really

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

TECHNOLOGY

Is It Really Such A Crazy Idea? – Real Estate In The Metaverse Is Booming

The idea of spending thousands or even millions of dollars to buy fictitious “land” in a virtual world sounds, to be frank, absurd. But in recent months, we’ve seen significant investments in virtual land within the metaverse. PwC is among the latest to dive in, having purchased real estate in The Sandbox, a virtual gaming world, for an undisclosed amount. If other reported sales are anything to go by, it would have been a handsome sum. One person recently bought a plot of land in the Snoopverse – a virtual world rapper Snoop Dogg is developing within The Sandbox – for US$450,000 (around £332,500). Meanwhile, the Metaverse Group, a real estate company focused on the metaverse economy, reportedly bought a piece of land in Decentraland, another virtual platform, for US$2.43 million. Let’...

Do You Really Want To Know? – This Calculator Will Guess How Many Healthy Years Of Life You Have Left

14Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY

Do You Really Want To Know? – This Calculator Will Guess How Many Healthy Years Of Life You Have Left

As the old saying goes, the only things certain in life are death and taxes. While death is inevitable, the quality of life you experience until death is often within an individual’s control. This is what our team at the Goldenson Center for Actuarial Research chose to focus on by developing a rigorous measure of quality of life. How many healthy years of life do you have ahead before you become unhealthy? Everyone understands the benefits of living a long healthy life, but this also has implications for industry and society. Medical costs, financial planning and health support services are directly related to the state of health of an individual or community. We call this measure of quality of life “healthy life expectancy” and its complement “unhealthy life expectancy.” We define ente...

New Years Resolutions: Do You Really Need Them?

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

New Years Resolutions: Do You Really Need Them?

The New Year is almost here and you may have a list of resolutions you've already set. The question is, do you really need them? For many people, setting resolutions for the new year is little more than a tradition they participate in. It might feel good at the moment - especially when you are caught up in the wave of "New Year, New Me" excitement. But the truth is, the new year rolls around and you remain the same old you, with the same quirks and beliefs. And you know what? That's okay. You have a uniqueness about you that you shouldn't try to force into a box with resolutions you don't actually believe in. Studies have shown that approximately 80% of new year's resolutions fail by the second week of February. So again, do you really need new year's resolutions? Short answer: no, you...

Here’s The Evolutionary Explanation Of Why Cat And Dog ‘Moms’ And ‘Dads’ Really Are Parenting Their Pets

28Oct

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIETY

Here’s The Evolutionary Explanation Of Why Cat And Dog ‘Moms’ And ‘Dads’ Really Are Parenting Their Pets

Shelly Volsche, Boise State University A pup out for a stroll, without paws touching the ground. Shelly Volsche, CC BY-ND Have you noticed more cats riding in strollers lately? Or bumper stickers that read, “I love my granddogs”? You’re not imagining it. More people are investing serious time, money and attention in their pets. It looks an awful lot like parenting, but of pets, not people. Can this kind of caregiving toward animals really be considered parenting? Or is something else going on here? I’m an anthropologist who studies human-animal interactions, a field known as anthrozoology. I want to better understand the behavior of pet parenting by people from the perspective of evolutionary science. After all, cultural norms and evolutionary biology both suggest people should focus on...

What LaMelo Ball Got Right – And Wrong About Why Star Athletes Who Want To Play For The NBA Don’t Really Need College

26Aug

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SPORTS

What LaMelo Ball Got Right – And Wrong About Why Star Athletes Who Want To Play For The NBA Don’t Really Need College

SPORTS John Holden, Oklahoma State University In a recent interview published in GQ, NBA star LaMelo Ball downplayed the importance of college for athletes who aspire to play professional basketball. When asked about his decision to forgo college and play professional basketball overseas before entering the NBA draft, Ball said: “You wanna go to the league, so school’s not your priority.” The then-19-year-old Ball, now 20, quickly clarified his quotes in GQ via Instagram, stating that he was only referencing his own situation and that while school is “not for everybody,” it is for many people. LaMelo Ball’s GQ interview is only the most recent point in a long-standing debate over the necessity of college for superstar athletes. Here are four points to help put Ball’s comments into shar...

10May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

HEALTH & WELLNESS

Sleep, How Much Do You Really Need?

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. Why do I need to sleep for a long time at night? – Sly M., 6, Cambridge, Massachusetts Just like eating, drinking or breathing, sleep is an essential part of life. In fact, all animals do it – with some interesting variations. A dolphin, for example, sleeps with one eye open and only half of its brain snoozing at a time. This is likely because dolphins need to be partly conscious to breathe while in the water. Zebras sometimes sleep standing up in case they need to wake up and quickly escape a predator. Bats sleep upside down. When someone’s asleep, it can look like they are turned “off” and not doing anything at all. But, t...

How Sick The US Health Care Delivery System Really Is

3Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

How Sick The US Health Care Delivery System Really Is

If you got the COVID-19 shot, you likely received a little paper card that shows you’ve been vaccinated. Make sure you keep that card in a safe place. There is no coordinated way to share information about who has been vaccinated and who has not. That is just one of the glaring flaws that COVID-19 has revealed about the U.S. health care system: It does not share health information well. Coordination between public health agencies and medical providers is lacking. Technical and regulatory restrictions impede use of digital technologies. To put it bluntly, our health care delivery system is failing patients. Prolonged disputes about the Affordable Care Act and rising health care costs have done little to help; the problems go beyond insurance and access. I have spent most of my career with...

The Coal Power’s Demise, What’s Really Driving It

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

BUSINESS

The Coal Power’s Demise, What’s Really Driving It

People often point to plunging natural gas prices as the reason U.S. coal-fired power plants have been shutting down at a faster pace in recent years. However, new research shows two other forces had a much larger effect: federal regulation and a well-funded activist campaign that launched in 2011 with the goal of ending coal power. We studied the retirement of U.S. coal-fired units from January 2008 to September 2016 and compared the effects of various market factors, regulations and activism on their early closure. In all, 348 coal-fired units either retired or switched to natural gas during that time. Among the many pressures on coal power that we reviewed, a federal regulation implemented in 2015 had the biggest overall effect. The Cross State Air Pollution Rule requires states to re...

Is the COVID-19 pandemic cure really worse than the disease? Here’s what our research found

8Jul

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

Is the COVID-19 pandemic cure really worse than the disease? Here’s what our research found

The coronavirus pandemic catapulted the country into one of the deepest recessions in U.S. history, leaving millions of Americans without jobs or health insurance. There is a lot of evidence that economic hardship is associated with poor health and can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, mental health problems, cognitive dysfunction and early death. All of that raises a question: Is the U.S. better off with the public health interventions being used to keep the coronavirus from spreading or without them? In a new working paper, I and a team of health economists from U.S. universities set out to answer that question from a humanitarian perspective. To do that, we reviewed the latest data and scientific research about the virus to evaluate the number of lives saved if public healt...

What are Asian giant hornets, and are they really dangerous? 5 questions answered

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

ENVIRONMENT, VIDEO REELS

What are Asian giant hornets, and are they really dangerous? 5 questions answered

According to recent press reports, two Asian giant hornets – a species not known to occur in North America – were found in northwest Washington state in late 2019, and a hornet colony was found and eliminated in British Columbia. Now scientists are trying to determine whether more of these large predatory insects are present in the region. Entomologist Akito Kawahara explains why headlines referring to “murder hornets” are misleading. Asian giant hornets (Vespa mandarinia japonica) drinking sap from tree bark in Japan. Alpsdake/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 1. How common are these hornets in Asia, and how much alarm do they cause? The Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) is fairly common in many parts of Asia, where it is called the “Giant hornet.” Growing up in Japan, I saw them relatively freque...