Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of “Crime and Punishment”, once wrote, “The degree of civilisation in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” Updated for the 21st century, our “degree of civilisation” might be revealed by the technology used inside them.
For Microsoft, prisons represent a market. In recent years, the company and its business partners have started providing an array of surveillance and Big Data analytics solutions to prisons, courts and community supervision programmes.
This comes against a backdrop of global protests against police violence along with calls to defund the police and address institutional racism at every level of the criminal justice system.
December 21, 2020
The Earth’s soils contain more than three times the amount of carbon than is found in the atmosphere, but the processes that bind carbon in the soil are still not well understood.
Improving such understanding may help researchers develop strategies for sequestering more carbon in soil, thereby keeping it out of the atmosphere where it combines with oxygen and acts as a greenhouse gas. Angela Possinger, Michael Zachman, Barnaby Levin/Provided
Scanning electron microscope image of an aggregate of soil used in this study.
A new study describes a breakthrough method for imaging the physical and chemical interactions that sequester carbon in soil at near atomic scales, with some surprising results.
Experts say using
Keeping humidity between 40% and 60% indoors is ideal.
Higher humidity also helps our immune systems fight off other invading viruses.
Respiratory viruses love the winter. These pathogens thrive in the cold and travel easier from host to host in dry air. When cold outdoor air with little moisture is heated indoors, the air s relative humidity drops to about 20%, Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiologist at Yale University, said in a statement. This dry air provides a clear pathway for airborne viruses.
Relative humidity (RH) is a measure of how saturated the air is with water vapor. So in a room with 40% relative humidity, the air holds 40% of the total amount of moisture it could hold in total. The drier the air, the lower the relative humidity, and the easier it is for viruses - including the coronavirus - to spread.
Experts say using humidifiers in homes during the winter could reduce coronavirus transmission risk.
Keeping humidity between 40% and 60% indoors is ideal.
Higher humidity also helps our immune systems fight off other invading viruses.
Respiratory viruses love the winter. These pathogens thrive in the cold and travel easier from host to host in dry air. When cold outdoor air with little moisture is heated indoors, the air s relative humidity drops to about 20%, Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiologist at Yale University, said in a statement. This dry air provides a clear pathway for airborne viruses.
Relative humidity (RH) is a measure of how saturated the air is with water vapor. So in a room with 40% relative humidity, the air holds 40% of the total amount of moisture it could hold in total. The drier the air, the lower the relative humidity, and the easier it is for viruses including the coronavirus to spread.