This might not be the typical expat blog, written by a German expat, living in the Philippines since 1999. It's different. In English and in German. Check it out! Enjoy reading!
Dies mag' nun wirklich nicht der typische Auswandererblog eines Deutschen auf den Philippinen sein. Er soll etwas anders sein. In Englisch und in Deutsch! Viel Spass beim Lesen!
You plan to move to the Philippines? Wollen Sie auf den Philippinen leben?
There are REALLY TONS of websites telling us how, why, maybe why not and when you'll be able to move to the Philippines. I only love to tell and explain some things "between the lines". Enjoy reading, be informed, have fun and be entertained too!
Ja, es gibt tonnenweise Webseiten, die Ihnen sagen wie, warum, vielleicht warum nicht und wann Sie am besten auf die Philippinen auswandern könnten. Ich möchte Ihnen in Zukunft "zwischen den Zeilen" einige zusätzlichen Dinge berichten und erzählen. Viel Spass beim Lesen und Gute Unterhaltung!
Visitors of germanexpatinthephilippines/Besucher dieser Webseite.Ich liebe meine Flaggensammlung!
Showing posts with label Associated Press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Associated Press. Show all posts
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Disgruntled X users are again flocking to Bluesky, a newer social media platform that grew out of the former Twitter before billionaire Elon Musk took it over in 2022. While it remains small compared to established online spaces such as X, it has emerged as an alternative for those looking for a different mood, lighter and friendlier and less influenced by Musk.
FILE - The app for Bluesky is shown on a mobile phone, left, and on a laptop screen on June 2, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
What is Bluesky?
Championed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was an invitation-only space until it opened to the public in February. That invite-only period gave the site time to build out moderation tools and other features. The platform resembles Musk's X, with a "discover" feed and a chronological feed for accounts that users follow. Users can send direct messages and pin posts, as well as find "starter packs" that provide a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow.
Why is Bluesky growing?
Bluesky said in mid-November that its total users surged to 15 million, up from roughly 13 million at the end of October, as some X users look for an alternative platform to post their thoughts and talk to others online. The post-election uptick in users isn't the first time Bluesky has benefited from people leaving X. The platform gained 2.6 million users in the week after X was banned in Brazil in August — 85% of them from Brazil, the company said. About 500,000 new users signed up in one day in October, when X signaled that blocked accounts would be able to see a user's public posts.
Across the platform, new users — among them journalists, left-leaning politicians and celebrities — have posted memes and shared that they were looking forward to using a space free from advertisements and hate speech. Some said it reminded them of the early days of Twitter more than a decade ago.
Despite Bluesky's growth, X posted after the election that it had "dominated the global conversation on the U.S. election" and had set new records.
Beyond social networking
Bluesky, though, has bigger ambitions than to supplant X. Beyond the platform itself, it is building a technical foundation — what it calls "a protocol for public conversation" — that could make social networks work across different platforms — also known as interoperability — like email, blogs or phone numbers.
Currently, you can't cross between social platforms to leave a comment on someone's account. Twitter users must stay on Twitter and TikTok users must stay on TikTok if they want to interact with accounts on those services. Big Tech companies have largely built moats around their online properties, which helps serve their advertising-focused business models.
Bluesky is trying to reimagine all of this and working toward interoperability.
CLAUDIA HUTH poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
BERLIN (AP) — Like many other young women living in communist East Germany, Solveig Leo thought nothing about juggling work and motherhood. The mother of two was able to preside over a large state-owned farm in the northeastern village of Banzkow because childcare was widely available.
Contrast that with Claudia Huth, a mother of five, who grew up in capitalist West Germany. Huth quit her job as a bank clerk when she was pregnant with her first child and led a life as a traditional housewife in the village of Egelsbach in Hesse, raising the kids and tending to her husband, who worked as a chemist.
Both Leo and Huth fulfilled roles that in many ways were typical for women in the vastly different political systems that governed Germany durings its decades of division following the country’s defeat in World War II in 1945.
As Germany celebrates the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 — and the country’s reunification less than a year later on Oct. 3, 1990 — many in Germany are reflecting on how women’s lives that have diverged so starkly under communism and capitalism have become much more similar again — though some differences remain even today.
“In West Germany, women — not all, but many — had to fight for their right to have a career,” said Clara Marz, the curator of an exhibition about women in divided Germany for the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany.
Women in East Germany, meanwhile, often had jobs — though that was something that “they had been ordered from above to do,” she added.
Built in 1961, the Wall stood for 28 years at the front line of the Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets. It was built by the communist regime to cut off East Germans from the supposed ideological contamination of the West and to stem the tide of people fleeing East Germany.
Today only a few stretches of the 156.4-kilometer (97.2-mile) barrier around the capitalist exclave of West Berlin remain, mostly as a tourist attraction.
“All the heavy industry was in the west, there was nothing here,” Leo, who is now 81 years old, said during a recent interview looking back at her life as a woman under communism. “East Germany had to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union. Women needed to work our own way out of that misery.”
By contrast, Leo said, women in the West didn't need to work because they were “spoiled by the Marshall Plan” — the United States’ generous reconstruction plan that poured billions of dollars into West Germany and other European countries after the war.
In capitalist West Germany, the economy recovered so quickly after the total devastation of WWII that people soon started talking of a Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” that brought them affluence and stability less than 10 years after the war.
That economic success, however, indirectly hampered women’s quest for equal rights. Most West German women stayed at home and were expected to take care of their household while their husbands worked. Religion, too, played a much bigger role than in atheist East Germany, confining women to traditional roles as caregivers of the family.
Mothers who tried to break out of these conventions and took on jobs were infamously decried as Rabenmütter, or uncaring moms who put work over family.
Not all West German women perceived their traditional roles as restrictive.
“I always had this idea to be with my children, because I loved being with them," said Huth, now 69. “It never really occurred to me to go to work.”
More than three decades after Germany’s unification, a new generation of women is barely aware of the different lives their mothers and grandmothers led depending on which part of the country they lived in. For most, combining work and motherhood has also become the normal way of life.
Hannah Fiedler, an 18-year-old high school graduate from Berlin, said the fact that her family lived in East Germany during the decades of the country's division has no impact on her life today.
“East or West — it's not even a topic in our family anymore,” she said, as she sat on a bench in the capital's Mitte neighborhood, which marks the former course of the Berlin Wall in the then-divided city.
She also said that growing up, she had not experienced any disadvantages because she's female.
“I'm white and privileged — for good or worse — I don't expect any problems when I enter the working world in the future,” she said.
Some small differences between the formerly divided parts of Germany linger on. In the former East, 74 percent of women are working, compared to 71.5 percent in the West, according to a 2023 study by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung foundation.
Childcare is also still more available in the former East than in the West.
In 2018, 57 percent of children under the age of three were looked after in a childcare facility in the eastern state of Saxony. That compares with 27 percent in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and 44 percent in Hamburg and Bremen, according to Germany's Federal Statistical Office.
Germany as a whole trails behind some other European countries when it comes to gender equality.
Only 31.4 percent lawmakers in Germany's national parliament are female, compared to 41 percent in Belgium's parliament, 43.6 percent in Denmark, 45 percent in Norway and 45.6 percent in Sweden.
Nonetheless, Leo, the 81-year-old farmer from former East Germany, is optimistic that eventually women all over the country will have the same opportunities. “I can’t imagine that there are any women who don’t like to be independent,” she said.
NEW YORK (AP) — Welcome toBeyoncé country. When it comes to the 2025 Grammy Award nominations, “Cowboy Carter” rules the nation. She leads the nods with 11, bringing her career total to 99 nominations. That makes her the most nominated artist in Grammy history.
“Cowboy Carter” is up for album and country album of the year, and “Texas Hold ’Em” is nominated for record, song and country song of the year. She also received nominations in a wide swath of genres, including pop, country, Americana and melodic rap performance categories.
This is her first time receiving nominations in the country and Americana categories. Previously, she and her husband Jay-Z were tied for most career nominations, at 88.
If Beyoncé wins the album of the year, she’ll become the first Black woman to do so in the 21st century. Lauryn Hill last won in 1999 for “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” joining Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston as the only Black women to take home the Grammys’ top prize.
Post Malone also received his first ever nominations in the country categories this year, having released his debut country album “F-1 Trillion” in August. That one is up for country album and “I Had Some Help,” his collaboration with Morgan Wallen, is nominated for country song and country duo/group performance. They are Wallen’s first ever Grammy nominations.
Malone is just behind Beyoncé, with seven nominations, tied with Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar and Charli XCX, who earned her first nominations as a solo artist.
Lamar’s ubiquitous diss track released during his feud with Drake, “Not Like Us,” is nominated for record and song of the year, rap song, music video as well as best rap performance. He has two simultaneous entries in the latter category, a career first: Future & Metro Boomin featuring Lamar, “Like That” is up for best rap performance and best rap song.
This is his third time receiving two simultaneous nominations for best rap song.
Taylor Swift and first-time nominees Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan boast of six nominations each.
Last year, women artists dominated the major categories. This year, that continues somewhat, but the main trend seems to be a variance of genre. In the album of the year category, alongside “Cowboy Carter” is André 3000’s new age, alt-jazz “New Blue Sun” and multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier’s “Djesse Vol. 4.” Rising pop stars Carpenter and Roan round it out, with “Short n’ Sweet” and “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” respectively, as well as Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department,” Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” and Charli XCX’s rave-ready “BRAT.”
Eilish is the only artist to have her first three albums become nominated for album of the year.
Last year, Swift won album of the year for “Midnights,” breaking the record for most wins in the category with four. This year, she becomes the first ever woman to seven career nominations in the category.
“The breadth and the variety of genres represented in the general field feels new and really exciting,” says the Recording Academy CEO and President Harvey Mason jr. He credits an active and evolving voting body for its success. “We’ve been very intentional in how we looked at and tried to rebalance our membership. So not just gender or people of color, different racial makeup, but also genre equity and trying to make sure that all different types of music in different regions and different locations are being represented in every way possible.”
Only recordings commercially released in the U.S. between Sept. 16, 2023 through Aug. 30, 2024 were eligible for nominations. The final round of Grammy voting, which determines its winners, will take place Dec. 12 through January 3.
In the best new artist category, Carpenter and Roan will go head-to-head, alongside Benson Boone, Doechii, Khruangbin, RAYE, Shaboozey and Teddy Swims.
In the song of the year category, Beyoncé is joined by Eilish with “Birds of a Feather,” Swift and Post Malone with “Fortnight,” Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”, Carpenter’s “Please Please Please,” Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ “Die With A Smile,” and Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”
Shaboozey is also a first-time nominee. His “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is the biggest song of the year, having spent more weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 than any other — it is so popular, a remix of the track is also up for remixed recording.
Elsewhere, Shaboozey is nominated in the melodic rap performance category for his feature on Beyoncé’s “SPAGHETTII.” Linda Martell, the first commercially-successful Black woman musician in country, is also featured on the song, delivering the 83-year-old artist her first Grammy nomination.
For record of the year, “Texas Hold ’Em” will compete against Swift and Post Malone’s “Fortnight,” Eilish’s “Birds of a Father,” Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”, Carpenter’s “Espresso,” Charli XCX’s “360,” and the Beatles last new song, the AI-assisted “Now and Then.”
“We’re trying to make sure we’re keeping up with how music creators and our community are using technology. And in this case, AI enhanced the record and allowed it to be eligible in the categories that it was eligible in,” Mason jr explains.
Dolly Parton scored her 55th career nomination in the audio book, narration, and storytelling recording category for her “Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones,” news The Associated Press broke to the country music legend Friday morning. “No! What did I get nominated for?” she cheered over the phone. “Oh, well, that’s cool. I thought it would be for my rock album, I’d take it.
“It feels good. I’m always appreciative of everything. I don’t work for that, but it’s always good to say ‘you’ve done good work,’ and for somebody to acknowledge that. So, I’m always proud of every award I get and every mention I get. That just makes me feel like I’m doing the right thing.”
She’s up against producer Guy Oldfield, George Clinton, Barbra Streisand and Jimmy Carter, who could become the oldest Grammy award winner in history at 100.
So, what’s missing? Like last year, there’s a huge dearth of Latin music — the fastest growing streaming genre in the United States — across the board, and no representation in the major categories. There are also only four entries in the best Música Mexicana album category, despite it also being one of the fastest growing genres.
And K-pop, too, seems to be absent. There are no nominations for the BTS members who’ve released solo material this year: RM’s “Right Place, Wrong Person,” J-Hope’s “Hope on the Street, Vol. 1,” and Jimin’s “Muse.” As a boy band, BTS has received five nominations across their career.
“I definitely see room for improvement across many genres and we are continuing to invite people to be a part of the academy,” Mason jr. says. “Without the right representation we don’t get the right results. When I say right, I mean reflective and representative of what’s happening in music today. So, the work continues.”
The 2025 Grammy Awards will air Feb. 2 live on CBS and Paramount+ from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
FILE - A volunteer pours water to cool a man off during a hot day in Karachi, Pakistan, May 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan, File)
CHICAGO (AP) — For the second year in a row, Earth will almost certainly be the hottest it's ever been. And for the first time, the globe this year reached more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming compared to the pre-industrial average, the European climate agency Copernicus said Thursday.
"It's this relentless nature of the warming that I think is is worrying," said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus.
Buontempo said the data clearly shows the planet would not see such a long sequence of record-breaking temperatures without the constant increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere driving global warming.
He cited other factors that contribute to exceptionally warm years like last year and this one. They include El Nino — the temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide — as well as volcanic eruptions that spew water vapor into the air and variations in energy from the sun. But he and other scientists say the long-term increase in temperatures beyond fluctuations like El Nino is a bad sign.
"A very strong El Nino event is a sneak peek into what the new normal will be about a decade from now," said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist with the nonprofit Berkeley Earth.
News of a likely second year of record heat comes a day after Republican Donald Trump, who has called climate change a "hoax" and promised to boost oil drilling and production, was reelected to the presidency. It also comes days before the next U.N. climate conference, called COP29, is set to begin in Azerbaijan. Talks are expected to focus on how to generate trillions of dollars to help the world transition to clean energes like wind and solar, and thus avoid continued warming.
Buontempo pointed out that going over the 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold of warming for a single year is different than the goal adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement. That goal was meant to try to cap warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times on average, over 20 or 30 years.
A United Nations report this year said that since the mid-1800s on average, the world has already heated up 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) — up from previous estimates of 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) or 1.2 degrees (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit). That's of concern because the U.N. says the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals of the world's nations still aren't nearly ambitious enough to keep the 1.5 degree Celsius target on track.
The target was chosen to try to stave off the worst effects of climate change on humanity, including extreme weather. "The heat waves, storm damage, and droughts that we are experiencing now are just the tip of the iceberg," said Natalie Mahowald, chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University.
Going over that number in 2024 doesn't mean the overall trend line of global warming has, but "in the absence of concerted action, it soon will," said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann.
Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson put it in starker terms. "I think we have missed the 1.5 degree window," said Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who track countries' carbon dioxide emissions. "There's too much warming."
Indiana state climatologist Beth Hall said she isn't surprised by the latest report from Copernicus, but emphasized that people should remember climate is a global issue beyond their local experiences with changing weather. "We tend to be siloed in our own individual world," she said. Reports like this one "are taking into account lots and lots of locations that aren't in our backyard."
Buontempo stressed the importance of global observations, bolstered by international cooperation, that allow scientists to have confidence in the new report's finding: Copernicus gets its results from billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.
He said that going over the 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) benchmark this year is "psychologically important" as nations make decisions internally and approach negotiations at the annual U.N. climate change summit November 11 to 22 in Azerbaijan.
"The decision, clearly, is ours. It's of each and every one of us. And it's the decision of our society and our policymakers as a consequence of that," he said. "But I believe these decisions are better made if they are based on evidence and facts."
NEW YORK (AP) - Joanna Levesque shot to stardom at 13. Two decades later, “JoJo” — as she’s better known — has written a memoir and says the song responsible for her meteoric rise, “Leave (Get Out),” was foreign to her. In fact, she cried when her label told her they wanted to make it her first single.
Lyrics about a boy who treated her poorly were not relatable to the sixth grader who recorded the hit. And sonically, the pop sound was far away from the young prodigy’s R&B and hip-hop comfort zone.
“I think that’s where the initial seed of confusion was planted within me, where I was like, ‘Oh, you should trust other people over yourself because ... look at this. You trusted other people and look how big it paid off,’” she said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
“Leave (Get Out)” went on to top the Billboard charts, making Levesque the youngest solo artist ever to have a No. 1 hit.
“I grew to love it. But initially, I just didn’t get it,” she said.
Much of Levesque’s experience with young pop stardom was similarly unpredictable or tumultuous, and she details those feelings in her new memoir, “Over the Influence.”
With “Leave (Get Out)” and her several other commercial hits like “Too Little Too Late” and “Baby It’s You,” Levesque’s formative years were spent in recording studios and tour buses. Still, she had a strong resonance with teens and young people, and her raw talent grabbed the attention of music fans of all ages.
“Sometimes, I don’t know what to say when people are like, ‘I grew up with you’ and I’m like, ‘We grew up together’ because I still am just a baby lady. But I feel really grateful to have this longevity and to still be here after all the crazy stuff that was going on,” she said.
Some of that “crazy stuff” Levesque is referring to is a years-long legal battle with her former record label. Blackground Records, which signed her as a 12-year-old, stalled the release of her third album and slowed down the trajectory of her blazing career.
Levesque said she knows, despite the hurdles and roadblocks the label and its executives put in her path, they shaped “what JoJo is.”
“Even though there were things that were chaotic and frustrating and scary and not at all what I would have wanted to go through, I take the good and the bad,” she said.
Levesque felt like the executives and team she worked with at the label were family, describing them as her “father figures and my uncles and my brothers.” “I love them, now, still, even though it didn’t work out,” she said.
With new music on the way, Levesque said she thinks the industry is headed in a direction that grants artists more freedom over their work and more of a voice in discussions about the direction of their careers. In 2018, she re-recorded her first two albums, which were not made available on streaming, to regain control of the rights. Three years later, Taylor Swift started doing the same.
“Things are changing and it’s crumbling — the old way of doing things,” she said. “I think it’s great. The structure of major labels still offers a lot, but at what cost?”
As she looks forward to the next chapter of her already veteran-level career, Levesque said it’s “refreshing” for her to see a new generation of young women in music who are defying the standards she felt she had to follow when she was coming up.
“‘You have to be nice. You have to be acceptable in these ways. You have to play these politics of politeness.’ It’s just exhausting,” she said, “So many of us that grew up with that woven into the fabric of our beliefs burn out and crash and burn.”
It’s “healing” to see artists like Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish play by their own rules, she said.
In writing her memoir and tracing her life from the earliest childhood memories to today, Levesque said she’s “reclaiming ownership” over her life.
“My hope is that other people will read this, in my gross transparency sometimes in this book, and hopefully be inspired to carve their own path, whatever that looks like for them.”
The western prairie fringed orchid is seen blooming on July 3, 2024, on the Sheyenne National Grassland in North Dakota. The orchid has declined due to loss of its native prairie habitat, among other factors, and is classified as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act. (AP)
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — On a remote tallgrass prairie in North Dakota, a secretive orchid pokes up from the ground. You'll only find it if you know where to look.
The striking, bright white blooms of the western prairie fringed orchid are elusive to fans who try to catch a glimpse — and as a threatened species protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, it is also a puzzle for researchers trying to learn more about the orchid's reproduction and role in its ecosystem.
Loss of its native prairie habitat has threatened the orchid. About 60 percent of native orchids in the U.S. and Canada are rapidly disappearing due to climate change, habitat loss and pollinator declines, said Julianne McGuinness, program development coordinator for the North American Orchid Conservation Center. Those showy, flowering plants beloved for their beauty can be an early indicator of decline occurring unnoticed in its environment. “They’re sort of like the canary in the coal mine for the rest of our ecosystems,” McGuinness said.
Graduate students from North Dakota State University in Fargo are hoping to learn more about the pollinators and reproduction of the western prairie fringed orchid. Their work includes logging the GPS coordinates of orchids at 20 various sites in Minnesota, North Dakota and Manitoba, Canada, swabbing orchids for tiny amounts of genetic material from insects, and attracting pollinating insects at night with blacklights and sheets. Years ago, Steve Travers, an associate professor at the university's Department of Biological Sciences, was fascinated to learn about the orchid — “these big, beautiful, two-foot tall, ginormous, gorgeous things that were pollinated at night.”
“I have a hell of a hard time finding it sometimes,” he said. “And when people see it the first time, there's like almost this rapid intake of breath. I mean, it's so big and it's just spectacular.”
The orchid is a unique insight into its nearly vanished ecosystem — the tallgrass prairie — as well as for understanding connectedness with pollinators and other plants, and is a good model system for studying rarity, Travers said.
The orchid’s only known pollinators are hawkmoths, big moths that are just the right fit and size to reach the orchid's nectar, in a long spur, while also pollinating the plant.
The western prairie fringed orchid is mostly found in reserves, such as the Sheyenne National Grassland in North Dakota and the Manitoba Tall Grass Prairie Preserve. The peak of the orchid's bloom was roughly mid-July.
Populations can be as small as one plant or as large as 500 to 1,000, Travers said. Once located, the researchers log the individual orchids' GPS coordinates to within 10 centimeters (four inches) accuracy so they can return later. Finding the orchid when it isn't flowering is like looking for a brown stick in a big, green field, Travers said.
Graduate student Josie Pickar's work is focused on what affects the orchid's reproductive success, including soil nutrients and pollinator service. She's been traveling to about 20 sites, looking at subsets of orchids, to gather soil samples and moisture content, count flowers, and record plant heights and conditions, as well as monitoring the orchids via trail cameras for what might be eating them. In September, she'll go back and count the orchids' seed capsules, which are extremely hard to find.
To find the orchids, the researchers used rough coordinates from land-management agencies. They've dealt with ticks galore, crossed a beaver dam while wearing waders and seen bear tracks in the process.
“It's been pretty wild,” Pickar said.
She's put in days of more than 12 hours, visiting about two orchid sites per day that could be up to three hours away — her team donning gear such as long pants, long-sleeve shirts, hats and sometimes mosquito-thwarting head nets. She called the orchid “almost alienlike when you see it out on the prairie.”
Graduate student Trinity Atkins, who was out from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m., is looking at the orchid's pollination networks: the pollinators that visit the orchid and what other plants they visit, too.
She swabs the orchids at all her sites, collects moths to see where they are going and uses a molecular technique called eDNA metabarcoding to see which pollinators visited the orchid, she said. Environmental DNA is genetic material left behind from, for instance, a butterfly visiting a flower. Some studies indicate daytime pollinators might be at work, she said.
Studying the orchid's pollinators requires work at all hours of the day.
In the morning, Atkins would swab orchids for eDNA before it degrades. In the afternoon, she would survey for other nearby plants that could be attracting pollinators. And at night, she would be blacklighting at prairie sites, collecting moths and taking measurements.
Travers said the research is important in terms of biodiversity, of which rare species are an integral component for their contributions to their ecosystem. While orchids are found all over the world, the western prairie fringed orchid is specifically adapted to the tallgrass prairie, he said.
“I kind of find that really interesting that you get all this variety in the genus and then, boom, it comes here and it turns into this huge, nocturnally pollinated thing, and I'd love to know why. Why did that happen? But that's a whole other question,” Travers said.
LONDON (AP) — It's the bane of many travelers: jet lag. Nobody wants to lose out because they're too tired to enjoy the delights of their vacation spot. Here are some tips on how to handle jet lag, wherever you might end up.
What is jet lag?
Scientists define jet lag as the effect on the human body of traveling across different time zones. Our bodies have biological clocks programmed into almost every cell in the body, according to Sofia Axelrod, who studies circadian rhythms at Rockefeller University in New York.
“The clock is set by the 24-hour light and dark pattern,” Axelrod said. “Every morning when we wake up, specialized (light) receptor cells in our retina receive a daylight signal, which is transmitted to the brain and from there, the whole body.”
When we travel to another time zone, our eyes receive the daylight signal at a different time than usual, causing our internal clocks to reset. But that process can take awhile — and it’s during that adjustment period that we feel the effects of jet lag.
Is jet lag preventable?
Yes, but that can come at a cost. Malcolm von Schantz, a professor who specializes in circadian rhythms at Northumbria University in Newcastle, said that flying in premium cabins where travelers can stretch out and properly rest, can ward off sleep deprivation, but he acknowledges that isn't an option for most people. Still, he said that timing your flights can help. For example, he suggests flying from Europe to North America during the day, so that it’s evening when passengers land and they can get a proper night’s sleep.
“If you take the evening flight instead, you’ll be woken up at midnight to be served breakfast and land an hour or two later, when both jet lag and sleep deprivation will hit you hard and simultaneously,” he said.
Von Schantz also said flying in newer models with a lighter frame, like the Airbus A350 or Boeing 787 Dreamliner, would help. That’s because those planes can maintain a more comfortable cabin atmosphere, which should help travelers feel less worn out by the end of their flights.
What should you do when you arrive?
Experts say getting exposure to sunlight is critical to resetting your internal body clock. That can mean either avoiding morning sun or deliberately seeking it out, depending on where you’ve travelled from. Getting light in the morning will advance your body clock, while light exposure in the early evening will delay it. Naps are OK, but scientists warn against taking long siestas later in the day, as that might compromise your ability to sleep through the night.
Are there supplements or medicines that might help?
Melatonin, a hormone that the brain naturally produces when the body thinks it’s night, can be helpful. But it’s not available everywhere and in some countries like the U.K. and France, a prescription is required. Von Schantz of Northumbria University said that one of the advantages of melatonin is that you can start taking it before your journey, to reset your internal clock quicker.
“If you’re in a part of the world where melatonin is available over the counter, you can combine the effects of light and melatonin to achieve the advance or delay (in your body clock) that you need,” he said.
What can you do to deal with the effects of jet lag?
Business travelers might want to consider arriving a day or two ahead of any important meetings or events, said Russell Foster of Oxford University, who has authored a book on circadian rhythms.
“You should just be aware that if you’re jet-lagged, you’re more likely to make unwise decisions, be less empathetic and unable to multitask,” he said. Tourists might not need to be as alert as business travelers, but they should still be careful, he said. He advises tourists to get caught up on their sleep before doing anything potentially risky or that requires concentration, like driving.
Foster said he tries to maximize his light exposure when he arrives at a new destination to offset jet lag. But he also has a fallback strategy: coffee.
“I’m not suggesting it’s an ideal thing to do, but caffeine will help override the sleepiness and cognitive impairment you might be feeling as a result of jet lag,” he said.
