GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Red imported fire ant invasions around the globe in recent years can now be traced to the southern U.S., where the nuisance insect gained a foothold in the 1930s, new University of Floridaresearch has found.
Native to South America, the ant had been contained there and in the southeastern U.S. before turning up in faraway places in the last 20 years — including California, China, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. (more…)
In 1968, when Su Wei left his family behind and voluntarily joined the millions of urban youth who were being sent by Chinese leader Mao Zedong into the countryside to work the land as part of a “re-education” movement, his spirit was nearly broken.
As part of Mao’s “up to the mountains and down to the villages” campaign, initiated in 1968 to quell civil unrest during the Cultural Revolution, all urban 16-year-olds were commanded to travel to rural villages to be schooled in hard agricultural labor. More than 20 million teenagers were sent to work in the countryside, often devoting more than a decade of their lives to farm labor. Not only did this deprive them of a formal education, but parting from their families was a heart-wrenching experience for most of the youngsters. However, for then 15-year-old Su — now a senior lector in East Asian languages at Yale — leaving life in Guangzhou (Canton) represented an escape from an even more brutal life, and so he set off eagerly for the countryside even before he was required to do so. (more…)
*comScore’s Unified Digital Measurement Approach Continues to Gain Industry Support*
*Yahoo! Sites Ranks as Top Internet Property in Hong Kong*
Hong Kong, October 21, 2010 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced that it will offer free participation in Media Metrix 360 to online publishers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Under this new initiative any publisher can now participate in Media Metrix 360 measurement with no implementation fee for tagging their website server data, providing publishers of all sizes the ability to participate in this enhanced, unified approach to digital measurement. comScore also announced growing industry support of the comScore Media Metrix 360 measurement solution, with Discuss.com.hk and Uwants.com recently becoming the first Hong Kong-based publishers to participate in this approach. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The more complex a plant or animal, the more difficulty it should have adapting to changes in the environment. That’s been a maxim of evolutionary theory since biologist Ronald Fisher put forth the idea in 1930.
Nursing home residents who used videoconferencing to keep in touch with family members felt it enriched their lives, according to a study in the June issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing.
Saturday, and again on Monday (22nd March) Beijing and part of eastern China was hit by two successive severe sandstorms originating in northern China. And the fine dust travelled not only to Taiwan, but as far as to the western United States.
