The re-emergence of a local outbreak threatens to derail one of the standout success stories in the global fight against the pandemic. Taiwan currently holds the No. 2 spot in Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking, a measure of the best places to be in the COVID-19 era.
Taiwan has managed to keep its total number of cases to 770, with just seven deaths, through a combination of restricting travel into the island early in the outbreak and implementing a strict quarantine and contact tracing strategy.
Yet many regions that showed initial success in fighting off the virus, from Thailand to South Korea, are now facing their worst outbreaks as cases are spiking around the globe with the onset of winter.
Jah Bella lost work during the pandemic and says OnlyFans has changed her life – she is making money and has ‘a lot more freedom to live life’. Photograph: Jah Bella
This time last year Jah Bella was doing it tough. She had fled an abusive relationship, was looking after her newborn daughter and was struggling to find work in far north Queensland.
“Every single regular job that I had, I was getting sexually harassed in some way,” she says. “I would either get fired or I’d have to leave once I reported it.”
When the pandemic hit all remaining gigs dried up.
Why is Exercise for Low Back Pain Beneficial?
Exercise is scientifically proven to provide relief from chronic low back pain (CLBP), but researchers are still unsure as to why it’s beneficial, according to researchers from UNSW Medicine and NeuRA (Neuroscience Research Australia), published in
The study aimed to better understand why back pain researchers think exercise helps people with CLBP, notes a media release from University of New South Wales.
The study’s senior author Dr Matt Jones, an exercise physiologist, clinician and researcher, says that the researchers were surprised to find there was no clear agreement between scientists about why they think exercise works for CLBP.
BULLETIN BOARD STAFF CORRESPONDENT STAFF CORRESPONDENT
A two-day international conference on Sustainable Technologies for Industry 4.0 (STI 2020) was held at the Permanent Campus of Green University of Bangladesh (GUB) in Purbachal on December 19-20, 2020. GUB s Faculty of Science and Engineering organized the international conference with a view to get ready for facing challenges of fourth industrial revolution.
GUB Vice Chancellor Prof. Dr. Md Golam Samdani Fakir presided over the opening session while Prof. Dr. A. S. M. Maksud Kamal, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Academic) of DU was present as special guest. Due to illness, Education Minister Dr. Dipu Moni, chief guest of the program was not present in the inauguration session.
NREL and UNSW raise two-junction solar cell efficiency record to 32.9%
The US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia have achieved record energy conversion efficiency for two-junction solar cells, creating a cell with two light-absorbing layers that converts 32.9% of sunlight into electricity (Myles A. Steiner et al, ‘High Efficiency Inverted GaAs and GaInP/GaAs Solar Cells With Strain‐Balanced GaInAs/GaAsP Quantum Wells’, Advanced Energy Materials, 13 December 2020).
Key to the cell’s design is a series of more than 150 ultrathin layers of alternating semiconductors that create quantum wells in the cell’s bottom absorber, allowing it to capture energy from a key range of the solar spectrum. While the new record only improves modestly on the previous 32.8% efficiency record, it is the first record-efficiency multi-junction solar cell to use a strain-balanced structure