Joel Embiid is expected to play this week for the Philadelphia 76ers - barring another setback, and there is always that chance with the 7-footer - after he won Olympic gold, signed a contract extension, slogged through a knee injury, was the root of two NBA investigations, scuffled with a columnist and was hit with a technical foul for waving a towel from the bench.

Behind Julian Reese's 21 points and 9 rebounds, Maryland won its 11th-straight non conference home game Monday night, surviving a rock fight of a first half before taking control and rolling over Florida A&M 84-53.

Cleveland has won its first 12 games and is off to the best start in the league. There are 10 teams in the Western Conference with winning records. And somehow, only two teams in the Eastern Conference have winning records.

Joel Embiid stuck around for extra work after shootaround. The 7-footer who has yet to officially step on the court for the Philadelphia 76ers this season was in no rush to finish his drills.

The Food and Drug Administration could put a stop to the use of phenylephrine, an ingredient in over-the-counter nasal decongestants, because its studies found it doesn't work.

A jury awarded more than $12 million Friday to a woman who lost her job at a Michigan insurance company after declining to get a COVID-19 vaccination.

Queen Camilla will miss Britain's annual remembrance weekend events to honor fallen service personnel while she recovers from a chest infection, Buckingham Palace said Saturday.

After working at a crowded and dangerous internment camp in Iraq, Air Force Staff Sgt. Heather O'Brien returned to the U.S. with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Monday on whether a law that legislators adopted more than a decade before the Civil War bans abortion and can still be enforced.

The Justice Department is suing to block UnitedHealth Group's $3.3 billion purchase of Amedisys, citing concerns the combination would hinder access to home health and hospice services in the U.S.

The curtain will come down on the Paris' feel-good summer with a grand parade of French athletes on the Champs Elysees on Saturday as the country throws one last party to celebrate the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Two former Olympic champions are in the race to be the next IOC president. So is a prince of a Middle East kingdom and the son of a former president. The global leaders of cycling, gymnastics and skiing also are in play.

American gymnast Jordan Chiles is asking Switzerland's Supreme Court to overturn a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport that stripped Chiles of a bronze medal in floor exercise at the 2024 Olympics.

Four-time Grand Prix series medalist Rika Kihira will miss the upcoming figure skating season because of a stress fracture in her right ankle that has not fully healed, the Japanese star announced Wednesday.

IOC presidential candidate Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr. has urged European lawmakers to regard investing in sport as a public health policy in his first keynote speech of a six-month Olympic leadership campaign.

Simone Biles simply wanted to mix it up when the gymnastics superstar invited some of the top American men to join her post-Olympic Tour.

He's been tough on Russia, led the charge to put prize money in the pockets of athletes and pushed for a definitive but much-derided resolution in the longstanding debate over transgender athletes.

The president of the suspended Russian Olympic Committee said Tuesday he plans to step down after six years in charge.

French authorities said Friday they have charged seven individuals in connection with a cyberbullying campaign targeting Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the Paris Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies.

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked a state law that would require classrooms in Louisiana to post the Ten Commandments starting in January.

At least 11 employees were taken to hospitals and residents were urged to shelter in place after an apparent explosion at a Louisville, Kentucky, business on Tuesday.

Democrats for Life of America said Tuesday that 97% of its endorsed candidates won their races in last week's election, which raises the question: Is there such a thing as a pro-life Democrat?

President-elect Donald Trump showed his intention to shake up the federal government Tuesday by naming former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to lead the CIA, Elon Musk to head a new department to cut waste and regulations, and the unexpected choice of military reservist and Fox News figure Pete Hegseth to serve as Defense Secretary.

David Tennant and Catherine Tate return for a series of 60th anniversary specials, now airing on BBC and streaming on Disney+.

The post Doctor Who Returns! first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Varada Sethu is joining the TARDIS alongside Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson for the Fifteenth Doctor's second season of adventures.

The post Doctor Who Is Getting A New Companion For 2025 first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Take a look at the first photos from Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson's first season in the TARDIS, streaming this Friday on Disney+.

The post Gallery: Doctor Who Double-Episode Premiere Is This Week first appeared on SciFi Stream.

The prequel series will chronicle the rise of the Bene Gesserit order thousands of years before Paul Atreides.

The post First Look At Dune: Prophecy, The Spin-Off TV Series Coming To Max first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Netflix is teasing the upcoming fourth season of The Witcher, with Liam Hemsworth taking over the lead role.

The post Toss A Coin: First Look At Liam Hemsworth’s Witcher first appeared on SciFi Stream.

The wait is nearly over, as the fourth and final season of Snowpiercer speeds our way July 21 on AMC.

The post New Teaser And Photos For Snowpiercer’s Final Season first appeared on SciFi Stream.

The EU BON project is pleased to announce the International Symposium "Nature and Governance – Biodiversity Data, Science, and the Policy Interface", which was held in Berlin from 11 to 12 February. The symposium aimed at clarifying and popularizing EU BON's objectives prior to the official EU BON Kick-off Meeting held from 13 to 15 February 2013.

The symposium was hosted by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and brought together high-ranking speakers and guests from across the world to talk and discuss the different aspects of the EU BON Project. Among the main issues covered was the future of biodiversity information, the challenges in front of new data policies, new approaches in collecting information, and ways to engage the public in biodiversity monitoring and assessments.

The EU BON project was started on 1 December, 2012, and will continue for 4.5 years. The aim of EU BON is to build a substantial part and contribute to the Group on Earth Observation's Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), through an innovative approach of integration of biodiversity information systems. The project, built as an answer to the need of a new integrated biodiversity data, will facilitate access to this knowledge and will effectively improve the work in the field of biodiversity observation in general.

###

For more information on the symposium and the events planned, please visit our programme page.

All interested parties are most welcome to attend the symposium or to follow it on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.

Additional information

EU BON (2012) stands for "Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network" and is a European research project, financed by the 7th EU framework programme for research and development (FP7). EU BON seeks ways to better integrate biodiversity information and implement into policy and decision-making of biodiversity monitoring and management in the EU.

GEO BON stands for "Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network". It coordinates activities relating to the Societal Benefit Area (SBA) on Biodiversity of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). Some 100 governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations are collaborating through GEO BON to organise and improve terrestrial, freshwater and marine biodiversity observations globally and make their biodiversity data, information and forecasts more readily accessible to policymakers, managers, experts and other users. Moreover, GEO BON has been recognized by the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. More information at: http://www.earthobservations.org/geobon.shtml.

The official Kickoff meeting of the Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON) project, organized by the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, took place on 13-15 February 2013 to formally mark the beginning of the project and to set goals and objectives for the future. Among the hottest issues discussed was the integration of EU BON's framework with the Global Earth Biodiversity Observation Network project GEO BON and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). Another intention set for the future is the enhanced communication and synchronization between the various partners and work packages.

The main objective set for EU BON is to facilitate with its contributions, and thus build a substantial part of GEO BON. EU BON Advisory Board, comprising ten leading experts in data management, biodiversity conservation and earth observation realms has been set up. Dr. Wouter Los - Chairman of the Expert centre for Taxonomic Identification (ETI), and 2nd Vice Chair of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility Governing Board (GBIF) was elected as a chair of the EU BON Advisory Board. It has been decided, with the directions and help of the EU BON's Advisory Board, to achieve that a substantial amount of work should be done towards a more comprehensive vision of the relationship between the two projects and the place EU BON takes as a major contributor.

Another aim delineated is working towards collaboration between the currently fragmented biodiversity data sources in Europe in an attempt to create an integrated network and framework for the benefit of the project objective itself, and GEO BON eventually. Dialogue and association with similar or relevant biodiversity projects and initiatives, on European and Global levels, are also encouraged. Organizing a conference is on the project's to do list.

Enhanced communication between the different partners and work packages has been outlined as the engine for achieving of the projects main objectives. A second official meeting has been already assigned for 2014 to measure the progress of EU BON and to set further goals. Meanwhile partners are already organizing workshops to work towards reflecting the directions for development currently set.

A new "LinkOut" feature introduced by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) NCBI’s allows the easy linking to content on PubMed and GenBank.  Dryad has already introduced the feature benefitting from easy and fast linking of associated content to the two resources.

PubMed and GenBank, from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), are hugely popular resources for searching and retrieving article abstracts and nucleotide sequence data, respectively.  PubMed indexes the vast majority of the biomedical literature, and deposition of nucleotide sequences in GenBank or one of the other INSDC databases is a near universal requirement for publication in a scientific journal. LinkOut allows the data from an article to be distributed among repositories without compromising its discoverability.

Dryad, intends to expand on this feature in a couple of ways. First, it is planned to make Dryad content searchable via the PubMed and GenBank identifiers, which because of their wide use will provide a convenient gateway for other biomedical databases to link out to Dryad.  Second, open web standards will be used to expose relationships between content in Dryad and other repositories, not just NCBI.

Original source: Dryad news and views

The first meeting of Work Package 5 (EU BON testing and validation of concepts, tools, and services) was held between 2^nd and 4^th April, 2013 in the Doñana Biological Station, in Spain. 23 people from 10 different institutions (7 of the EU BON consortium) worked towards building a draft on Principles and Guidelines for establishing and operating EU BON test sites.

During the meeting the members agreed on starting documenting each of the sites, using a common format to be decided in May on the Informatics Task Force meeting of WP2 (Data integration and interoperability) in Norway. A data inventory will also be built in each of the sites, adding monitoring protocols in stepwise fashion.

In addition the meeting served to get a better view of the variety of Ecosystems in Doñana as well as the monitoring protocols that are being conducted in this area. 

The "Environmental research: Experiences on best practices towards Horizon 2020" conference will be held the 30th of May 2013 in Brussels at the Museum of Natural Sciences.  Organizers of the event are the APRE (Agency for the Promotion of European Research), and the ENVIMPACT consortium.

The event will gather European Commission representatives,  researchers, FP7 project's participants, governmental, academic and industrial stakeholders of the Central East European countries with the aim of presenting the current and future tools and trends for dissemination and exploitation of R&D results with a special focus on the thematic areas of research in air pollution, chemical pollution and environmental technologies, especially in the Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries.

The agenda of the conference and the press release are downloadable at the link: http://download.apre.it/envimpact_presskit1.zip

The registration is free, please register at http://www.envimpact.eu/index.cfm?action=article&publication_id=922

ENVIMPACT project has been launched on 1st January 2011. This initiative is funded by the European Commission under FP7, DG Research and Innovation, with the objectives to improve the current communication  and dissemination of environmental research results deriving from Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries.

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) was initiated by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals after a meeting in  December 2012 during the ASCB Annual Meeting in San Francisco. The document recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated.

DORA puts into question the use of Journal Impact Factor as a main tool for assessment, and proposes the consideration of various other factors towards more sophisticated and meaningful approaches. DORA is a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines.

To read the whole declaration, please follow the link: http://am.ascb.org/dora/

The European Commission adopted a new strategy for encouraging the use of green infrastructure, and for ensuring that the enhancement of natural processes becomes a systematic part of spatial planning. Green Infrastructure is a tried and tested tool that uses nature to provide ecological, economic and social benefits. Instead of building flood protection infrastructure, for example, a green infrastructure solution would be to allow a natural wetland to absorb the excess water from heavy rain.

Green infrastructure is often cheaper and more durable than alternatives provided through conventional civil engineering. Biodiversity-rich parks, green spaces and fresh air corridors can for example mitigate the negative effects of summer heat waves. In addition to the health and environmental benefits, green infrastructure also brings multiple social benefits: it creates jobs and makes cities more appealing places to live and work. And it allows for wildlife to thrive, even in an urban context.

Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik said: "Building green infrastructure is often a good investment for nature, for the economy and for jobs. We should provide society with solutions that work with nature instead of against it, where that makes economic and environmental sense."

More about the EC Green Infrastructure here: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/ecosystems/index_en.htm

The EUBrazilOpenBio project  announces two new training tools as a part of its e-training Programme aiming at educating and enabling current and potential users of EUBrazilOpenBio to unlock new knowledge and shape effective policy on biodiversity challenges. The new tools cover the following use cases: Ecological Niche Modeling and Cross-mapping.

The EUBrazilOpenBio anytime, anywhere eTraining tools are designed for researchers in the spheres of Biodiversity, Life science, Climate Change, application Developers as well as regulatory authorities and policy decision-makers.

EUBrazilOpenBio is focused on tackling the complexity of biodiversity science such as the diversity of multidisciplinary datasets spanning from climatology to earth sciences by integrating advanced computing resources with data sources across Europe and Brazil.

For more informationand to try out the new tools click here.

The Brazilian initiative PPBio (The Program for Research on Biodiversity) launches a new book based on over a decade of experience in implementing the biodiversity monitoring system RAPELD in the Brazilian Amazon. Richly illustrated and written in simple language, the book "Biodiversity and Integrated Environmental Monitoring" addresses the issues that led to the system development, covering topics such as the spatial organization and representation of biological diversity, environmental monitoring, and data management.

Monitoring of biodiversity is not merely an academic endeavor. Although scientific aspects such as representation of biodiversity and biodiversity data integration, management and preservation are of a great importance, it is also essential to think about the political context in which decisions will be made and how to incorporate political stakeholders and decision makers.

"As this important book makes clear questions about biodiversity are far from purely scientific. Biodiversity matters. Our needs to assess it embed in a complex of questions posed by managers, policy makers and those who live in or otherwise benefit from biodiversity.",  explains Dr Stuart L. Pimm in the preface of the book. "So how do we ensure that data collected now will be useful for purposes we cannot yet imagine at some unexpected time in the future? Or provide comparison to some other place that we might survey some day?"

Those and many more questions regarding biodiversity data management and policy involvement are discussed in the new book "Biodiversity and Integrated Environmental Monitoring".

The University of Cambridge invites for applications for a Research Associate to work on EU-BON, a major EU-funded research project seeking to improve the use of biodiversity data in public policy.

Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant social science or conservation science. Experience in both qualitative and quantitative analysis is desirable. Applicants should ideally have some first-hand experience of public policy processes and a willingness to travel within the European Union for research. Excellent organisational and communication skills will be essential in working as a successful part of this large, multi-partner and multinational team.

The researcher will carry out research on how biodiversity data is currently used in European policy making and will contribute to analysis of the opportunities to increase its effective provision and use. Research methods are likely to combine qualitative and quantitate analysis and to focus on the use of biodiversity data in public policy contexts. It is expected that some of the research will take place in Brussels. The researcher will have considerable freedom in defining the research project in discussion with Dr Doubleday and Prof Sutherland. In addition to carrying out research on the use of biodiversity data in European policy making, the researcher will support Cambridge's contribution to EU BON as a whole. This will involve contributing to other workpackages as and when required. More information about EU BON can be found here: http://www.eubon.eu

Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available for 36 months in the first instance.

Completed applications consisting of a CHRIS/6 (Parts I & III) (downloadable from http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/hr/forms/chris6/) a covering letter, and CV, should be sent to Danielle Feger, via email: geogrec@hermes.cam.ac.uk or sent to Research Administrator, Department of Geography, Downing Site, Cambridge, CB2 3EN

Please quote reference LC01355 on your application and in any correspondence about this vacancy.

Any enquiries concerning the position can be made to Dr Robert Doubleday, rob.doubleday@csap.cam.ac.uk

For more information about the position, please visit: http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/1611/

Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook sets out key steps to harness IT and open data to inform better decisions

Copenhagen, Denmark – A new initiative launched today (2 Oct) aims to coordinate global efforts and funding to deliver the best possible information about life on Earth, and our impacts upon it.

The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook sets out a framework to harness the immense power of information technology and an open data culture to gather unprecedented evidence about biodiversity and to inform better decisions.

The framework is outlined in a document and website entitled Delivering Biodiversity Knowledge in the Information Age, inviting policy makers, funders, researchers, informatics specialists, data holders and others to unite around four key focus areas where progress is needed.

The focus areas, each consisting of several specific components, are:

• Culture – promoting practices and infrastructure for sharing data, using common standards and persistent archives, backed up by strong policy incentives and a community of willing specialists;
• Data – addressing the need to transform all data about species, past and present, into usable and accessible digital formats; from historic collections and literature to citizen science observations, remote sensors and gene sequencing;
• Evidence – organizing and assessing data from all sources to provide clear, consistent views giving them context; including taxonomic organization, integrated occurrences in time and space, capturing information about species interactions, and improving data quality through collaborative curation; and
• Understanding – building models from recorded measurements and observations to support data-driven research and evidence-based planning, including predictive tools, better visualization and feedbacks to prioritize new data capture.

The document is being promoted through a number of upcoming events this month, including the Governing Board of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD SBSTTA) where it forms part of the discussion on meeting global targets to end biodiversity loss.

The framework arose from the Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference which gathered around 100 experts in Copenhagen in July, 2012, to identify critical questions relating to biodiversity and tools needed answer them. Workshop leaders at that conference went on to draw up and author the current document.

The Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook includes examples of projects and initiatives contributing to its objectives, and the accompanying website www.biodiversityinformatics.org invites feedback from others wishing to align their own activities to the framework.

A deck of slides for presentations about GBIO is available at http://www.slideshare.net/GBIF/global-biodiversity-informatics-outlook