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Nearly all the ice on Earth is in some state of meltdown. As it spills into the ocean, it raises sea levels. But if you’re curious to know exactly which glaciers are going to drown your corner of the planet, NASA’s got some answers.
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By R. Matthew Ward
This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter, reviews for the real world. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article here.
After doing 13 hours of research and considering 76 models, we performed dozens of hours of real-world testing and 13 additional hours of focused, in-depth testing on the top 14 Bluetooth-audio receivers for adding wireless connectivity to an existing audio system. We think the StarTech BT2A Bluetooth Audio Receiver is the best receiver for most people thanks to its combination of connectivity, range, audio quality, and usability at a reasonable price.
Whether it’s because your new smartphone has no headphone jack, or you aren’t ready to give up your old stereo in favor of a great Bluetooth speaker, a Bluetooth audio receiver can add wireless streaming capabilities to your existing home stereo or speakers with little loss in sound quality.
The ideal Bluetooth receiver should sound as good as a direct, wired connection. It should pair with your devices easily and reliably, and should have a large-enough range to cover a typical living area. We also like when a Bluetooth receiver has a digital audio output, which allows you to use an optional, separate DAC (digital-to-analog converter) for better sound quality.
We considered 76 top Bluetooth receivers, and ultimately tested 14 models. For our tests, we paired each one first to a MacBook and an iPhone to see how easy it was to pair source devices to the receiver. We also tested how reliably the receiver connected and disconnected once paired, how well it reconnected following a disconnection, and how easy it was to switch to a different source. For devices that could pair with multiple devices simultaneously, we used up to six devices to test this feature.
To evaluate audio quality, we first used each device to listen to background music, then compared them head-to-head using our favorite test tracks. We also assessed the range of each receiver by measuring the distance at which music started skipping with both an unobstructed and obstructed line of sight. To read about our testing process in more detail, please see our full guide.
The StarTech BT2A Bluetooth Audio Receiver is our top pick for most people thanks to its combination of good sound quality, range, usability, connectivity, and price. In our tests, it reliably paired to new devices and reconnected to old devices, and it could remember up to eight paired devices. It comes from a reputable vendor, has a two-year warranty, and is reasonably priced.
In terms of audio quality, the BT2A—along with our runner-up, below—provided the best sound quality of the models we tested in this price range. Overall, these two models offered better dynamic range and crisper high-frequency and midrange detail compared with similarly priced models, along with minimal high-frequency distortion and a tight low end. The BT2A also features an optical digital-audio output, allowing you to upgrade audio quality by using an external DAC.
While running our tests, we noticed that Monoprice’s Bluetooth Streaming Music Receiver appears to be functionally identical to the StarTech BT2A. When we opened both models, we found that they use the same circuit board and the same DAC, and they performed essentially identically in our testing. We made the StarTech receiver our top pick because it’s covered by a two-year warranty, versus only one year for the Monoprice receiver, but the Monoprice is also a safe buy.
If you have nice speakers or a higher-end audio system—such as our picks for best receiver and bookshelf speakers—and you want a Bluetooth connection that can do them justice, the Audioengine B1 Bluetooth Music Receiver is a great upgrade choice.
The B1 is based on the same circuitry as Audioengine’s well-regarded D1 DAC, and the unit’s audio quality reflects this: It offers better sound, by a good margin, than the less expensive Bluetooth receivers we tested. Music is lively and involving, with crisp, clear highs; detailed midrange; and tight, clean bass. The Audioengine B1 also includes optical-digital output if you want to hook it up to an even better DAC in the future.
The B1 is also the only model we tested that includes an external antenna. According to Audioengine, the antenna extends the B1’s range to 100 feet, three times what most other receivers claim. In our tests, the B1 never skipped, even when at maximum range.
Before Bluetooth speakers became ubiquitous, many people bought speaker docks—compact speaker systems with a docking cradle for a smartphone or MP3 player. The vast majority of these used Apple’s older 30-pin dock connector, which has since been replaced by the Lightning connector. If you have one of these 30-pin docks, you can use Samson’s 30-Pin Bluetooth Receiver BT30 to wirelessly stream music to it.
The BT30’s sound quality isn’t fantastic, but it is better than any of the other dock-connector models we tested. Its range is also superior to that of the other models we tested, and pairing and connecting Bluetooth devices is hassle-free.
This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter. To see the current recommendation, please go here.
Note from Wirecutter: When readers choose to buy our independently chosen editorial picks, we may earn affiliate commissions that support our work.
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It’s safe to say that melting glaciers and ice sheets are bad things: they raise ocean levels and risk flooding low-lying coastal areas. But which of these icy bodies do you have to worry about in your area? NASA might help. It recently developed a technique that can determine which glaciers and sheets pose a threat to a given area. It’s complex, but it could make a big difference for coastal cities that may need to react to global warming.
Gradient fingerprint mapping, as it’s called, uses advanced math to check the local variations in the ice thickness of all of the world’s ice drainage systems. When you map all these gradients, you can determine where the water will ultimately go. And it’s more complicated than you think — if a lot of ice melts, it can actually lower the sea level in certain areas because of the reduced gravitational pull.
The resulting predictions can be surprising in multiple ways. For one thing, proximity isn’t necessarily an indicator of which glaciers you have to worry about. New York City primarily has to fret about the glaciers in Greenland’s northeast (those furthest away), for example. As for that gravitational effect? The sea level around Oslo, Norway would actually fall if only the glaciers in the same Greenland area melted. Meanwhile, the breaking ice sheets in the western Antarctic would pose the greatest danger to Sydney.
It’s not exactly the most heartening discovery, but it could be important if there’s no way to dramatically slow or halt the melting process. Planners could use the data to understand whether or not they need sea walls and other measures to prevent flooding. Like it or not, that know-how may become crucial in the next few decades.
Via: Earther
Source: Science Advances
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It can be difficult to fully recover from knee injuries or other damage to your joints, if just because there hasn’t been an artificial replacement for cartilage that can withstand as much punishment as the real thing. That may not be an issue in the long run, though: scientists have developed a Kevlar-based hydrogel that behaves like natural cartilage. It mixes a network of Kevlar nanofibers with polyvinyl alcohol to absorb water at rest (like real cartilage does in idle moments) and become extremely resistant to abuse, but releases it under stress — say, a workout at the gym.
You don’t even need a lot of it to replicate a human body’s sturdiness and overall functionality. A material with 92 percent water is about as tough as real cartilage, while a 70 percent mix is comparable to rubber. Previous attempts at simulating cartilage couldn’t hold enough water to transport nutrients to cells, which made them a poor fit for implants.
There’s a long way to go before the material becomes useful. Researchers are hoping to patent the substance and find companies to make it a practical reality. The implications are already quite clear, mind you. If it works as well in patients as it does in lab experiments, it could lead to cartilage implants that are roughly as good as the real tissue they replace. A serious knee injury might not put an end to your running days.
Source: University of Michigan, Wiley Online Library
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Kaitlin Myers, a shopper for Instacart, studies her smartphone as she shops for a customer at Whole Foods in Denver. Myers received a grocery list for a shopper and then completed the shopping on Tuesday, October 28, 2014.
Denver Post Photo by Cyrus McCrimmon
OAKLAND, Calif.—Seated at a dimly-lit bar, a gregarious man dressed in a scarf and beanie reflecting his favorite local sports team, explained to Ars last week why he and some of his fellow Instacart shoppers plan on not working this Sunday and Monday.
“We’re going to sign up for shifts and then when it’s time, if I’m working from 10am to 1pm on [November 19], the first order, I’m going to decline it, not accept the batch,” he said, using Instacart’s term for multiple pickups at a single retail location. “They’ll kick us off and we’ll continue to do that until they kick us off [for the day].”
The man, who goes by Ike, declined to let Ars use his full name for fear of reprisal—he also doesn’t want unwanted scrutiny from his colleagues at his full-time public sector job.
Instacart, which was founded in 2013 and has raised over $674 million in venture capital, lets customers purchase groceries online (at a markup) so “shoppers” can purchase the items directly in-store and then deliver them. Like other so-called “gig economy” startups like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and more, Instacart relies heavily on part-time or contract labor.
The San Francisco startup has been sued multiple times in recent years over what some workers say are notably inadequate wages. Instacart has agreed to pay at least several million dollars to settle the lawsuits, which will result in a typical settlement payout of a few hundred dollars per worker. The attorneys who brought the lawsuits, by contrast, stand to make millions.
The company only has about 300 full-time employees (almost entirely based at corporate headquarters), but it has hundreds of thousands of part-time, in-store shoppers; independent contractor itinerant shoppers; and contractor delivery-only workers across 154 cities nationwide.
Ike has only been a shopper for a few months, but he’s frustrated by what he’s learned from his colleagues on a closed Facebook group, which serves as an online water cooler for over 5,300 Instacart shoppers. To help report this story, Ars was invited to join this Facebook group.
There, workers can gripe, compare notes, and organize. This group hopes that its strike, however small it may be, will help customers and the company understand their grievances over claimed inadequate tips and alleged low pay for particularly bulky and heavy orders. It is impossible to know precisely how many Instacart workers will actually stop working.
“Part of the reason why we do it is to help the shoppers stand up for themselves,” Ike explained while nursing his beer.
Instacart declined to speak to Ars on the record, but it said that it does know about the planned strike in Austin, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri, and it did not expect any service interruptions.
Instacart provided Ars with the names and contact details of three shoppers who might have a different experience than those who plan to strike. Ars contacted them all by e-mail early Saturday morning. Of those, two responded.
One was Bradley Egan, a part-time employee and in-store shopper based in Houston, Texas.
“I was not even remotely aware of the strike going on this weekend,” he wrote, noting that he is paid $20 per hour.
“Instacart is a solid company that treats its employees fairly and offers the potential to make plenty of money for the work required. If employees are upset about small delivery fees or not receiving tips, then they should try working any other delivery job (such as a restaurant delivery driver) where there is usually no delivery charge, no compensation for gas, and long/late grueling hours to work.”
One of the strike’s leaders is Matthew Telles, a Chicago-based shopper who has been with Instacart for two years. He was also one of the named plaintiffs in a lawsuit (Camp et al v. Maplebear dba Instacart) that resulted in a $4.6 million preliminary settlement, which is set to be finalized in a Los Angeles court in January 2018. (Telles is set to receive $681 as part of the settlement.)
Anonymous
In a lengthy phone interview with Ars, Telles explained that “full-service shoppers” like himself who do the on-the-ground labor of shopping, texting with customers while in-store, paying, loading, and delivering groceries to customers, make their take-home pay in a combination of three streams of income.
The first, and the most important, is the “commission” pay per delivery, which is algorithmically calculated. Commission varies not only by region, but also day to day and week to week. Recently reported commissions are as high as $14 (New York City) or as low as just $1 (Evansville, Indiana).
When there are more full-service shoppers and delivery contractors available, the pay amount per worker goes down, and when there is higher demand for shopping, workers are encouraged to stay on the clock. There are also various bonuses (“bumps” in company parlance) and other incentives.
On top of that, shoppers make a per-item fee (typically $0.40)—however, this is not per unit of that item.
Ars spoke with six Instacart shoppers who said that they have routinely been made to pick up several heavy items, such as cases of bottled water, soda, or ice. Those items, of course, not only have to be loaded into a shopping cart, and then into a car, but they must be also hand-carried to someone’s door—sometimes up flights of stairs. Shoppers are still paid a $0.40 per-item fee even if someone orders one, five, or 10 cases of bottled water.
Photos posted on Twitter seem to bear this out.
Only a $1.20 commission for that. Â @Instacart @apoorva_mehta you’re abusing shoppers. Â #wheresthetipinstacart #Instashady #ApoorvaSteals #Instathief Look at your partner @Publix @Costco @WholeFoods @HEB @Wegmans http://pic.twitter.com/Lh5YrEsOEz
— ICShopper55 (@ICShopper55) November 10, 2017
There also appears to be an incentive for companies that order office snacks and beverages to simply do it through Instacart—where the fee is far lower than a commercial delivery service. However, most Instacart shoppers are driving small commuter cars, not large trucks with dollies and other equipment to help move bulky items.
“We are delivering these insanely fucking huge orders,” one Bay Area shopper, who spoke to Ars on the condition of anonymity, said. “We’re delivering to Apple, Facebook, these huge companies that are putting in massive orders—Costco doesn’t know how big these orders are. If we call [the support line], they tell us ‘Tough shit, you’re going to get deactivated—you have to do it.’”
Instacart, however, said that shoppers are free to refuse orders that they feel they can’t handle at no penalty, or to call a shopper support hotline to have more shoppers dispatched, or to make multiple trips for an increased commission.
The third stream of income is the service fee and tips, which workers stress are vastly different.
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A Bangladeshi child works in a brick-breaking yard in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on June 3, 2017. The broken bricks are mixed in with concrete. Typically working barefoot and with rough utensils, a child worker earns less than $2 a day.
Mehedi Hasan/NurPhoto via Getty Images
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A Bangladeshi child works in a brick-breaking yard in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on June 3, 2017. The broken bricks are mixed in with concrete. Typically working barefoot and with rough utensils, a child worker earns less than $2 a day.
Mehedi Hasan/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The latest statistics on child labor are in — and they’re not encouraging.
An estimated 152 million children around the globe are doing work that prevents them from getting an education or that’s harmful to their health. That’s almost 1 in 10 children worldwide.
The figures, which cover 2016, were released this week in a report by the United Nation’s International Labour Organization.
Here are eight more takeaways:
This isn’t about a kid doing a few chores on the family farm after school.
It’s worth noting that these statistics only cover children who are doing work that is hazardous to their health or that prevents them from attending school full-time because of the hours involved or the nature of the job.
So it does not include, for instance, 12- to 14-year-olds doing non-hazardous, “light” work for fewer than 14 hours a week.
There’s been progress on this issue, but it’s slowing.
Two years ago the world’s leaders pledged to end child labor by the year 2025. But while the share of kids engaged in child labor has dropped substantially over the last decade and a half — from 16 percent in 2000 to 9.6 percent in 2016 — the decline has been slowing in recent years. And at the current rate of decline, by 2025 there will still be 121 million children involved in child labor.
A lot of the children who are working are very young.
Almost half of the children engaged in child labor in 2016 — 72.5 million — were between the ages of 5 and 11. And there was almost no decline in their numbers over the last four years.
The problem is particularly severe in Africa.
Nearly 1 in 5 children in Africa is engaged in child labor. That is the highest share of any region and way ahead of the next highest, Asia and the Pacific, where about 1 in 14 children do this sort of work. Progress in Africa has also been particularly limited: In fact, over the last four years the share of children working in Africa actually edged up slightly.
Boys seem to be more at risk than girls — or are they?
Nearly 60 percent of child labor is done by boys. But the report cautions that this may reflect underreporting of domestic work done by girls.
Most of these children work in agriculture.
Just over 70 percent. This includes not farming but fishing, forestry and livestock.
Almost half do work that is hazardous.
The report classifies work as hazardous either because the occupation is in itself harmful — for instance carrying heavy loads, working at dangerous heights or with dangerous machinery or with hazardous substances — or because the working conditions — such as night work or excessive working hours — put children at risk of injury.
Laws are not enough.
The report argues that laws are crucial. But it also notes that practically every country in the world has already signed international agreements prohibiting child labor. Just as key is for countries to enforce existing laws and to provide two benefits shown to have a major impact on reducing child labor: educational opportunities for children and economic opportunities for their parents.
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During last week’s presentation of
, company CEO
introduced an unexpected addition to the
lineup while segueing from the semi to the
: a
. This was the second-biggest surprise of the evening, after the Roadster reveal, but with much more emphasis on the word “big.” If the renderings can be believed, the
pickup’s bed can swallow a
SuperCrew. Affirming those renderings, Musk said, “It’s a pickup truck
.”
The pickup looks like a repurposed Tesla semi tractor, minus one of the drive axles out back. If one of the original
Unimogs had escaped the factory in 1946 and evolved in isolation in the Schwarzwald, we’d expect it to emerge looking like Tesla’s offering. Musk foreshadowed the arrival of an approximate vehicle in September. When Jason Cruickshank tweeted “Can we get a light duty pickup next,” Musk replied, “What if we just made a mini version of the Tesla semi?”
This isn’t exactly light-duty, though, falling well outside the
three typical categories of truck buyers
. Musk said anyone could drive the rendered Tesla pickup with a standard
, meaning it wouldn’t exceed the specs for a
. Vehicles in that class include the
and
/
siblings (the last of which served as Autobot Ironhide), but that’s the upper end – the Tesla pickup might look as beefy, but it could take things down a few notches. As is almost always the case with Tesla, who knows? We’ll find out for certain if and when the pickup makes production.
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