Running out of excuses not to write that book? Whether you’ve always wanted to preserve your childhood memories, document your years catering Hollywood parties, or share your knowledge of the best fishing spots in New England, YouBooks gives you a way to do it without writing a single chapter yourself.

This AI-powered platform helps you create nonfiction books up to 300,000 words using a blend of top-tier models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama. You don’t just get words on a page; you get structured, well-researched manuscripts that match your preferred writing style and tone. Just provide a brief description or upload personal notes, and YouBooks takes it from there.

Unlike ghostwriting services that charge thousands and keep the rights, you own everything YouBooks generates. That means you can self-publish to Amazon, hand out printed copies to family, or keep your story saved for future generations.

Your book is delivered in multiple formats—Word (.docx) for easy editing, EPUB for ebook platforms, PDF for sharing or printing, and Markdown for custom formatting. Whether you’re creating a memoir, instructional guide, or niche nonfiction title, YouBooks is built to support your vision.

• Describe your idea: Start with a short prompt or detailed description.
• Set your preferences: Choose tone, style, and upload research or notes.
• Let the AI write: Multi-AI collaboration generates a book up to 300,000 words.
• Download in multiple formats: Choose DOCX, PDF, EPUB, or Markdown.
• Own the results: You keep full commercial rights to sell or share your book however you want.

If you’ve got stories, insights, or advice to share, YouBooks turns your ideas into something shareable—just $49.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

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Youbooks – AI Nonfiction Book Generator: Lifetime Subscription

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The post From Amazon to memory lane: This AI writes your book so you don’t have to appeared first on Popular Science.

Let’s be real—subscriptions are everywhere. From streaming to software, everything wants a slice of your wallet every month. But not Microsoft Office 2024 Home. This is a one-time purchase with no recurring fees or hidden strings attached. For just $129.97 (normally $149.99), you get lifetime access to the essential Microsoft Office suite.

That means the full, install-it-on-your-computer, offline-friendly versions—not the stripped-down web apps or trial versions. Once you install it on your Mac or PC, it’s yours, and you don’t need to rely on the cloud or wait for slow browser-based apps to load. Even better, there are no “please renew your subscription” messages popping up when you’re just trying to finish your resume.

Microsoft Office 2024 brings a refreshed, modern interface with faster performance and better integration of AI-powered tools. Word now offers improved editing suggestions and a cleaner layout that makes formatting less of a headache. Excel gets smarter, too—with upgraded formula handling, dynamic arrays, and powerful charting tools that help make sense of your data, whether you’re budgeting or building a business model. 

There’s plenty to love about this updated suite, so check it out:

This version is compatible with macOS and Windows and licensed for installation on one device. You’ll get full functionality across the apps without the limitations that often come with cloud-only or “free” office tools.

And let’s not forget—this is the latest version, so it’s fully optimized for today’s hardware and operating systems. Whether you’re on a new MacBook Pro or a reliable Windows desktop, you’re getting smooth performance and long-term usability.

Tired of software that never really feels like yours? It’s time to change your relationship with your productivity apps.

Own this Microsoft Office 2024 Home lifetime license for your Mac or PC forever for $129.97 (normally $149.99), and actually get stuff done—without a monthly bill hanging over your head.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

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Microsoft Office 2024 Home for Mac or PC: One-Time Purchase

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The post Say hello to your favorite Office apps with this lifetime license, minus the annoying monthly fee appeared first on Popular Science.

For nearly two decades, balloons carrying highly sensitive atmospheric instruments have drifted more than 25 miles above one of the world’s most remote regions. The floating array is the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a project overseen by an international group of researchers tasked with measuring some of the universe’s oldest and hardest-to-detect cosmic rays. Specifically, the team is hunting for neutrinos—particles with no charge that also possess the smallest known subatomic mass. But according to their recent report, ANITA has repeatedly picked up some truly weird signals that defy explanation.

“The [radio pulses] appear inconsistent with the standard model of particle physics,” the study’s authors wrote for the journal Physical Review Letters.

Neutrino signals are everywhere, and originate from high-energy sources like our sun, supernovae, and the Big Bang. Billions of the particles are passing through a space the size of your thumbnail at any given time—but that doesn’t make them easy to find. That’s because they generally don’t interact with their surroundings, meaning trying to find them is similar to searching for subatomic needles in a cosmic haystack.

“This is [a] double-edged sword problem,” Penn State University associate professor of physics, astronomy, and astrophysics and study co-author Stephanie Wissel said in a statement. “[But] if we detect them, it means they have traveled all this way without interacting with anything else. We could be detecting a neutrino coming from the edge of the observable universe.”

Neutrinos travel at nearly the speed of light, and tracing them back to their sources can offer more data than even some of today’s most powerful space telescopes. Wissel has spent years codesigning experiments to identify neutrinos, and that’s where systems like ANITA come into play. Once deployed, ANITA’s radio antenna balloons are pointed back down to the ice where there is very little chance of signal interference. Wissel and colleagues then wait for radio emissions as neutrinos interact with the Earth’s frozen surface.

The team is particularly focused on tau neutrinos. These are specifically affected by the Antarctic ice and subsequently release secondary subatomic particles called tau leptons during emission events known as air showers. Although invisible to the human eye, Wissel likens the showers to waving a sparkler in one direction as the sparks shoot away from it. Despite their infinitesimal size, physicists distinguish between ice and air shower emissions, identify particle attributes, and even trace them back to their origin site.

But that’s only if they obey the known laws of physics—and a handful of particles aren’t doing that in Antarctica.

“The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” said Wissel.

Further calculations indicated the anomalies would have needed to pass through and potentially interact with thousands of miles of rock to get to them. This should mean that their signals were undetectable—and yet ANITA still flagged them. Researchers then cross-referenced these readings with other detector projects but didn’t find anything to help explain the data, leading them to classify them as “anomalous.” Although some experts have suggested the signals could relate to the universe’s elusive dark matter, there currently aren’t enough follow-up observations to explain the weirdness. But if nothing else, the team is pretty confident the signals aren’t their intended targets.

“It’s an interesting problem because we still don’t actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they’re most likely not representing neutrinos,” she added.

Wissel’s team is currently designing a new aerial neutrino detector called the Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO). Larger and more fine-tuned than ANITA, PUEO should be even better at flagging. In the process, it may also help to solve the identity of the physics-defying signals.

“My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don’t fully understand… [but] we haven’t been able to find any of those yet either,” said Wissel. “So, right now, it’s one of these long-standing mysteries.”

The post Physicists can’t explain mysterious radio wave emissions in Antarctica appeared first on Popular Science.

Si aprono le porte alle ultime sessioni dei corsi online,

We all dream — but why? As with many mysteries of the mind, science doesn’t have one neat answer. 

“You’ll get as many answers to the question ‘What is the purpose of dreaming?’ as there are dream psychologists,” says Deirdre Barrett, dream researcher at Harvard University and author of The Committee of Sleep. 

According to Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, dreams offered vital clues to unresolved conflicts buried deep within our psyche. But Freud’s theory, introduced in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams, sparked plenty of controversy. Critics argued that his dream interpretations were overly focused on sex, highly subjective, and impossible to verify—two analysts might offer entirely different readings of the same dream, with no objective way to know who was right.

In the decades since Freud, other scientists have offered alternative explanations for why we dream. One of the most prominent is the threat simulation theory, proposed by Finnish neuroscientist and psychologist Antti Revonsuo in 2000. According to this view, dreaming is an ancient biological defense mechanism. By simulating dangerous situations, our brains rehearse the skills needed to recognize and avoid threats—a kind of virtual reality training ground for survival. A 2005 study lent support to this theory by examining the dreams of Kurdish children exposed to war and trauma. Compared to non-traumatized Finnish children, these children reported more frequent dreams filled with severe threats, suggesting that their minds were practicing how to cope with danger.

But even the threat simulation theory is debated. A 2008 study comparing residents of high-crime areas in South Africa to those in low-crime parts of Wales found that South African participants, despite facing more real-world threats, actually reported fewer threatening dreams than their Welsh counterparts. This result challenges the idea that the brain uses dreams to simulate danger when exposed to trauma.

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Another theory suggests that dreams are simply a side effect of memory consolidation—the brain’s way of replaying and reinforcing new memories while we sleep. As the brain’s hippocampus and neocortex work together to file away fresh information, they may also blend it with older memories, creating the often strange mashups we experience as dreams.

Dreams may also help us process and manage emotions, especially negative ones, according to the emotion regulation theory of dreaming. Research focusing on recently divorced individuals experiencing depression found that participants who dreamed about their ex-spouses were more likely to show significant improvement in their mood one year later, particularly if their dreams were vivid and emotionally rich. Another study found that people who dreamed about stressful events they had experienced before sleep woke up feeling more positively about the events the next day, suggesting that dreams can help transform emotional distress into resilience.

Recent brain imaging studies support this idea. People who frequently experience fear-related dreams show reduced activation in fear centers of the brain during waking life, hinting that these dreams may serve as a kind of overnight therapy session, helping us better regulate our emotions when awake.

Ultimately, Barrett suggests that we may be asking the wrong question. “We’d rarely ask the analogous question: ‘What is the purpose of thinking?’” she says. Just as waking thought serves many functions—from planning to problem-solving to daydreaming—dreams likely do too. “The value of dreaming lies in its difference. It’s a distinct mode of thought—one that supplements and enriches our waking cognition.”

In fact, some researchers believe dreams offer a unique mental space for solving problems that stump us during the day. In this altered brain state, regions responsible for imagery become more active, allowing the mind to solve problems requiring visualisation. History is full of famous examples: Mary Shelley reportedly dreamed the central scenes of Frankenstein; German chemist August Kekulé envisioned the ring structure of benzene in a dream; and Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed his final form of the periodic table of the elements.

In the end, dreams may serve many purposes—or none at all—but they remind us that even in sleep, the brain never truly rests.

This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post What’s the purpose of dreaming?  appeared first on Popular Science.

Archeologists have been exploring the historical origins behind Homer’s The Odyssey for decades, if not centuries. As is the case for many of the world’s poetic epics, at least some evidence suggests that the long-suffering protagonist was partially based on an actual individual. Even if The Odyssey’s hero Odysseus never actually existed, excavation sites indicate people turned to him  as a source of inspiration for thousands of years—even going so far as to sometimes worship him.

The newest finds to shed light on both Odysseus and his followers come from his home island of Ithaca, at what’s known as the Agios Athanasios–School of Homer. An announcement on June 9 from the Greek Ministry of Culture cites the discovery of a rare underground spring cistern dating to the 14th–13th centuries BCE, during the Mycenaean palatial period. According to archeologists, the settlement at the School of Homer likely functioned as a hub for supervising surrounding ports and lands while protecting the area’s rich water resources. It’s just one of a network of 7 to 8 sites dotting northwest Ithaca that appear to collectively define the major urban center described by Homer in The Odyssey.

While archeologists still can’t definitively point to Odysseus’ existence, additional discoveries in the form of two late Hellenistic inscriptions illustrate the mythological figure’s importance, which eventually contributed to his local veneration. The first is ΟΔΥCCEOC, the Greek genitive (i.e. possessive or attributive) case of Odysseus which suggests a writer referring to the location as the hero’s palace or temple. The second iteration, ΟΔΥCCEI, is found on a dedicatory inscription possibly created by a visiting pilgrim. These correspond to a similar etching discovered at Ithaca’s nearby Polis Bay cave site during the 1930s that reads “ΕΥΧΗΝ ΟΔΥCCΕΙ,” or “Thanks, Odysseus.” Combined with multiple ritual artifacts and a small bronze bust of the Homeric hero, it’s clear the area remained a major “sanctuary” dedicated to the legendary figure for centuries.

“The complex is characterized by robust structures on terraces, incorporating impressive elements of carved architecture, as well as niches for votive offerings or inscriptions, which testify to the intensive cultic use,” explained the Greek Ministry of Culture.

Interestingly, even more recent finds at the School of Homer appear to predate the Odyssean pilgrimage site by thousands of years. The famous ruins’ previously oldest artifacts dated back to the Bronze Age Mycenaean period around the 14th and 13th centuries BCE. Now, flint tools and pottery shards indicate that  the earliest known human activity at the stone complex is traceable all the way to the Final Neolithic period (late 5th to 4th millennium BCE). Taken altogether, it appears that the site’s importance and cultural significance extended back into the annals of time—even further than the mythical, ill-fated voyage of Odysseus.

The post Ancient Greek inscriptions point to the ‘Sanctuary of Odysseus’ appeared first on Popular Science.

The American suburbs, once a bastion of affordable homeownership, are losing that status as middle-class home buyers find themselves increasingly priced out of even suburban areas, according to an article by Jake Safane in Investopedia. “When comparing price-per-square foot, the suburbs are more expensive in 53% of the 100 largest metro areas in the U.S., and 65% of these suburban areas are more expensive on an overall basis, due in part to larger homes in the suburbs versus cities, according to Realtor.com listing data.”

As more Americans seek out affordable housing in suburban and exurban areas, costs are rising. “While options still exist, finding an affordable suburban home often involves making significant trade-offs, like in home size, location, or condition,” Safane adds. Low housing inventory, including both existing and new homes for sale, and high mortgage rates are also contributing to rising costs.

The article notes that “many desirable areas have seen big increases in additional housing costs that you might not consider when first looking for homes. For example, insurance costs have been rising almost everywhere in the U.S., with one-third of U.S. ZIP codes seeing a 30% increase in home insurance prices from 2021-2024.” In places with high risks for disasters like wildfires such as California, insurers are pulling out altogether. People wanting to buy homes in suburban areas are more likely to have to make tradeoffs such as lower square footage or homes that need more work.

• Housing Costs
• housing affordability
• Homeownership
• Suburbs

Dati ad alta precisione su correnti, onde e sedimenti dal

South America’s lush Amazon region is a biodiversity hotspot, which means that every living thing must find a way to co-exist. Even some of the most feared snakes on the planet–anacondas. In a paper published June 16 in the journal Frontiers in Amphibian and Reptile Science, conservation biologists Beatriz Cosendey and Juarez Carlos Brito Pezzuti from the Federal University of Pará’s Center for Amazonian Studies in Brazil, analyze the key points behind the interactions between humans and the local anaconda populations.

Ahead of the paper’s publication, the team at Frontiers conducted this wide-ranging Q&A with Conesday. It has not been altered.

Frontiers: What inspired you to become a researcher?

Beatriz Cosendey: As a child, I was fascinated by reports and documentaries about field research and often wondered what it took to be there and what kind of knowledge was being produced. Later, as an ecologist, I felt the need for approaches that better connected scientific research with real-world contexts. I became especially interested in perspectives that viewed humans not as separate from nature, but as part of ecological systems. This led me to explore integrative methods that incorporate local and traditional knowledge, aiming to make research more relevant and accessible to the communities involved.

F: Can you tell us about the research you’re currently working on?

BC: My research focuses on ethnobiology, an interdisciplinary field intersecting ecology, conservation, and traditional knowledge. We investigate not only the biodiversity of an area but also the relationship local communities have with surrounding species, providing a better understanding of local dynamics and areas needing special attention for conservation. After all, no one knows a place better than those who have lived there for generations. This deep familiarity allows for early detection of changes or environmental shifts. Additionally, developing a collaborative project with residents generates greater engagement, as they recognize themselves as active contributors; and collective participation is essential for effective conservation.

F: Could you tell us about one of the legends surrounding anacondas?

BC: One of the greatest myths is about the Great Snake—a huge snake that is said to inhabit the Amazon River and sleep beneath the town. According to the dwellers, the Great Snake is an anaconda that has grown too large; its movements can shake the river’s waters, and its eyes look like fire in the darkness of night. People say anacondas can grow so big that they can swallow large animals—including humans or cattle—without difficulty.

F: What could be the reasons why the traditional role of anacondas as a spiritual and mythological entity has changed? Do you think the fact that fewer anacondas have been seen in recent years contributes to their diminished importance as an mythological entity?

BC: Not exactly. I believe the two are related, but not in a direct way. The mythology still exists, but among Aritapera dwellers, there’s a more practical, everyday concern—mainly the fear of losing their chickens. As a result, anacondas have come to be seen as stealthy thieves. These traits are mostly associated with smaller individuals (up to around 2–2.5 meters), while the larger ones—which may still carry the symbolic weight of the ‘Great Snake’—tend to retreat to more sheltered areas; because of the presence of houses, motorized boats, and general noise, they are now seen much less frequently.

F: Can you share some of the quotes you’ve collected in interviews that show the attitude of community members towards anacondas? How do chickens come into play?

BC: When talking about anacondas, one thing always comes up: chickens. “Chicken is her [the anaconda’s] favorite dish. If one clucks, she comes,” said one dweller. This kind of remark helps explain why the conflict is often framed in economic terms. During the interviews and conversations with local dwellers, many emphasized the financial impact of losing their animals: “The biggest loss is that they keep taking chicks and chickens…” or “You raise the chicken—you can’t just let it be eaten for free, right?”

For them, it’s a loss of investment, especially since corn, which is used as chicken feed, is expensive. As one person put it: “We spend time feeding and raising the birds, and then the snake comes and takes them.” One dweller shared that, in an attempt to prevent another loss, he killed the anaconda and removed the last chicken it had swallowed from its belly—”it was still fresh,” he said—and used it for his meal, cooking the chicken for lunch so it wouldn’t go to waste.

Some interviewees reported that they had to rebuild their chicken coops and pigsties because too many anacondas were getting in. Participants would point out where the anaconda had entered and explained that they came in through gaps or cracks but couldn’t get out afterwards because they ‘tufavam’ — a local term referring to the snake’s body swelling after ingesting prey.

We saw chicken coops made with mesh, with nylon, some that worked and some that didn’t. Guided by the locals’ insights, we concluded that the best solution to compensate for the gaps between the wooden slats is to line the coop with a fine nylon mesh (to block smaller animals), and on the outside, a layer of wire mesh, which protects the inner mesh and prevents the entry of larger animals.

F: Are there any common misconceptions about this area of research? How would you address them?

BC: Yes, very much. Although ethnobiology is an old science, it’s still underexplored and often misunderstood. In some fields, there are ongoing debates about the robustness and scientific validity of the field and related areas. This is largely because the findings don’t always rely only on hard statistical data.

However, like any other scientific field, it follows standardized methodologies, and no result is accepted without proper grounding. What happens is that ethnobiology leans more toward the human sciences, placing human beings and traditional knowledge as key variables within its framework.

To address these misconceptions, I believe it’s important to emphasize that ethnobiology produces solid and relevant knowledge—especially in the context of conservation and sustainable development. It offers insights that purely biological approaches might overlook and helps build bridges between science and society.

F: What are some of the areas of research you’d like to see tackled in the years ahead?

BC: I’d like to see more conservation projects that include local communities as active participants rather than as passive observers. Incorporating their voices, perspectives, and needs not only makes initiatives more effective, but also more just. There is also great potential in recognizing and valuing traditional knowledge. Beyond its cultural significance, certain practices—such as the use of natural compounds—could become practical assets for other vulnerable regions. Once properly documented and understood, many of these approaches offer adaptable forms of environmental management and could help inform broader conservation strategies elsewhere.

F: How has open science benefited the reach and impact of your research?

BC: Open science is crucial for making research more accessible. By eliminating access barriers, it facilitates a broader exchange of knowledge—important especially for interdisciplinary research like mine which draws on multiple knowledge systems and gains value when shared widely. For scientific work, it ensures that knowledge reaches a wider audience, including practitioners and policymakers. This openness fosters dialogue across different sectors, making research more inclusive and encouraging greater collaboration among diverse groups.

The Q&A can also be read here.

The post Q&A: How anacondas, chickens, and locals may be able to coexist in the Amazon appeared first on Popular Science.

With every passing month, AI-generated content gets harder to distinguish from material made by human beings. Google’s latest video maker is a case in point: The newly launched Veo 3 model is a step up in terms of realism, while also adding audio for the first time, so synced dialog, natural sound, and other audio effects can be added in.

Google promises the new Veo 3 model has a better understanding of real world physics, and is smarter at turning your text prompts into video clips. Those clips are capped at eight seconds for now, and at a resolution of 720p—presumably because of the high computing (and environmental) demands of generating these videos.

As is the norm with AI upgrades, Google doesn’t talk about energy use or what these models have been trained on, but it has enlisted the help of filmmakers Dave Clark, Henry Daubrez, and Junie Lau in promoting the capabilities of Veo 3. Short movies are already being created, with more on the way.

At the same time, Google has also announced an online video editor called Flow, which lets you string together scenes and take a more structured approach to building with AI. If you don’t want to create anything but want to see what’s possible with these tools, sit back and watch some Flow TV in your browser.

So how does Veo 3 impact the state of AI video making? It’s clear that we’re going to see more deepfakes than ever, and that distinguishing real video from AI video is going to be even more difficult—and as you’ll see from the examples collected below, a whole new range of AI video creations are possible.

You don’t have to look far for examples of Veo 3 being put to use. Perhaps Google’s own showreel is a good place to start: You can see feathers floating through the air, animated characters in the woods, a detective interrogating a rubber duck, and a violinist playing music.

These clips show off some of the leaps forward that Veo 3 has made, particularly in terms of video quality, and the accompanying audio. On the whole, the music and the dialog matches up with the video perfectly well, adding to the overall effect—it really does look as though real actors are speaking real lines.

Even Google’s hand-picked collection of clips aren’t flawless though. The physics are often wonky, and we have no way of knowing how closely the finished results adhere to the text prompts that were used, because they’re not included. Creating realistic AI video is one thing, but closely following the supplied text instructions to make it is another.

One Veo 3 series that’s recently gone viral is a Stormtrooper vlog on Instagram, following the exploits of a hapless Stormtrooper called Greg. The series is a clever way of keeping consistency across multiple videos and multiple scenes—because of course all Stormtroopers look the same—and it again shows the high level of video quality that’s possible with Veo 3.

The AI video generator has also proved popular for producing vox pop videos, where people are interviewed in the streets: See the clip Endless Line in NYC for example. There are inconsistencies and errors if you look closely enough, but it’s still a convincing artificial spoof of real-life interviews that you would find on YouTube.

One of the reasons that these AI interviews look so realistic is that Veo 3 will have been trained extensively on videos like them. Note how the camera angle always tends to be the same, and the people always look rather generic. When it comes to creating more obscure content, that Veo 3 has less training data to draw upon, it’s not quite as capable.

Right now, you need to sign up to the Google AI Ultra plan—a whopping $250 a month—to make the most of Veo 3. That is a steep ask for casual users and the AI curious, though perhaps not such a big expense for a creative studio or a film company. Even then, there are usage limits, though these aren’t specified (the restrictions generally depend on how much pressure Google’s AI infrastructure is under at any particular time).

If you’re on the more modest $20-per-month Google AI Pro plan, you get 3 credits per day for what’s called ‘Veo 3 Fast’. It’s a quicker, lower-quality, less energy intensive version of Veo 3, though Google hasn’t gone into too much depth about the differences between Veo 3 and Veo 3 Fast. Over time, these allowances may change around.

Those of you on an AI Pro or AI Ultra plan can head to Gemini on the web to start making videos (Google says access in the mobile app is still rolling out, so you might see it there too). In the prompt box at the bottom of the screen, click Video to tell the app you want to produce a video, then type out a description of what you want to see.

Remember you’ve only got 8 seconds here, so you can’t include too much in the way of scene direction and plot. Specify as much as you can in terms of the camera angle and movement, what you want to see in the scene, and the sound effects. When you’re ready, click the arrow on the right, and the AI gets to work.

In general, it helps to be as specific as possible when making Veo 3 videos. Anything you don’t mention will be invented by the AI (and it won’t always follow your instructions to the letter either). Above is my effort at trying to create a summery hiking scene, which came out okay, apart from the rather random cut half way through. Once you’ve used up your allocation of Veo 3 credits, you’ll be put back on the older Veo 2 AI model.

These videos may be ultra-realistic on the whole, but they’re still no match for real filmmaking. There are still way too many inconsistencies, physics problems, and deviations from the prompt, not to mention the issue of generic output, which means a lot of content looks similar. However, there’s no doubt Veo 4 is already in the works.

The post Google’s AI video creator gets major upgrade. How to use it. appeared first on Popular Science.

Rural hospitals across the United States are struggling to keep their labor and delivery departments open, putting safe birth care more than an hour away for many rural women.

As Anna Claire Vollers explains in the Maine Morning Star, over 100 hospitals in 26 states have closed their L&D departments since 2020, according to a report from the Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform. Today, less than 1,000 rural hospitals offer labor and delivery services.

“Staffing shortages, low Medicaid reimbursement payments and declining birth rates have contributed to the closures. Some states have responded by changing how Medicaid funds are spent, by allowing the opening of freestanding birth centers, or by encouraging urban-based obstetricians to open satellite clinics in rural areas.” This leads to women giving birth in emergency rooms, a lack of adequate prenatal care, and an increase in preterm births.

Because L&D units must have staff on call 24/7, they are “expensive and complicated”  to maintain. “In most cases, insurers don’t pay hospitals to maintain that standby capacity; they’re paid per birth. Hospitals cover their losses on obstetrics with revenue they get from more lucrative services.” For rural hospitals with low numbers of births, the cost is sometimes too much to cover.

Proposed cuts to Medicaid could make the situation worse, despite the Trump administration’s other efforts to promote higher birth rates.

• Hospitals
• Births
• Healthcare
• women
• Children
• Labor & Delivery

Drivers in Nepal are adopting electric vehicles at breakneck speed, with 65 percent of new cars sold in that country last year being electric.

As Adele Peters explains in Fast Company, the rapid growth is thanks to radically reduced import duties and excise taxes on EVs, which dropped the purchase cost for consumers. “After someone owns an EV, it’s also cheaper to operate than a gas or diesel vehicle. That’s true anywhere, but especially in Nepal, where fuel is imported and expensive.”

Electric three-wheeled vehicles known as tempos, which gained early popularity in the 1990s, are making a comeback. Kathmandu, the capital, is also investing in a fleet of electric buses, which cost around 33 times less to charge than the cost of fuel for a gas-powered bus.

The shift helps the nation achieve its Paris Agreement goal of reaching 90 percent adoption of EVs for private four-wheeled vehicles by 2030, which will help curb air pollution in Kathmandu, where the city’s mountainous geography traps pollutants.

• Nepal
• Electric Cars
• Electric Vehicles
• Climate Change
• Carbon Emissions

Washington, D.C. is removing plastic delineators and concrete barriers from a protected bike lane in Northwest Washington, citing low usage and the aesthetics of the posts, reports Rachel Weiner in The Washington Post.

For now, the poles and concrete barriers have been replaced with plastic barrels. But the city’s intention is to take those away once the rest of the two-way lane is removed and to replace it with painted bike lanes on either side of the street.

This marks the first time the city has removed protected bike lanes, causing concern among bike safety advocates that the move is a first step in a backlash to hard-won bike infrastructure. Significantly, “U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy has frozen all federal grants involving cycling, recently calling bike lanes in congested areas ‘a problem,’” Weiner notes.

Tricia Duncan, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in the area, told The Washington Post that “They are sacrificing safety for aesthetics,” noting that the plan for the lanes came out of “hundreds of hours” of community engagement and planning. “Supporters of the lanes agree they don’t get much through-traffic, but that they were suggested by DDOT in part because of a long-awaited connection to the Capital Crescent Trail that is finally moving forward.”

• Bike Lanes
• Protected Bike Lanes
• Bike Infrastructure
• Road Safety

A growing share of new housing units in U.S. cities are ‘micro-apartments’ that measure under 441 square feet, according to a report by Mary Salmonsen in Smart Cities Dive. Cities with the highest percentage of micro-apartments in the pipeline include Seattle (66 percent), Boston (56.2 percent), and Newark (49.8 percent).

The growth of micro-apartments is due in part to the housing crisis and recent zoning changes made by cities to accommodate higher density and more housing. “Seattle’s wave of new micro-housing construction coincides with zoning reforms passed in 2024 that permit micro-apartments in all areas zoned for multifamily housing, according to the StorageCafe report.”

As far as existing housing goes, San Francisco has the highest share of micro-apartments, at 14 percent of its apartment inventory. Today, 28 percent of the city’s pipeline is small units. “Out of the top 10 cities with the largest share of micro-apartments, seven are located in the West, with only one — Philadelphia — on the East Coast.”

• Micro Apartments
• Small Houses
• Small Apartments
• Housing Supply
• Density