Australians: Four from Romania, one from Poland, arrested for ATM skimming
This Transparent Beehive Lets Beekeepers See the Bees at Work MyModernMet
The Aging Brain: Is Misplaced DNA to Blame? Science
Thirsty Raccoons Are Breaking Into Homes in Germany, and Specifically Stealing Beer Food & Wine
Bank of Ireland unsure when services will be restored Irish Examiner From a few days ago, but noteworthy that it happened.
With its elegant Neoclassical architecture and graceful colonnades, the Czech spa town of Marianske Lazne, or Marienbad, is one of the most appealing spa towns in Europe. If you’re going to spend one day in Marianske Lazne
With 250 jets, the Singing Fountain (Zpivajici Fontana) is probably the most popular tourist site in town and comes complete with lights, music and tourists taking videos on their cell phones. Time your visit right. The fountain starts dancing to music every odd hour during the day and evening, plus there’s a final performance at 10 p.m.
You’ll find the Singing Fountain in the main spa zone at the end of the main Colonnade.
Trails in Marianske Lazne
If you like hikes and strolls, walking some of the many historical trails is one of the top outdoorsy things to do in Marianske Lazne. You’ll have fun checking out the Goethe Trail, Royal Trail, Mitterach Trail and the Edward Trail, though I found it a challenge to stay on any particular one, and usually ended up zigzagging along two or three before landing up back in town. Get a map from the tourist board or your hotel, or study the info boards you’ll find at trailheads.
No doubt at some point you’ll land up at the Geological Park, a trail through the beech forest that highlights no end of rocks and flora and will get you well acquainted with the geology of the region.
It was in Marianske Lazne the 74-year old Goethe fell madly in love with 19-year-old Ulrika von Levetzow. Sadly for him, Ulrika turned down his marriage proposal at his birthday party in the nearby town of Loket,
Environmental users abandoned Twitter after Musk takeover
Trends in Ecology, Environmental users abandoned Twitter after Musk takeover. Published: August 15, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2023.07.002 – “In our sample of 380,000 environmentally oriented users, nearly 50% became inactive on Twitter after it was sold in October 2022, a rate much higher than a control sample. Given Twitter’s importance for public communication, our finding has troubling implications for digital environmental information sharing and public mobilization. Twitter’s importance for public discourse – Twitter has been the dominant social media platform for diverse environmental interests to communicate and organize around advocacy goals, exchange ideas and research, and find new opportunities for collaboration. As a result, Twitter has been used to track a broad array of topics important to conservation and environmental research, ranging from biodiversity conservation, human–nature interactions, climate change beliefs, extreme weather disaster responses, and environmental policy preferences, as well as to disseminate information and mobilize public interest by environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and public agencies.
There is currently no platform equivalent to Twitter. Thus, any changes in engagement by environmentally minded users raises serious questions about where to track discourse about environmental conservation and how to mobilize pro-environmental segments of the public. We provide evidence that the recent acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk has led to the rapid decline of pro-environmental Twitter users (henceforth, ‘Environmental Twitter’) at a rate higher than comparable online communities.”
“A survey conducted by Nature suggests that Jarochowska, now at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, is far from alone in curtailing her use of the platform. Since entrepreneur Elon Musk took control in October 2022, he has made a series of largely unpopular changes to Twitter, including cutting down on content moderation; ditching its ‘blue-check’ verification system in favour of one that grants paying members additional clout and privileges; charging money for access to data for research; limiting the number of tweets users can see; and abruptly changing the platform’s name and familiar logo to simply ‘X’. His management has left scientists reconsidering the value of X, and many seem to be leaving. To get a better sense of how researchers are currently interacting with the site formerly known as Twitter, Naturereached out to more than 170,000 scientists who were, or still are, users; nearly 9,200 responded. More than half reported that they have reduced the time they spend on the platform in the past six months and just under 7% have stopped using it altogether. Roughly 46% have joined other social-media platforms, such as Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and TikTok.”
