-day workweek back when I did the 9 to 5 thing, but thankfully my boss let me shift my working hours. I’d come in at 11 am and leave at 7 pm, which meant I got to avoid most of the DC rush hour traffic.
Of course, it’s even better than all of this when you can telecommute entirely. That would truly save money for both employers and employees.
Several years ago, the common advice was 6-8 cups of water a day. Lately, I’ve been hearing 8-10 cups a day. Thankfully, there’s a easy formula you can use to calculate the amount you need.
½ * bodyweight = x ounces of daily water
I didn’t come up with this on my own. It’s a formula you can find on the Hippocrates Health website. So let’s see, for my 160 lbs. body, I’d need 10 cups of water per day.
½ * 160 = 80 ounces / 8 = 10 cups of daily water
For those of you on the metric system, 1 ounce is about 25.6 ml, and 8 ounces (1 cup) is 237 ml (or a little more than a quarter liter).
For my needs, that would work out to 2.36 liters per day. It’s really not that much, particularly on these hot summer days. The sad thing is I’m not drinking enough, and then I end up with these monster headaches. The lack of water may not be the main reason, since I’ve got plenty of other things going on, but it sure is one of the contributing factors.
This is a summary of articles I read and found interesting during this past week. The list is shared from among my feed subscriptions:
Raoul Pop 